BOE Business Meeting 2021-5-10

001(upbeat music) I call the statutory budget hearing on the 2021/22 proposed budget and the following business meeting to order. Welcome to those of you here in our audience or watching us live stream or later via our recording. I note that all members of the board and cabinet are present. The executive order that allows board meetings to be conducted virtually remains in place. So our residents are able to participate in tonight's three public comment periods virtually via the link that was provided in the notice for tonight's meetings. So Stuart, please go ahead and present the proposed budget overview. Sure. Thank you very much, Pam. So as Pam mentioned, it is the official budget hearing, which every school across the New York State will be presenting in the time period leading up to the budget. So just

002as tonight is just a general real quick overview, and then a chance for anyone in the community to have a comment about the budget. So we can go the next slide, Jerry. So again, just a reminder of the 21/22 proposed budget, the total budget on this will be the amount that appears on the budget resolution, the proposition that will appear next Tuesday will be $166,862,755. That's a 2.56% increase budget to budget an increase in the tax levy of 2.15%, which is a little bit over $19,000 under the projected tax levy limit. That translates into a tax rate increase for our town of Scarsdale 1.93% and then the town of Mamaroneck 6.28%. And down below, you can see the impact to the average assessed home in our communities. And then the budget plan itself, which shows

003again, that top line, the budget to budget that 2.56% offset by other revenues, primarily state aids, sales, tax revenue, of just short of $10 million transfer from reserves, primarily in this case, debt service reserve, which will be going towards some of the, going towards the renovations in the auditorium as a part two to those renovations. Assigned fund balance of 2.22 5 million, resulting in once you take away those revenues from the expenditures or the budget, the total tax levy the amount that needs to be raised in taxes 154,374 399, which is that 2.15% increase. So what does the budget accomplish? It continues to maintain the high quality teaching and learning consistent with our strategic plan and our Scarsdale school district values. It implements a COVID-19 budget strategy or as you recall, we are taking $800,000

004from the assigned fund balance to be in place in case we need to hire additional teachers or instructional support going into next year, the SPARK program. That's the summer program that Dr. McIntosh will talk about later in this evening. And money set aside for any additional PPE that we would need to purchase in case that was needed next year. Also continues a comprehensive approach to our SSEM, the safety security emergency management across the district. The elevator cleaning protocols across all of our elementary schools. That's an additional cleaner in each of those buildings. And it continues to be consistent with our facility improvement plan, as we do have plant improvements and the improvement to the auditorium in next year's budget. This is the calendar. We've made it all the way through. Okay, we started way back

005in December with our public meetings and actually went back a little bit further than that in November. A little bit different than the preparation that went into this year's budget. I think we had probably six more lines on the calendar from last year. However, we've led through the path, getting through all the different budget sessions up to this evening and leading up to the budget vote next Tuesday, which will be Scarsdale Congregational Church from 7:00am to 9:00pm. And we'll have the crossing guard there, there's ample parking for everyone. And we'll be all set up to welcome everyone. Awesome. Thanks Stuart. Yep. So the next item would be public comment on this proposed budget and we would first entertain any comment from our live audience. If anyone wants to come to the podium with a comment

006on the budget. Now would be the time. Seeing none, we'll go to the Zoom and anyone who is watching this live stream and now wants to comment via the Zoom link, please raise your hand and I will recognize you and you can speak via the Zoom. I see no hands, right? No hand raised. Okay, so the public comment on the 2021/22 proposed budget is now closed. And without comment, there would be no wrap up. So I would say we can move into the business meeting, which we already called to order. Again, I will note that all members of the board are present as is cabinet. Well, maybe I'll just welcome everyone again, to this meeting and for watching us via live stream and or via the recording. Before tonight's business meeting, the board met with

007representatives for our high school students from each grade. And we heard their reflections on this year, with a particular focus on the return to full in person instruction. We heard what was difficult and what helps them meet any challenges. We heard about unexpected gains that we would do well to reflect on going forward. And we heard from those involved and actually from all the students and their perceptions of the work of the dignity, inclusion and the belonging team and of the faculty and staff in that topic. We heard about some of the work that that team has specifically been engaged in and how it can is impacting the student experience at Scarsdale High School. The board is extremely pleased to have the opportunity to meet with a high school student group twice a year and

008we are grateful for the efforts of each of them. After that the board convened a special meeting in the high school auditorium for the presentation of the tenure recommendations for 2021. The board acted on the recommendations of the superintendent to confer tenure to the 21 individuals presented. And I repeat our appreciation for their work and our congratulations to those 21 administrators and teachers who attained that recognition tonight. We also just held the statutory budget hearing on the 2021/22 proposed budget. I know we've a lot of other work tonight. So I'll just quickly wish our seniors a great last full week in the building. And thank all our students and families for their continued attention to the protocols in place that are in place as key mitigation measures. And then add our appreciation to community members

009including our mayor who continue to engage with the district and board on district matters most recently on vaccination opportunities with the Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corporation, the Scarsdale Medical Group and the White Plains hospital. While individuals and families are always encouraged to work directly with their physicians or pediatricians on medical issues as the first course of action. We are appreciative of these additional choices. As always, we continue to invite community members to share thoughts, concerns, and suggestions with the board via email or during public comment. And we do you expect to hold our first coffee with two board members as a third way for convening engagement later this month, one afternoon on the high school campus. And that's all I have to say Thomas. Thank you, Pam. Good evening, and welcome everyone. We appreciate everyone joining

010us virtually and in person. And tonight,, we actually have maybe for the first time a full audience in our board meeting. And there's a special reason for that that I'm gonna come back to in a few minutes. But in the meantime, welcome to everybody here in our physical audience tonight. As Pam mentioned, we've already had a busy evening and there's a lot still ahead for us. This afternoon, as Pam mentioned, we met with the Scarsdale high school students and had an opportunity to learn about their experiences over the course of the year. And as Pam mentioned more particularly in their return to full in person learning. I was really struck personally on the power of connections that students talked about, about the really innovative ways that teachers and counselors and Dean's reach out to them.

011When we were in a hybrid model, and how even under those difficult circumstances we were able to create a sense of community. And then really talked about why it was especially important to sort of see people in person, both in terms of class opportunities, club activities, after school activities, and to really rebuild that sense of kind of community and camaraderie now that so many of our children and youth have been missing over the course of this year. Students also talked very openly and candidly about the DEI efforts, which is something that we've been really thinking about pretty intently lately. They really talked about the natural connections that many teachers are making this year, particularly tied to current events that are going on in the news and making connections into classrooms. Students noted that particularly in

012English and social studies classes, that there's very robust conversations about that, that people are getting not only into the current event context, but some of the historical context of the roots of where some of these issues have stemmed. Students also talked about the opportunities that exist in that area to maybe reach out more into some of our STEM courses and other courses. But I thought they had just great insights to present to us as administrators and the board in terms of what their experiences have been like. And just as always, they really express such an appreciation for their teachers. It's just really uncanny to hear these young folks talk about the admiration and respect that they have for the folks who work with them every day. As Pam also said, we had a 10 year

013recommendation ceremony in which we recognize 21 individuals 16 teachers and five administrators who attained tenure after an extensive probationary period. We love their contributions to our district over the past many years, and we're very excited that they will become permanent members of the Scarsdale school community moving forward. Speaking of recognition, every spring across the nation school personnel are recognized for their enduring expertise and dedication to our students, families and our entire communities. These acknowledgments span from early April through mid May and include the following. Reaching back to early April, we have national assistant principals week which was April 5th through the 9th. We have administrative professionals day on Wednesday, April 21st. Principals Appreciation Day was on Saturday this year on May 1st. National teachers Appreciation Week was last week, extending from May 3rd through May

0147th. And finally, school nurse week is still going on from May 6th through the 12th. In pre pandemic times all of these individuals play a critical role in educating and shaping our children and youth, giving them the tools to create lives of meaning and purpose. These kind, patient, hardworking, dedicated, and understanding professionals give selflessly of their time and expertise to ensure each student reaches his or her full potential and receives the support that they need over time. During the past years, many challenges these efforts have been magnified even more demonstrating the deep tenacity and commitment that is the hallmark of a Scarsdale employee, educator and leader. When I reflect on what makes Scarsdale school so uniquely different from other places, it always comes down to the people here, and the remarkable relationships that they forged

015with students and with one another. Along with the district, our Board of Education, parents, and PTAs have also acknowledged that these weeks of recognition and more importantly, the people behind them. And we thank all of you for your ongoing efforts in support of our children. Finally, tonight, we have a very full agenda. We have three significant updates. One of them is in the audience tonight, which is we have about a dozen new hires, which we are exceptionally excited about on welcoming into the Scarsdale school community. And we'll be doing that shortly in the personnel update and we again, welcome all of you for being here tonight, and congratulations on your appointments. We also have a journey forward update, which has become a staple of our board meetings in terms of talking about our progress towards

016more in person learning and some of our planning for next year. And finally, we have a DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion update tonight. That's gonna lay out a roadmap for both the end of this year for next year as a planning year and beyond. So some very important work that we're gonna get through tonight. We appreciate everyone staying tuned and participating so that you can be involved in some of our most significant and meaningful work. So again, welcome to all of our new teachers. Thank you guys for being here. And with that, I'll pass it back to Pam. All right, thanks Thomas. Are there any board members who have an opening report? I didn't get a notice so I'm thinking no, right? Okay, then we will move on to the personnel report, Drew. Thank you

017very much, Pam. In preparing for tonight and in welcoming some of our new probationary and full year leave faculty members. I had a nagging feeling that in the winter, when the snow day caused the cancellation of a board meeting, you remember that, that I perhaps missed this opportunity to thank and congratulate some of our retirees, some of whom their successors are in the audience. So I wanna do that close that loop before we turn to this one. But we did have some folks on the February 8th board agenda that represented collectively 166 years of service to Scarsdale, and they included Paula Battista and Joan Fiorella from Green Acres Elementary School. Susan Goodman, one of Eric's right hand people as our teacher in charge for special education. Lindsey Hex from Heathcote Elementary. Celia Cook from Scarsdale

018Middle School, Mark Winston from Quaker Ridge Elementary. And Nelson de Silva and Maggie Secrets both from the science department here at the high school. So a big thanks to them again, there will be. (audience applauding) There will be an opportunity to recognize them in our retirement in recognition ceremony in June more formally. And turning our attention to those in the audience tonight. We're delighted to recommend a number this is our first wave of hires for 2021/22 and several of the folks have been able to come tonight which we're grateful for. So I will start by introducing a familiar face to us. She served this year as a full year leave replacement but returning next year as a probationary teacher, Zoey Calhoun, in the high school world language. Can you stand up and wave to a

019Zoey? Give us a quick wave. Congratulations Zoey. And in the high school art department, Jennifer Hench. (audience applauding) And we welcome to the science department Umang Desai. (audience applauding) And in the dean's office in the high school, Kristen Kerrigan. (audience applauding) And in the music area for Scarsdale Middle School, Caitlin Lezera. (audience applauding) In our world language department here at the high school, Fernanda Mascosa. (audience applauding) And in the science area again at the high school Jessica Toll. (audience applauding) Also in science at the high school, Andrew Visconty. (audience applauding) In social studies at the high school we welcome Ron Widelec. (audience applauding) And in mathematics in the high school, again, Orville Crawford. (audience applauding) And a familiar face to us. I'm not sure if she's here tonight, but Jillian Haker, there she is. (audience

020applauding) Julian has been with us this year, but we'll be returning in mathematics next year as a full year leave replacement. And we welcome Antoinette Nardini, also mathematics. (audience applauding) I think I got everyone. Did I miss anyone? All right. Well, welcome. We're so delighted to have you and it's gonna be a fast summer. Awesome, well welcome to you all. (audience applauding) Just so there's a long agenda tonight. The consent agenda is until a little bit later in the meeting, so you don't need to wait for that. But the board will take action along with many other items in a single vote later in the meeting under the consent agenda. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Thanks all. And for those viewing, we'll just wait. While these celebrated individuals leave. Congrats

021welcome. You might recognize Mark Visconty Andrew's father is the security. The safety monitor at the middle school. Oh, there it is. I did recognize him. That's right. All right, great. Okay, thank you, Drew. So now we'll move to item six, the journey forward update. Can some one? Yeah, I think someone's there to shut the door. All right looks good. So this is Thomas and Eric. The journey forward update. Yes, thank you. Eric is gonna kick us off in just a second. But we do have a couple of special guests here tonight will be Elliot Cohen is joining us to do talk a little bit about mental health services, both over the course of this year and sort of planning ahead. And we also have three of our administrators here who are gonna be talking to

022us about our SPARK program, the summer enrichment program. So we're going to start from the top of the agenda, Eric. And then we'll introduce folks as we get ready for those portions of the. Yes, sir, thank you. So tonight, we are going to start off with a mental health update, Dr. Elliot Cohen's going to take five or six minutes and tell us about really what has happened this year, what the district is seeing as far as mental health needs, and ultimately what our thinking is for next year. So with that in mind, I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Cohen to tell us. From where, from here? Okay, thank you for inviting me to participate this evening. For anybody interested. There's a lot more information on the district website about our mental health restart plan.

023It will take too long to go through it right now. I just do want to highlight a couple of points, three main points. One is that for a number of years now we have been working on a complete mental health approach which looks at simultaneously seeking to ameliorate psychological issues and mental health problems while also fostering well being skills, we need to be both proactive and reactive and responsive. This approach was at the core of our mental health restart planning this year. Other features included using a universal multi tier level of assessment and intervention, and adapting our approaches and services to meet the bandwidth and logistical challenges posed by the pandemic. What we found the next few slides I go through what we found before we opened up fully and then I'll talk about what

024we're finding now and a little bit about projections for next year. We found for the hybrid time that kids were fairly resilient, most some not. And that's pretty consistent with what the literature was suggesting we would find based upon other studies of trauma. We have never had a pandemic like this to study to compare it to. But overall, children were less happy. Those most students didn't manage. Anxiety and depression did continue to be the two main things as they were pre pandemic that we were concerned about. We did see upticks and referrals both within the school as well as outside of school, and those with pre existing issues were more likely to struggle. But the majority students were emotionally managing. Those who had some personal and or family struggles were definitely prior to COVID were

025more likely to be experiencing difficulties during COVID. But this by no means this is not an absolute type of thing, and there were exceptions both ways. We actually saw fewer peer social issues like bullying, and marginalization, and their corresponding depressions and anxieties, but we were seeing more family based conflicts and their corresponding depressions and anxieties. It is understandable that tensions would rise in this environment with everyone living and working and playing in some you know, same cramped quarters, you know, day in day out without a break, especially within the context of this other stresses of the pandemic. And we have more parent referrals to CSEs, 504s and for counseling. We had a struggling subgroup despite a resilient majority. Although many students showed resilience, we found two subsets of kids who warranted increased attention. The first

026is a small group of students who were exhibiting a high level of depression. And, you know, a complex, deep and hard to remediate type of depression. In part This was due to pandemic related factors, and a weakened community infrastructure. In part This was due to the family stressors. Other factors included the shutting down of a child's world, the wrestler can't wrestle, the dancer can't dance, and more limited social interactions. These kids were depressed and show little positive mood reactivity, which is what you get into typical kind of depression. Even when something good happens. Many of these kids have pre pandemic psychological issues as well, but not all. The second subgroup is a very curious subgroup. Because it was probably a version of the struggling group. But it's different. Because these kids brightened in response to

027positive events. There are a group of students who did very well when they were in the building. They appeared happy, they participated, they were energized to learn. But were languishing went out of the building. When they fail to complete asynchronous work, they pretty much fell off the map when they weren't in the building. Some of these kids were exhibiting what we may call atypical depression of adolescence. Basically, that's a form of depression, where mood temporary lifts in response to positive events and situations unlike classic depression, where you don't really get that kind of lift. And the interesting thing was coming to school was experienced as that positive situation for a lot of those kids. So what are we seeing now? We see that most students are happy to be back. Children are playing and wanna

028play. Of all ages. more kids are thriving. We've seen some improvement in our struggling groups. Some of these kids are doing somewhat better now. For our transition grade students there were some minor adjustments to learning the building the flow, but most of them got the hang of it pretty quickly. With the return to more normal schooling, there might also be some return to anxiety related to academic pressures. You might have seen the New York Times article I think was like, yesterday, or the day before, right? About how students like ours, districts like ours have been reporting higher levels of stress, stemming from what Sonia Luthor and Denise Pope call, you know, parent pressure around grades and college admissions, which they say had relaxed a bit during the epidemic or the pandemic and now has kind

029of resurfaced. And we had anticipated with worry. The last thing up there, the school avoidance, we were worried about that. Because when kids learn a pattern of school being optional, in a sense, like attending like I could stay home, we were worried that we're gonna have many more school avoiding kids. And we do have some, but nowhere near the numbers that we had anticipated. So I'm glad about that. And so there are many lessons that we've learned this year. But in the interest of time, I'm just going to share two. First, schools play and our school in particular plays a vital role in the mental health and well being of our students. Probably because it bolsters essential well being factors by providing opportunities for positive emotional experiences, such as having fun, seeing your friends and

030playing, engagement, relationships, a sense of achievement, and sometimes a sense of meaning and purpose. And second, relationships, routines and resources, help children thrive. COVID challenged all of these, the extent to which we were successful this year is directly linked to how well our schools and families were able to foster relationships and routines and provide resources. So in terms of next year, I do not have a crystal ball prediction, because I don't know where the pandemic is gonna go. But from a mental health perspective, I will say that I hope we continue on the current trajectory. Regardless, our mental health team will implement all of what we learned this year, and continue to work tirelessly to foster the well being of our students. And so, specifically, we plan to continue to grow our mental health model,

031our complete mental health model with those two factors. We're gonna continue to advocate for prioritization of well being and mental health as transparent school goals. We will continue to implement strategies that helped us with our bandwidth challenges, such as our front loading of well being, such as finding that briefer counseling sessions with more students is probably better than longer counseling sessions with fewer students. And we are going to maintain the fidelity of our building level mental health teams, which we really beefed up this past year. And keep our watchful eye out for ongoing needs. We will also continue to destigmatize mental health. And we will increase access, visibility and communication with students, parents and staff, and also our collaboration with parents. We enjoyed a number of really wonderful collaborations with parents this past year. I'm

032thinking of Wendy Macmillan and Jen Rossano. Who took it upon themselves to do a wonderful series of interviews with mental health staff at the middle school level, and then to disseminate the information that we shared into all different places, including the Enquirer. And that's my presentation. And I'm happy to answer questions when the time comes. Before we open up questions for Dr. Cohen. I just like to first thank him very, very much for coming tonight. Just to give you an idea of Dr. Cohen's day, he spent the day in middle school, obviously working with children and doing his day job. He has spent the last two hours in a conference room in central office giving an SDI course on mental health to Scarsdale teachers, and now he is here. So we very much thank him

033for taking time out of his busy schedule. And I would like to echo just a few statements before we move on to questions. I know the board's anxious to ask some questions. But, you know, to Elliot and his entire team, you guys have been really heroic. This year, mental health has been and well being has been something that has been a district priority, well in advance of the pandemic, but nobody anticipated the kind of challenges that would arise. We had numerous crises, I would say incidents in which families responded to us at all hours of the day at night, and Elliot and his team followed up on every single referral that came to us, every issue proactively reached out to kids that were sort of known issues, and then also kids who had not presented

034as we talked about some of the struggling subgroups. So it's really extraordinary efforts. I couldn't be more proud of the efforts that you and the entire team have extended and we really provide kind of wraparound services for those students who need them and are available for any other student who may need them as well. And I know that sort of that pre pandemic approach and certainly all the care that happened during the pandemic is gonna carry on into next year and beyond. So, just my heartfelt gratitude on Elliot, also. Thank you. I'll also add, I don't know if everyone here knows this. But Dr. Cohen presented at a Westchester Putnam School Board Association webinar to you know, hundreds of board members across our region and districts who are very interested in hearing more detail about

035Scottsdale mental health restart plan and the work that he and his team were leading here and the you know, the structures, the tasks and the efficacy, and it was just a very impressive presentation. And since you just came back from this SDI course, I did wonder if there's, you know, the board approved a bunch of SDI courses, of course, recently, I think four of them were specifically new related to mental health, I could have that completely wrong, but there was certainly a handful that from the summer, working to help our faculty be very aware of what's going to be happening in the fall and training them on that. Is there anything, can you speak from minute on what you see is the value of this courses for students? Yes, yeah of course, for sure. Yeah.

036I think they I mean, I participate in a lot of them. So I'm a little biased, probably. But, you know, the idea here is that, let's face it, the teachers are the front lines. It's not the psychologist, I'm not a frontline person. It may seem like that, but the way I see how this works best, is to give training in the hands of the people who are day in day out with the students in the classroom, you know, at recess, dealing with large numbers of students. So, you know, philosophically, you know, the way I think of it is, if I have some information that might, I might have learned somewhere along the way that I could then transfer to a teacher who then transfers it to, say, some middle school teacher, teachers 100 kids roughly

037a year, that's 100 kids, we're gonna get the benefit of that, for me to sit in my office and see 100 kids, it's just not gonna happen. So the SDI model of bringing in mental health and people who know about mental health to disseminate this information and train teachers, is my opinion, the best thing that we can do. And with due respect to Dr. Cohen participate means he leads some of the most popular courses in the SDI through the summer and through the semesters, including ones on ADHD, anxiety, depression, positive psychology and well being. Thank you, Dr. Cohen, that was a great presentation, I have a couple of questions. You talk about teachers being on the front lines, I totally agree with that one of the best practices that's coming, that's being discussed now in

038terms of school wellness and mental health is to have regular time during classroom periods. For check ins for teachers to have check ins with students, the idea there is that it doesn't require the students to actually go and seek counseling, it makes it easier for them to feel less alone. And it's, as you mentioned, the teachers would be trained, and they could keep track of students who might be at risk. Do we have plans to incorporate these types of wellness checks in our classrooms for next year? So I'm not unaware of the formal planning in terms of that. But what you're asking me about I'm very curious about I can tell you that anecdotally, I know many teachers who have already begun to implement that type of strategy in the classrooms, I could name the

039specific teachers and what they're doing. For example, I'll leave names out of it for now. But there was one teacher who's her plan for the day we came back to school was that she would start every class by sharing a positive thought for the day that she experienced and would encourage the children to do the same. And that was just a little strategy that she built in to her classroom, sort of following the methods of positive psychology. So there is that I do support that idea of allowing teachers to do that kind of work. There are times let's be honest here, you know, there are times when teachers feel that they are in over their heads when it comes to mental health issues. They are not psychologists, but as long as we have good collaboration,

040we can problem solve through that there are kids that will you know, we're secondary and tertiary, right? So it's like, it depends on what level we're dealing with. But that initial screening is so important. It's so so important. And you know, I've been around you know, I've visited a number of different schools. You know, a couple years ago, I was in Australia at a conference and I got to visit three different programs that were incorporating excellent strategies. And what you're describing was very much the basis of one of the most effective programs that I came to see there. So I've seen it work well. And then just to just to follow up, another one of the best practices that's being discussed in the mental health community is to actually have physical spaces within the school

041buildings, where students can go for activities or to connect with a peer or a peer counselor. And the best practice seems to be to have students involved in the design of this space. Can you talk a little bit about the spaces that might be available to our students in our buildings? Yeah, well, I don't know every building thoroughly. I know the middle school well, 'cause that's where I'm housed. Having student agency and input is gonna be always a great thing, obviously, in terms of space and activity, one needs to think about that, right. So from a trauma perspective, we know that, you know, the mind and the body are connected. And we know that one good way for kids de escalate when they're coming in with a lot of stress is to move. So if

042we have opportunities for that, I'll mention just 'cause I already started it, the program that I mentioned before in Australia, so one of the things that they did was exactly that as well, is that what they would do is they would and this was a special education program for children who had been through really, really horrific trauma at the high school level. And they would start the day with that check in that you were just describing, they would go around the room. And everybody just had to say the following on a five point scale, I'm energized and eager and ready to learn. I'm pretty eager to learn all the way down to I can't do this today, get me out of here. That was the first five minutes of class. Right after that the kids

043went to an activity period where they had all sorts of ways to to move. They had tug of wars, they had badminton, all of that movement. And then they would regroup and come back to the room. And some of those kids during that moving period would have a psychologist, kind of talk to them, like you mentioned that you're not ready to learn today, what's going on. And sometimes there were really traumatic things that they were experiencing, talk to them and movement, come back to the classroom, do a retake on on that five point scale. And many I saw it with my own two eyes, I actually saw it happen, many of those kids were now ready to learn. So it's just something to think about, particularly for children who are struggling. Thank you, Dr. Cohen,

044this was a great presentation. I know, we've heard a lot this year about kids and their struggles. And it's really wonderful to hear all the things that our district has been doing. And I especially appreciate the focus on ways to correct behaviors or things that the district is doing. But I do have a question. You mentioned this year that you were concerned, or that there was some concern about school avoidance. And luckily, that hasn't manifested in the way we thought, is there anything that we're worried about for next year? We're still worried about school avoidance for next year, 'cause we don't know what's gonna happen after a longer hiatus, you know, it's summertime, right? And kids are gonna come back. Our transition kids, you know, going into sixth grade, going into ninth grade. Are they

045ready? I think the majority of them are going to be ready. But you might have a few. I don't think we're out of the woods yet in terms of school avoidance, we definitely still do have school avoiding children. My point was that we don't have anywhere near the numbers that we thought we're gonna get from a psychological viewpoint, from behavioral psychology viewpoint, we should have more problems than we're having right now with school avoidance. And so I'm cautiously optimistic that it's not going to be the terrible problem that we were all, our mental health department we were very worried about this. We even took the planning, you know, kind of contingencies to deal with it. And we haven't really had to activate that very much. So it's hard to predict. I do know that there's

046some good and some bad. So one thing that we've learned from this year is that more people are seeking mental health help. Parents are more open about looking for it. Kids are more open about seeking it. It's been normalized, you know, because so many people are talking about the pandemic, and how it's kind of made us anxious and made us depressed. And it's good to get help. And so it's out there. And I think that that's a good thing. From a staffing perspective, it might mean that we're just really, really, really busy next year. So that's a little concern that I have but I do think that you should see if you haven't yet how happy the kids are like in the middle school. They are smiling, they are playing, they are enjoying, it's a

047wonderful thing to see. So I think we have to kind of take a look for this. We also know that the way this kind of stuff works is that adverse life events are something that we are worried about in general, because we know that they can be cumulative. So if a child has one adverse life event, say they've, God forbid, in a fire or something like that, okay, we don't wanna kind of pile on many others. So we can look at our population say a lot of people have been through an adverse life event from COVID. And therefore, you know, I don't know what the future holds. But, you know, I don't wanna pile up too many bad events, traumatic events, because then we'll be dealing with more higher levels of psychological dysfunction. Thank you.

048I don't personally have children at home, that are still in school. But I'm thinking that parents may be concerned as we enter summer, where there is a distress period for parents and kids, which is great. And then they start anticipating the fall. Is there any way or any opportunity to, I guess, coach parents on what to be looking for, in terms of the kids reactions, and preparing themselves for the next school year that would help us sort of get in front of, you know, you say that the teachers are on the front line, which of course they are. But in reality, the parents are on the front line with their own kids. So, yes, you know, just like you wanna train a teacher, to some degree, I would think you'd wanna train a parent, one

049of the positives of Scarsdale but perhaps one of the challenges is the multicultural factor. That we have lots of cultures that may look at mental health in different ways and say, in America, where it's may be very kind of every day ish, and people are used to it. We have, you know, tremendous number of people from overseas that may still have a certain discomfort. So I'm just wondering, is there any way over the summer, you know, pre school kick off, to help coach parents on things to look for, that might be warning signs for their children? Sure, I mean, the the warning signs, the last part of your question, are the same warning signs that we always ask parents to think about, if you see certainly a shift in a child's behavior, that's a warning

050sign. Withdrawal is a warning sign. Now, every kid will withdraw now and then but we're talking about the extent of that withdrawal behavior, lack of energy, lack of socialization, those are all things that are red flags. So change in behavior and those kinds of things are the things that parents would look for to do. In terms of getting kids ready, you know, kids learn by example, more, they learn by what we do more than what we say. So that's something that parents need to be mindful about how I approach going back to work in September will affect my kid more than what I tell them, they should think about. We do need to talk to our kids as well. There is a you know, there is a possibility, again, that kids can, you know, start

051to think about one of the things that I was worried about. And the reason why we were worried about this school avoidance is because again, many of our students, all of our students started to learn kind of a little message that was unintended, which is, school attendance is not automatic. When I was a kid, school attendance was automatic, if I was afraid to go to school, 'cause I thought I was gonna fail my test or something. It didn't matter. You go to school, that was a routine, don't break that it's there's a wall there that you just can't go through. And one of the things that scared us about COVID, as a psychologist I'm saying is that that automaticity was lost. And now it became a permeable barrier as opposed to an absolute barrier. And

052in the minds of some children, particularly our anxious children, our school anxious and wooden children that can resurface. They always have a hard time during the transition that's characteristic of these children. So it wouldn't surprise me. If your school anxious or your generally anxious kid come September says, my stomach hurts. I don't feel like going to school. I don't think I can go. You know, I can see that. And I think this year, gave a little reinforcement to that. Like I said, I'm so pleased by what we're seeing. 'Cause I was expecting this to be very different. I was pleased that we don't have that level. We do have some I don't wanna mislead you, we do have some for sure. But it's not those numbers. So I think we just have to continue to

053kind of work with our parents around this, part of our visibility is communication. And I am proud of the efforts that our mental health professionals in the district at all levels this year did it wasn't always identical at all the levels nor should it be identical at all levels. But you know, we did a lot of work to find out what we needed to know many of you are probably aware that we surveyed parents for information at our high school level, they surveyed students and parents for information about who might need some help. And so we got a few, we got some extra names of kids that we knew we had to check on that we didn't get through the regular channels. The high school I will tell you we surveyed, I think it was

054in December, and they got a very, very low response rate very, very low return, you know, from students and from parents. And just in case you're curious. Parents definitely identified more students than self identified at the high school level. And the good news is that the December survey, every single student that had been identified was already known to our mental health professionals. So we already had them, which was wonderful. So yeah. Just to be specific, when we look at the students who are dealing with school avoidance this year, we actually have less students than in a typical year for school avoidance as we've come back. It is vagary of the pandemic, it certainly wasn't something we were expecting that that would be a major problem. But it has not been. We obviously in a school

055district this size, you'll always have some of those issues at any given point. But it is not any higher than it would be and it is in fact a little bit lower than our normal school year. Can I ask I know you said the high school was assessed with surveys, how were the elementary and middle school children assessed in terms of surveys? So different surveys. Different surveys, okay. But they surveyed parents, at the elementary, middle school level, we surveyed parents, and the idea of the survey was to let us know, if you think your child may need some help. If there's also a rating scale, like you know, how do you think your child is doing? And do you think they've might need to check in with one of us. And elementary did a similar

056type of survey, we only did the elementary middle school in this was the end of August. We did not repeat it. We were about to repeat it. But then school reopened. And so we said why don't we just wait to see what we've got before we resurveyed. And we didn't see the need at that point. The high school did it earlier they did in December. And we also learned from their second survey that the yield was not really impressive at all. And is that plan to continue in terms of when you say to be proactive? How will we be assessing in the fall? It's something that we need to discuss, you know, we haven't made a decision on that just yet. Whether or not we need to kind of do that surveying again, is something

057that is in the plans to be discussed. I do not have an answer yet. I can attest to the other levels of surveying, the number of students that were identified by the survey that were already identified was extremely high on all three of the surveys when we started in August. Could you talk a little bit about the students that have remained virtual? And how we're following up with them, given that there may only be one on the screen now? I appreciate hearing that at all levels? Sure. I think I could answer part of that question. I don't know that I could answer the second part because I don't know what the plans. I think that we were actually just talking about that outside actually some possibility. So I don't know what the formal plans are.

058There may be others in the room who might be able to answer that. But I can tell you that I'm about to say is a little bit difficult, but I'm gonna say it which is overall, it seems that the children who have been remote only are overall less happy than the kids who are coming in. It's not an absolute statement. I know kids who are home and they're happy. I know kids in school who are unhappy. But overall, I do think that most children benefit from being in school from an emotional perspective. I worked last year with a child with very high levels of social anxiety in Zoom sessions, and he said Dr. Cohen, I said, how you doing with this quarantine and all this stuff staying home, he said Dr. Cohen you don't get

059it. He said COVID is Nirvana for a person like me. And I was thinking he's right and he's wrong. As a psychologist, I'm saying he's definitely not right. From his own heart. He's feeling like this is a comfortable place, but as you know, for psychologists, we're always trying to help people kind of grow. And so what he's saying is I don't have to grow, I don't have to put myself out there and take some social risks. This is I'm gonna stay in my cocoon. So, you know, I talked about that. But but so some of these kids really feel like calm and ease at peace. And if you ask them, they'll say, I'm happier because I don't have to go to school and deal with the social anxiety. But we're not moving the needle than

060really, either in terms of having them learn how to do those things. So that's, did I answer your question? You did I just curious, do you find that across all three levels? Or is it a different sense between secondary and primary? From talking to my colleagues at the other levels, more or less yes. I think the high school is more of a unique situation. In terms of who's staying home, I don't really have a pulse on on that. I think there are more. Also, I think it's more complicated. I do, but talking to my colleagues, the I think, overall do share what I just said, which is that they are concerned about them. And some of them at the high school level, I will say that that one of our psychologists did tell me that

061she's particularly concerned, because some of the kids that she needs to work with in person to deal with this, are taking the option of staying home. And so it limits the efficacy of what she can really do. So we do have that. I appreciate that update, hopefully, we can figure out a way given especially that, those kids may not have that front line of the teachers, while they're on Zoom, not face to face. And just speaking of teachers, I just appreciate your perspective on the health and wellness of our teachers, administrators and staff. Yeah, I appreciate that I wasn't part of my presentation. But that was also part of our mental health restart plan, you know, our thinking was that we all our staff in particular, you know, really need to be taken care of,

062because we know from everything we've ever read and studied in psychology, that the helpers need to be helped. And like I said, before, our teachers are our frontline, our mental health staff, we built in our own systems of checking in and taking care of, it's really important. And there's good literature on this. And it's you cannot have well children if you don't have well teachers. And so it's an imperative. So we took that seriously. And I thought maybe it's a little bit beyond the scope, I thought maybe it's more Drew's scope, in terms of personnel, but we did kind of do a little bit of work on that as well. And I'm proud to say that we did it, and I'm happy that we did it, and we're gonna continue to do it. Could you

063talk a little bit about our special needs students and how their experience compared to typically developing students across all the all the grade levels? Yeah, I think we've done a wonderful job. At really, you know, I remember being in restart planning meetings with many of the people in this room, you know, pretty much since March 2020, wherever April to turn whenever it started. And I think from the get go, we recognized, really under an Eric's leadership, that we really had to make sure that these kids were taken care of, because they remember I meant the adverse life events that I mentioned. So those are types of adverse life events, having a learning disability, or an emotional disability, those also count. And so we had to kind of really kind of focus on that. And I

064think, you know, it wasn't the same at all levels. It was like little details in terms of the program and who came in when and all that. But, you know, pretty much all along our special students were brought, for example, in the middle school brought into the building as much as possible more than the non classified students, because we do recognize the need for more help. And, look, it's not a perfect world in COVID but I do think that we did the right thing there. And you might have a few pieces to add to that. But that was my impression. Thank you, Elliot. Yeah, you know, from the get go, it was to try and give our students with that had additional services, access to those services and access to as much in person learning

065as possible. Obviously, students who start off with a learning disability or an emotional disability do need extra support in order to get make the kind of gains that we would want them to make. Across the board, elementary, middle and high school our Special Education Programs had additional in person learning time and access to the school counselors in a live fashion, especially when needed and there were a lot of subjective choices made on students who needed to be prioritized for whether it was in person, different types of in person services. And that's always been an option throughout the year. So at this point, you know, we are pretty happy with in the context of a pandemic, but we're pretty happy with the way our services have rolled out for the year. And now that all students

066are back full time, are we identifying students who maybe over the course of the pandemic developed need for additional supports? So, you know, this is one of the pieces where, you know, Dr. McIntosh and I are working together with our multi tiered support services. A pandemic is not a disability. That being said, there are students who have disabilities that might not rise in a normal year to significantly impact their ability to access a general education. So there certainly are a number of referrals that have come in throughout the year, and many of those are students who were doing just fine with a 504. This has kind of made that ability to access a general education that much more difficult, so that that would be a situation where a student might get classified. Next year, we

067will need to look at the students who walk into class in September, we need to do our formative assessments, we need to understand where we're meeting those students. And we need to make our curriculum reach the students who are not disabled, because maybe they missed a particular skill, or this skill didn't get covered quite as much as it usually would in a year. And we need to adjust and use our spiraled curriculums to hit and build those skills next year. You know, the idea that any and every student in the world at this point has had a similar experience. So that is going to be something that is across the board. So it's inherently not a disability, we're all in the same boat there. And we need to adjust the way we engage students on

068a pre referral basis to address many of those issues. I would second everything that Eric has said. And really the key is the vertical articulation is making sure that we are connecting with the grade above and the grade below. So that we can look at where there are areas that we cover the essential areas, but there are areas that may need some shoring up as we go forward. That being said, in talking with teachers, by walking through the district, the students have made progress this year. Students have learned this year, students have had an engaging and enriching year throughout whether we were on hybrid and now that we're back in full time, I think it's unbelievable the way teachers have adjusted the way they're engaging students, adjusted pedagogy to use virtual, in person, both at

069the same time, you know, just seeing some of the things that teachers have done is really eye opening and amazing. And kids are engaged, and they've learned some things that they wouldn't have otherwise learned, you know, without the pandemic, so there will be silver linings to this. Thanks for Ron. I do wanna just circle back for just a second to one of Ron's questions about the virtual learning teachers and students. I know that in the virtual elementary, for example, there are students that are being identified for a variety of, in a variety of areas as needed. And part of having these small class sizes is that teachers are able to pick up on it and communicate with the teacher, and then reach out to the building level support. I was just talking to a teacher

070about it the other day. So it's something that is ongoing, even for the students who are at home. Are there any other questions for Dr. Cohen, 'cause I would like him to get home and get some dinner at some point this evening. Thank you very much, Elliot. With that, under the auspices of our usual journey forward update, we're gonna talk a little bit about barriers. I'll give a quick COVID numbers update. I'm gonna talk about our vaccine opportunities coming up, end of year activities, and ultimately the 2021/22 school year planning. So I believe, Thomas, you're gonna start with our barriers. So we sent an update last week. I'm sorry, what was that? I said or lack thereof. Okay, yeah or lack thereof. We sent out a communication on Friday that talked about our forward moving

071on barriers. As we explained in that communique. In the absence of guidance and an interest in moving forward more in person learning we had to make some decisions as a district for how to move forward. We made the decision to get ourselves more comfortable with the idea have increased in person learning, really, by keeping our multi layered risk mitigation plan in place, but sort of supplementing or supplanting the idea of six foot social distancing with other mitigation strategies, and those were, namely, the use of increased barriers, and also the availability of vaccines. Of course, shortly thereafter, we did get updated guidance which said that barriers were no longer needed. And I felt like I made a personal commitment to families to students and to teachers, that we were going to use this as an intermediary

072step. And so we felt compelled to do that, and to at least keep them in place for a couple of weeks, we said that we would reevaluate those, even without the updated guidance. And with the guidance that certainly, you know, we wanted to make sure that we did that in a meaningful way. So we did reach out in survey, we'd heard a lot of information from our parents through our PTA officers through PTC through a parent emails to the board and the administration. So we've got a sense of where the parents were on that issue. We also then reached out to our faculty. Through a survey, we had 219 educators who respond to nearly 85% of those reported, that barriers were having a significant impact on teaching and learning in their classrooms. There were a

073few mixed responses, some people were neutral, a handful, and some people said if teachers feel or my colleagues feel more comfortable having them in place, I don't have a problem with it. But by and large, the feedback was was largely negative. And so in response to that, we did say that they would no longer be required. Although we wanted to be attentive to the fact that there were a variety of situations within classrooms. In the elementary school, we have to provide barriers for lunches because of the eating in the classrooms without masks. We understand that for health reasons, or other kinds of reasons, people would like to use them discretionarily. And so we provided that as an opportunity. And we sort of laid out the different options that really allowed teachers who felt uncomfortable to

074take those down, and then allowed parents and teachers at their discretion to be able to use those, we do have some available in each of our classroom spaces. In our elementary classrooms, we are allowing teachers to take them down during instructional time, and then just to put them up at lunchtime. So we feel that, you know, we tried to accommodate as many people as possible with this change in practice. Just as a reminder, we've continued to talk about at each and every step of our sort of journey forward that we were looking at practices. We were following the science and science trends and adjusting our plans accordingly. And for me, this was one more step in that direction. I don't know if there's actually why don't we go ahead and go through the entirety of.

075So the science and the trends leads to our COVID numbers update, which is happily good news across the board. There are only 13 current active cases in Scarsdale, which is down from the 30s. At our last board meeting, that has fallen precipitously over the last weeks. And Scarsdale is officially out of the high risk red category on the CDC metrics as our seven day cases per 100,000 have dropped below 100. They're at 78.2 currently, and falling. We have a daily rate now that is in the single digits, which we haven't seen since beginning of November. Which is fantastic. So I expect that to fall precipitously. Continuing if the trend holds. Currently, there's a positive rate of 1.1 over the seven day average. And it has been below one for the last two days. So that

076is also excellent news. And just as a side for the metrics for the CDC, we are currently in the orange metric, but that is only because the cases per 100,000 over seven days continues to be over 50 our positivity rate actually puts us in the lowest category. But for this the two metrics you take the higher designation of the two. With that said, I am happy to announce that this Thursday Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps will be providing vaccinations for those 16 and 17 year olds of our staff and our families at their building over near five corners. And we will be sending out a link for that tomorrow in an update so that students can sign up. A couple of things for that they must be over 16 still 16 or over. Because Pfizer although

077an hour ago was approved for 12 to 15 year old the requisite state orders only, you know, filter down through the bureaucracy they will not be ready to give 12 to 15 year olds doses as of Thursday. We originally had scheduled a Friday and Monday vaccine rollout by White Plains hospital at Scarsdale Medical Group. They are unsure why but this Sunday they did not get their allotment of Pfizer vaccines. They are unsure why that happened but they are ready to roll out vaccines for us, as soon as they get their allotment, which would be next week or the following week. So those dates will be rescheduled. That being said, the timing may work out because at that point 12 to 15 year olds will be eligible to receive that vaccine. We did a survey, an

078interest survey on Friday, the results of that where there are about 55 16 to 17 year olds who were identified as interest in receiving the shot and there were 325 12 to 15 year olds who identified on that interest survey. So the Thursday booking by SVAC can handle all of the kids that were shown as interest on our survey, which is nice. And then the upcoming White Plains Hospital at Scarsdale Medical Group should be able to do our 12 to 15 year olds or at least start on our 12 to 15 year olds come when they get their allotment of Pfizer. Any questions on what we've done so far before I go into the end of the year activities? I don't know, did you skip the update on secondary openings? Like there was just like

079everything's great. Yes, I actually took that off the bat, the secondary openings did start very well. We have had the worst problem we had was rearranging traffic at the middle school for pickup, but as far as schedules and logistics within school, we've had an excellent opening, kids are happy. One of the things that Elliott said earlier which you may not have heard is kids are willing to play. You know, as you go to the middle school, that is the age where kids at recess start to be too cool to play and you see always a few kids playing a game or doing those different things. This year, it has been such a stark difference, the students who are out during lunch almost are all playing in some way shape, or form and it's just a

080different energy to it which was really nice to see. On the high school level, things started smoothly, going back to the regular schedule has been kind of like a welcome old coat that kids can engage in and we've had an excellent an excellent start. So we don't foresee that changing till the end of the year, which is very nice. We have had very few COVID cases, we've had two since the community updates ended which is great 'cause we're really, I'm gonna knock on wood when I say this, but we have not had the cases that we've experienced over the past months and that's really true of where we stand. So, one of the things that everybody is excited to hear about is our end of the year activities. And if you were with us during

081the Scarsdale restart steering committee on Wednesday, you'll actually know that what I'm about to say is different than what we heard there because there has been changes since last Wednesday. So I'll start with the high school and the graduation plans. Right now there's going to be one ceremony, it is going to be on Butler Field, it will either be a daytime or a nighttime ceremony. Right now the committee at the high school is deciding which would be most beneficial for the families there. That being said, because we're doing it outside and it's an untented event, we will need to have two rain possibilities. So the initial ceremony will be scheduled for Thursday rather than the traditional Friday with the rain date on Friday. There is an opportunity to have an under the lights but that

082is what the committee is deciding whether they wanna do a morning or an evening ceremony. That is a ceremony that will require testing and or proof of vaccination. So we are currently working with Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps to provide that testing for anybody, any student who may need it. Adult will need to provide their own testing or their own proof of vaccination prior to that ceremony and the state has set out that you must have a PCR test within 72 hours of the event or an antigen test within six hours which is much less logistically feasible. Prom, which is the major change we've had in the last week or so is actually going to be held at Glen Island. So we've had the opportunity to work with Glen Island. They had a second party that's

083normally there during our prom date back out, that provides us with both rooms at Glen Island which is a very large event venue so they have about a 1900 person capacity in normal times. We would be in the neighborhood of about 375 people for prom 'cause this year we are only going to allow seniors to come to prom, that will allow us using the two rooms, one for eating, one for dancing to set up a socially distance appropriate capacity event. Ackland which I think will be much preferred by all of our students that our Dean Field tent idea. So we're very happy that that can happen. And then third, the senior class play, that will run, and the prom is a testing and vaccination-required event as well. Senior class play will not require testing or

084proof of vaccination, there will be three shows with 100 guests or 100 audience members at each show. And that will be Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The middle school, there is no moving up ceremony typically, what there usually is is eighth grade celebrations during the school day, those will be done by house rather than as a full eighth grade. So those will look generally as they normally would except house. We're also because the fifth graders haven't had their opportunity to tour and visit the middle school, we're doing two things to make up that experience. The first is we are moving the eighth, or excuse me, the sixth grade orientation to the same day as freshmen orientation in high school where they'll be able to come to the school prior to school starting and have an experience

085much like the freshmen orientation. Secondly, once house assignments are made, the PTC will be organizing a middle school scavenger hunt after school, each house will have their own afternoon to do that. There'll be potted, each of the kids will be potted into kind of randomized groups and we'll be able to do a scavenger hunt within the school to get an idea of it, some of the SO from the middle school will be there to help out and show the kids around. And then the group activities for that will be outside on the field. So that's a wonderful opportunity that we're gonna start this year just to give the kids the opportunity to come into the middle school prior to that right before school day. And then finally, or not finally, but elementary. Moving up right

086now will be by class, there'll be two guests for each student who is moving up. So if there are three sections in an elementary school, there'll be three ceremonies, if there are four, there will be four ceremonies that will happen throughout the day. Students will then kind of return, moving up ceremony is always during a regular day of school so those students normally return to school, some parents pick up and take their students to lunch or an early dinner, that's still an option. But students will be able to return to their class and finish their day of school. And then Field Day will continue in all of the elementary schools, it will unfortunately be without parents this year, but they will keep cohorting in place during field days and arrange it internally so that kids

087can celebrate and compete with each other in a great way at the end of the year, but it will be an internal event this year. And then finally, we have many staff retirements this year, we've worked with the staff to make sure all of our staff celebrations follow all the applicable New York State guidelines because I don't know of a year where our staff deserves kind of an end of the year time to be with one another and feel the presence together and celebrate what was a very hard and well worked year. That is all for the end of the year. Thanks, Eric. And then planning for the, well, before we do that, there's a typo in our current memo that says that it's gonna be on Dean field for the prom so we will

088update that after this meeting and make sure that that's corrected as it goes out to the broader community. As we think about the 2021/22 school year, we're very excited. I did send out an update really specifically on state guidance on Friday, not really the totality of the academic and mental health services and other programs that we're offering, but really an understanding of how we're gonna be responding to state guidance moving forward. You know, just to go back a little bit, the reason that the governor has such broad powers is because under obviously emergency authorization, the governor was able to step in and use his executive power through executive orders to do all sorts of things that were really important for us to mitigate the worst of the pandemic crisis. But as we move down and

089certainly as Eric described, as the statistics are really beginning to drop precipitously as we're beginning to see a sort of emerge out of a crisis situation, we're not sure how long that emergency authorization power is going to last, at some point that that is gonna go away and we're gonna resume and the functioning of schools and the operations will go back on to the Board of Regents which is where that work really belongs from a statutory standpoint. And so we fully expect that to be happening. Having said that, we do believe that there will be some mitigation efforts that are continuing to be in place for schools. As I mentioned in that update, certainly we believe that masks are here, although we've been hearing more recently that actually maybe masks will be going away sooner

090rather than later. But we will continue to practice things that we do in a high density school environment anyway, which is hand washing, I think we're more tentative now to having fresh air circulation going on in the buildings. You know, this has certainly taught us some lessons about hygiene and health that we need to sort of move forward with in our practice. But as we started way back in December as we started this meeting with a budget hearing, we talked about way back in December that we anticipate this being a normal school year to the extent that we'll be back on normal school schedules, that we will be running our facilities and operations the same way, that we'll have the full gamut of programs and services, that we'll be using our facilities during the school

091day for academic purposes, but for clubs and activities, and all those kinds of things. So we do really expect a full return to normalcy in spite of the fact that there may be some mitigation efforts like masks or things like that. But for all intents and purposes, that's our planning. If we for some reason see a turn in the metrics and we get some updated guidance, of course, we will be coming back and revisiting that in a formalized way and we'll be sharing out those concerns. We did meet with the restart committee and really thanked them for their time and effort over the course of this year, we did sort of say we wouldn't necessarily anticipate bringing the back together, they're sort of on a hiatus, unless or until there was a change in guidance.

092And we saw the need to sort of bring them back in to be thought partners on sort of rolling out some new scheme. We do also believe that we're fully prepared we've lived through the worst crisis in most of our lifetimes and I feel like although there may have been fits and starts in that process, I think that we do feel like anything that kind of comes back to us in terms of quarantines or if we had to somehow switch to a remote or hybrid model, we feel really ready to do that at this point in a way that we were not prepared the first time around necessarily to do that. So we have developed a sense of confidence through our trial and error experiences to do that. So again, for all intents and purposes

093around state guidance very specifically, we're anticipating a return to normalcy in the fall with some contingency planning in the event that some of that changes on us. And then in terms of the academic and special programming and mental health services, just to be clear, we always spend a lot of time thinking about the transition into a new school year, as Elliot talked to us about. We're gonna be spending some special attention on transition years particularly, transitions particularly into new buildings. We always spend the first few weeks and months of school working on relationship building and community building, of course, we'll be redoubling and thinking about those efforts even more as we realize that kids have had sort of some missed experiences this year. Mental health services, I think they did a great job of thinking

094about, we do typically provide wraparound services for kids, we're very responsive to that. As we said, there weren't as many kids as significantly impacted as we thought, but we certainly know that kids are and we'll continue to work with those kids closely and continue to take referrals and get feedback from families to make sure that we are reaching out to every student who might need us. And then in terms of curriculum, there's this notion of sort of learning laws, we've also heard kids have been learning, some kids have thrived in a virtual environment, others have not thrived in a virtual environment. But the real strength of a Scarsdale education is that our teachers pre assess students, they understand where they are in that learning journey, no two kids are ever at the exact same place

095anyway, but we get that by assessing students, teachers understand where the individuals and where their classrooms are and they specially design curriculum to make sure that all students are able to move forward. And as we move into next year, that will again be a continuation of our current practice with maybe some even extra attention and emphasis on making sure that we're really aware of any skill deficits that students may have or areas that we may need to cycle back through in terms of a curriculum that sort of spiral through topics again and again and again. So there are multiple opportunities for students to gain strength in areas that they maybe need some additional supports in. So, I think that we are planning next year as robustly as we do every year, but with some special

096attention and emphasis on some of the areas that we've been talking about this evening. Questions before we move to our spark update? I just wanna share a comment I shared with the research steering committee that I do think there would be a lot of value in convening a group to review this past year, what worked well, what didn't work well, lessons learned going forward. Meanwhile I understand this will happen within every classroom, within every building, I think there's a lot of value in having such a team at the district board, whatever the level is, and to do that with the appropriate stakeholders involved. So I understand research steering committee won't be meeting anymore, but I do think there's a important path forward with a different group for a different purpose from this year. So I

097just shared that with the resource steering committee so I want to share that with this group as well. It's my understanding of certainly that all the administrative teams, the building leaders and their administrative teams along with their existing restart steering committees may be doing that work, maybe have already done a lot of work in terms of lessons learned at their faculty meetings. I can't think of a meeting I've been in recently where that's not front and center of our conversation. I think it is difficult, you know, honestly, we're still living in the moment, I don't think that you can have true perspective until sometimes you're, you know, you need to be 10 or 20 or 50 feet away from it. So I think to the point, I think we're gonna continue to reflect on this

098and I think the lessons learned are gonna be different depending on where you are. So a classroom teacher's lessons learned are gonna be different than a principals lessons learned, they are gonna be different than my lessons learned. And I think we all have to take those lessons and sort of incorporate them into our individual practice. I think that's where the real power is. I mean, I know the board has certainly been reflecting on things and we've been hearing about what we could do better as a board in terms of communication and so on and so forth. So I think that's the real value and the real power in doing that kind of reflection. Again, I think it's something that we've been starting and working on, but something that we're going to carry on I think

099for a long time. And I think in some cases, the further we get away from this, the clear some of those lessons are gonna become to all of us. Well, then I'll restate that, I think the board should do that then for itself. Okay, that's fair. Could I ask, we were discussing sort of earlier the Governor Cuomo's emergency powers and do we have any sense, so last summer, he came out and said, come up with these models, do we have any sense when we might know what's expected of next year? Yeah, that's the million dollar question that we've all, I mean, so we compare ourselves to Connecticut and Connecticut has already come out and said there will not be a virtual only model, they've already provided some other guidance that's been clear, we have yet

100to receive that kind of guidance. Our experience has been unfortunately that it tends to be often later than is helpful for us to make plans. But I suspect in looking at the other kinds of metrics that are going on around us in terms of reopening efforts, that there'll be minimal if any kind of moving forward. That's a Thomas prediction. But you were sort of anticipating that masks will be required. You know, I would have said almost definitely, but Eric, you can talk to us like there was just-- I mean, we were seeing more and more articles. Dr. Fauci himself this morning said, it's time to start looking at indoor mask mandates and how those are used. That being said, we've also heard that until younger students can be vaccinated, that mask may be more necessary

101in schools. That being said, they've moved up their thought on when two to 15 year olds could be, or excuse me, two to 11 year olds could be approved and that that might be as early as September or August which is fantastic news. So what I anticipate for the summer is hearing what we can do more normally rather than hearing what the next new mandate is. And I think as those things roll out, it will move us from where we are now, which is full in person learning with less of the close quarter type of work, less of the group work than we would ultimately like, but ultimately a more normalized situation to be, I would look at that as kind of, unless there's some major turn in the virus, that being the at worst,

102September, versus it could be significantly more normalized. That being said, at this point, we are starting to think about loosening usage on fields, uses on different after school activities because as we know, the fomites are less of a an issue, the cleaning becomes a little bit less of an issue, it's still important, but not to the extent that we were thinking two, three, four or five months ago. So all of those things are moving in the right direction and we expect them to continue. You know, the nice thing about whether or not we need to wear masks, it's not a logistical change, it's you're either gonna wear a mask or you're not. So those are pieces that are easier to plan for. You know, the virtual only option in New York is still a question

103mark. At this point, there would need to be an extension of the requirement from New York State Ed to continue with virtual only option because in a normal year, the virtual only option would not actually fulfill the requirements of school under New York State Education Law. That's been an exception for this year. So, given the states around us and what they've done, you know, my bet would be that we're probably not going to have a virtual option next year. Okay, so it just sounds like we really don't know when we might get that guidance. That's right, I have no idea. Okay, thanks. That's unfortunately been the case all year. All right-- Before we move on, I just wanna take one quick second to thank White Plains Hospital and Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps for the opportunities

104they are providing us over the next weeks for vaccination. So just a big shout out to them and a big thank you. And that's a great segue into thanking our SPARK administrators who are also sitting in the audience who are gonna come up and talk to us about our summer enrichment program for elementary students for a couple of minutes. So, I invite up William, Kristina and Tricia. Hi, everyone, thanks for letting us speak tonight, we just wanna give you a quick brief overview of what we have planned. Of course, we're still in the planning stages so we'll just give you a little sneak preview of what that's about. So currently right now we have 350 students registered for our program. And just to back up a minute, we are calling it the SPARK program because

105it stands for a Summer Project-based Academic Retreat for Kids. Our hope is that this will be a fun and exciting, just exciting program for students just to be happy, be in school, engage in hands on activities. So out of the 350 students, we're gonna have two buildings. So one will be at Fox Meadow where we'll have the incoming first, second and third graders and the second will be at Green Acres where it will have the incoming fourth, fifth, and then incoming sixth graders as well. And then from there, we will be partnering with the Scarsdale Recreation Department. So students will start at our schools from nine to 11 and then we will transport about half of those students to their rec programs that they signed up for and the other half will just be picked

106up on to other camps. So we're excited about that. Something else that we're excited about is these, the professional development that we're really engaging the teachers in and that will be about project based learning. So this PD will hopefully carry through the classrooms in the upcoming year. So I'm gonna turn it over William Yang to explain a little bit more about project based learning and our partnership for professional development. Good evening, everybody. So as Trish said, our focus is gonna be on project based learning for our students as well as our teachers and project based learning is a promising approach to supporting our strategic plan goals. It promotes deeper learning through a multidisciplinary approach as students apply skills, strategies, content knowledge to research and design and implement an authentic project rather than search for answers

107in an activity that could be easily googled. To help us develop these project units for all of our students, we're thankful for the support of the Scottsdale Teachers Institute as well as our partnership with the Center for Professional Education of Teachers, CPET, which is based out of Teachers College, Columbia University. We've also had a partnership with them through the Global Learning Alliance in the past. And we have a dynamic research team and a staff developer who's working with us to really explore this expertise in project based learning at the elementary level specifically. And so we look forward to working with students from across five elementary schools, this is a unique opportunity for us. And so to do that, we're looking at attending to all the diverse learners that we have across the district. And so

108Miss Beck is actually gonna talk a little bit about attending to diverse learners. So out of over 300 students, we actually have about 70 youngsters who either have an IEP or a 504 and we are ready to differentiate and meet the needs of all of our students. We have about 25 teachers signed up already, two of which are special education teachers. We will have a school nurse in each one of our buildings and we are ready to meet the needs of all of our students. We will also have six one to one aides looking at our population for youngsters who have signed up, as well as additional aid support for some of our students and for some teacher support and we're very excited. We just wanna thank Dr. Hagerman, Dr. McIntosh, the board, all the

109families that are participating in this, we're really excited about this opportunity and we look forward to sharing more with you in the near future. Thank you guys. Are there any questions from board members on the SPARK program in its early stages? I was just wondering, could you give us an example of a project that might be undertaken by a student. Sure. And it is the whole time, is at one project for the whole time? So, true project based learning experiences take about six to eight weeks in a unit. Because we only have three weeks, we are going to limit the scope of the projects because of the timeframe and the reality of time that we have. But there are a number of projects, authentic projects that we could look at. So for example, for our

110youngest learners, one example that other schools have done is to develop a recess path or sensory path that our first and second graders could develop. And in that process, they'll research and design sensory paths for other students in the community to actually go through and communicating that out through traditional means such as how to books that we do actually during our teachers college reading and writing units that spiral through the grades, but also exploring multiple modalities 'cause we know that if you ask any five year old to read a how to book, they're more apt to look at your video on YouTube. So encouraging our students to not only communicate traditionally, but also looking at the new modalities that our students will need in the future. And then in other projects such as developing what

111is sustainability and looking at how can we implement a plan for our community to help promote sustainability in our community? We could also look at other projects that include how do you present and ask for a $25 micro loan that you could finance a cause and having critical literacies and presentation skills and interviewing experts in the financial world on how you would actually manage that are some examples that other schools and districts are actually exploring. Will all of the students be able to fit into cooled spaces in the two buildings. Yes, most of the classrooms that have air conditioners are the ones that we'll be occupying. We also hope to get outside and courtyards when the weather isn't too hot, but yet, that's something important for us too. Do you have a sense or the

112the numbers, the 350 students, evenly split across grades in the five elementary schools? Yeah, it is surprisingly almost like 20% of the school. It's really fascinating to see that. And then if you look across the grades, we do have more lower grades students enrolled. So at our Fox Meadow School, we'll have one section more than our grade contingent at Green Acres. Thanks. And you mentioned about 70 students have an IEP or a 504, is it gonna mirror our ICT classes where those students will be in class with general education students. They will absolutely be in class with their general education peers. And I'll just go around and make sure that everybody's needs are being taken care of but as we would with any other school year, we'll make sure that the teacher who has those

113students has looked at the IEP or the 504 and is aware of all the accommodations on the youngster's plans. Great, thank you. And what exactly is the PD that you're talking about? Is this something that's happening in June or is it a one day event or? No, thank you, that's a great question. We are actually meeting, there's two components to it, there's the pre-program PD that we're actually going to explore what project based learning is, develop the units, try to make them gold standard projects for our students. And that's working prior to the program beginning on July 6. So that will take place sometime between now and the end of June. And then there's also a PD that takes place during the program in which we will have reflective practice with our teachers looking at

114the documentation of what happens with students and really learning as much as we possibly can from some of the opportunities that we're trying out with the students over the summer. And hopefully that will eventually translate and give us more information about how we can bring that into the school year as opposed to just in isolation in the summer program. All right, any other questions? Well, thank you to all three of you, we really appreciate your extraordinary efforts and planning this program for our students. I do want to thank the three of you, it has been an absolute pleasure and I thank you so much for stepping forward and showing your enthusiasm and your creativity. It's wonderful so thank you. Bravo. (applauding) All right, and that winds up our journey forward update for this evening, it

115was a rather extensive but I think there was a lot of important information that was covered as part of that. Are there any last questions before we move on? If no one has questions, I do have a statement on behalf of the board. Please. But I just wanna make sure, no question? So, on behalf of the board, I do wanna thank, I'm gonna get emotional, I wanna thank the members of the restart steering committee and each of the 12 restart task groups, many of which continue to meet, deliberate, and provide recommendations throughout this entire year. These multi stakeholder groups established a year ago have been an extremely important aspect of the restart and the journey forward work. They allowed representatives of all our key stakeholders to exercise design thinking together and to share perspectives, thoughts,

116concerns and suggestions regarding the reopening our schools and the many complicated components of that work. The tasks put forth to each group were very difficult, the obstacles were new to everyone and there often were passionately held diverse perspectives that fell across a wide spectrum for every topic. The board knows that each member of every committee came to the table with a full commitment to listen to others, to consider the different points of view, to participate fully in the discussion, to think creatively, and depending on your committee's charge and the point of time during the year, to arrive at, to receive, to approve or to advise on suggestions and solutions that move towards safely increasing in person teaching and learning while providing excellent remote experiences for our students during the hybrid model. Your commitment was to

117providing an educational environment that was physically and emotionally safe, that nourished connections, and that fostered meaningful learning experiences for each of our students. Your work supported the guiding principles which prioritize safety, social and emotional learning and the mental health and well being of our students. The board is deeply appreciative of this work on behalf of the district and your partnership. We know it was extremely emotional, difficult and exhausting and we know you were each dealing with your own issues in your own personal lives. Eric, a special thanks from the board for leading this district wide effort, you've been excellent. Thank you for guiding us through this unprecedented experience. And thank you again to all members of the administration of all of our task groups and committees for your unwavering attention to the reopening planning, the

118restart work and the journey forward. Thank you, Pam. I think we're going to move into 7.0. All right, so we will do that before our two hour wellness break. Hearing from those present, we have an opportunity for members of the public to speak on agenda items or other non personnel related matters per the adopted resolution by the board. Our policy 1230 was amended this year to allow each individual three minutes to speak and there's a 90 minute cap on this first public comment period. And this will exist for the duration of the executive order issued by the governor. We're gonna look for people in the audience to speak first. So anyone who'd like to come to the podium. Okay, seeing none, we'll go to Zoom and there is one hand raised. So Mayra, I'm going

119to promote you to panelist. I'll ask you to unmute yourself. And we'll wait for Mayra. Just introduce yourself, give your name and address, and if you're representing another organization, Mayra. Go ahead. Mayra, can you hear me, you're unmuted. Looks all right, Jerry? We can't hear you, Mayra. Jerry's just looking to see if there's something he can see. Hi, are you able to hear me? Yes, go ahead. Great, thank you, Miss Fuehrer. Good evening, Mayra Kirkendall-Rodríguez, Fox Meadow Road, just a couple of... We can't hear you, Mayra. Okay, this looks to be an echo, I'll do what I can. Yeah, I think we're having a problems so are you able to hear me now? We can, yeah. Yeah, okay, I'll try again later, thank you. No, we can hear you, Mayra. Okay, there's an echo, I'll

120just the best I can. Thank you very much. Yeah, there seems to be an echo. All right, why don't you try again, Mayra. Maybe we promote you and we'll give it another shot. If she's watching, she shouldn't be watching when she's trying to call. Okay, Mayra-- I'll just later. No, we can hear you fine. You may hear something, do you wanna turn off your live stream or something like that? (voice distorted) You wanna try again, Mayra? Okay, I'll give it one more try. Go ahead. Yeah, we're not hearing you. Okay, I'll try one more time. Let's see if this works, I don't know. So far so good. Mayra Kirkendall-Rodríguez, thank you very much. I hope that I am audible. I wanted to thank you very much for this meeting. Just a quick comment on whether

121it's possible at some point in the future to include some of the documents on the agenda, especially if it's about budgets or science or mental health just so that we have an opportunity to review them a little bit before the meeting because I think it would be much more fruitful. Secondly, I really appreciated Dr. Cohen's presentation, I'm just kind of curious if again later in this meeting or at some point in the near future, you could give us a bit of an explanation if there's any data being collected or how it's being collected. When I hear comments like group of students who are doing well in the building or group of students not doing well, I'm not really sure whether that's 1% of those student population, is it 20%. And I also heard a lot

122about teens, but maybe I missed something, I didn't hear as much about elementary school so I am curious as to have some of those issues are being addressed in terms of how to identify red flags with elementary school students. I think Mr. Klein of the board for asking Dr. Cohen about what can be offered for parents because we certainly can use health, in fact, for me not being a medical professional, it was certainly a question I was going to ask, I certainly would benefit from learning about red flags to watch out for, especially for elementary school children. And I agree with Mr. Klein that we are indeed a very diverse community, however, unless there's data, I personally I'm very cautious about assumptions about how people from other countries or about those of us who are

123not the majority culture in this town relate to mental health. It certainly would be something perhaps worth exploring. Yet, to give you a different perspective, some of us come from cultures where we're quite comfortable being open about issues, seeking help and not hiding challenges. I've personally have observed more closeness about mental health amongst some groups within the majority culture in the United States. I would suggest that perhaps there could be differences about how people relate to mental health based on socioeconomic status perhaps, but yet again, absent data, comments about differences are conjectures at best. Thirdly, on Dr. Hagerman's comment, I definitely agree it's very difficult to do a post mortem while the pandemic indeed has not died. A model that might be worth exploring is what happened after the financial crisis. The Financial Crisis Inquiry

124Commission studied what led to the financial crisis and how was it resolved, but it didn't happen until after a few years of the crisis to allow for deeper analysis and calmer analysis. However, if an assessment of the steering committee or of the board were to be undertaken in the near future, I would hope that people who are not in either body are part of this process, otherwise, what type of impartial assessment would this be? Lastly, thank you very much for what I consider anyway a great presentation on SPARK. Dr. McIntosh had mentioned a couple of meetings ago that this was an olive branch extended to the parents. I for one am already seeing leaves and olives starting to grow on that branch so thank you very much for all your efforts on SPARK. Thank you,

125Mayra. Oh, I'm not supposed to do that. I'm going to promote Diane. Diane, I'm gonna ask you to unmute, and then when you're ready if you look good, you can go ahead and start. Hello. Go ahead, Diane. Now you're muted. Hello. Go ahead, Diane, we can hear you. We're gonna ask her to mute her computer as well. Hello, can you hear me now? Yeah. Yes, we guess we can. Oh, okay, sorry, I couldn't hear you. This is Diane Gurden, 4 Colvin Road. So, I appreciated what Dr. Cohen said too and also what Mr. Klein said about parents being on the front line. And I think during the mental health situation with our children, the parents were really on the front line. I also agree with what Mayra was saying with needing some more stats because

126I think it can be very clear for the children that are completely falling apart and then there are children that maybe are completely fine, but I think there's a bigger range in the middle of kids that are having some issues. And potentially the school doesn't even know about them because I think they're, you know, some parents maybe brought them to therapists or got them on medication and didn't really even tell the school about it. So, I'm not really sure that we have an accurate picture. I know that like they said there was a survey in December, but it's been quite a while since December and that was just the high school level. So I do think it would be helpful to collect some more information, especially about children who left to go to other schools

127because they just couldn't get it to work. And also checking with parents about potentially substance abuse, if the children are on medication, if they're going to therapy, any kind of issues with like overuse of the internet, any kind of extreme behavior there. The other thing is that the youth outreach workers, the impression in the high school that I'm hearing from a lot of people is that they're stretched very thin. They're an amazing resource, but it is difficult now to get on their radar so I think it's really something we need to consider going forward with the kids and their recovery after at the end of this pandemic and as it hopefully ends in the fall. Thank you, Diane. Rachana, I'm gonna promote you and you just need to unmute yourself and then you can begin.

128We should be able to hear you. Hello. Yeah, we can hear you. Can you guys hear me? Yes. All right, perfect. Rachana Singh from 19 Griffen. I wanted to actually thank the board for doing a mental health update and I really appreciated Dr. Cohen's presentation. I just I'm a little bit confused and I think I've spoken about this before, I think the board needs to dedicate a portion of the website, the district website, that talks about social emotional learning curriculum that supports the mental health issue. How does the New York State standard of social emotional learning curriculum fit into all this conversation about mental health issue? How do you communicate to parents what you're doing? I realized that parents are pretty much in the dark about their kids social emotional learning. My kids are in

129two separate school buildings at the district and I've yet to see a parent survey this academic year on social emotional learning. I love the idea of physical spaces for sensory and regulation and pure learning. I guess I'm just trying to understand how does the board adhere to New York State standard which actually has a framework for mental health education instruction? Does the district commit to accept that as a fair framework? And how do we work on improving the positive school climate that affects the kids mental well being? I think we would benefit more from more surveys. As you know, the effects of the pandemic would not be known right away so that's why I think surveys periodically is just so important to understand how the kids are doing. As far as the special needs population

130is concerned, it's really hard to do a data analysis because there is no updated special education report this year. I know the district is working on it, But it's hard to understand how really the special education cohort is doing in terms of mental health and well being. So those are just some of my thoughts I wanted to share with the board, thank you for your time. Thank you. Are there any members of the public who would like to participate in public comment via Zoom? We have one, Diksha, I'm promoting you to panelists and I'm going to unmute you. And then just state your name and address and you should be able to speak, we should be able to hear. Hello. We can hear you. Hi, this is Diksha Mudbhary Sitaula, I live at 3 Edgewood

131Road. I just wanted to support Mayra's point on it not being helpful to hear generalized comments about attitudes towards mental health in other communities from a sitting board member, it's inappropriate and it's harmful. My main point however relates to the DEI policy and I'm eagerly looking forward to that portion of the agenda but I wonder if you could explain what efforts are in place to attract and hire more diversity in hiring practices. I know we were presented with the new hires for the coming school year so I'm just wondering what efforts have been kind of changed in hiring practices to attract and hire more diversity in our town in our teaching given that such area that requires attention, thank you. Thank you. Any other members of the public want to raise their hand and participate

132via Zoom? All right, seeing none, I will close this first public comment of our business meeting and move into the next agenda item, which is follow up to public comment. And I can hear that there might be things that Eric wants to talk about in terms of percentages and Drew maybe the hiring and Edgar maybe curriculum. I don't know, you guys go ahead. Sure. With response to the data collection of how many or what increase we've seen in mental health, sometimes that's difficult to have a real handle on during the school year as you're taking in referrals as counselors are having engagements with students. But at the end of the year, we do look at that and we look at students scene and we'll be able to give a better understanding of what the increase

133was towards the end of this year. There has been an uptick in referrals as you've heard through the year. It's not a uptick in referrals, it's not a huge uptick in referrals, it is certainly an uptick. I don't have a percentage for you yet as we base them on the yearly referral rate and we certainly collect that data every year. As far as providing parents with additional understanding of what red flags to look for or how to engage students who might be feeling anxious or depressed, that's certainly something we can look into. There's been a number of programs this year both through the PTC, through child and through our office of having panels of people to talk about those things throughout the year, but we can certainly put together something that could be a little

134bit of a guide for parents on each level through the summer. As far as special education piece, yes, the updated special education report will be done in the beginning part of next year and presented, I believe we decided on January as the education report for special education at the last cabinet meeting so. In terms of responding to practices related to having a diverse and well represented pool of employees, teachers and beyond, this is an area that we're actively working on. There are really three main areas that we've focused on, one is education, the second is outreach and the third is support once we recruit and hire. The education piece has been working internally with our administrators and those department chairs and so on responsible for hiring stating that and reaching and understanding that it is

135one of our objectives to try to recruit a diverse faculty and staff. One of the things we've started doing is collecting data on internally data on the candidate pools that we have for each position and how many candidates are people of color for example. We have a statement in our recruiting materials that go out that goes along with our EOE statement, equal opportunity employer, and it reads, studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply for jobs unless they believe they meet every one of the qualifications as described in the job description. We are most interested in finding the best candidate for the job and that candidate may be one who comes from a less traditional background, we would encourage you to apply even if you don't believe you meet

136every one of our qualifications described. So that's a symbolic but I think a meaningful statement that goes out in our postings. Education also means working in the region. This is recruiting candidates that come from less traditional backgrounds or are candidates of color is a challenge for many Westchester districts, not just Scarsdale. And I serve as an officer in the Lower Hudson Council of School personnel Administrators and this has been our area of focus for the last three years. We've been working with New York University to deepen our own knowledge and understanding of what is attractive about a school system for candidates who might not see themselves as, in our case, working in Scarsdale. The board's action to establish a policy on diversity, equity and inclusion by the way is a huge step. That is one

137of the first things some candidates will do is to say, well, what's the district's position on these issues and having a policy is a positive thing. We have established regionally a diversity recruitment fair, it occurred for the second time this year, it was virtual this year, last year, it was actually the weekend before we closed. We had it in person but this year it was online and we did get over 750 people, admittedly not all people who would necessarily meet the definition of a diverse candidate, but nonetheless, it was a chance to meet and greet and also have some education sessions where we helped people who might not normally apply to one of the 25 school districts that participated to understand something about us. We had a panel that included a regional superintendent, a principal,

138our principal from Edgewood Elementary School and two human resource officials talking about the districts and they all four of those individuals were from diverse backgrounds and spoke to their own decision about why they ended up in a Westchester district. We have more work to do, we have internal work to do especially around maybe forming some affinity groups, and I need to learn and interested in learning what it is that not only would cause people to apply here, but keep them here, keep candidates feeling once they're in our system to feel supported and part of the community. We do have a very robust mentor program and professional development as you hear about so frequently but I think we need to start turning our eye toward listening, that's a mixed metaphor, but listening more to our own

139employees, our own staff, and hear from them what's worked and what we might wanna think about. Thanks, Drew, I'd like to address the SEL question. So there was a reference to the New York State social emotional learning benchmarks. And just for those who are not aware, this is predominantly around three goals, the first one is around developing self awareness and self management skills that are essential not only to school but to life, so general executive functioning to be able to manage your emotions and relationships. The second goal is using social awareness and interpersonal skills to maintain positive relationships over time. And the third goal is to demonstrate ethical decision making and responsible behaviors. So those are broken down into five bands if you can think about it, it's K-3 which is early elementary, then four

140to five which they're considering sort of later elementary, middle school, six to eight, early high school which is nine to 10 and then late high school obviously which is 11th and 12th grade. And if you take one example, I'm just going to pull one out here. Let's see. So for example, using communication, social skills to interactively effectively with others. So that's a skill. You know, I think that there's some folks who may believe that those are special pullout classes that you were sort of teaching those discrete skills. But those are really embedded in all of our classrooms across the district, from, you know, ICT classrooms where there's maybe a strong focus on that, to our AP classes really, AT classes, I should say. So at the earliest level at the elementary, you know, that skill

141might look like identifying ways to work and play well with others. You know, when you translate that to sort of middle school, it's demonstrating cooperation and teamwork to promote group effectiveness. You know, our project based learning are something that we talked about, which is a prominent feature gamification at the middle school. And a part of those processes are not only to work together to collaborate, but often to evaluate both your individual performance and performance of a group. And that's really what gets at the heart of that skill. And to find out whether or not students are growing, and then translate that up to our highest level of seniors is to plan, implement, and evaluate one's participation in a group project at a more sophisticated level. So, you know, again, students working on a large scale

142project, and then evaluating their own contributions to that work in a really authentic way, as well as those of their teammates. And those can be sort of difficult conversations. But starting in elementary school, you know, you sort of build those foundational skills to be able to negotiate those conversations as you work through the system. So I just wanna be clear that that's the way we sort of approach these learning benchmarks that teachers are aware of their responsibilities within those 10, you know, the three goals in three or four sub goals within each of those, and teachers are aware of those and embed those as part of instructional practice as a regular course of classroom instruction. Absolutely. And there are opportunities for more explicit instructions around bullying and that kind of thing, which is coordinated through

143the school psychologists for more kind of explicit direction about some of these areas. And that is something that is not pulled out. And again, there are certain students who, again, are identified in the support pragmatic language associated with support. All right, thank you for the responses. I think that pretty much wraps up responses to public comments. So I think it's 8:10 I think is a good time to take our wellness break our first wellness break and be back in five minutes. It's not quite a 8:10. So let's be back at 8:18. All right, we will restart and move to item nine written communications Alison. So before I review the written communications, I wanna remind everyone that email sent to the Board of Education is also viewed by the superintendent and the district clerk. The Open

144Meetings law requires that all board deliberations which may lead to action or policy occur in public. Therefore, any written communication sent to the board, or will be reported in an upcoming public board meeting, and a board member will respond to written comments. Okay, so I'm gonna move to 9.02 the written comments. Between April 11th and May 7th, the board received 17 emails, six focused on the journey forward including concerns over use of barriers, quarantine requirements, the new summer enrichment program, concern about elementary students playing wind instruments and concern about new virus variants. Five emails express support for the new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policy. One email conveyed technical difficulties that were experienced during the last board meeting, and one supported adding an August meeting for the board. Two were invitations to board members to attend

145upcoming events. And one email requested transportation for students attending school out of district. Thanks, Alison. The next item is the consent agenda preamble. Just letting everyone know that the superintendent and board officers meet on right now the Thursday before each board meeting to create the agenda. We ask board members to submit thoughts and questions to prepare for that agenda. Sometimes another board member is able to attend that agenda setting meeting, items that we believe have no controversy regarding them and do not require discussion are placed on the consent agenda. They have the same background material as all other items, and right now if any member of the board feels that an item on the consent agenda does require discussion, please ask to remove it at this time. Alright, seeing none, Karen is that you with

146the consent agenda? Yeah. Okay. The consent agenda has 17 items. 11.01 minutes of the business meeting on Monday, April 12th 2021. 11.02 minutes of the special meeting on Tuesday, April 20th 2021. 11.03 minutes of the special meeting on Monday, May 3rd 2021. 11.0 for certified personnel, 11.05 non certified personnel, 11.06 Central Treasurer's Report for the middle school and high school extra classroom activity funds for the period of January 1 2021 to march 31 2021. 11.07 claims audit report for April 2021. 11.08 tax tertiary settlements 6 Kensington road. 11.09 tax tertiary settlement for 97 Brookby road. 11.10 Custodiol cleaning products agreement with Viking pure solutions. The following bids for the 2021/2022 school year are 11.11 Custodial supplies bid, 11.12 General Contracting services bid, 11.13 District Wide Roof Repairs bid, 11.14 is for the appointment of Leah

147Dembutser as chair of the district budget vote an election on May 18 2021. 11.15 the revisions made to the list of assistant clerks for the May 18 2021. Special district meeting for the budget vote and election. 11.16 a special education contract and 11.17 acceptance of the consent agenda. And I move that the Board accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you Karen. May I have a second? Second? Thank you, Carl. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed, abstentions? All right, the motion passes. And we'll move on to the next items, which are the discussion and information items led by Thomas. Thanks, so the first item is going to be a diversity equity and inclusion update. It's just gonna be important that yeah, if we can have the screen there, so we can kind of reference

148the slides, that'd be great. I'd like to start off the presentation. And just so we you know, we have about 16 slides here. So this is not going to be a completely comprehensive presentation on all things DEI. It's gonna be a very focused presentation on our sort of planning work for both the short and longer term just to sort of talk about the scope of this work. And I would like to start off by thanking Edgar my colleague here, the full administrative team, the STI, the STA, PTC and PTAs, and particularly our teachers who have been champions of this work, both in the short term longer term. For some people, I know there's a little bit of anxiety, I wanna acknowledge that up front in the community around taking on this work. And what does

149that really mean for Scarsdale, and what's it going to entail for my students, and sort of what's going to be involved in that. But I wanna sort of remind folks that we've been involved in DEI work for more than two decades in the district, through a variety of different aspects of committee work, classroom work, we've been people who have had teachers who've been implementing work this work in their classrooms for a very long time. And then we have folks who are fairly new to this journey. And we wanna recognize that as we embark on this work that we have folks all over the place with that, and we wanna be very clear, we wanna be thoughtful, we wanna be deliberative as we share this information with the broader community. So I'm moving on to the

150next slide. Tonight, we really wanna also ground this work in something that's meaningful, we wanna you know, make sure that we're not bringing in some sort of a liberal agenda into the district. But this work is really much very much grounded in the state guidance that's been provided for us, as well as our local school board policy. So we're gonna start at the macro state level, we're gonna work our way down to sort of our local school board policy, and then again, really spend the majority of tonight's presentation talking about how we plan to develop a community wide school wide rather plan for our DEI efforts and how we will be rolling that out in the district, also talking about the supports that we plan to enlist in terms of helping us with that work,

151and then provide some really specific examples. And I think there'll be really helpful for people who may be anxious about this work in terms of what does this really look like in the classroom from elementary through high school. And of course, we're gonna leave some time for board to ask us questions. So the next slide, you know, late breaking news before we actually jump into the state guidance, so just today, the region's voted unanimously to adopt a policy statement that encourages every school board in the state to have a policy on diversity, equity and inclusion effective immediately. So I think that's a very strong statement coming from on our board of regents and the chancellor. You know, said the reason we're doing this in part is because there's a growing body of research that finds

152that all students benefit when their schools implement strong diversity, equity, inclusion policies and practices, including academic, cognitive, civic, social, emotional, and economic benefits. And so this really is kind of a holistic, you know, sort of net around why it is important that we have kids, and be able to have the skills to be able to work collaboratively with a wide variety of folks to be able to engage in meaningful work, I'm starting obviously, at this point, with, study and pursuing other options beyond school. And then certainly as we think about preparing them for life in they're sort of fields of work later on. In terms of policy on that, again, this is late breaking, so it doesn't necessarily align very closely with the policy that we adopted, we're gonna go into that in a few

153minutes. But the goals that they list very explicitly in terms of their policy is that it should include language on recruiting, retaining a diverse workforce, which we talked a little bit about just a few moments ago with Drew. That it should implement non discriminatory discipline policies and practices. And that's something we've been looking at, again, to make sure that, you know, there's been a lot of controversy around saggy jeans and about hairstyles and various things like that, and making sure that we're very attentive to making sure that those aren't based on any sort of differences. Developing students abilities to connect across lines of difference, elevate historically marginalized voices and empower students as a voice of change, which is obviously something we want, students be able to do to actively participate as democratic citizens in the

154world. To eliminate the use of terms of phrases that perpetuate negative stereotypes, and minimize disruption among students. And then finally, to address the need for inclusive and culturally responsive teaching and learning. And, you know, this is, again, part of understand the true American experience and what that means from all different perspectives. So again, that's sort of late breaking, that's not on our slides, this was prepared beforehand, but I just wanna make you aware of that. And we've already gotten some feedback that folks have said to us that this was just a recommendation. And so this is actually now moving into a domain that's stronger than a recommendation, about really encouraging all school boards across the state to have these policies. So in some ways, we're ahead of that curve a little bit, which I'm excited

155about. And we'll kind of come back to that. But let's go back for a second to the state guidance before today's announcement, which is really there are two documents. I can't see the slides that are out there though. Thank you for bringing that back. So there are two documents that came out in order of operations that came out backwards in a way. But I'm gonna put them in the right order for you tonight. The first one is the New York State Board of Regents framework on DEI in New York schools. And this was really sort of a call to arms that really provides the background information like why are we doing this, why is it important? Why in a state like New York that's so diverse in every facet do we need to be engaging

156in this work in really authentic ways in public schools. And so this document, you know, it's only a 10 page document, it's actually fairly accessible, I encourage folks to read it. But if you don't have time to read it, I'm gonna give you a quick primer on it. You know, it really talks about the background information that goes into the socio political context of what's going on, I don't think many of us have to go very far beyond turning on the news, to understand a lot of the conflicts that are occurring around us and across the nation. And so, you know, equipping our students to be able to understand these issues to grapple with them and be part of problem solving in the future is obviously something that we're all committed to as part of

157a public education. That goes on to talk about the danger of the single story. And it really calls out to Amanda R. Deechi, who is a Nigerian journalist and author, she does an amazing TED talk on, you know, thinking that she even understood her own people as a Nigerian, and then talked about how wrong she was in so many ways. And then sort of translates that from going from Nigeria, to a college in the United States, and the sort of stereotypes that she faced, even in a very elite US school, and just talk about the things that we miss out on personally, when we subscribe to a single story or a single perspective, and don't bother to sort of reach out and understand other perspectives. And then obviously, that goes on to talk about that

158you can't be an effective collaborator or a problem solver, if you don't have the ability to understand other people's perspectives, and be able to work with those as well. And then some, you know, some sort of DEI 101 is also included in this. So what are some definitions of diversity, equity inclusion, and that's where some people get stuck right there, that very first step in the process is disagreeing on what this terminology is. And we may not all agree with the way the state defines these. But it does give us a common starting place for this work and a common definition. And that allows us to, you know, we might be able to morph that in and sort of rethink those. But it does give us a strong foundation from which to start this work

159in a common understanding. And then finally, the role of school districts, you know, we're not here to change the nation at this point or the state at this point, even our entire community, our job is to educate our students and to make sure that they're fully prepared to be again for future learning and for future life outside of here. Giving them all the skills that they need to work in a really pluralistic society, with lots of different kinds of folks. And so that's really where we're gonna be more inwardly focused on what we're doing in our schools. So the next document is called the New York State culturally responsive sustaining education framework. It's a mouthful. And it's 64 pages, which seems kind of daunting. But really, it can actually be distilled down to very simple

160four principles. And heck, all you have to do is walk away with these four ideas, and you have it. The first one is that it's about welcoming and affirming environments for our students and faculty. So everyone who walks in the door of the Scarsdale school should feel welcome, affirmed, that they have a place there that they feel welcome, that their stories are gonna be heard, that they have every opportunity to access the programs and services and education that's there. And I know we talked about recruitment of staff. So not only do people wanna come here, but people wanna stay here and have their entire careers here. So making sure that people feel welcome and affirmed, and are part of our school community no matter who they are, what backgrounds they come from. The second principle

161is high expectations around rigorous instruction. This is a hallmark of a Scarsdale education, this is nothing new for us. Right, we wanna continue to have absolutely high expectations for every student, to come in with the belief that every student has the capability of learning that all students are capable of doing high level work. And that with the right coaching and mentoring all students can be successful here. The third principle is inclusive curriculum and instruction. And again, we've been working on that we heard from our high school students tonight that particularly in their English and social studies classes, they really began to see a different sort of resources and texts being used that are really much more representative, they really talked about using current events of springboards into having more rich and robust conversations around issues

162around race and anti bias, and other kinds of issues around differences. And then finally, ongoing professional development. So again, four principles that I don't think anyone can argue with. And these are all things that we have been committed to as a district. So you know, let's take all those scary parts of this framework language out of it. And say, these are all four things that I think most of us can agree on the 64 pages is about then taking this information and saying, here's what students can do to create welcoming and affirming environments. Here's what students can do, to make sure that curriculum is inclusive. And then it goes through teachers, and then it goes through building leaders. And then it goes through school districts, and then it goes to school boards. So that document

163really and guess what the language is nearly parallel as you go through each of those groups. So our work is not so different from one another. But in fact, it sort of suggests that we we work together on this, and we create a synergy around this. And when all those arrows are pointing in the same direction, we're gonna make real progress with this. So that's what the state has said, and affirm that with even stronger language today. So now let's talk about what Scarsdale has said. Again, we will have some examples. And we'll talk about going back 20 years, two decades of work on this. And this is certainly not our only policy on diversity issues, we have others that reflect our interest in pursuing this in a more meaningful way. But most recently, back

164in April 23, the board did adopt policy, 0105, equity, inclusivity diversity in education. And again, I'm all about sort of this and going back to my sixth grade, no inner teacher here about distilling difficult texts down to easy to understand bite sized pieces. So this policy tells us that there are five things that we need to be thinking about as a district, the first one positive, inclusive learning environments, have we heard that before? Well, yes, we did. We just heard about it in the framework. So already, there's a really clear alignment that's being set up there. But there's a broad representation in our curriculum environment, and faculty and staff. Again, concepts we've already been talking about things that we're already interested in doing, and have been working on for some time. The third one gets

165a little more pithy, it's got a lot of, you know, big words, and it talks about professional development on the historical injustices and inequalities that have led to institutional educational barriers, and means to eliminate them. So what does that really talking about? It's really about access and opportunity, who gets to have access to the full array of services and programs that we offer? Who get the opportunities? Are they available to all students? Are they available to our students who have disabilities? Are they available to males and females? Are they available to all races, in an equal and measured way? And and if they're not, then that's what we start to need to have some of those more difficult conversations about why or why not? And are we contributing in some way to that, even if

166passively so? And if we are, you know, what kinds of changes can we implement to make sure that that is not the case, again, very inward facing, on really the opportunities that we're providing for our students. Number four is around curriculum and instructional materials that will reflect educational equity. And again, I think we've made some marked progress on that. And then we have a long way to go, you know, our students said again, English and social studies seeing real transformation. Students said themselves, you know, STEAM, they'd like to see maybe more of that in some of these more non traditional subject areas or curricular areas where you wouldn't necessarily naturally make those connections. Are there ways to bring in diverse points of view and diverse perspectives as part of that work as well. And then

167the fifth component of this policy is saying there'll be some accountability essentially, right? That we'll be looking to establish some specific goals and some specific metrics. And we're gonna do this in sort of a bifurcated way. We're gonna do that over the next two years. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that in the next slide. So are the immediate planning by immediate Thomas's definite, well, Thomas and Edgar's definition, that's basically from now until the end of this school year, we're really thinking of this as being a planning and iterating process. So we're trying to call together the best thinking of folks who have been involved in this work. As we were reaching out to all sorts of groups that we wanna be involved in these conversations, you know, we reached out to our

168multicultural committees across the district, even though I've been really involved in this work a little shocked to find out that we have, you know, over 75 parents involved in various committees, and then almost another 70 faculty members who are formally involved, I'm not talking about in their classroom practices, I'm talking about serving on committees that are really dedicated to this work. So that's already some really strong tentacles throughout our entire district of people who've been working on this and focusing on this, we thought, oh, maybe we'd have one meeting with these groups, and quickly realize, we're gonna have to have multiple meetings to be able to really have a meaningful conversation and dialogue around that. So information sharing with key stakeholders, and obviously, tonight, we're sharing this with the Scarsdale world. You know, today, I've

169met with the PTC and went through this presentation with them, tomorrow we have compact committee. Beyond that, we've sent out a note to faculty and staff on the new policy update and sort of the work that we're doing on this, and then we're gonna be meeting with all the multicultural committees. So really, I'm trying to cast a pretty broad net in terms of bringing people into the fold, both to go through this presentation as we are with you guys tonight, but also to learn about what's going on in the buildings and to help that have that inform our process and our planning and thinking as we're moving forward. Again, I talked about meeting with compact committee tomorrow, they are gonna be the ones there was a district, you know, part of that policy was to

170have a district committee responsible for setting some immediate goals and metrics. And so we're gonna really be going back to those four principles within the framework and talking about how can we create a goal to make our classrooms more welcoming and affirming? What's something we can do to really ensure rigorous standards and high quality instruction, and so on, and so forth. And then we're gonna talk a little bit more in a moment about working with consultants so that we recognize we have expertise within house. But we also wanna have some expertise outside of Scarsdale that are gonna help us with two aspects of this planning. The first one is just our planning processes to make sure that we're on the right track, and creating an appropriate foundation for this work. And then secondly, having some

171more outward facing facilitators who can work with our students who can work with our faculty and who can work with our parents and broader community. And again, we started those conversations with the SDI to do coordination with that, talk to the PTC so that as we're planning programming for next year and beyond, that, we can make sure that we can put speakers in front of students, and then that same day in front of teachers, and that same day in front of parents, because, you know, developing that common understanding that common context, that common vocabulary, is really gonna be important for us as a community to be able to grow in this way. We have a really strong focus on leadership learning foundations, you know, as we started this work, I think there's there's some anxiety,

172you know, Edgar can attest to this, we've had people come to us and say, you know, Thomas, I just, I don't feel equipped, as a white person, or as this person or as that person to lead this work in my building or in this committee. And and so we wanna make sure that we're not expecting people to be expert facilitators in this we're expecting people to be learners in process along with the rest of us, we've talked about the importance of being allies in this work, not necessarily experts in this work. And so we're trying to create a foundation on with our leadership team to make sure that there is some level of comfort, and again, a common context and the common knowledge to be able to move this work forward. And then finally, coordination

173with our district partners. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about that in a moment. So moving on to the district compact committee. So tomorrow is gonna be a big day for the compact committee. And we're gonna come together, and we're gonna look at the New York State, culturally responsible sustaining education framework together, we're gonna really pull out those four principles that we talked about, and really have that be the focus, we're gonna talk about potentially coming up with a goal for area 123, you know, professional development, we might talk about, but that's something that might be a little more in the domain of Edgar, Drew and Eric and others to be thinking about how we kind of work on that in a more systematic way across our faculty and staff. And we're gonna

174come up with measurable metrics on next year, and again, just to contextualize this, this is gonna be a planning year for us. So next year, we're gonna come up with a district wide plan that then is gonna result in a sort of two to four year plan that will seamlessly then hopefully mesh with our strategic plan. As we looked through that already, there's some natural places where there's gonna be a Nexus that just sort of fits naturally. And then there may be some places where we need to enhance that plan in a way that we hadn't necessarily thought about. But that is something that we talked about early on in the strategic plan process, if this was a living document, and then we would be coming back and making some appropriate changes in real time,

175as issues were timely or important for us as a district. We're gonna talk a little bit about the selecting the district consultants as this will not be a compact committee initiative, but just wanna have them sort of updated on that and be a part of that, because obviously they're gonna be working with those consultants along with the rest of us. And then finally, talk a little bit about a communication plan. One of the things lessons learned, you know, we talked about his work going through this, not only to the pandemic, but in life in general, we know that communication, communication, communication has been an ongoing theme in the district. And so we wanna be in front of that to the extent possible, and let folks know sort of where we're going and have people come

176along with us in that journey. So in the area of consultant searches, we did have our administrative council come together, we've been talking about this at the last many meetings. And we compiled a list of consultants that we have used either through the SDI that others of us have experienced through professional development opportunities in New York City or beyond, we have talked with the PTA PTC, so for example, Dr. Reverend Marks was a speaker who is here recently, that really resonated with a lot of people. So he was obviously a person who made it very quickly on our list, we generated about a half dozen folks to start the process with, and then a subcommittee met, and we actually doubled that list, by going a little bit deeper and talking about other kinds of experiences.

177So we feel like we have a really good pool of folks to start with. And again, we're looking for facilitators for a couple of different things. One is for helping us to plan as a district, and that would be available for a building principal wants them to come in and say, hey, help me with this initiative that I'm rolling out of my building. This is for the administrative team to be thinking about how we're, you know, maybe setting up some of our leadership learning foundations. And this certainly as a district, when we're looking at our sort of macro level plan, and say, yeah, you guys are sort of on the right track here. But have you thought about X, Y, and Z that you may wanna, you know, bring into this as major components of

178this plan as you're moving ahead with it. So we're now in the process of vetting. And we put together a rubric based on some sort of best practices around consultants in general, and then DEI specifically. So obviously, our criteria you can see listed on this rubric here is industry experience, on school consulting experience, specifically, on whether that's there or not issue specific knowledge. So again, we're not committing necessarily to one consultant, but people who bring in particular expertise. So Dr. Reverend Marks was here is an expert on implicit bias. And so you know, in some cases, we might bring someone in as a one presentation person who really has some unique expertise that nobody else might bring to us. Or we might find somebody who's able to do multiple kinds of presentations across a variety

179of audiences, on their current position, and sort of credibility that they have, obviously, that's gonna be important. We have very sophisticated on faculty, staff, and parents here. And so we need somebody who is sort of gonna be recognized as an authority by those folks. Motivation was really important. Some people have these incredibly poignant life stories about why they got into this work. And I think that's always really compelling, sorry, really compelling to people, particularly when you're doing that sort of act of facilitation. And so you know, making sure that somebody is there not collecting a paycheck, but doing it for, you know, sort of souls work. And then culture fit. You know, we always think about this, for every person we've ever come, we sort of assess on whether or not they were sort of

180the right person, the right speaker. And sometimes people are here in a very accessible, and whether you're, you know, working with custodians, aides, or teachers or administrators are able to sort of reach out across all those lines, and be able to really have a compelling story or a compelling create a compelling experience for people. And other times things just fall flat. You know, that's just sort of the nature of bringing consultants in and working with people. So we wanna, you know, focus on that whether or not this person will be a good fit with our executives, if we're looking for something a little bit longer term, and then cost is obviously a consideration as stewards of district resources, we always have to be thinking about that. So we're in the process of again, we have

181this rubric. We're doing our individual vetting at this point, we come in together, I think tomorrow, in fact, and we'll be narrowing down our list to you know, probably half of what we have, and then we'll begin the process of setting up reference checking and interviews with those folks. And then of course, we'll be reporting back out to this group, as we, you know, get make more headway. And again, you know, not only as the admin council involved in that, but the STA has also reached out and asked to be a part of those interviews, and we welcome that opportunity. So the teachers have a voice in this process, and I think again, they're gonna help inform us of the best folks that are gonna really connect with teachers in a meaningful sort of way.

182And then finally, and then I'm gonna turn this over to Edgar to pick up here I'm gonna start talking is our leadership learning foundations. And again, going back to that point that we all bear some responsibility in carrying this work forward, but also, that we're learners in this process and very active learners in this process. Part of what we're gonna be doing, as administrators, regardless of our level is to be doing needs assessments throughout our various areas of responsibility. So for Edgar, that's needs assessment might be looking at curricular areas, you know, especially in STEAM, you know, for example, which was called out specifically by our students tonight, and what areas are we bringing multiple perspectives and different representation into our STEAM courses? You know, understanding from a HR standpoint, you know, what are those

183factors that are either having people be very interested in applying to Scarsdale, or that are keeping people away from Scottsdale and why wouldn't they apply? And, you know, Drew pointed out a great example, which I loved in that language about, you know, the way different people perceive job responsibilities and whether or not I measure up to all of those things, particularly in a place like Scarsdale, which can seem sort of intimidating to somebody from the outside. And so just being really aware of all of those kind of dynamics that are, you know, again, moving us forward in this work or not, or hindering us, and then, you know, if they are hindering us sort of, what kinds of ways can we go about counteracting that? I don't know if you guys know, I mean, I

184think we talked about this with the board. I don't know if the broader Scarsdale community knows, but we are committed to our own professional growth as a group of administrators. And we have very long administrative meetings sometimes. But we realized a little while back, that we weren't necessarily focused on our own professional growth or learning as a group like this. And so we set aside some time before our administrative meetings called alter administrative learning time. And this has been a time dedicated to our professional growth as a group. This year, we're using Ellie Drago-Severson as a consultant who comes in and she's been helping us sort of with norms with sort of individual coaching with group coaching, it's been a really a great experience for us as well, I think individually, and then as an

185entire administrative team. So you know, she's done just remarkable work with us. And really, I think, in this time of COVID, was just the right person to be supporting our administrative work in this way. But we do see a shift happening. Not that she won't be working with us maybe more individually, but shifting this time to more of a focus on DEI kind of moving forward. So that that becomes the foundation of what we're thinking about and learning about together. One of the specific things we've talked about is developing common understanding through an anchor text or anchor resources. So in talking with Annemarie Nee, with the SDI, there been about six or seven books that have been prominent throughout our SDI courses, through teacher book groups, and things like that. So we're looking at those

186along with books that are being used in our classrooms, that's sort of some anchoring texts that we all wanna become familiar with, so that we're all aware of those. And then, you know, perhaps to go more deeply into one text, so that we can, again, build common understandings and common vocabulary and common knowledge together as we continue to think about facilitating this work for the district. And then also, a portion of that is dedicating time to sharing best practices, because what we don't wanna do is to impose top down a district approach to DEI in the district, we're using what we have very similar to our innovation approach, which is sort of three concentric circles, if you can sort of picture that with me. The first one is we have stuff going on in our

187classrooms, by some great teachers who have been doing this work for a really long time. And so we want that to continue to flourish in the way that it is, we're gonna support those teachers make sure they have the resources to be able to do what they're doing right now. Beyond that, we know that we have grade levels, we have teams, we have buildings, we have departments who are working on DEI initiatives together. And again, that's something we wanna support. They already have goals in place, already have work that they've been working on, in some cases, anchor text resources that they're working on. And so we wanna again, support that work and make sure that continues moving forward. We're talking about the third concentric circle, really, which is at what point are we kind of

188common having some common understandings around DEI work together? And how can we start pointing those arrows in the same direction? I'd liken it to, you know, a few years ago, Drew, we moved to having common goal setting in the district where teachers still had some autonomy to do individual goals. But we're also being asked to develop goals that specifically aligned to school and district initiatives. And that's sort of the way we're envisioning the DEI work so that we allow the individual work to go on, but at the same time to eventually create some alignment across the district in these efforts. So with that, I will turn it over to my friend Edgar to pick up. Thank you so much Thomas. So Tom has talked about it a little bit. Our partnerships are really essential in

189this work, not surprisingly, one of our major partnerships with the Scarsdale Teachers Institute We have met with STI recently to review-- Your mic is off. It's off? Oh, sorry. I'll try again. Our partnership with the Scarsdale Teacher Institute is really core. We've met recently with Emory we need to talk about the course offerings that they have, that are coming up this summer, and also started to talk to her about what we anticipate being the needs as we go into the fall and into the spring. And our purpose is really to align and collaborate on professional development opportunities, and provide both rich electives for teachers to choose. But let those electives also inform what may then become a shared experiences for our teachers and our students. We deeply value our partnerships with PTC and the PTA

190as Thomas mentioned, it's important that we meet and discuss a shared vision. And it's also helpful for us to communicate and when appropriate share our presentations to create synchronicity of our vision for our students. A great deal of this work has been pioneered by the school based multicultural and equity justice committees, which are made up of faculty, students and parents and Thomas talked about our great numbers there. We're going to be meeting and discussing the framework with these groups. We're of course stronger together. Therefore, collaboration of our resources and speakers make a great deal of sense. A recent example of this was a coordination between the DH dignity, inclusion and belonging group at the high school, the interdependence committee, the high school English and social studies departments and the curriculum office for the Anthony Ray

191Hinton presentation. This was followed by the adoption of his memoir by the Board of Education here as a common student text. As Pam mentioned, we met with a group of high school students earlier today, who highlighted that presentation as a very specifically powerful experience. And also, Karen Ceske and I have been attending the Village of Scarsdale ad hoc counsel to combat racism and bias. And a report was recently, it's in the process actually, of being generated with the feedback and guidance that we provided about the work that's ongoing in the district. It was very interesting because what they had said is when they were talking about what goes on around the town, the schools are such a focal point, because people tend to gravitate to Scarsdale for you know, Martines is a great bakery. But

192you know, the schools are what we would like to believe are bringing people to Scarsdale. So it's very important that we have an alignment, and a communication and a contact with the village. As we look ahead to the 21/22 planning, our goal is to be intentional and clear in our process. We start with developing a wide understanding of our framework, our guiding framework, to uncover misunderstandings about the framework, including that a framework is not a curriculum, but rather provides a critical lens through which we examine our practices, resources, and the scope that's going to inform its inclusivity and eventual enrichment. We'll also use the Board of Ed policy to guide the goal setting and the priorities. And as described, our compact committee will implement the goals within their charge. This is a year in which

193we'll look both at our curriculum content and professional development through the lens of diversity, equity and inclusion. This is a year of thoughtful research, and will form the design and implementation of district wide professional learning. Importantly, we will integrate this into the strategic plan and set longer term goals for ourselves 2022 to 2025 and beyond. We've been engaged in this work for many years, even as Thomas had noted decades, our research and development have involved meaningful work with the Scarsdale Teacher Institute, working on DEI and since its inception, really in 1967. The East West Center in Educational and Resource Organization established by the US Congress in 1960. To strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific and the United States. The Interdependence Institute, which is an internal Institute and committee

194which supports and celebrates much of this work. The Global Learning Alliance, Scarsdale is a founding member with partner schools and Finland and Singapore originally established as a benchmarking Alliance to identify and study educational practices of excellence. Each member comes from a high achieving district school with teacher university partnerships. Scarsdale has partnered with Columbia University's Teachers College through the Center for Professional Education of teachers, which is actually going to be partnering with us in the SPARC program as well as William had noted. Teacher grants and innovation have supported this area as well. Importantly, and also the study abroad programs with a goal of global for all weather, service learning, language acquisition, homestays, and or performance experiences. We of course, look forward to that continuing as safety allows. This is some of the work underway, it's just

195a snapshot, a few examples to highlight. District wide, there's going to be a continuation and enrichment through the SDI as I had mentioned, level specific consultants will continue to work with us. Innovation and sharing of best practices as Thomas said the laboratory model moving out. And also, multi lingual library sections have been established in all of the district libraries. At the elementary, there's increasing multiple perspectives the classroom multi cultural libraries ongoing. Also the university partnership with teachers college, which has enriched the diversity of it's text resources we had mentioned earlier, in response to one of the colors we have a wide variety of asset ESL programs, including circle of friends, and also special recognition events, to highlight multicultural aspects and celebrate them in the schools. And also, the one book one school has been something

196that schools have done at the elementary level with themes of acceptance and belonging. At the middle school, they are using the structure of core to support team building and belonging at the middle school level, as well. They are expanding their texts with multiple perspectives, and having some more and more classroom libraries that have the multiple perspectives in them. So the fingertip access for the kids. You've heard a little bit about Level Up Village in which our students partner on academic projects with countries around the world. They have a Human Rights Day, which is a tradition at the middle school. And they also have a partnership with the prospector theater which celebrates the abilities of differently abled employees. At the high school, Global Citizens Day is a wonderful event that they have. And also, they're engaged

197in text analysis and pilots at the ELA and social studies level as the students had mentioned, which have come to this board for review. One of them just to preview is this one, interior Chinatown is being presented today. Students surveys and committee participation to get the opinions of and perspectives of students and also the Global Learning Alliance which I had mentioned before. What I'm gonna do now is just to do a little bit of a dive into the Global Learning Alliance as an example. This is something that's fresh in our minds because it just happened in April. In April Scarsdale had the pleasure of facilitating a GLA virtual summit with our university partners. This year we welcome international participants from for the first time from Turkey and South Africa. At the center was a student

198research project after choosing and sharing texts on the theme of belonging from their native countries. Students from the founding districts worked in small internationally diverse teams to research and present on currently marginalized groups of people. Five presentations were given to the GLA participants and students were asked questions about their process and their findings. The teachers involved in the student research projects are Heather Waters from Scarsdale, Leiw Pei Li from Hwa Chong Institute, and Tanali Norberg from Helsingin Normaalisco. Apologies to Finland for that. I was trying to do it in the native language I was making an effort. So the entire virtual summit was over three days. On the first day the educators talked through the three stories chosen by our students so that we could see what they were reading and talking about in their

199groups and then can To the themes of belonging and identity ourselves, considering key quotes and passages, the second day was dedicated to the project I had described I just described. And on the final day the GLA board took time to connect about our experiences and education across five different countries. We identified four areas, we wanna focus on planning on a student project for 2021/2022, research study on that 2021 student project, a newsletter, ongoing collaboration and updates, and planning a global education online course with our university partners. And then the following slide shot is a virtual selfie of our international partners. And you can see up there on the corner, are the president of the organization, Dr. Thomas Hagerman in the upper right. Is that Finish also? Actually not president just board chair. You know, and

200I think this is we really wanted to end with this sort of as a capstone so that people could really understand what we talk about when we're talking about DEI in action. You know, there's a lot of concern around critical race theory and about Project 1619. And all these things that we're seeing in the media, about, you know, sort of creating controversies around this work. But this is what we are talking about in Scarsdale is really creating these opportunities. The virtual summit was an extraordinary opportunity for what it was, there were people who were participating at nine in the morning, you know, at midday and nine o'clock at night. And these student groups were coming together and collaborating and doing these presentations that was really quite amazing. It differed somewhat from the experience that they

201had in person, though, where other students spend the last time we were in Helsinki students spend a half a day together sort of getting to know each other, they'd worked together virtually, but not in person. And within three days, you know, when it was time to say goodbye, there were tears and hugs and like they'd created these incredible bonds. And that really allowed them not only to sort of work together, but you know, they were gonna have relationships that were going to be sustained well beyond. And so they have these now connections and friendships around the globe. And no doubt sort of kept in touch with those students as a result of this work that they were engaged in. We've certainly heard that echoed again and again, we talked about this Global for All initiative,

202which is our hope that every one of our high school students has some sort of a meaningful global experience. And as I've described, that might be a musical performance in London, you know, it might be a homestay in Taiwan, it might be, you know, a language study program in Japan, it can take on a lot of different forms. But we really want to have an authentic experience for every one of our students, that they sort of design around their interests, and pursuit of you know, being tied to other academic issues that they really care about deeply. So that's really sort of where we are with the DEI work. I hope that this provides some context this is something that we are seeing as a community, school community effort, in terms of bringing together the best

203practices that we think are currently in place, and then building upon those as we continue to learn more together as a school community in this work. And then it has tentacles not only as we said, in the in the classroom environment, which is really important, but also as we think about the greater the environment around us, the environment as the third teacher, and also particularly our actual teachers and faculty and staff, that are more representative over time as we continue to hire. So that's our presentation. I would like to open it up to board members for questions at this point. Oh go ahead. No, please go ahead. No. I just had a quick question about the compact committee is given that the committee wasn't originally established for DEI work, are we comfortable that the committee

204has the appropriate membership for this type of work both this year for the next few months and then any thoughts about next year as well? Yeah, so I'm not sure if it's exactly the right committee, we kind of talked about this the last time we got together. It is a committee that has certainly been focused on this. It's been sort of a clearinghouse of practices. We've dedicated the vast majority of our meetings when we used to meet more regularly, were really around DEI efforts and things that were going on. We did you know, we codified some of these changes into our formal compact plan. We did some resource sharing, we set up a Twitter page, we had a we did a bunch of different things that were really focused on DEI. We did already you

205know, I was working with the PTC earlier today. And Don you said, oh, can I have these three other people sort of join that meeting 'cause they're really going to be spearheading this work. I said, absolutely send them along. They're not formal members of the compact committee, but the more the merrier. So we wanted to bring that in, you know, I think for this year because we wanna set up some goals and metrics, and adhere as close as we can to the board policy, that this is going to be the I think most efficient route to getting that work started. I think we do have a question, you know to be direct Ron to your answer is thinking about who really owns this work sort of moving forward, I don't know if it will be

206compact committee in the long run. But at this point in the year with so many other things going on, it definitely will help us to get started on this work, as opposed to waiting and trying to reconstitute a brand new group at this point. But it's certainly open the idea of making changes to that over time. And I just really just wanna make sure as we think about long term that we have the appropriate membership that you know, for this type of work. I completely agree. Following up with that, I was wondering, when are the compact elections? Because aren't you about to have a changeover on your compact team? We are and that's a great point, as you know, we will be including this part of at least the immediate term work in that, and

207I think that shapes. So, you know, we do have sort of the codified list of people who have traditionally been a member of compact, but those have also changed over time, for a variety of reasons. And there's no, there's no reason we need to adhere to the traditional folks. I mean, typically, we have the PTA president, but I suspect there has already some conversation about having more of the multicultural committee leadership, serve as the representatives because of the changing nature of the charge of that group. Yeah, I know, just 'cause you know, it's May, and soon you'll have new PTA presidents, you'll also have new compact members, 'cause they're elected around this time. That's right. That's right. And that's why we wanna sort of be in front of this right now. Because hopefully, this will

208influence those who decide, you know, both from the school and where they want on this committee, and also the representatives themselves. Will there be opportunity for a broader input from the parents and the stakeholders? So the broader input in the immediate term, and again, this is internal school based curriculum based HR based work. So really I think we're gonna be leaning primarily on our multicultural committees of which parents who are interested already have an opportunity to serve on those committees. And if they want to be involved because of this renewed work in DEI, then I would certainly encourage them to reach out to the multicultural committees at each of their schools to find out how they can become a part of those 'cause those are gonna be groups that are gonna continue to anchor this

209work as we move forward in our planning processes. Can I ask another question. Please. I noticed that you had the structure of core on the list to do this work or to help usher through some of this work. That's an example. And I noticed that you did not have a sieve Ed or I'm forgetting what the parallel program is in the high school, it's not sieve Ed, and I was wondering if this will also find its way into that sort of smaller community. So yeah, so we could, you know, just to be clear, we could have added another 43 slides of things that were going on, because you put DEI, there is a concept and it means a lot of different things for a lot of different people. We wanted to give a couple of

210three or four just very specific examples at each of our levels so that's all we were trying to do. Hardly representative and completely not fair to all of the teachers and other folks who are involved doing incredible work in this area already. So I just wanna be clear, this is like this much of the work that's going on, we just wanted to give you some very specific examples. This isn't so much a question but maybe a comment. I think what I'm seeing is fantastic, it just gets me all charged up personally. And I see lots of outreach opportunities that can spin off from this in terms of trying to create linkages with the community, which I know part of our agenda this year was to participate in community outreach to improve. And I know there

211were some ideas that other communities have used in terms of, you know, you talk about an anchor text, but people like whole cities have selected a book, "To Kill a Mockingbird" was one of them in Chicago, where you encourage your community to read a book to create a dialogue. And we have a new library, we have all new programs. I think there are all sorts of really interesting ways to try and coordinate some of the books that the students are reading with, I mean, I as an adult would personally love to read some of these books if I knew about them, so I think we have to make an added effort to create these linkages. I was just thinking about, I think recently we were talking about creating murals in the village and think about

212we could have a DEI theme of murals that encourage people in the art programs and literature, integrating some of these images visually into the community. There are just so many cool interesting ways to tie all this together that we, even though obviously our agenda is to school and the students, is to try and get the parents and other community members as a part of it. So I really applaud you, it's very, very exciting from my perspective, thank you. Thanks, Bob, and you will be reading books, to be clear, that number three on the board goal is the board and its officers and employees will learn about historical injustices so you will definitely be a part of those conversations and we will be, again, if we choose an anchor text for the administrative team, that'd be

213something that would be handing out to the board to be a part of those conversations as well because I think it is important that we're all sort of learning together in this process. And then to your broader point of community input, you know, I think we're definitely interested in that and I think that's why we stress so much on the idea of partnerships. I think we have to be realistic about the scope in which we can focus our time and energy and resources and I think that has to be inward focusing towards our students and faculty, but certainly that's where the alignment with the PTC, with the village liaison committees and other kinds of outreach, I know that we are always looking for partnership opportunities with the village in various ways and so I think

214that there will be those natural extensions of this work, but I also think we'll be really leaning on our partners to make sure that that's happening in the shorter term as we kind of build a more robust program from within and build outward. I've already mentioned this to Thomas over the past few weeks as he's been sharing with me the commitment and work that he and Edgar have been leading and admin council has been working on. And I just wanna, I think that the PTA is in our schools and a lot of the work has been very much focused on multiculturalism and I think obviously that's outstanding and should continue, but I also wanna, as you said with definitions earlier, the definition of diversity is so much broader than just multiculturalism and it has to

215do with learning differences which child very much represents and should he be part in terms of participation and input on that, and also gender expression, sexual orientation, gender identity, all of that is part of diversity and I just wanna make sure that our community understands how core that is in terms of this work as well and it's not just multiculturalism. And I know Carl touched upon it before but I feel strongly how broad this work is so. Can I ask about the consultants? First of all, let me say, Edgar, Thomas, you guys have done a great job, I'm so impressed with everything that I saw tonight. But the consultants, are they gonna work with the parents? Could you just talk a little bit more about what you think they might do? Yeah, so primarily from

216the school standpoint again, our focus is gonna be on students and on faculty. But we've already talked with the PTC and PTAs about trying to leverage those experiences and make sure that we have the opportunity so whenever somebody is in district working with us directly, that we have an opportunity to sort of extend that out to PTCs. That certainly if we had sort of longer planning sessions, that we have all those folks sitting at the table with us so that we can, you know, the way we've been playing a lot of things is sort of an opportunity presents itself and we wanna jump on that because this is a great speaker, this will be a great program to offer. But if we can be more proactive in our thinking and set up, you know, a

217program for a year and use consultants as part of that to sort of say, here's how you really wanna scaffold these speakers to get the most out of this experience or to really experience growth over time. You know, I think that would be our long term goal. I suspect next year is gonna be a bit of a hybrid as we work through that process, but certainly, as we get to that longer term plan, trying to be really as much aligned as we can so that again, if we have the opportunity, we have a speaker come in and work with our student body, then talk with the faculty as a whole and then maybe do a parent presentation that night and those kind. So as much as we can do that, I think that's where our

218interest lies. Yeah, I think that I agree with Thomas. I also think that there will be times for us to be more specific and surgical in our approach where we might bring in a consultant to talk specifically about a curriculum area, for example. For example, I'm attending an SDI in which they're talking specifically about problematic texts and they're working in conjunction with a professor who has a relationship with the SDI, David Solomon, who has an expertise in this particular area. So, while we're gonna be looking for somebody to connect all the pieces, we also will not hesitate to lean on people who may have specific and targeted expertise in certain areas. I think that's great. I guess you've kind of mentioned as you were evaluating consultants that SDI had sort of expressed being part of--

219SCA. Oh, I thought that the SCA, yeah, sorry, the SCA had expressed being part of sort of the evaluating consultants and I was wondering, we've talked about partners, if PTC or PTAs were involved in looking at the consultants as well. So we haven't at this point, but I certainly don't have any hesitation about sharing with them. Again, one of them came directly from the PTA. Right, it sounds like there is a lot of-- So we've been paying attention to the people that have been brought in and that's obviously influenced our thinking as well and we'll continue to have that reciprocal relationship with the PTC and PTA obviously, yeah. Carl, you've been trying to get something in. Yeah, that's right, I don't mind waiting. So, first of all, I really appreciate everything you presented, I think

220we're all around this table pretty excited about this. I kind of had a few thoughts, one coming really kind of on top of what Bob was saying which is, involving the community which is the family. And when I say the community, I'm talking about the families, the parents, you know, to the extent, the larger community, yes, but that's in our direction. And when I looked at the New York State guidance document, I can't remember what it was called now, but they anticipate to the extent we're trying to align ourselves with that, it does anticipate fairly, it does anticipate a parent family interaction of some sort or involvement. It's not specific, but I think that's something that we should be thinking about for number one, because I think it will, everything that happens in school reinforced

221at home, you know, really important. The other thing is, I think that that is already becoming important because we've already seen that while we all, I think most of us, I'm gonna say at this table are fairly comfortable with this subject matter and the direction that we're going in, that not everybody has that comfort level. And it's important to get that information out there that explains it. So for instance, fostering high expectations and rigorous instruction to get the message out there that this is not going to in any way diminish opportunity education which we understand having been talking about this for quite a while, but that this is going to be something that's gonna benefit all of the students and it's gonna enhance that rigor that we already have and make it part of what

222we're doing even more than it already is, if that's possible. So, I think that outreach is important because for those reasons, I think it's important among others. The other thing which is kind of a question and you touched on is, that New York State report also kind of lumps in district leaders into one category and it's not clear where kind of administration ends and Board of Education begins. And a large part for us is to sit here and listen and tell you how great everything is going or not if we think that, and certainly reading a book, reading books and having whatever we need to do is important but I'm also interested and I don't know, I don't think this doesn't have to be an answer right now, but I'm interested as a board like

223a little more hands on what we would be thinking about doing to make sure that we are as engaged as, in my mind, as engaged as the students, the teachers, and as engaged as we would like the community to be. So, as we go forward, things are picking up steam, it's just something to think about for, I mean, really for you to educate us in a way because I feel like I can't say what it is we need to be doing but I do feel like we should be actively doing in this regard to keep pace with everybody and to demonstrate part of leadership that we're participating, that we're active learners about this as well so. So I think you bring up a really interesting distinction and it wasn't something I was necessarily thinking about

224before you brought it up, Carl, but when you talk about different types of leadership, it really spans the whole spectrum of school life. So you have teachers who are also teacher leaders, you have building administration that clearly identifies as a leader, you have district administration, you have board, but we all play distinct roles in that and as a part of those roles, we have distinct influence. So my job is different than your job, your job as a board member trustee is really around governance, around policy which you've done, so like one of the things you've already acknowledged is the importance of this work and codifying it into practice. The board is really engaged in community engagement and you have an opportunity to talk about what your values and goals are. And so when you go

225out and do this community engagement, articulating that this is a priority of the Board of Education, and using your opportunities for speaking at events, speaking to people, making this a priority, supervision of district affairs which is a board goal and responsibility, making sure that we're fulfilling on the kinds of things that you believe we should be and that we've said we would be. But that's different than my work and Edgar's work which is sort of implementing this and rolling this out in a foundational way that's accessible and understandable for faculty and staff, which is different than what a teacher leader is doing by presenting curricular materials in a really authentic and meaningful way in their classroom. And so I think you're absolutely right, we need to be thinking about our personal roles and responsibilities. As

226Pam said, I don't know that everybody's in the same place on this work, I think if people are really honest and vulnerable, some people say, yeah, I feel here I am on the issue of race, here's where the issue I'm on like homophobia, here's what I understand about the trans experience, here's what I understand about gender expression, like there's some things I know a lot about, there's some things I know almost nothing about, you know, learning differences and disabilities. I've heard of some of the big disabilities, I'm not sure I know about the other kinds of disabilities. I don't know about other kinds of experiences that make kids feel marginalized here. So I think we're all kind of on a spectrum and I think going through, you know, again, having these needs assessments and sort

227of coming to understand ourselves where we are, you know, expressing a willingness to learn and grow from wherever we're starting. And then allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in this work and to say, I have a lot to learn. And I think Edgar and I are starting from that place, you know, like we are hardly experts in this area but we're committed to it and I think that's the first step and we're committed to being allies and supporters of this work in the district and we're committed to bringing in people who can help facilitate this work in a really meaningful way. I think that Carl makes an important point and I think NISBA is recognizing this point, they are working on board specific trainings in this area that will be specific to board members responsibilities. Morehouse

228College is now offering specific training for school board members. And I think there's a group in New York City, a little closer than Morehouse College, that is also offering specific training to board members for this work. But I also wanted to follow up on the other point that Carl made with regard to how we are communicating out this work because I think that there's been so much media coverage of different types of DEI policies that have been implemented in other schools and that has caused some concern that these policies necessarily stifle student voice and that's absolutely the opposite of what we wanna do here. You know, student voice and choice are one of the pillars of our strategic plan, we would not implement any sort of policy that would stifle student voices. So I do

229think to Carl's point that communicating very clearly about the goals of this policy is gonna be critical. Already on it, we've already been talking about it. Can I ask one more thing. I heard a lot about reading books, discussion, but I didn't necessarily hear the word reflection and so I was wondering where student reflections, self awareness fits into some of this. Student's looking at themselves, their own identities, their own biases, to work through some of what they're learning? Well, I think that a part of that to Thomas's point is happening in classrooms as they look at certain texts and they look critically at certain texts and they talk about them through both the lens of 2021 but also in a historical context, and they reflect on themselves identity. But that is part of really a

230quality lesson where there's a level of metacognition, like what did you think of this and why did you think that way just as a good practice. Okay, thank you all, appreciate all the feedback, much more to come. One more thing. Yes. Sorry, so, I remember you were thinking of doing a DEI update pretty regularly for the board as you go forward. Like in the same way the journey forward update was a big obvious necessity for this year, is there a thought on us communication to the board schedule or is this? Yeah, I mean, we haven't talked about this formally and I think we wanna, I'm sure tonight's the night to do it, but I think some of our initial thinking was that we would, to harken back to the education reports, I think this is

231the reason that we're here is around teaching and learning. And then what we've discovered is there were supposed to be every month and then they became every other month and then they got usurped by business and budget and other kinds of things. So I think carving out or eking out some specific time to talk about this, whether it's to take the place of the journey forward efforts moving forward or some other regular interval. But I do think it's critical for us to, if we're gonna really say this is our priority sort of moving forward amongst other priorities, that we need to find some time to do a really regular update in the way that we have. Now, we wanna make sure that they're timely and meaningful and don't become just something that we're doing for

232the sake of doing so I wanna come up with a realistic timeline that makes sense relative to the work that's going on. But I think we're really prepared to think about doing that moving forward. I think I would encourage when you develop your communication plan, my gut feeling is as we were, particularly as Pam was going through the checklist of the definition of DEI, it occurred to me that while perhaps we're all sitting around here nodding our heads yes, yes, yes, there may very well be people nodding their heads no, no, no, that these are topics that are perhaps not as fully embraced as we might think in terms of sharing some of this information. We don't know, but I think in the spirit of transparency, I think I would err over communicating than under

233communicating because I could see parents saying, they're perhaps expressing concern for whatever reason, and that we've already started to get emails about the curriculum on DEI that parents were concerned about and we haven't even had our first, you know, now we have, we've had this great presentation. So I think I could see where it would be really important to be very transparent as much as we can when we're ready, but not to leave it to a once a year or even twice a year. I think more is better than less. Absolutely, point taken. I'm done. All right, we'll move on then, thank you. Sorry, I guess I'm still doing the information item. Oh, yeah, but it's actually, yes, but it's wrong so you can just run, Ron. Thank you, Pam. This information item is about

234the Westchester Putnam School Board Association administrative budget and election of board members and officers. There are two items on the ballot, one is the approval of the WPSBA budget, and one is for the officers and for members of the board. The proposed budget from WPSBA will have our dues increasing by approximately 2%. And just as a little background for those who may not be as familiar with this organization, the Westchester Putnam School Board Association provides many services and benefits to our district, some examples include organizing meetings with districts across the region to collaborate, presentations on timely topics, trainings and other resources, information and services. You have any questions? Any questions? And this is on our action item tonight because of the time. It just came a little late between meetings for us. Thank you, Ron.

235I'm gonna do a lot of order here, since we have a board member presenting, I'm gonna go ahead and do the other board member item which is 12.04, which is the NISBA active engagement as part of the action center, which sounds like a complicated title, but Alison is gonna break it down for us. So, the federal government's decision during the last presidential administration to cap the deductibility of state and local taxes from federal income tax, which is also known as the SALT deduction, has put tremendous pressure on our residents and has put tremendous pressure on school district budgets all across New York State. So together with other districts and with the New York State School Board Association, we are inviting our residents to take action via the active engagement link that's attached to this board

236meeting agenda to tell our federal leaders that we support their efforts to repeal the cap and to restore the full SALT deduction. So I urge everyone to visit that site and consider signing on. Questions for Alison. I remember this was something that had a lot of political momentum a couple of years ago and I'm sure people haven't forgotten so make sure to act on your civic responsibility. I think Bill Natbony will sign on. All right, any other questions? Thank you. Then again out of order 12.03, proposed textbooks, Edgar, if you can finish out the information. Yes, I will be brief. But this is "Interior Chinatown", I referred to it before, it's a book by Charles Yu, very engaging and creative story. It won the National Book Award. It is a work of fiction, but it

237talks specifically about Asian stereotypes. And it is written as a teleplay. So it's actually very easy to start reading and get distracted by, another one of them. And that is for the AT English class. And again, connects to the the pilots of the books, the new, multiple voices and new classics. And then this is a another engaging book for middle schoolers and I think a lot of people will cheer about this. It's about financial literacy and it's for the FACS class and the name of the book is "How To Turn $100 Into $1,000,000". Nothing I knew about when I was in middle school. But we're hearing that financial literacy should start younger and younger. So for all those eighth graders with credit cards and everybody else, this looks like an engaging and informative book. Okay,

238any questions on these two texts? All right, thank you to everyone who provided information during the information items and discussion and now we're gonna be moving on to item number 13 action items, Pam. Okay, thanks, Thomas, item 13.01, the Board of Education meeting calendar. Bob, I believe that is your item. Yes. I'd like to move that the board approve the Board of Education calendar of meetings for the 2021/22 school year as discussed at our last meeting and is currently presented. Thank you, Bob, may I have a second. Second. Thanks, Alison, any discussion on this item? I would just like to reiterate my comments from our last meeting when it was an information item that I believe that this board should be scheduling meetings over the summer. I just cannot fathom how this board will not

239have a scheduled board meeting for almost two and a half months from July 7 until September 20. I believe we have a lot of work before us, important work, and we should meet and do it. I also think that we will have long periods between meetings with this proposed calendar, multiple times where there will be a month between board meetings and I just think that is too long and I cannot support the calendars presented because of these reasons. Thank you, Ron, any other discussion? So we could add dates if we wanted to, right? Always, we do. And so I just think that with at least one new board member coming on, it might be nice to wait until our July meeting before we considered adding dates over the summer. Is it possible to put a

240placeholder on August 23 as a potential date for a board meeting before school starts? From my understanding, a placeholder would be a meeting, cabinet would consider that a day that they would have to then schedule their summer around so it would be as if there was a scheduled meeting. So I'm not sure a placeholder matters versus a meeting matters, is that your understanding? I mean, yeah, we would treat it as a meeting day. I look at this calendar as a floor, not a ceiling. I mean, always in the past when we have had issues that have come up, we have added meetings. One example is when COVID first struck and we had to really redo the whole budget. We added many meetings in order to get that work accomplished. So I don't see any reason

241why that wouldn't continue to be the case. If things changed from what they look like now over the summer and we needed to meet in order to figure out how we were gonna comply with some sort of new guidance that came down, then I don't see any reason why we couldn't add a meeting. But I don't really see the need to do that now. So again, I just look at this as as a floor, not a ceiling. Ron, you said that there's work that you think needs to be done over the summer by the board, obviously by the board, we're talking about the board calendar. I'm just curious, I mean, we talked a little bit about a potential restart update or something like that. It takes other than that I guess because I think we're

242basically of the understanding that we'll get some more information but we're gonna go back, I don't wanna say normal, there may be masks and other things, but everybody will be in school theoretically full time subject to the governor's order et cetera, et cetera. I'm just curious, what specific work you have in mind that you would think needs to be done in July and August because if there's something, I think I just wanna know what is your thinking? Sure, I think it's a fair question. So a couple things. I mean, this board regularly just has a lot of work and many things we had to table this year, we had to table our policy work. You know, there is a subcommittee on community engagement, I think there's a number of things that could get proposed to

243the board potentially, I think that's something that would be very valuable to work on, especially this summer. I don't know that necessarily all of it is "summer work", I just think that we have a lot to do and our years are busy without COVID, we have a lot to discuss, we are taking on a lot of other goals and initiatives. I think those are valuable times. I do wanna say, I very much respect the fact that our administrators have been working very hard and deserve and need some time off. I'm very open to this idea that there could be an update with finding and working around Thomas's schedule, maybe Thomas and the board members are available. I get that it can be hard to schedule things, but even if the executive order is not extended,

244four board members is a quorum, the other three can dial in without an executive order. I just think it's been one of the themes we heard a lot this year was taking a proactive rather than a reactive approach, whether you agree with it or not, that's what I believe is a theme we heard. And I think this is an example of us, we have an opportunity to be proactive in setting our calendar, that's how I feel. I would like to say, I don't disagree at all with Ron about being proactive, I guess my hesitation is that in the context of the year we've been through, I believe it is not in the best interest to commit the administration to last week of August before school starts meeting. If you're talking about something that is time

245sensitive, I personally will give up my vacation to come back and do it. If it's to talk about policies that we didn't manage to get to this year, I personally find that not a motivator to pencil in a meeting at the last week of August, personally. So I think if there is something critical, I think we will all step up to the plate and do it, if it's to fail on things that were not addressed because we want to appear more proactive, I don't think that's the week to do it personally. Can I just clarify something, this subcommittee work continues or could presumably continue even without a board meeting so I don't remember who's on the policy subcommittee or the community engagement subcommittee, but I assume those folks can still meet during the summer if

246they want to work on those issues. Am I correct in that? I mean, I'm kind of asking. I know you won't be but I know you'll be but. Well, first of all, so the policy committees would have to be, there's only one that still is in existence I think or is there two committees active, is that a two? So they would probably just reconvene their work once the board decided that that's work that we'd have the space to take on again. I don't know if you decide that at your July reorganization meeting or your first September meeting, but of course that does involve, you know, cabinet members are often a part of those meetings simply because they relate to district operations often and departmental specialty. In my six years or previous to my work as

247a PT council member where I was paying attention to board work for five, six, seven, eight years prior to coming on the board, there weren't committees that met, we didn't have committees, the board did not have committees so it didn't have committees that worked through the summer. Our first committees have been our policy committees and then committee engagement committee. We're just working on a communication plan, Karen, Ron are working on the communication plan right now. I guess what I'm kind of alluding to with respect to Ron's objection to the calendar is that, I wouldn't mind, I'm gonna be here this summer for more or less, I might be away for a week, whatever it is, but so my view on the calendar is it's fine how it is, if we have specific work we wanna

248do, I think we should schedule a meeting, I don't see any problem with that. And I think we're all open to hearing it's, it doesn't have to be right now, if there's something specific that Ron's interested in pursuing or anybody else on the board for that matter, that we could arrange that. But absent something specific, I don't see any reason, I'm kind of with Bob on this, I don't see any reason to just have a meeting to show that we're having a meeting. Any other discussion? I guess I was thinking of the meeting more in terms of a check in of the board before school actually starts, an opportunity for public comment or question as we're heading into a year that we still have some unknown sitting here. And maybe this again is a discussion

249on July 6, whether that needs to be added because we'll know more then, but I just see it more as a opportunity to be responsive to the public after having such a challenging year. All right, any other discussion? All right, so we'll do a vote. All those in favor of the motion? We did have a second. Yeah, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Opposed. Any abstentions? Okay, the motion passes and we'll move on to, oops, sorry, 13.02, the roof replacement bid at Edgewood, Quaker Ridge and the middle school. That's me, thanks, Amber. This item is a resolution for the roofing projects that were part of the 2018 bond project. The work scope consists of roofing replacement for the middle school and partial replacements at Quaker Ridge and Edgewood, and I recommend that

250the board adopt the resolution as it's presented in the meeting agenda. Thank you, Amber, may I have a second. Second. Thanks, Carl, any discussion? All right, no discussion, we'll do a vote. All those in favor. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? Okay, the motion passes. And we'll move to 13.03, the Westchester Putnam administrative budget, Ron. I move that the board cast its vote on the ratification of the 2021/2022 Westchester Putnam School Board Association budget and slate of 2021/2022 officers and members of the Board of Directors as presented. Thank you, Ron, may I have a second. Second. Thanks, Carl, any discussion? All right, and I have a question. This is just going to be submitted by you to Stacey at West Put and they'll record those votes at their meeting which we'll be missing. Okay, any other discussion?

251All right, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? Okay, the motion passes. Moving on to item 14, the gift proposal to Fox Meadow, Karen. I move that the board accept the gift proposal from the current fifth grade Fox Meadow Girl Scouts for a kindness bench to be placed at the Fox Meadow School. Thank you, may I have a second. Second. Thanks, Amber, any discussion on this item? All right, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? The motion passes and we issue our thanks to the Fox Meadow Girl Scouts for this kindness bench. Item 15 is public comment or second opportunity. At this public comment period, the comments are still limited to three minutes, but we don't have the 90 minute cap on this public comment period. And there's no

252one in our audience here other than Ray, you have anything to say, Ray. So we'll go to our attendees in Zoom. And please raise your hand in Zoom if you would like to speak at this public comment, period. I don't see any. Right now no one has their hand raised. Oh, there we go. Okay, so Mayra, I'm going to do the same thing, promote you to panelist and whatever magic you did before, please go ahead with that, I'm going to ask you to unmute. Jerry will let you know we can hear you and you can go ahead, Mayra. Hi, thank you, good evening again. Mayra Kirkendall-Rodríguez, still at Fox Meadow Road. I really wanted to thank Dr. Hagerman for that incredibly energetic presentation, I don't think I've ever seen you that energetic in the last

253year. You are energetic but (indistinct) Its been a hard year, Mayra, it's been a hard year. This is exactly an example of why it would be really helpful to get some information about it because there was just so much information that you shared, it would be very difficult to comment or ask more questions, there was just a lot there and I do appreciate all the effort that you put into that and of course, the entire cabinet. I do appreciate Miss Fuehrer, Finger and Klein's comments on families. My personal observation is of course that biases start home and so it does kind of make me wonder how this will work and of course perhaps you shouldn't expect or shouldn't have excessive expectations of our schools because a lot of these issues do arise at home. I

254would like to just, again, mention parent involvement, it's fantastic that you go through the PTC, those women work so hard, so do all the heads of the PTAs and I of course appreciate their efforts. I would like to mention that back in May of 2020, I mentioned several times both at the Board of Ed and I also wrote about the fact that in my humble opinion, there should have been an open call for volunteers for the restart steering committee, I was told that this was not the way to do things, roughly paraphrasing, and again, I encourage you to have an open call, there's lots of individuals in our community who for various reasons, may not be able to be members of the PTA, may not be able to be members of the PTC, but perhaps

255DEI may be the thing that they really like and we just don't know that or at least I personally don't know that. So, I really encourage you to seek out the community. You know what, if nobody writes back, if nobody volunteers, then you can even send me a big message saying, LOL, Mayra, you were wrong and I will let it go humbly. But I think it's important to reach out in addition to the PTC and PTA and see who's out there who can contribute to your incredibly important efforts in DEI. Also, I do appreciate some of you saying that, I don't know how to say this as delicately as possible, but the administration is relatively homogeneous, 86% of the Board of Education currently is Caucasian and after May 18th, it will also be 86% Caucasian.

256I remind everybody, of course, I am married to a 15th generation Caucasian man and so but what I'm really getting at here is that I am curious to hear a little bit more about in addition to both, what else is gonna go on in terms of training, education et cetera for the board and for the administration about these very complex issues with diversity? You did mention that, that I believe this Dr. McIntosh, that Scarsdale has been doing DEI for many decades. I see bits and pieces of that, but I think it would be great if you actually put those documents, put those historical records on your website. I myself have been a multicultural co-chair for Fox Meadow for six years and I haven't seen a lot of that information and you know what I'm like,

257I do look for it. I know that this evening is probably not possible but I certainly would love to hear more details about the consultants and the cost and how exactly that might be selected. I know there was a lot of information given today and so it's not possible to get into all these details. Lastly, I have to say that I started to get a little bit, I don't know if the term is confused or perplexed, but I thought we were talking about DEI, the next thing I know we were talking about the relationship that Scarsdale has had within for a long time, I know that PBS assistance are working awful a lot about that and I appreciate Dr. McIntosh's efforts with affinity group languages, definitely pretty brutal, I don't even go there. But I

258get a little confused because are we talking about D&I or are we talking about study abroad and are we, because study abroad has to do with how much families can afford to send their kids abroad, but I'm not sure exactly what that means in terms of actual curriculum in Scarsdale. Dr. Hagerman I believe mentioned studying language in Japan or being exposed to Japanese, but for the most part in Scarsdale, we don't have a world language program from the elementary school all through the middle school, we have a romance language program. In the high school, we have romance and then we have Mandarin, a level four language. So again, fantastic, interesting to hear this presentation, I really look forward to a lot more work on just the ability of parents maybe having some different meetings to

259really get a lot more details. But thank you for all your efforts and thank you, everybody, for all your comments on this important issue, thank you. Thank you, Mayra. I gave her a little extra time because we interrupted her so much. Attendees, any other hands that want to be raised for public comment, Zoom attendees. Okay, seeing none, I will close this second opportunity for public comment during our business meeting and move to follow up, I mean. Yeah, so I would like to thank Mayra, she always brings a lot of interesting dimension to the conversation and brings in insight that challenge us to think in different ways and so thank you Mayra for that. Just a couple of observations. You know, I understand the desire for doing an all call within the community, but it is

260difficult for us to have folks who are otherwise disconnected from schools to serve as a liaison in such an important role. So we didn't necessarily say that folks had to be tied to the PTA or PTC leadership role, but rather, one of the pieces that we put out there was to have people who are part of at least the multicultural committees at the schools. I think it's gonna be very important that if somebody serves in a leadership role, that they're dialed into what's going on at the school and an integral part of that. And again, for our purposes, we cannot take on individual pet projects or interests as part of the district's focus on this work, but really, we have to, again, create the synergy with the different programs and initiatives that are going on

261within our buildings. And so we do need to have people being connected. And I understand time limits and people's availability and all those kinds of things, but we do feel like it's pretty important that people are at a minimum serving on their local school's multicultural committees if they're going to serve in a district leadership role. So I've just wanted to make that clarification there. You know, point taken on the administrative team. When I came to Scarsdale seven years ago, I don't think we had any administrators of color and certainly very few faculty members, I think we've made a very concerted effort, Drew spoke to that issue at length a little bit earlier about our attempts to diversify. But I also wanna be clear that differences go far beyond the color of one's skin so that

262there are diverse experiences and diverse backgrounds and we talked a while back about sort of the definition of culture which reaches far beyond skin color to beliefs to sort of past experiences of living in poverty, sexual orientation, gender differences, I mean, all sorts of religious beliefs and backgrounds. And so, we have to recognize that often behind the veneer of somebody lies differences that may not be apparent on the surface sometimes. And again, that's part of our DEI work is to recognize that everybody has a story, everybody has a narrative, and that whatever those are, we're trying to sort of expose the importance of being accepting and understanding of those pieces. And then finally, again, there was a lot of information presented and so we did talk about a wide variety of experiences, again, trying to

263provide some content and context for our DEI work. When we talked about the study abroad programs specifically, we were talking about, you know, it goes under the umbrella for me of understanding differences of cross cultural connections, of collaboration, and all of that for us is the inclusive part of the diversity, both understanding differences, and then sort of navigating those kinds of relationships in a global setting, particularly with a focus on again, real authentic work and problem solving and those kinds of pieces which we believe can be experienced in the four different kinds of aspects of Global for All initiative that Edgar described. So, I get the point that was being made, but I think our belief is that students do benefit whether it's performance based service learning, a language study, or so on. And Mayra

264rightly points out that we have a romance language based language program in the district. I think we're trying to expand that, again, we do offer the Mandarin, I think that there have been calls for us to expand our language offerings. I think that was largely seen as a personnel issue and a resource issue in the past. I think if anything, we've learned from this pandemic that Zoom and other platforms allow us to maybe think about curriculum offerings in a different way and access to programs and potentially languages in a different way and so I think that's something that we will continue to have discussions about at this board table and certainly through our schools in terms of offering opportunities to students that may not have been available to them in the past. And so I

265think that's again, part of all of our thinking about this work. So just a couple of immediate responses. Yeah, and I'm happy to just talk about the Global Learning Alliance a little bit. We do consider that a multicultural experience, but beyond that, one of the reasons we determined that we were gonna highlight it is because the project that the students were working on was specifically about belonging. So the projects, and I could have gone into more detail but we were just trying to keep it tight, but it was about studying marginalized and ostracized groups, and then doing research on it and reporting out across the three different nations. So we thought it was an interesting point to highlight. Okay, thank you both. Oh, sorry, next items, wrap up items. The only thing I have is,

266Eric, a long time ago, today, tonight, earlier, you after Mayra's question in the first public comment, and she talked about kind of something to help parents with red flags, you mentioned something about a guide. And I didn't want you to push yourself into doing that guide unless it was a board request of you, but I'd wanted to see if it was a board request, if the board thought that that might be something helpful for you. I think it's worth the conversation with the counselors, both guidance counselors and psychologists to talk about a resource page or updating a resource page that we already have on the website for parents over the summer about looking at students and red flags specifically, I think that's a reasonable ask. Okay, so it doesn't need to be a board request,

267it's just your initiative with that, thank you. We can do that. Okay, so I only had that, were there other wrap up items. Budget vote reminder. You wanna do it or you wanna, all right, so May 18 at the Scarsdale Congregational Church, there's the vote on the 2021/22 budget from 7:00am to 9:00pm and also the board of election votes so we encourage you all to attend and vote. That's good? Crossing guard and parking lot. If we could go back for one second. Just as a reminder, on the red flag issue that we were just talking about, if people look at our Journey Forward page, we actually did add a quite a while ago a mental health resources page, it has quite a lot of information. And towards the bottom, it has a section called COVID-19

268Mental Health Resources for Children and Teams. The very first article is mental health during COVID, signs your child may need more support. It's a very interesting article that exactly speaks to some of those signs and signals that parents may wanna be paying attention to and it talks about when to reach out to school or other personnel for that. And then there's another five or six articles there that are sort of in that same vein, helping students to cope. Information for helping kids and parents cope from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, information from the CDC. So there is already a little bit of a bevy of information that's available on our web page currently for folks who are interested in that. Thank you, Thomas. Other wrap up items, anything I missed. All right,

269so meeting dates for the coming month, Alison. So this Thursday, May 13, the board committee on community engagement will meet at 1:30 in the Grand Conference Room here in high school. As Pam said, on Tuesday, May 18, we have the budget vote and the board elections from 7:00am to 9:00pm at the Scarsdale Congregational Church. And then that evening at around 9:30, there'll be a special meeting of the board where we certify the results. On Monday, May 24, we'll have our next board meeting, we'll begin at 5:30 with a special meeting or an executive session, and then at 6:30, we'll have an education report followed by a business meeting and that will take place here in room 170 in the high school. Then on June 7 is the next board meeting, we'll begin at five o'clock

270with special meeting or executive session in room 170, followed by our retirement recognition ceremony at 6:00pm. Always a joyful and just very moving ceremony, I encourage everyone to watch. After that probably around seven o'clock, we'll have our business meeting here in room 170 and then we'll follow that if necessary with executive session. Thanks, Alison. I just want to confirm that the board committee on community engagement which will be reading live in Grande will be videotaped as was the norm last year, but not live, right? Are the public able to attend this in the way that they've attended these committee meetings in the past? I mean, we've had a couple of members but-- This isn't available, right? We'll have limited seating, I guess we would ask people if they plan to attend to let us know

271so that we could accommodate the sitting. Thank you. And I also just wanted to mention that that special meeting will not be live streamed, the one to confirm the vote. That's just done at the church very quickly, not videotaped, not live streamed, we're not doing that. And finally, only because this goes through June 7, I just wanna let the community know, the board's obviously already aware of this, we have added another meeting on June 21 to our board calendar. So that's on the board calendars, it's on our schedules now, but the community doesn't know about it because we added it a couple weeks ago to this year's calendar. So we do have a meeting on June 21 as well scheduled for this board. Anything else? Okay, adjournment. I am looking for a motion to adjourn

272for the evening. So moved. Second? Thanks, Karen. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? Motion passes, we are adjourned, thanks, everyone.