001um we are moving right along um we are going to we have no public comments and we're going to start to do the pledge oh right yeah i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right so now we are [Music] and inclusion initiatives informative the lady who walked yep i need to share it just bear with me all right good job young lady can whisper like a mouse in the next [Music] i can't get this to but if you want the clicker it's that button right there oh that's your mouth um good evening um i'm eileen peters weinberg and i am the school improvement specialist for sullivan county boces and i'm really happy
002to be doing that um i was hired three years ago and almost um pretty much to the month in october and one of the first presentations that i gave was to the administrators of sullivan boces and it was about culturally responsive education so we've come quite a ways from that initial first presentation to where we are now and thank you for asking me to share what we've been doing with you so let me just go right ahead here and that doesn't work so let's see does that one work ah did you need yeah maria i i i don't know how to advance oh do i just push it on the arrow just try that you know just try this so what i'm doing oh tricky these two buttons front forward and backwards so which one
003here yep okay here's the microphone that might help no i'm good so i need a microphone so um we're looking at the parable of the blind man and the elephant which many of you may know and it the original one which was thousands of years ago from india was talking about blind men feeling an elephant and each one coming forward with what they thought the elephant was now in this case we have diversity equity and inclusion as the elephant and you can see that there are different responses to what each of those folks those blind folks think diversity equity and inclusion might be now the thing to know about this is obviously if you're a blind person and you're feeling you only have one frame of reference folks today who are not blind either literally
004or figuratively do have the opportunity to see other people's perspectives but sometimes it's very difficult when somebody has an idea about what something is to listen to another point of view so and that is really kind of what's going on in terms of defining diversity equity and inclusion getting a really good working definition that we can then use and put into place in our schools and in our classrooms and this button isn't working maria i'm sorry should i try the arrow yeah i've been using i pressed it honestly okay i'm sorry so um the first thing we're asking ourselves is well why why are we doing this the first reason although maybe not the most compelling but certainly a definitely compelling reason is that we need to be in compliance with federal state local laws
005policies guidelines and practices and we have a whole raft of laws and regulations and guidelines that come to us from the federal government constitutional amendments new york state laws and as you well know from local agencies developing your own policy for diversity equity and inclusion and the second reason which i think is certainly equally compelling oh it's much more on a moral and ethical level has to do with disrupting inequity and i put up this um quote from the uh the um frameworks for culturally responsive and sustaining education and basically what it is telling you is that new york state accepts and acknowledges and understands the responsibility that we must prevent repetition of continuing to marginalize and undervalue our historically marginalized populations and we need to do whatever we can to overcome any kind of
006oppression neglect and social isolation and that's coming right from the state there we go this is another compelling reason which as i'm sure you know that there is an increasing amount of diverse students diverse populations that are becoming more and more part of this country's fabric and as you can see in um the far left when we're looking at the year 2002 59 of our students were white uh projected for 2024 we have of our students will be white and there are all these other wonderful uh different types of cultures and races that are except for african-american that are increasing in number so this is a reality this is not something that is possible this is not something that is uh pretend this is actual and we really need to address it because it is
007happening now just very briefly i thought i'd just throw up there for you the different types of federal law and constitutional law and new york state law that um impact the types of diversity equity and inclusion work that we are trying to do so starting back in 1964 with civil rights law and we come full circle in terms of looking at our state guidelines 2015 but we have also more much more recently we have come out with let me just show you from the new york state board of regents and i'm sorry that this is not um new york state board of regents has come out with um frameworks standards for professional standards for educational leaders that came out first in 2015 and has been amended in 2018 to put diversity equity and inclusion the
008third goal down the list i'm sorry that this isn't clear we also have social emotional frameworks which came out we have the culturally responsive and sustaining education frameworks that we are working off of um an organization called used to be called teaching tolerance it's now called learning for justice has come out with social justice standards so we are looking at frameworks and benchmarks that impact the way we are going to be delivering education to our students that's better and most recently in 2021 new york state has come out with a road roadmap that is very similar to the one that they put out for the next-gen standards a couple of years ago and this roadmap certainly gives us the guidelines for what we need to do to build capacity what we need to do in
009in terms of implementing the different types of standards and activities and concepts that would support diversity equity and inclusive learning and this brings us to you folks um i understand that uh tonight um i think i heard that you are going to be voting on the policy that you have created and um so this is local agency that is responding to the need for diversity equity and inclusion in our classrooms the benefits of diversity equity and inclusion i'm sure that most of you are aware of and bottom line is we're looking to close achievement gaps we are looking to increase graduation rates we are looking to decrease dropout rates and unfortunately those types of things mostly impact our impoverished students who come from low income areas and many of those students are students who are
010black indigenous people of color the civic and social emotional benefits certainly are being addressed as i said in the benchmarks that new york state has put out for social emotional learning and it has been shown over again in research that students who feel welcome students who feel affirmed students who feel safe in schools will improve academically and that improvement can be dramatic and please understand when i talk about diversity i am not just talking about race i am talking about all the diversity that you can possibly think of which we have all the time there is diversity in religion there is diversity in cultural backgrounds there's diversity in socioeconomic status so when you think diversity just don't think students who have different racial or ethnic backgrounds we are all diverse we are all diverse so
011these standards and these types of benefits are for all students not just those who may come from uh skin that is different than ours i like the way you said that that's something that we need to continue to repeat because the opponents of this are arguing that this is anti-white pro-black uh we've got to point out that it's for all children yes and thank you and i also want to point out this is national transgender month so included in diversity are certainly those folks who have gender identity that may be different from what you know or what you're used to or what you're familiar with so as i said diversity is everywhere and it is all of us and the economic benefits well in terms of a workforce we can't do much better than produce
012global citizens who will be productive and certainly help to enhance this nation help to enhance their communities and certainly do well for themselves in creating good solid families who will then be able to support their students in schools diversity equity inclusion if you want to think of a funnel that's the top of the funnel and as the funnel gets more narrow you have what's called culturally relevant teaching which is one of the foundational pieces of diversity equity inclusion it is a way of teaching through students and not just two students it's a way of teaching using students what's called funds of knowledge which means the culture the information the education the traditions that they bring with them from their homes into the classroom so using that embedding it infusing it through the curriculum and instructional
013strategies it's what's called culturally relevant teaching it's also called culturally responsive teaching culturally congruent teaching there's a bunch of names but basically what it means is teaching through the student not just to the student so that's that's the opening now what has been done well i'm going to tell you so we're looking at general initiatives and these were brought to your attention i believe in the june 10th board meeting by maria summer and what she has talked about is raising consciousness consciousness and looking at the development implementation of the community as part of this work certainly uh dei workshops during our super attendance conference days and providing iss the instructional services workshops focusing on diversity equity and inclusion focusing on culturally responsive and sustaining education social emotional learning and family and community engagement and that's
014the broad brush now i'm going to paint with a fine brush i was asked to develop an overview of what it would look like if we took those culturally responsive sustaining education frameworks and the social emotional learning frameworks and all those other acronyms that i just mentioned what would it look like if we were to put them in boxes in order to be able to roll them out to the districts and so this is what i developed in the large box at the top it says that all of these things are informed by what the state has put out what local agencies have put out in terms of policy so all of the things that are on that chart are informed by using the frameworks and the benchmarks that have been produced by the state
015so if you just want to take a look at that chart for a second and you can see that it goes from the knowing thyself which is what research has shown to be critical before teaching you have to know who you are what your triggers are if you're going to be teaching a lesson on the history of the civil war what do you believe about the civil war what have you been brought up thinking and what may be a trigger for you so that doesn't mean you shouldn't teach the civil war it just means you need to know where your own landmines might be because what you want students to do is not think like you but to think critically about what you're saying and have them develop their own ideas so there's no indoctrination
016here this has to be something that comes from within first before you can deliver it to the students does anybody have any question about this overview professional development for dei standards um there have been this is where um i come in i've been giving professional development on dei for the past two and a half years that started thanks to dr dufour which really gave some traction to this work he developed an idea for creating a round table where folks could come and speak their truth in a safe space it became so successful that we just continued to work with it and we talked about different topics every month so that was for the folks from boces we had administrators we had teachers we had social workers we had a whole range of people that would
017join these roundtable discussions these are the social emotional learning workshops that i designed developed and delivered these became very popular once the pandemic hit up until this point i had been focusing a great deal of my work on english language arts but when the pandemic kid and teachers had to build the wings on the plane while it was flying and we were all so overwhelmed with what we needed to do in order to support our students i thought it would be worthwhile to try and give some self-care teaching teachers how to be mindful of their own needs and also to be mindful of the needs of their students so that they would learn practices and strategies about social emotional learning which they would then turn key train to their students so we had whole bunches
018of folks that were coming to these workshops and they have continued um this year we're working on resilience and we have monthly workshops on that for those for teachers but we also have i've been going into a district and doing social emotional learning with the administrators which has been a lot of fun because for some of them that's a very new kind of concept to think about well how do i be mindful and how do i just stop and breathe for a minute and how do i disengage for those 30 seconds so i can respond instead of just react so those are the different types of workshops that i've been offering and these are the diversity equity and inclusion workshops that i have been offering and as you can see up there the dei round
019table as i said that was initiated by dr dufour those were the topics for not all but many of the workshop many of the roundtables that we had we would have these discussions on those particular topics we've been having workshops on difficult discussions because these are controversial topics and students are fully aware of the controversies that are going on i'm talking particularly middle school and high school but the littles certainly hear the news or they hear their folks or their families talking about it so in order to have those difficult conversations you need to know how to have a difficult conversation because unless you're prepared because things can get really kind of tense so you need to know the processes and the procedures and the strategies and the mindsets before going into having these difficult
020discussions so they can be productive and i just want to highlight one thing um on december 6 i've collaborated with a wonderful person named alex alluro on developing a workshop on lgbtq and where it's an introductory foundational workshop alex will be um offering uh definitions of different gender identities and i will be discussing or presenting the different types of laws guidelines and policies that impact education in reference to lgbtq students and how will we continue to build on all of this work well we have uh a newly established new york state boces professional learning network that marie and i have been invited to join and the first meeting of that will be at the end of november this will be a group uh from all the boces in the state the folks that are doing
021the dei work for their particular region so this way we will be able to be cohesive in what kind of work we are doing and how we'll be able to deliver it we're looking at aligning workshops with um activities that are shown on the night on the new york state ed dei framework and we're looking to engage a wider pool of participants creating a a larger dei round table that will invite members of the community it will invite students it will and we want to embrace a much larger population who will have input in what we will be doing moving forward providing administrators and educators professional development with resources and materials so they can carry this work forward in their individual districts and in their schools and finally expanded opportunities for all students to access
022excellence in education questions i thought it was very interesting by the way one of the more interesting things i've had the pleasure to listen to um i don't think i really have a question though okay if you think of one i'm here i'll find you i know you will thanks thank you coming up next i guess i just wake my computer back up okay now we are on the consent agenda 6.012n3 um [Music] thank you linda a second anthony thank you so i didn't see you down there um questions comments okay let's take the vote can you throw us back so that we're all in the same can you get me started on this thing oh it's probably turned on you need to push the button well i've been pushing it how long do i
023need to push we have okay so gene will throw that up for us in a minute online carol and carol may i have your votes and i'll put them in okay thank you you've got cans also yes everyone else voted okay because it says connection to the server may have been lost but no i think you could be came in through great thank you all right i don't see the totals that's unanimous unanimous thank you genes okay item seven um the trains audit report 7.01 we have to vote on that only came up gene i'm sorry as six point zero one but then we have six point zero two and six points that's the point of part of the percent it's all part of it but it's all labeled as six point zero one yeah
024it's all exactly okay well 7.01 is the claims audit report and that is informational but it's always a great conversation how are we doing anyone have any questions comments fairly well except for that thirty four thousand nine hundred and eighty dollars so it's just correction great thank you very much okay since that's informational that's all we need to do these little things treasures report august 2021 this is an action item sue thank you second hit please don't ken thank you okay question you seem to me that both of our treasurer's reports were about twice the size they usually are uh am i wrong on that or um they are longer but they're not twice the size they're probably maybe five pages longer than the previous reports i went and looked at them it it looks
025like when they scanned in i think in in the past they didn't print the whole big cap report so like there are two pages to any report or multiple pages to any windcap report and the last page is always the criteria of the report and so when i look there are a lot of i think i counted four maybe five of these extra pages so we can work on not scanning in the first you know criteria pages when you want to report will you get that left okay thank you all right well i agree with ken if you look at it we usually get like a page or two you know they're usually 20 to 20. and we would have added a page um in the spring because we created there is a retention reserve
026so that's you know an additional item um and then we'll have the other reserve when we fund it for the uh do we do we need any more discussion maybe questions or anything so we're going to vote on this one this is the august 2021. okay we're ready for a vote he's going to change raise your hand yeah thank you very much everybody voted for it moving right along treasured before september again i need a motion sue and ken thank you i'm sorry um any questions or conversation about it none great i'd like to call a vote all those in favor show hands great thank you very much personnel matters this is also an action item so before we discuss it i need a motion linda and anthony thank you very much okay there you
027go you got it all in front of you got any questions does anyone have any questions about this think all the pages you're hearing please do um you'll notice that uh kyle eaton is being appointed general special education you'll also notice somewhere else on here he's resigning right uh kyle is resigning from his position as a social studies teacher which he was hired under but he was one of the new teachers that were hired in a academic area but he didn't have the special ed certificate and we sent them out to go and get it so he's the first one of that group to get a special insert so he's resigning from the gen ed position and being appointed on a special ed tenure track so that's why his name appears i'm here twice and
028it's a four-year challenge right it's a four-year track but as a measure of good faith he will be credited with the one year and i'll recommend him pretending after four rather than five years no that makes perfect sense no one had any other questions about any of it okay and may i have a both keys well this is jacob please just show ends now again unanimous both and zoom in at the table so i only have two quick items um one is me and one is going to be jet so i'll give her some of my time um the token testing we are in our sixth week of cover testing um gene we started with 60 yes and we're down to how many 62 and we're down to 54. okay so um a number of
029our staff have gotten vaccinated and are no longer being tested the testing is going 99.9 smoothly um we're basically doing it randomly so um we change the day of the week that we do the testing i want to give kudos to gene i'm going to be christiansen because the two of them are handling the entire testing process wow and gene is also supporting five other school districts using the same company and guiding them through the wilderness that is totally tested we had one positive case in one of our pools and um we actually were able to notify the individual before they started showing symptoms oh wow so um the methodology does work uh and knock on wood and i think the only wood is sitting in my office at all with a desk i have
030um we have had no uh incidents since then and though gene and melinda now have it down and tweaked that we are getting our results pretty much within 24 hours now uh which is excellent we were originally told we could take up to a 72 hours so um we're testing and you know we have a one staff member that that's quality uh and they're not happy with it but uh this isn't an us thing it's a event for just the instrument of the testing so it is going up very very smoothly anybody have any questions on that yeah the union is cooperating the uh union um files a notice of claim which is reserving their right to take due to a legal action and that was the last we heard um the notice is then
031filed the notice is with our attorney um the uh government leadership has been very supportive and uh has remind basically reminded their membership that they must comply uh with the directive and uh you know could anything happen possibly do i expect it no but that that's all settled down that's an aside i was at an event and um i'm speaking with theresa because she too was that it was a rotary event and um she was clearly very supportive leadership has been very supportive and they've done what they're required to do but um you can always tell when something is required well i officially give this to you yeah how's your family doing yeah okay and that's kind of been the case with us um the other thing i just want to touch on and i
032had sent this summary uh home [Music] about staffing and what we were doing and jen donna hammer myself and then jen myself and jeff sat down and we put together uh a recruitment plan and i'm just going to ask jen to touch on that a little bit now and we're just going to go into the generalities of it so as i discussed last month recruitment is a challenge um we i think i mentioned that one of our principals um was setting up interviews and about 50 were showing up so the trend this month was we had six people that we were hoping to hire for teacher reads in my talent queue uh took me two weeks and multiple phone calls to each person multiple emails before i finally had to say i can't we can't
033do it anymore we had to five of them we had to say no because they weren't calling us back so our discussions were about we need to reach the people that aren't looking uh because the people that are looking a lot of them aren't really looking they're just going to emotions so what we'd like to do and i'm going to pass this around we're going to start we there's a lot of word of mouth we find that word of mouth works so donna hammer developed this card and we're actually going to be doing a mailing to the local um to the local towns so we're going to do a mass mailing we're also going to contact the parents i think bob was the one who came up with there might be parents that might be
034home and maybe they want to work when their kids are in school so we're going to take this same recruitment plan donna's card turn it into an email facebook post and we're going to push it out we're trying to get to parents um we're also going to do social media and we're going to ask our staff to share those social media posts um not maybe not everybody's on the boces facebook page but if i share it i've now reached another 200 people everybody in this room we could probably reach another thousand people things like that recruitment things yeah so because of my connection so we're going to take the next step a lot of times people come because they know somebody and they feel comfortable so we're going to do we know we can't do
035a sign-on bonus we know we can't do a finders you know we have the staff give them money so what we'd like to do is everybody who shares the facebook page or social media will win boces swag we're going to place an order for something so anybody don is going to keep track whoever shares it they're going to be get getting some type of you know swag we're going to take it one step further is that on the website ultimately as it's rolled out so the postcard will line up on the left good whereas each thing is finalized and i forgot to mention the postcards we did this couple years ago and we actually are going to give out physical postcards and take them to the dentist office with you to the doctor's office where
036you can go post them in the grocery stores and i'm just going to inject those postcards it's going to be targeted it's not a blind mailing around the county we're targeting exhibitions around liberty liberty ferndale youngsville white silver springs livingston manor parksville spawn lake harrison south fullsburg um so the second round of if the staff then gets someone to apply for a job um then they're going to get maybe a mug or something another recent boces spotted and then everybody will we're going to do quarterly everyone who had someone apply is going to get a chance at um a bistro set that the um carpentry that students in our carpentry program won't be making and if somebody's hired they're going to get one to give certificates from cpu correct that's right yes that's right and
037if they're hired we already have gift certificates um for auto body auto detailing we have ones from cosmetology we'll be getting them from culinary so they'll be able to get a good certificate as well from one of our programs victims very um uh testimonial videos um the the theme of this program is why i work at solomon buses and we're going to be getting uh testimonial videos from uh all types of staff members and start posting them online and they'll be these will be the things that will go out it'll be a short recruitment video and donna will send it out to the staff and if the staff links it on their facebook page and uh i don't have anything else but did this somehow i don't think so they'll tag it and if we
038know that they're packed then he'll get something for him and that's okay i think you've been very creative and i think there's a little luck you know pull in a few people good people too you know if i had a kid and i wanted a job while it was while my child was in school that is the characters if we get linda um fists who lives in monticello but has no transportation but her child goes to boces and she'd like to work during those hours and make some money then we'll call monticello and say hey listen if you let linda ride the bus with her kid to school we'll assign her to one of your kids you know that's um um before we leave your report um can you just help give us any updates
039on what's going on with the searches say in sullivan west and in chicago valley we've been retained as the search consultant they appointed me at their last board meeting we've already started the process they have the brochure in the application that we did last time they're reviewing it and updating it to this friday we have the survey that we used for the board and the community last time so the board is doing that survey what they want to see in the next superintendent i'm meeting with them before i go on vacation on december 2nd to finalize those documents everything will be printed and set to go and it will go out after the first of the year we'll run our placement ads simultaneously during the month of january and february we will be uh doing
040a community focus group by survey and also holding in-person focus groups this worked very well from aboard the last time uh their target is to start interviewing by the end of february beginning in the march and have somebody on board by uh july 1st um sullivan west um i have little or no information sullivan west historically does not use poses to do their search um they are using a search consultant that i work with myself um this is a very mixed service not many people around the state do the dss do it and there's a set of search consultants on you had one that i have not dealt with before from well no then it is the center um and the rounds right there's two of them in buffalo so you might have had the
041other one but we share information because coincidentally four years ago when i started here we were in the exact same situation sullivan west and tri valley were both doing a search at the exact same time that's funny i was doing a search for dry valley and dr uh doctor and dr ramming were doing it for sullivan so they're being secured to do it i work very closely with them we exchange information so i always know what's going on even though we're not doing the search i have a responsibility to report things to state education before i do not know who they're going to use as their interim but mr walker knows that as soon as the board makes their decision uh i have to be notified just like i told tanya once the folks in
042liberty made your decision i needed to be notified because it's a formal process that needs to be done by the bs notify the state education department the new york state council of school superintendents the new york state school board's associations and the myriad other legal entities that need to know who is the super parent thank you thank you thank you that's it for you yeah moving right along now to 10.01 policy 3430 diversity equity and inclusion second reading and approval discussion and approval all right folks we're not going to read this out loud we need a motion we do we need a motion thank you ken thank you anthony okay now we need to open into discussion are there any comments or questions on this second read there's everybody comfortable with the wording all those
043in favor raise your hand excellent unanimous thank you gene and finally board member comments i'm going to start anthony can i start with you linda happy thanksgiving everybody thank you thank you all for all you do ken nothing thank you sue i'm the same and i guess i will no thank you i'm good there do you have a comment carol you are muted carol you have muted yourself because my husband came home in the dog bark and the cats came in and then he made dinner and so i had to mute myself through the whole thing i could go on if you want me to go on i had a lot of fun you're just fine all right so uh happy thanksgiving everybody and see you in december and since kathy is not here could
044someone could you do it thank you linda thank you thank you and thank you all as always [Music] with you guys good night get home safely maria did you want something thank you [Music] shut them down