Board of Education Meeting 6/2/2021

001good evening i'd like to welcome you to the june 2 2021 board of education meeting superintendent would lead us in the pledge great this is definitely our favorite part of our board meeting when we get to recognize our amazing students we're going to start with the science olympiad students from murphy junior high school and i'd ask msu mcguire to come to the microphone if you would like to be joined sue by some of your colleagues that's absolutely fine we have mr hanger meyer miss pahuja with us thank you i'm not starting over this year definitely posed a number of challenges with students on our science olympiad team having team members remote and in person working together on different events tonight is actually the first time that the team is together in one place this year's

002science olympiad looked much different than in years past due to covert 19 concerns all invitationals regional state and the national competition were held virtually having virtual virtual tournaments this year actually allowed both the jalinas and murphy teams to compete in invitational competitions that were held in florida illinois california and wisconsin without ever leaving long island definitely saved money both murphy and jalinas competed at the eastern long island regional competition and then both went on to the state competition at the state level jalinas and murphy placed first and second respectively out of the 52 of the best new york state olympiad teams both of our teams went on to the national competition to represent new york state competing with 60 of the best teams in the country both teams did well earning medals at the national

003level even more important when these students apply for college or interview for a job they will ask them if they have leadership qualities do they work well with others are they detailed oriented and are they reliable one of these three village science olympiad team members will be able to answer yes to these questions we are so proud of all these students and their outstanding achievements so we do have the metals the second place metals from states some of the other metals haven't come yet and then afterwards we have bags for you of all your other metals lots of them going on here all right so michael lay sean skinner michael miliken shirley is wearing our shirt from last year because we did not have a chance last year due to culvert 19 to get recognized

004by the board so she's showing off our shirt from last year and i'll mention this year's shirt in two seconds uh oliver wu [Applause] your last name sorry jasika zashika designed our shirt this year and this is i think the first time we went with our sky blue and our yes what is it uh like a proton b positive i believe yes so wait yes um i just wanted to congratulate both the jelenas and murphy uh science olympiad teams what an honor for these two teams to represent the entire state the only two teams to represent our entire state in the nationals we couldn't be more proud for those of you who don't know this is murphy's first first success in achieving that national status of getting to the nationals and we couldn't be more

005proud of them so at the same time i'd also like to recognize our coaches mr mcguire miss pampahouja and mr derek angermeier we'd like everybody to come up front and we can take a picture i'm not sure if our public relations person is okay great so do that that would be wonderful thank you okay 12 people in the back that's the right way i guess that means sean can go on the back i can't hide thank you murphy we're going to line up and we're going to go out there so don't leave yet guys we're going to leave yet we have stuff for you and pictures i want to congratulate all of our murphy students the coaches and the parents for all of your support you did a wonderful job congratulations to all we're just

006going to give a few minutes for the julianis science olympiad team to join us anime so everyone here i'd like to ask uh nicolette di martino to come to the microphone and if you'd like to be joined by your co-coaches um that would be great chris murata dan raykoff who am i missing anybody else that's here this evening okay great okay awesome okay okay so my name is nicolette dimartino and i'm the head coach of the julina science olympiad team along with coaches dave mutter christopher morata and daniel rykov i'm here to recognize our team for the outstanding performance at the national science olympiad tournament 10th place in the entire nation is no small feat and you should all be so proud of yourselves as my colleagues stated this year's science olympiad looked very different

007from years past but these distinguished students worked diligently to conquer any obstacles that was put in front of them in order to succeed through intense competition at both the regional and state level jalinas and murphy were able to persevere and represent new york state on a national scale after finishing first and second respectively at the state tournament notably this was the first year that our district represented the entire state of new york at the national tournament our students adjusted to the virtual format of this year's competition and truly demonstrated what it means to be a team as they prepared for these tournaments we may not have been in the same room but these students excelled in terms of leadership collaboration communication and in their passion for science olympiad i'm extremely grateful to have coached a

008team of such superb individuals and i know that they all have bright futures again ahead and i'd just like to congratulate them great job [Applause] all right so certificates we have some certificates here for them so i'll just call your names and you guys can grab them so michael zang katie duong alexander song [Applause] judy zao sophia saritsana anna zing tina zing vivian yee alexandra dewan [Applause] daniel liang zoe zao emily maya livingston [Applause] violet fortner [Applause] and that's all of it so congratulations again guys amazing job [Applause] miss keene would you like to come to the microphone thank you thank you very much i just want to congratulate our team jalinas you are amazing and you have made three village history by becoming the first team to place 10th in the nation remotely so

009it's an amazing accomplishment um and i think when we look back and we think of all the things that we've done this year this is going to be one of the top highlights of the year so i just want to congratulate jelenas and my alma mater murphy on policing at the signs olympia tournaments it's been an amazing accomplishment and we are so proud of all your hard work and your coaches and their hard work so we'd like to recognize our four coaches nicoletti martino [Applause] mr mutter dave mutter who's not here this evening dan reichoff and mr morata chris morata congratulations again to all great job we're going to take a picture thank the front to take a you oh yeah let's grab that um hey [Applause] thank you and congratulations to our amazing students

010coaches and parents what a remarkable achievement it is now my pleasure to introduce dr marnie quilla who is our science chairperson at word novel and also the head of instar hi everyone thanks for having us tonight it really is a pleasure to be here gives us a sense of things getting back to the way they may be in the future i have sitting in front of you two of ward melville's finest not only finest students to go through our high school but two of the finest students to go through the instar program so neil is here on my left and animesh on my right so i just want to give you a little bit of a background about them and i'm looking over my shoulder at dr baum who always wants to give me the

011hook but this year i really i really do believe that in order for you to truly understand the accomplishments of these two young men you need to know a little bit about their tour of duty and instar for the past three years so when neil and animesh came into the program in the fall of 2018 the instar staff and myself had just spent the summer revamping the sophomore program we decided that we needed to enhance the student experience by bringing in more authentic hands-on research in-house meaning in our greenhouse and in the variety of labs that we have at ward mobile so neil and anamesh were part of really our test class in a lot of ways and little did they know that they were our test subjects and i can say that minus that

012little glitch in the middle 2020 uh it's amazing that we have seen such an improvement and just an experiential advance in the program for the instar students what they are able to do as sophomores was incredible their year in 2019 ended on a high note as they cleaned up at the long island science congress competition taking home tons of plaques and medals for the work that they did as sophomores we come into junior year and they start working on their toshiba explorer vision competition where they have to come up with a novel solution to a unique problem that's a different prompt every year the kids got just about done with submitting their ideas when friday the 13th happened and we all went home for what we thought was just going to be a week and

013a week turned into a month and you know the rest junior year is very important in instar it's because because it's when our students get relationships building with mentors that they want to do their pre-college research with in the summer between junior and senior year unfortunately more than half of the seniors ended up not being able to hang on to their mentorships as universities closed and they were not allowed to go on to campuses or into researching labs but these two guys because of their tenacity and the relationships that they built and stuck with and kept in contact with their mentors animish was able to complete his work through a mentorship at brookhaven national lab and neil was able to complete his at stony brook so while yes they are you know our our finest

014they have gone through not only just being three years with me and instar which is hard enough but also with that pandemic thrown in the accomplishments that i'm here to tell you about tonight are just above and beyond so i'm going to start with anime ghosh here on my right and if you want you can come stand with me because i'm going to let him speak into the mic for just three seconds i'm looking at alan so animesh the first competition that the students apply for is the regeneron science talent search and that happens in the first quarter of the year and they have to apply by mid-november it's a manuscript-based competition it's based on the research that they completed over the summer and then how well they tell their story in their manuscript thousands

015of students from all over the country apply to the science talent search and animesh was one of 300 this year named as scholars and so i would like to congratulate you for your work and your not um award as scholar in regeneron and anime is going to tell you a little bit about his work layman's terms but it's about alzheimer's disease and diagnosis which is really important and i think you'll enjoy it all right so my project the long title was prognosis and diagnosis of alzheimer's disease using graft convolutional neural networks which basically in layman's terms is i developed a computer program that would take in different kinds of brain data in terms of like structure the connections in your brain and it would output what stage of alzheimer's disease a patient is at or

016is most likely at and so i used a new kind of computer program that takes in graphs based on patient uh history and like patient brain data to make those diagnoses [Applause] and next we have neil maita who all of his science competitions virtually which means that he had to create a virtual platform a website and instead of using our uh more traditional posters that students would stand in front of and talk about all the work that they've done they'd give a a an online sort of slideshow with a little window of themselves up in the corner talking very quickly about everything that they did neil was one of our students to compete at the long island science and engineering fair which feeds into the international science and engineering fair and a very very few

017students from the long island region go to the international fair because the competition on long island is so so steep neil went to isef this year virtually and he was just recently awarded third place overall in the category of cell and molecular biology for his work on panetth cells and i'm going to have neil come up and tell you a little bit about that as it pertains to ulcerative colitis and crohn's disease there you go my friend you come speaking to the mic thank you all right so my work looked at the gut and its ability to protect us against the constant threats of infectious particles and pathogens and every day planet cells which are the crime-fighting cells of your gut i like to call them protect us against these infections by producing proteins that

018can eradicate these threats and in diseases such as crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis this inflammation of the gut this immune response is dysregulated it doesn't work properly and in order to combat it there have been several therapies proposed one of them involve a special protein called interleukin-22 which is found all throughout the body but in the gut it has a special role in regulating how we respond to disease so i studied the role of interleukin-22 in regulating planet cells and i found that interleukin-22 is responsible for some of the key features of the immune response in the gut that can protect us from these diseases and as a result researchers working in clinical trials today will be able to understand which patients will respond differently to these sort of therapies thank you so much [Applause]

019awesome so anamesh will be attending carnegie mellon in the fall uh computer science i believe math and computer science and neil are you still going to brown he's still going to brown public health awesome all right so thank you so much for having us on on behalf of the instar program jim dornichek todd kettler jenny saragano jen corleto and myself and on behalf of the entire science department we really thank you for your support and thank you for helping us get through this time and helping us get neal and animesh where they're off to go so thanks very much we're going to take a picture on but we just want to wish you both well we are so impressed with what you've done and um i'm sure that your college experience will be a wonderful

020one and you will begin to create new research there and i hope that whatever you decide to do in the future will be so fulfilling and will make a remarkable difference in our world so thank you i yeah thank you [Applause] thank you okay so that brings us to roman numeral five public hearing on the 2021-22 budget rebound mr carlson thank you we're putting the presentation up on the screen okay so as we know the original budget did not get the super majority of 60 required it got just under 58 uh so therefore it did not pass so uh the the options were uh put the same budget up for a revote put a revised budget up for a second vote or go straight to contingency um and that's something that we've been uh discussing

021since uh the idea of going above the cap uh began in the first place uh so some of this is since the the decision was to put the same budget up for revo we've been through a lot of this information already so i'm not going to spend a lot of time on it uh but uh we had this started our discussion on the budget this year uh in the budget presentation on state aid because that was a topic that was so big in the news because um many districts got a tremendous amount more of aid uh most of that aid was in a a state aid category called foundation aid and some districts did get a tremendous amount of money we we did not get a tremendous amount i mean it's 1.8 million dollars well

022so we'll certainly take it um but uh one thing i i had mentioned uh previously just to put that in perspective a little bit from a year ago to this year our aid went down by 1.6 million and now to next year it's going up by 1.8 million so again we'll take it um but it's it's not a whole lot for us to work with now you add on to that when we get to the tax cap in our case and and as uh uh you know we've we've discussed over the years is the tenth uh tenth budget year of of having the tax cap uh it's there there are different uh variable variables in in calculating the cap and every district's cap is different and it changes from year to year uh and our

023cap for this coming up year is 1.37 uh which by the way just so you know would generate about 2.2 million dollars more in tax levy for us so that plus the state aid would have been basically what we had to work with an additional money for next year so the proposed budget budget that we put up and it's putting them we'll be putting them for revo has a tax increase of 1.85 percent again it's above the cap so it would require the 60 in order for it to pass now why why are we going above the cap well for one we were one of the few districts anywhere not just in suffolk county or on long island or in new york or in the country i think without trying to sound dramatic anywhere in

024the world that had all of our kids every every student that wanted to attend school in person five days a week going back k-12 going all the way back to the first day of school in september uh but it cost a lot of money we spent a lot of money on it it's about seven million dollars we spent just in covert course alone to do that most of that money went to additional instructional staff which what what that did for us was it allowed us to have smaller class size so we could maintain six foot distancing within the classrooms so any time throughout the year when somebody whether it be a staff member or student tested tested positive for covid uh we have not had to quarantine entire classrooms uh and as we saw in

025the news uh at various times throughout the year uh some schools had to close entire school buildings for periods of time we did not have to do that um it was because we we did that small class size so we could have that six foot distancing which is what the department of health who by the way are the ones who would determine who quarantines that's what they looked at most six foot distancing and uh you know the the master required uh we did other things you know all the cleaning all of that kind of stuff uh but most of it had to do with making those smaller class size uh to have that distancing now uh that additional money there was special legislation passed this year we did not have that extra seven million dollars

026sitting in our budget so there was special legislation passes here that allowed us to tap into our reserves uh to pay for covert related expenses uh but that special legislation passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor requires us to pay the money back to our reserves starting with this coming up year and then also for next year we don't know what september is going to bring we don't know what next school year is going to bring we want to be fully prepared where should there be we hopefully hopefully we'll be back to more or less normal next year we all hope that but if there is a resurgence and we have to then we need to do the six foot distance or we need to do some other uh health or and

027safety protocols we want to we want to be able to do that we don't want to go backwards we don't want to get to next year if school districts all around start having to do a hybrid again next year we don't want to have to do that if at all possible we want to keep our kids in school five days a week again next year again hopefully that doesn't happen there's not a resurgence we get back to normal we don't have to worry you know we could go back to normal that's what we're hoping for we're all hoping for that but we want to be prepared in case that doesn't happen those were the reasons for going above the cap so and i'm going to explain a little bit now uh what happens if the

028budget doesn't doesn't piss i'm going to get to that so the tax levy so under this proposed budget the average home the average home in three village would pay an additional 222 dollars a year in school tax under this proposed budget if we had gone out at the cap to 1.37 that same home would have an increase of 164 dollars it's a difference of 58 a year i get listen i'm not saying that it's nothing any tax increase is is a tax increase absolutely we all pay a lot of taxes not saying we don't uh and no one likes to pay more but that's just putting it out that's the difference between the two so uh i'm going to explain a little bit what happens if it doesn't pass uh but i want to uh

029mention that we're changing the voting to all at the high school the reason we're doing that is because this past vote remember we changed a couple years ago from all elementary schools we changed to the three secondary schools so we had where uh people living in the mount the tenant zone would vote at murphy those in this talk at attendance voted elena's everybody else at the high school and then you have some primary elections uh this time of year so people are getting cards in their mail saying here's where you vote for a primary and they say oh well this says i vote at such at such a school well that's for the primary for the budget vote you vote here and then we would have people go to nasa cake and then oh no

030it's not here and then they go to murphy and then they find out no i don't vote at murphy either now i have to go to the high school so we want to make it easier for everybody all at the high school and hopefully that's the way it goes forever going forward all at the high school in the gym we'll have signs up we'll have signs of all the schools saying voting is at the high school and at the high school you go in the north entrance on the gymnasium side and the voting is in the gym we'll all be there so to summarize uh the budget-to-budget increase is a 1.75 increase in spending which results in a tax levy increase of 1.85 percent and again because it's above the cap it still requires the

03160 super majority of the voters who vote to vote yes in order for it to pass so if the budget doesn't pass what happens well then now second vote we automatically go to a contingency budget and that means no increase to the tax levy at all okay so that's that's i guess the good news uh but it does require some reductions from this proposed budget now we will use whatever resources we can to mitigate any impact of student programs what does that mean well we are getting some federal money this year about 1.8 million dollars uh that money can be spread out over a couple of years some of it is earmarked for certain covert related type expenses we will use that money as much as possible to make our our our programs work uh

032when we talk about well we might have to uh reduce class uh increase clemson increase class size if the budget doesn't pass what we're talking about is the six foot distance we may not be able to have six foot distance uh uh come september in every classroom again hopefully we won't need it but we would never put up a budget that uh where the the results if we could avoid it would be devastating to the to the students we would never do that we will make we will do everything we can including using more fund balance if we need um to to have to make this this budget if it fails have where your kids won't see any change in school as much as possible one of the things that we were um included in

033the proposed budget was adding some electives out of secondary schools we may not be able to add those electives that we were proposing to add uh and that is the kind of things that we would have to work with our billing principles if we get to that point over the summer but i want to make sure everybody knows this isn't uh you better vote for it or your kids are going to suffer absolutely not uh we would not have brought this up in the first place if that were the case um not at all your kids are going to no matter what happens your kids are going to have a great education next year just like they always do and we will make sure that happens we we it would be it would have been

034irresponsible for us to put up a budget that if it failed then your kids would suffer absolutely and anyone who's thinking that that's what we're doing you're absolutely right if that's what we're doing but we're not we're gonna make sure your kids uh get the program they deserve so uh i just wanna address uh remember so tuesday june 15th that date is established uh by the state third tuesday of june i just want to mention a couple of things um regarding um per pupil costs i know there's been a lot of talk about that um one thing i want to mention is there's nothing wrong with looking at perpetual course i'm not saying that but i would just ask that you get your information from a reliable source not from well somebody told me or

035i read an article or i looked up on districts websites because you know what not everybody calculates it the same way um even even a number as simple as enrollment there's a lot of different ways to do it what day was it was it an average this even the state ed department they for state aid purposes uses uh uh different weightings for different kids could be special ed kids get weighted more and they're referred to in in state aid as uh uh pupil units not even necessarily pupils pupil units so one district might say well you know that's what they mean by it so we're going to use that number as our enrollment so here's what i would ask you do there is i'm going to go to the there is a website just uh

036indulge me for a second go on to google all right and if you type in new york state school well here it is right here new york state school report card all right first one nysed data site oh oh oh sorry about that what let me just check the connections here well anyway while he's doing that i'll continue talking so uh oh new york state school report card the the first link is data site and it brings up a lot of information oh here we go okay so this is the screen it brings you to you could type in for instance three village and as you type then it'll come up all right so three village school district all right i'm gonna scroll down a little bit all right now you see down here there's

037no information about fiscal data that's for 1920. they don't have it up for 1920 yet so latest they have is 1819. see here fiscal supplement right here all right so now what's good about this is a couple of years old right i get that uh but it's the latest that they have but the information has been audited and reported to the comptroller's office and to the state education department and it's these numbers are calculated by the state education department the same way for everybody so it's the fairest way to compare district to district okay so what they say is here this school district all right general education this is a per pupil special education 48 8. all right then what they do is they compare us to similar districts all right basically that has to

038do with the wealth of the district but this is again this is the state ed department determining which districts they're going to compare us to and similar so here's similar districts expenditures general education expenditures per pupil 15 400. we're at 16062. that's about a 4.3 percent uh uh we're higher than similar districts on special ed where we were at 48 827 uh similar districts especially 41 372. that's an 18 increase so uh we spend we spend a little more than similar districts on our kids uh a lot more on the special ed than similar districts um now one of the mis uh uh common uh fallacies uh or misconceptions about special ed is that all costs are mandated well well that's not true i mean there are a lot of course that are mandated with

039special ed but we a lot of districts including us give more than just the bare minimum minimum required by law we do that for all of our kids uh we would not pride ourselves as a school district if our goal was to provide just the bare minimum that the law requires whether it be as they refer general education or special education so some of the areas that we we really excel at and special education is one of them uh we have we have other districts pay tuition to send their kids to to our special ed program so one more thing about this per pupil cost it also does not include there are things that that unless you know what what's included and not included it may skew your results a little bit so for instance

040if you just look at our total expenditures well that includes all of our capital projects and debt service meaning bond payments and that number is in this year's budget over 19 million dollars all right that's about nine percent of our budget going towards capital projects and bond payments uh so that's a and that's included so that would be included in cost per pupil but what that number does not include or reflect is that uh because of building aid we get 11.1 million dollars in building aid for that but that shows up on the revenue side so if we're spending a lot more than uh let's say another district on our capital projects it's going to make our spending look higher even though we're getting aid back from it we get 66 building aid uh that's

041a nice deal think about if at your home if every time you did a project at your house somebody else paid two-thirds of the cost well that's what we have some districts get more than that some get less uh either way it's a good deal we like to take advantage of that um i have no indication that that's going to change that's 66 but we want to make take advantage of it at least when it's there we've had to do a lot of work on our buildings um there was a time when our buildings were neglected we can't go back in time and change that and it is not uh not to criticize people in the past but our buildings needed a lot of work we did we did a couple of bonds we did

042energy performance contracts we put solar panels up uh just to give you just a couple of examples in 2007 the tennis courts at ward mobile high school were unplayable not just they didn't look great they were unplayable the teams could not use them our tennis teams at ward mobile high school had their matches at stony brook university and uh practices at the world gym on mark tree road that's kind of embarrassing uh we fixed that um asked mr scanlon about when he was a teacher at woodmobile high school and he went to open up a window the whole window frame and all fell out and crashed down onto the ground outside thank god nobody was out there but we've replaced all of our in the last 12 years let's say all of our windows we've

043replaced all of our hvac units in the entire entire district every classroom in our district has air conditioning not just the window air conditioning the unit ventilator in the classroom provides cooling very very few districts anywhere have that we do we've replaced roofs we've replaced our oil burners we have dual fuel so we can switch between oil and gas whichever is cheaper we put in emergency generators a couple years ago remember the whole lead and water thing from a couple years ago we put in bottle filling filtered water bottle filling stations throughout the district um you look at our athletic facilities that's all work that we've been doing that all adds to the uh per pupil cost uh our transportation uh one of the things that we do more so than most districts i'm just

044giving you just a couple of examples of you know when people say we spend more than other districts well yeah we do we provide a lot more services than a lot of a lot of other districts all of our kids are eligible for transportation three village most school districts not all but most school districts require at least some of their kids to live a certain distance from school in order to be eligible for transportation some cases even kindergarten have to live a half mile or otherwise they walk or the parents have to drive them all of our kids are eligible well that costs money too we're spending over 10 million dollars a year on transportation that adds into the expense expenses per pupil but also again similar to building aid that doesn't reflect the almost

045four million dollars we get back in transportation aid from the state for that um the big the big thing now it for us is class size even pre-pandemic we had low class size that's that's an expensive thing to do we've had low class size all along uh but now not that we had a plant you know i'd like to say we knew it was coming but of course we didn't um that was really key to us being able to have kids in school five days a week this year the low class size we had to start and then made them even smaller to have that six foot distance so um you know i talked about the special ed program we have we take in about three million dollars a year in revenue for a special

046ed program from other districts that send kids here um and the the one thing that that the if the budget passes does for us then then your kids won't see a difference this year or or minimal difference um miss penises you'll talk about that a little bit more um but uh it would set us up to the two main benefits to us to go above the cap and the reason we we we did that is uh it sets us up for in great position should there be some sort of recur or resurgence covid and we have to do you know more similar to what we've had to do this year um and it kind of puts us in a better long-term uh fiscal uh position but that's not something that that you know everyone needs

047to worry about tonight so um that's my long-winded way of saying um you know go out and vote whatever whatever you feel is best for you and your family and your kids vote uh but either way uh we're gonna take care of your kids thank you mr carlson and i i just want to reiterate some of the statements that were made by mr carlson with regard to our students we have always made our students in three village the number one priority and they will continue to be the number one priority as we move forward whether the budget passes or not we will do everything within our power to mitigate the impact on students so that the impact for them will be as minimal as possible when we talked about restoring some of the electives we

048are are certainly going to try our best to do that we want to make sure that students aren't in study halls and are fully engaged in their academic program at our secondary level we know this year some of our students had more study halls than we would have wanted we don't want to see that moving forward again there are times when we have classes of students we may not be able to run certain electives that don't have as or generate as much interest from our students and we'll run those that have greater interest for our student body but the impact as much as we can will be minimal for our students regardless so i don't want anybody to feel like it is a threat of our our budget newsletter or anything that we've put forward

049that if you don't vote for the budget that it's going to impact your students so negatively that will not happen we will not allow that to occur in three village the issue of the six foot distancing the doh has been very um consistent i'll use that word with regard to six feet from the very beginning i know that there have been statements made that you can go to three feet four feet five feet but the contact tracing still remains at six feet we don't want to have to quarantine students unnecessarily a disruption in education is an impact on the child but it's also an impact on the family and we know how important it is for that continuity of instruction so maintaining that six feet of distance is critical and we don't know what kind

050of changes may be occurring in the future with the department of health we know that the coveted numbers are down significantly more people are becoming vaccinated and we're expecting guidance to come forward sometime within the next few weeks that will help guide us for the 21-22 school year maintaining that six feet i believe will be a critical component i'm surmising on that but i believe that that one piece has been extraordinarily consistent with the doh and also with the cdc i i also want to make this statement that it has been said that the only reason we went to five days a week was because we were expecting um 20 of our students to be remote at no one time was any student did we ever have 20 of our students remote the maximum number

051we had remote was 15 um that number um declined and was at 13 in our recent survey where 80 percent of the parents responded about next year was a preliminary survey we had 90 close 98.55 of our parents saying that they wanted to bring their children back to school that is a confidence factor that's a belief in the system that we put in place and we are looking for all of our students to be able to be back in three village with as much of a normal routine next year as possible the other thing i want to point out that all through this we our teachers showed up every day at work there was no resistance in fact there was a passion and a dedication from our teaching staff to be in every day we

052ran all of our co-curricular clubs and when sports were able to be put back in we were we were gung-ho in saying yes let's bring our students back and let's allow those sports to continue i also want to say that we allowed our students to condition and practice when they when we was uh into scholastic sports were not taking place we tried to make this as much of a productive and normal environment for our students and our families as possible and we will continue to do that regardless so i just want to thank our community for the support thank our teachers thank our thank all of our staff for being there for us and helping to make this year an accomplished one i just want to uh mention uh one more thing about the difference

053between uh why didn't we go out at the cap this time um and and the reason is um in the in the tax cap calculation the way the formula works uh it's a little quirky this may sound a little crazy but for one time it's where we we actually uh are able to provide more more of our tax revenue that we receive or our money towards uh educational programs if the budget were to fail and we'd be on contingency uh than if it passed at the cap the reason being at the cap includes money for capital projects um that money can't be used for anything else we can't take money that was approved as capital projects and just say well instead of doing that we're going to move it over and we're going to decrease

054class size we can't do that um that's part of the tax calculation so that that 1.37 percent tax cap amount uh that gives us 2.2 million dollars more in tax uh tax levy uh but we we have that capital project money that can only be used for capital projects at a contingent budget there is no cap calculation because the rule is no increase to the tax levy whatever the tax levy is this year the tax levy is next year can't be higher um but then there's no more cap calculation the money that we had in capital projects this year which is included in the tax levy is still included in next year's budget including the next year's tax levy and we can use that money then for educational programs uh but only if either we

055go above the cap and it passes or we go to contingency budget that only happens once uh and we figured now is the time to to take advantage of that um with the our full back position meaning we go to contingency budget fails second time uh the fallback position still putting us in a better position to make sure we can have kids in school every day next year uh than if the budget passed at the cap that's why we were doing it that way okay are there any questions from the board members of course so uh first of all jeff thank you for that explanation about the quirk i was going to ask you to explain it anyway about about the quirk and uh in the way uh it actually works out better for our

056students if we either pierce the cap or if it goes to contingency people ask all the time why didn't you just make the make the small adjustment and go back out and the answer is because we're at a disadvantage because of all the money we spent last year on kovid and of bringing the kids in we're seven million dollars in the hole and by either going to contingency or the cap that's going to be what what works out better for the long-term financial stability of the district it's a very important distinction it's just it's a quirk in the way that this is calculated and quite frankly we'd be foolish not to not well you know what it's it's like the building aid formula the building ate formula that we get 66 percent that goes back

057to coincidentally 1966 but it was it was when the three village uh district uh school district came into being with the merger of the setorket school district and the stony brook school district and the the aid ratio at the time was set at 66 percent based on the wealth of the area well over the years uh the area has grown more affluent um but every year when that that ratio is calculated it's well based on current wealth or what we got last year whatever is higher and every year we still get so we still get the 66 percent it's one of those kind of quirky things in the in the state aid formulas but it works to our benefit so we're going to take advantage of it as much as we can right i think

058our our intention as a board is that we're interested in maintaining the long-term financial stability uh of the district and just and and quite frankly going out at the cap would have hurt us more than going out above the cap um one other one other thing i wanted to know you said we got three million dollars in revenue from kids that tuition in uh on uh who are receiving special ed uh services yes either so so does that count in our expenditures but the revenue there's no offsetting revenue to the calculation am i understanding that correctly well well right so so the course for those kids is built into our budget right because you know whether it's it's kids that attend the academy or or any any of our uh programs in any of our

059schools that come from from another district um the cost you know the the teacher you know we we take a student from let's just say smithtown goes into the classroom right well we have the teacher we have the aid we have a ta in there whatever the classroom is and that's all part of our course the revenue that we receive right doesn't um it doesn't go as a credit on the expenditure it goes on the revenue side so it in a way inflates our cost on the expenditure side but we get revenue on the on the opposite side so to just look at per pupil cost it can make it look higher because of that you know i think that we have we have a community that's very engaged we have a community that's educated

060that that has questions and i think that sometimes when there's a feeling that there's a lack of transparency they get frustrated and they feel like you know they they see the worst and it's it's disappointing that there's kind of that lack of faith in maybe it's part of a lack of faith in government or lack of faith in institutions but i think that we should and i'm not trying to tell anybody to vote for or or vote against it i mean i'm you know i want people to understand how we got to this point and why either contingency or piercing the tax cap um why those are the two choices that are going to be better for students and why if we went out at the tax cap it would pass very easily i mean

061we could do that no problem it's a it's a difference of 58 dollars per household it would probably pass with you know 60 70 percent numbers um and going above the tax cap is no fun yeah yeah i mean right i mean you know we you know we weren't excited we weren't excited to do something that we knew would be a challenge in a community that has really um born a tremendous burden over the last year or two um this wasn't a decision that was made lightly and i'm certainly not going to advocate uh to tell anybody how to vote but what i would what i would do and what i would ask we've had a number of people who have questions and i i don't want to see people frustrated i don't want to

062see people with misinformation and i think that i think that i would like to see us taking any opportunity to make sure we're engaging with members of the public whether it's at a forum like this that can allow for some discussion and some question and answer and look some people are going to be angry and some people are going to have questions that you know i've seen questions out there that that don't really make sense and people you know because there's just misinformation and it's a very complex topic and i want to know that we're doing everything we can to educate people to be transparent about how we how we came to this point i i agree i mean i i think just just in general over the years whenever we do budget presentations um

063sometimes um i mean i'm happy to tell everybody it's it's all your tax money so um i'm i'm happy to tell anybody uh where it's going how it's being spent how decisions but i don't think this is interactive enough to kind of i know but no i don't mean i don't mean a setting like this but even just in budget presentations um and um i think anyone that was in in the in the pta has seen that sometimes they say okay all right enough already time's up um so i'm i'm more than happy to you know get going for it and just don't just me now but but going forward uh you know next year you know i'd be glad to um whether whether we have some some sort of uh other forum where people

064can come i mean we have we have the budget meetings where we talk about the budget um you know we have the civic association meeting every year um and and typically it's the same people that show up and they they hear it so um if and if anyone anyone here has has ideas you want you want you want to get more involved in the budget i am more than happy to explain as much as you want well i'd like to hear questions today good and you know i'd like to and i'd like to answer the questions you know i don't want it to just be um you know i know that ordinarily uh public participation is not is is you know we're we're holding a meeting in public it's not a public meeting so people

065can come up and speak and we you know we don't necessarily engage but i think in in a situation like this where we're having a budget hearing and people have questions and it was you know it was 58 of the community 58 of the community supported uh supported the budget as is that's a pretty significant majority um you know that was they were head by 20 by by almost 20 points in any other kind of election that would be a blowout 48 58 to 42 would be a decisive victory but in this case it wasn't but i think that i think that we should just make it clear to people answer their questions let them make up their minds with good information and and that can start tonight if it's the will of the board

066any other questions comments okay i think jonathan has a good idea i think it's a great idea but i think we should go to public participation which i believe come up and ask is questions absolutely question for the budget next week in two weeks right okay all right so that brings us to items through board action there are none informational items of interest any no okay public participation so i will dispense from my statement and we'll see what what transpires let's see but three minutes okay and i have the timer and he's tough okay we'll start with carmine and sarah who wants to talk about the budget all right are there are the rules about i think i've heard before you're supposed to say your name and yeah uh and i am uh at 44

067mills road in stanford all right uh thank you for the response i really appreciate the the heart that was in that so first i want to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the board who are all serving the community in the volunteer capacity with expertise that spans decades and has most recently guided us through some of the most unprecedented challenges according to the 2018 census data the three village school district is the fifth highest spender and the per pupil in the nation uh in 29 with students over five thousand or enrollment over five thousand and in 2019 we're the third highest even if you take into consideration variations between sites and districts we're still number three it's a lot to make of u.s news world reports ranks word melville high school academics at 1752 seven one

068thousand seven hundred fifty second in the nation 170 in the new york state we're significantly outspending our districts with higher ranking academics and better programs our students are well educated but it's clear that the district's performance is not commensurate with its spending the district's tax levy on my home alone is 67 of my taxes my property taxes tax maps may indicate that three village area is an affluent community but if you remove one of the largest hedge funds from in the world along with data from several of their salaries we are quintessentially a very middle-class community the year-over-year increases are not negligible to our residents especially the ones that are struggling after a global pandemic some even lost their jobs it's especially difficult for those on fixed incomes i believe as the three village community

069at large we have failed in our civic responsibility only 10 percent voted this out last time around i sincerely hope that the data alone encourages the community involvement i want them to know that the school district affects more than just the people with students in the district i'd like to offer a few suggestions that will help to engage the community and restore confidence reinstate the community representatives on the budget committee so there is more meaningful and transparent interaction facilitate community participation in finance audit policy and curriculum committee meetings readily provide more transparent budget information when it's presented including actual expenditures from recent years and where excesses were utilized these are essential part of understanding how the district spends mr carlson has stated that the district does not have a use it or lose it approach

070to budgeting yet every dollar is spent every year consider offering incentives to teachers administrators and or programs that will reward them for not depleting their budgets do not initiate new programs that require new hires until there is room in the budget to accommodate them do not cancel our current programs or lay off teachers to make room for ones that don't exist give precedent to previously existing programs and teachers over retaining temporary staff hired during the pandemic use extra money received during the pandemic to refund the general reserve since that's why they were used in the first place utilize technology to get feedback from the community about budgeting programs and potential changes in curriculum for example the poll that you use to determine parents desire for in-person versus remote learning that would have given you a

071valuable information about the community's support for the budget finally offer less formal interactions with the board these meetings are often intimidating for some of our more reserved residents i think you'll get a much more genuine feedback thank you for your time i'm going to ask you could you give your little your notes because some of those things were really very well stated to our district clerk to our district clerk yeah thank you very much well carmen send us an email about that too as well but uh but carmine you know thank you for for speaking and uh i just wanted to uh respond to a couple things you said uh one it was a few years ago we um we it was probably six seven eight years ago uh we worked with assemblyman angle bright

072to um we we actually worked very we committed resources to to the effort um to craft legislation uh that was going to the intention of it was to remove outliers income outliers um in the calculation of the district's wealth and if we um if we removed i think it was jeff was it a half of a percent i think it was the top half percent yeah and i don't want to make it sound like you know we're all we're all getting old but i think that was more like 12 years ago it was 12 years ago yeah yeah i actually went to albany to testify boy that was a long time ago yeah uh i went to albany to testify worked closely with that with uh with with angle bright we had a legislative committee

073at that time and we did we did work to address exactly that um we introduced legislation um but ultimately you know it's a zero-sum game with state aid in albany and more state aid for us is less state aid for other people not everybody has a problem with outliers and so it didn't go anywhere so we have we have looked at that you're absolutely correct when you remove our income outliers um and i mean when i talk about outliers you know i mean it's their outliers um our our um our uh school district's income average income was exactly oh i think like it was almost exactly uh the the state average right you know so we so you're absolutely correct you're you know your assertion is correct that we are you know from an income

074standpoint we're not a wealthy community we're you know we're literally an average uh a community of average wealth the other thing that i want to point out is that the is that the committee meetings that you referred to policy you know uh finance those are all public meetings but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of effort to make it publicly knowledgeable i don't think the public realized that i think maybe there's some sort of campaign yeah you know i i agree and and you know i would love to see people get more involved and you know another point you made about about a turnout of of 10 or something it's incredibly low i i ca it's it's mystifying to me why so few people are interested and come out and vote i mean i'm

075not talking to you guys but 90 percent of the voters in our in our district don't come vote it's hard it's hard to discern what that means does that mean that they're happy with the status quo does that mean they don't care does that mean that they're that they're just i don't know i don't know what i don't know what it means i don't know how to draw a conclusion from that but i don't think it's a good number i'd like to see more people voting did anyone else have a comment cheryl do you want to just describe some of these uh polls that like the u.s news and world report and why we wind up some of them are extremely subjective and there are polls that three village does not participate in one of

076the issues that some of these polls look at is the numbers of students who take ap exams in our school district we do not require students to take an advanced placement exam many of our students are enrolled in ap courses in fact we probably offer almost every ap course that there is imaginable and our students are fully enrolled in those classes however unlike other school districts we don't require the students to take those exams stu that has been the practice here in three village for as long as i've been here and i've been here for 37 years so that that is one of the impacts the other impact that we see in these surveys is they look at diversity of the student body our student body is not as diverse as others and that is

077another factor that is considered when when ranking school districts i've seen us ranked on certain school districts like niche and others with an a a plus in academics in other areas but when it comes to diversity we're legacy and that impacts how we are ranked um we pride ourselves on offering our students the an academic program that i think is bar none in in compared to other school districts as you can see this evening we honored our science olympiad students and regeneron students our students are achieving at very very high levels here but we also offer programs co-curricular programs and our athletic program is also very robust and as mr carlson spoke about our special education program many students parents we hear from parents all the time about moving to three village for that purpose

078as well as other school districts cross-contracting with us because of the programs we offer so sometimes those rankings are not the most objective in really evaluating or assessing a school district anything else all right we're going to move on to sherry montana good evening i'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of you personally for everything you've done to accomplish what many deemed impossible you were able to bring our children back to school in person five days a weeks safely where most other districts did not i know this came at a cost and that new york state put a loophole in that cost by saying that you could borrow from the reserves but the money had to be paid back within five years as we all know hindsight is 20 20. if we could

079only go back to last summer knowing what we know now yes we could probably have saved some money on some of the safeties that were put in place like the sneeze guards unfortunately we cannot we must move forward i truly understand that the many have concerns about our budget going up along with our taxes going up and i'm not any different i too have concerns but we need to plan for the upcoming year and not knowing for sure what it will bring i try to look at the big picture and all the programs that this district offers our children we have a phenomenal athletic program music arts theater programs gifted programs like ig ap classes honors classes stem enrichment we have math clubs multiple science olympiad teams renowned special ed services free peak pre-k in

080each of our five elementary schools which helps to diagnose and catch any needs for services early our district goes out of its way to encourage and foster whatever strains our children have many have questioned the buses that weren't used last year when school closed and don't understand that the district fulfilled its contractual obligation to assure that whenever our children were able to go back to school they could with the provided transportation at the negotiated lower rates unlike some districts that did not and then had to pay higher prices when the students did return our district offers e-books where available yet always has the old-fashioned books for those that need or want them our district accommodated the families that were uncomfortable for whatever reason sending their children into the schools with a full remote program these

081all come at an expense and i personally believe that the average of 58 dollars per household is a very small cost to offer all these services and programs to our children and would hate to lose any of them thank you anyone have any comments nope okay barbara rosati it's good evening everybody so i really welcome mr conrad 180 on the format of this meeting um it would have been nice perhaps to um maybe post a notice so that people would know that this was going to be a question and answer forum i'm not mean i don't mean by any means to to this is not good it's great but many people would have attended and probably come up with questions had they known before that this was going to be the case in probably two

082years uh that have been uh almost two years i've been attending uh almost religiously board meetings this is the very first time that this is for a question and answer forum i think this would be great if it could it could continue not only for budget purposes but also for other issues it would bring bring us a long way to build trust with the community because i can tell you because i hear it every day i've reached out to a lot of people in these two years there's a lot of frustration over the lack of communications the lack of a forum where people can ask questions and get answers in a public setting people have to need to discuss together we can't rely on an email to cheryl who's a saint by the way in

083answering thousands of emails and this is not really what it should be okay this should be something democratic and if there's something that is not democratic it's not i don't think the super majority rule which it was built to protect the citizens from tax hikes in a low voter turnout election what's undemocratic is not having a way of communicating directly with the community find a way whatever it is that works best but we need to find a way to do that and so um regarding the budget i would welcome uh some workshops like the district used to hold in the past and like some districts do every year uh starting in february january and workshops to explain how the budget is developed and to provide for the wait for the community to provide input and

084really understand what it entails and so um with this i also wanted to add a couple of things on the rankings unfortunately they're not no ranking is perfect i'm referring to niche u.s news no ranking is perfect but sadly this is what people use when they are shopping around for for districts and also i wanted to point out that diversity is uh used as a uh it's not used actually it's just displayed but what actually is used for the rankings is just the uh percentage improvement of the disadvantaged students and this is the only criteria that is not diversity to actually make the rankings and that's i'll just respond barbara thank you for the for your comments and uh i would just take issue with that with the with the 180 part because i i

085think that as far as i know for as long as i've been on the board i have always fought hard for transparency for openness for adherence to the open meetings law um so it's not a 180 for me i don't know if how you meant it but no i knew that okay because i talked to you of just 180 publicly that it's and since everybody nobody said no this is not a good idea i'm assuming that we all agree uh and i can tell you a lot of people in the community agree especially parents who want to be involved that there needs to be a reform of the format of the board meetings because this is as we've witnessed in the in the few months last few months is inhumane is it comes across as

086disrespectful for the community and it doesn't help really uh to solve problems with trust and and to actually solve problems with stop yeah it is it's tricky to find that it's it's tricky to find the format that works because sometimes you know you get into a situation like this and i've been in meetings like this that devolve into shouting and it just it becomes unproductive and so the law the law um provides the open meetings law uh provides for this public participation thing um which it says you know you're supposed to have three minutes per person and the problem starts to come in where you start to make exceptions and you start to do this and you start to do things differently and then it opens the door to people saying well that person spoke

087for four minutes now i want to speak for four minutes and then you know it it goes on but to to your point about to your point about this discussions about the budget i'm not just talking about a long-term change which i would love to see more opportunities for informal conversations because i think there's no better antidote to suspicion and you know the kind of the the doubts and static that happens then good information i think the more people understand about the about what we do every single person here cares about kids and is trying to is is really is is i i i feel confident in saying i can't see into their hearts but i feel i've worked with them for years and i feel confident in saying that but so over the longer

088term i would like to see more opportunities for you to learn about what we do for us to have our discussions in public and be more transparent but in the short term in this budget cycle i would like to be able to have another forum where we can have questions and answer before this upcoming election i'm not just talking about generally yes and and in fact the only problem i have here tonight and i thank mr carlson for all his uh um information that he provided i mean we still don't know what would happen exactly with the contingency budget we're still talking about maybe we'll try our best and and we we don't doubt that you'll try your best but obviously parents want to know exactly what's going to happen and to me there's no

089reason to know exactly what happens because you at this point you have all the numbers and so you need to come up with a plan that is exactly what's going to happen and possibly if possible that would be ideal to get community input on that i don't see why we can't have a survey monkey survey and see what people care about or you know honestly a lot of people many many people i spoke with they still can't understand how it is that we have three more million dollars in federal and state aid and still are not able to not uh sacrifice existing programs we understand that some additions are needed and that our superintendent in particular cares a lot about health health is important but the question that comes up often is do we need

090it now at a moment where we really need to go back to normal so about the about the survey uh monkey again and that's something that we that we wrestle with is so if i'm if i'm asked to decide something the the question for someone who's elected to to you know we're elected here to make these decisions so the question is always do i vote based on what i think or do i vote based on what the people who elected me think or do i vote based on what i think the whole community wants and so it is it's very hard to know um i try to you know i try to be involved in in the community and in groups and try to take the temperature of of of what's going on but it's

091even if we did something like a survey you know what we're going to have you know three percent of of of people respond to the survey and so we'll get a sense of what those three people who cared enough to to to to step out it's it's just again it's just it's hard to know i would love to be able to know what everybody thinks and really get a sense of the broader uh sense of the community it's very hard to do i mean if you have an idea of how to do it i would love to know yeah it's better than nothing yeah right okay i was just gonna say cheryl said that 80 percent of the parents replied to their recent survey regarding enrollment for next year remote versus the person yep so

092maybe the outcome for a survey for parents feedback would be better than even okay okay the next one is marlon dumbo hi good evening um welcome sue by the way um congratulations and i guess shari's not here but i'm looking forward to see what you bring to the board um so i am speaking about the budget um it was defeated in a democratic election and to say that community members are disappointed is really an understatement a lot of people feel insulted by your decision to propose the same budget again there are countless opportunities and resources to educate the community prior to today i heard mr carlson speak no insult but ad nauseam in many different forums prior to the election so i'm not sure why this is happening now and since it was voted down

093and you're saying it's either pierce the cap or go to the contingency i'm not sure why you're not just going to the contingency um so if you feel that the reason was lack of education then that's really a failure on your part or perhaps it was hubris just assuming that you know people would go for it the budget should be a joint effort a communication we're the ones footing the bill um and i believe that people did understand the information that they were given and they don't agree with piercing the cap um it seems like you still don't understand why it was defeated um people are tired in this community of um seeing a decreasing enrollment and increasing taxes every single year and there's no measurable improvement in education um mr and sarah and other

094people have referenced the the other surveys that have been out there so if we're third highest in the country in spending and we're at 1752 in ranking that's not a little off that's a big disparity you can't just brush that off and say it was the technique of the rankings there there's a problem we're 170th you know ranking in new york but we're still third in spending in the country there's something wrong there even if you compare locally to districts there are other successful districts that are spending less than us and are offering the same type of electives and sports and all the other things that we're offering people are leaving here the incoming class is 43 smaller than the outgoing class people are leaving because it's not affordable and they're not getting what they

095need um for what they're spending they're not leaving because it's not as pretty anymore or there's more crime why are they leaving because it's not affordable and they're not getting value for their money so please don't insult us by dismissing the results of the vote just because you don't like it provide us with a budget that demonstrates fiscal responsibility provide us with value and we'll approve the budget happily but we're not going to accept increasing costs accepting new union contracts that contain substantial raises for teachers hire new non-essential staff expand non-core programs you know work on non-essential capital projects families are struggling after the pandemic it's not about the 58 dollars okay so it's not about the 58 dollars we know that you have to pay back the money but when we look closely and

096we see that there is money to repay it in the five years that we need to repay it um mr cornright she said that you're interested in the long-term financial stability of the district there are other ways to do that other than continuously raising taxes on the community there's a lot of fact that can be trimmed and i can give you lots of suggestions how or we can have a conversation about it but the answer is not continuously raising taxes so and my other example for that would be if i wanted to buy something then i would cut out other expenses i wouldn't get a credit card and just keep adding on credit cards you know to finance what i want i would find other ways to do it in a responsible way um so

097and then as far as the comments is you know we're very impressed with the the children in this uh you know the science olympiads that's amazing but there's still maybe one percent of the students in this district that are doing that there are lots of athletes but they're still a very small percentage we seem to forget about all the other average kids the majority of kids that are in the middle that aren't in science olympiads and that aren't intel scholars we can't forget about those and that's what we're doing [Applause] anyone can comment nope actually this name i can't read i see a d an m oh give me a break okay sorry i'm a bit deaf my name's david mckinnon we seem to be very close to an agreement that we should all vote

098no on the budget contingency is clearly our best option lower costs and more flexible i didn't expect that we'd be so close to an agreement on this but i'm very glad to hear that i actually came here to talk about the new york state tax cup what is the new york state tax cap it is a measure put in place by the governor and state legislature to limit price gouging by long island school districts for education services there is a simple test to see if price gouging is a problem if you drive to the local mall and pay 30 or 40 percent more for services than you would pay in a legitimately high cost area like boston or the bay area then you're getting gouged there is no rational economic model where education costs on

099long island should be significantly higher than those in boston or the bay area yet they are the governor and a large bipartisan majority of republican and democrat legislators voted to make the tax cap permanent in 2019 they all voted for a measure to stop gouging of taxpayers by long island school districts there is no good reason to attempt to bypass this anti-gouging measure why was this measure necessary as others have mentioned based on 2019 census data the three village school district has the third highest education cost in the nation for schools larger than four thousand enrollment as jeff mentioned nicer also keeps numbers and that numbers we're the highest in new york state for 4000 or greater enrollment for our school's size we are very close all at the highest cost provider in the nation

100this is not economically rational for most of my life i have largely taken it for granted that spending more money for education is always a good thing but that money has to be spent wisely we spend more on education than almost anyone else in the country but where is our outstanding middle school writing program where is our outstanding elementary math program they don't exist the money has been frittered away rather than invested in actual education at the last board meeting it was argued that it was undemocratic for local citizens to vote to keep the cap intact undemocratic to vote for a measure designed to protect taxpayers a measure put in place by politicians representing almost every citizen in this state the board is never going to do anything to control costs the only way to

101get accountability is to vote no on the budget as jeff acknowledged no existing programs will be cut if this budget does not pass how can we be so sure it is basic arithmetic this year we will receive an additional 3.1 million dollars from state and federal governments compared to last year in addition actual costs this year will be several million dollars lower thanks to the success of the covert vaccine and our fully enrollment it is going to be very difficult to undo the decades of not always well considered spending authorized by this school board but if we don't start now in a year when we have been given a 3.1 million dollar windfall when do we start vote no thank you [Applause] anyone want to comment okay jim soviera what was his name jim so

102yeah good evening i want to address what jonathan spoke about and that is transparency and uh over the last few weeks a lot of it's been left in the dark especially over the memorial day weekend as to the change involving but excuse me polling places and even this meeting tonight and i'm not looking to uh this was an ad this was an ad that ran in the village science herald i'm kind of a political junkie so whenever i look at an ad thank you whenever i look at an ad eventually what i do is i look to see who it was paid for by and you can see you know three smiling faces and vote yes on the budget can anybody see who it was paid for it's a trick question i had to take

103out a magnifying glass to see on the bottom at the right corner it was paid for written in script cursive i don't know if we're teaching that anymore the three village teachers association that's really not a fine example of transparency you know that was a little thing i wanted to find out what was going on with the re-vote over the you know there was a old saying i think it was one of the kennedys said if you want bad news to get out put it out on a friday if you want really bad news to get out put it on the friday of a memorial day weekend so if you were if you were perusing the local paper this weekend and you maybe i don't know if you were maybe searching for uh a house

104that was going bankrupt or something like that you're looking for one of those things you might have stumbled into right i lost the room already here you might have run into an ad well not in that it was in the legal section and in the legal section was the notice of this meeting tonight and if you went around and you kind of kept going budget hearing specialist is here you go to the next page school district elections this didn't even get a big heading but that's when i found out and maybe two or three other people in the district found out that they were now closing 66 percent of the polling places that was it it was there or you could have perused the website and maybe staggered into it there that's not transparency that

105ad isn't transparent this kind of behavior isn't transparent and you want to one you want i don't usually come to meetings i really don't but this ticked me off it really did i felt it was disrespectful that ad ticked me off i felt it was disrespectful you've got full page nice pictures you can't even read who it was paid for by you want to know why some people are angry that's not transparent oh okay well hello everybody thank you sir because your statement about transparency is what is leading me here to the podium tonight my name is nicole haratinitis and i have a seven-year-old son we chose remote learning this year and i would like to thank all of you for that opportunity um we didn't do so out of fear but we did so

106because um we just wanted to live free out of away from the mass away from the testing away from everything and the reason that i'm standing here today is because of the lack of transparency in our school district and that is what i wish to discuss i don't know if you recognize my name i sent a message an email to all of you last week and i asked you about a laundry list of things i spoke with you mrs passage one of the things that i asked about was critical race theory and i know that this is like all over the news lately in the beginning of the year anti-racism and social justice task forces were formed there has been no information provided to families that i know of i'm curious to know if there

107was research that was provided what were the committee's findings and did any of these findings influence or change the curriculum i was told that there was no way crt was being implemented but i have been now given documents that suggest otherwise and i'm wondering why if it's not harmful and it's not controversial why is this not being communicated to our community who has a right to know what is being taught to our kids and again where our taxpayer money is going we know that crt is a political narrative the author even states so and as historians have rejected it to his core they explain that it erases the actual events of american history with a fictional narrative which suggests racism racism is inherent in all of us to which i wholeheartedly disagree in our family

108we focus on character and what unifies us not the color of one's skin just because you are not calling it critical race theory does not mean that you are not implementing it in our district crt advocates have provided teacher training guest speakers using our tax dollars and now new curriculum has been purchased it's called erase racism being home taught being home taught me what i'd never had known had my son was learning in person and is what led me to question all of this for columbus day his class watched a video i heard things like how the white europeans came upon the indigenous people killed them stole their land and their gold not quite age appropriate for a seven-year-old to process in february which is black history month every day there was a lesson on

109black americans who rose from slavery to accomplish amazing amazing things was this a part of american history yes are there other black americans who weren't slaves that broke barriers and also rose to greatness yes however they remained unnamed every lesson for days had to do with slavery leading my child to ask me are all black people slaves february is also the month we celebrate george washington abraham lincoln and presidents week yet because i'm home i noticed that these founding fathers were not mentioned at all you would think lincoln may have been mentioned since he did in fact abolish slavery these lessons about our history should be taught when it is age appropriate in order to correct this and to help my child understand i did a lesson on slavery lincoln and the civil war he's

110seven again had i not been listening this goes back to transparency i would never have known i sat here last week and i listened to each member of the board state how the budget not passing was unfair i am here to tell you what is unfair it is unfair to burden our children with the mistakes of the past when it is beyond their level of comprehension it is unfair to force them to see people based on skin color when what they are taught at home is to look in the inside my child does not need to erase racism from within his self it is not in him but it is being taught to him in school okay ashley malingon mandates for kids sorry hello um just about one month ago i spoke at a board

111meeting here requesting that our districts follow updated guidance from the department of health which would allow the barriers to remove be removed at the deaths of our elementary students can i go like this i it's hard for me to breathe throughout this past month we have seen countless districts in our county like rocky point miller please hophog say jim comac and pet med just to name a few rush to remove the barriers to bring some normalcy and happiness to their children this is what we as parents here in three village have been begging for changes that would make a big difference for the social emotional health of our kids additionally within the past week or so we've now seen the above mentioned districts as well as many others write letters to the department of health

112and governor cuomo requesting further change for their students requesting that now that our infection rates are near zero and that half the states in our country don't require universal masking for their students anymore that new york state reconsiders and makes mass optional for children and give parents choice for their children for next school year where are three villages letters to the department of health and the governor where is three village advocating for choice for the students where is three village when hundreds of parents are writing calling speaking out begging for change in the beginning of the school year i was proud i was proud of our district for taking a stand and doing whatever had to be done to get our kids back to school full-time i was proud we were advocating for our kids

113and on the cutting edge of decision making but now as it relates to this matter i sadly cannot say that i feel proud of our district i do not feel proud that certain parents are being ignored i do not feel proud that decisions made for our kids behind closed district doors are being made behind closed district doors in administrative echo chambers i do not feel proud that we have seen zero change for our children despite so much progress against this pandemic i really also hope everyone sitting here tonight is seeing the curtain being pulled back on this entire production right now yes this virus is real but the response has not been especially as it relates to our children in newly leaked emails dr fauci himself said that mass are only for six for sick

114people that asymptomatic spread is rare and that masks are not needed as protection against covid as the virus is so small that it passes easily between the fibers of a mask it's time to take all the truth into account and it's time for three village to begin fighting for the fighting the state for change and choice for our children before they issue new guidance in a few weeks those parents who want to mask their kids or keep them behind a barrier should have that right but we should also have the right to bring our healthy children back to normal for next school year especially given all the new information available show us you care for the feelings of every parent in this district show us we aren't being ignored show us you are doing what

115so many other districts in our county are doing show us the letters you will write to the state and to the department of health show us you are staying true to your position as an advocate for our kids and fight for their rights next year cannot look like this year and we desperately need your help before it's too late [Applause] the the board of education has discussed the issue of the partitions and we will begin taking those down with regard with regard to writing to the department of health i i want to make the statement that we are not medical professionals and i would not be in a position nor would any of my colleagues sitting here making a statement to the department of health of how they should govern or what they should be

116doing with regard to giving advice in terms of medical advice that the health and safety protocols that the department of health that the cdc put forward are based on science and data i myself and my colleagues here are not in any position to be writing those letters and in fact our suffolk county superintendents association has not encouraged us to do that i know there are independent school districts that have stepped forward to do to do just that but i do not feel that that is a prudent decision on our part just as i wouldn't expect that the department of health would come in and tell us what kind of curriculum we should be running they are the department of health they're as they are an organization that is set up to provide us with those

117appropriate health and safety protocols and we must i believe follow those with due diligence yes our students have been safe yes our numbers in free village have been wonderful and have been down but again as our chief medical officer has said i wear my mask for you and you wear it for me so if certain parents are saying well i don't need my child to wear a mask and i don't care if your child does but then it defeats the purpose of the other child having the mask on so i hope you can understand that i do expect based on the the newest guidance that has come forth from the department of health with regard to the summer camps of saying to students that it's not necessary to wear them while outside and that they're

118only being encouraged but not enforced on inside a school building i think we're going to see that guidance coming forth and i do not believe that it's necessary for us to be writing those letters but allow the experts who are heading the department of health the doctors who are in charge to make those decisions because they are the ones that are going to help us to be successful and i know statements have been made that children are unaffected by covid that first of all i know that they are affected at a much lesser rate but i want to be very clear there are children who have died from covid there are children who have the um misc disease as a result of covet i would never want any child here in three village to be

119a victim to that we're going to do everything we can to protect our children and i understand that people are frustrated with the mitigated layers but we we have to be diligent in how we proceed so yes right now the universal masks are required in our schools and we have to move forward with that do i expect that there will be change i'm surmising that yes there will be based on the lower numbers but i think we have to be patient and allow that process to take place but in the meantime the partitions will be taken down i i can't comment on another school district i don't know what their decision-making process is nor would i just as when our district made the decision to open five days a week and other districts were hybrid

120we were not commenting on them and i'm not commenting on their decision making at this point i cannot do that i don't know what why they made those decisions but i i will say that i do not think it is a prudent decision for us to direct or tell the department of health how to do their job on behalf of student athletes we reached out on to section 11 who is the governing body for suffolk county and we implored them for our athletes yes we did so why can't you do that i'm not sure the students um that were playing sports had certain protocols that they had to follow so i'm i'm not right yes and the department of health really weighed in very strongly with the athletes especially those that were at higher risk

121if you remember we had to test all of our higher risk athletes until a certain point of time so the department of health was working very closely with regard to higher risk athletes and all athletes okay heather coppola yes i'm back i'm back okay heather capola um okay first of all thank you so much for the decision on the plexiglas i know i'm not speaking for myself but many we are super appreciative and i know when i go home and tell my kids i could probably cry but i'm not going to okay so a couple things and i kind of can't go off this other districts that are writing letters so right here i have letters from smithtown miller place shorm waiting river plainage com swag port jefferson rocky point and riverheads is going out

122tonight they have written their letters to the governor and the health commissioner asking for change in mandates for their students they're asking parents for choice that's what they're asking they're not trying to be the doctors they're not trying to tell them what to medically do they're saying we want to give our parents a choice help us do that so that's with at least these districts our question again is where's three villages you up here are volunteers but you were put in this position and you're your obligation to serve us as a community you should be the voice for the parents for all the parents we vote you in to be that voice and that's exactly kind what we need you to do right now many of us we're writing letters we're making phone calls we're

123going to rallies but we're fighting for a choice but we need to be backed up by our district three village parents need to be backed up by our three village board of education don't you want to be known for standing up for children's rights and the rights of parents to have a choice for their children you know that these restrictions um they're absurd they're wrong and if you don't believe that that's frightening and just like i stated last week it's not about the science if it was about the science the whole guideline on camps wouldn't have been pulled back like you said cheryl indoors and outdoors they do last summer indoors and outdoors our kids did not need masks in camp a week and a half after camp ended they needed masks in schools so

124when you say that you're hoping next year will look different because this year they don't need masks and camps well they didn't need masking camps last year either so that's a little i don't know i kind of feel like i can't go there the the only statement i want to make is we did not have a vaccine last year either so okay and but there's no vaccine for children under 12 right now at this moment in time yeah so um so my question children in daycare's preschools and camps are not required to be wearing a mask indoors or outdoors but why in school why are schools the exception and now obviously as of today we found out three thousand two hundred and thirty four of faucey's emails being released and he states and i quote

125masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to in people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection the typical mask you buy in the drugstore is not really effective in keeping out the virus and if you're not questioning all that i think that's a problem and this may be this is my own opinion and we all know that you guys want a budget passed understand that and here's the truth and i'm speaking for myself because i can only speak for myself and my vote and i but i do believe there are people out there that believe the same as i do that we need to know that you're fighting for our children across the board not just on their educational needs because in my opinion i

126have no doubt in that really i don't education athletics our teachers are top-notch and i don't doubt that but i need to know that you're fighting for our kids mental health and wellness as well we know that you need to be submitting the plans for next year once you get guidance in july and you have the power of what those plans look like just please be advocating for all the kids and all the families in free village that's what i ask and then you made a question you made a comment about the number of kids that have died from coven now just keep in mind because you said we would never want one of those to be ours right there have been over four thousand deaths from the covet vaccine going forward i'm not gonna

127not making this a vaccine to be but just going forward remember that you said that you would never want one of our kids in three village because of the whole mass thing i would never want to force a vaccine on a child if there's been already been four thousand and i won't get into the science of that so all that to be said again i'm going to end with thank you again for hearing us and thank you for those of you that respond to us and um we appreciate it okay maggie dakaris hi my name is maggie deckers and i'm a fifth grader at arrowhead please unmask as children i can hardly breathe my mask on especially on a hot day i also cannot show my emotions to my friends when i'm smiling at them

128sometimes they don't even know no our emotions are being hidden behind these masks please give us the choice to breathe in and out fresh air don't you think it's unbelievable that we have to wear these masks when it doesn't even affect children i strongly believe that we should have the choice to wear masks or not the parents are already safe if they did take the vaccine and whether or not they did they and as children should have a choice to wear the masks or not it is getting close to summer and it's getting harder and harder to wear these masks thank you i'm peggy decress i'm maggie's mom thank you for letting us speak tonight i'm going to make this short and sweet please unmask these poor kids why are we making them suffer the

129negative long-term psychological side effects will be detrimental to these kids young children are not affected by this virus and adults with whom they are surrounded by have a chance to be protected with a covet vaccine why are these children carrying this burden why are they suffering this is completely unfair to our children please give parents the choice that is a very simple and reasonable request okay more containers good evening mr carlson i never got the opportunity to thank you personally for what you did to my wife for my wife and my son um your dedication i have a medical exemption first of all if you want to see it or my lawyer you can secondly thank you again mr carlson your dedication to your career this institution is resolute i won't go into details of

130what he did for my wife and my son and my son isn't even in the school district yet so again thank you sir you're wanting to be transparent and doing a q a forum is exactly what this community needs i moved here three years ago and i'm going to date myself a little bit but i'm think i'm in good company i used to watch channel 12 news and they used to have the kids jeopardy all i ever saw was syosset and ward melville being 17 years old and in seaford high school i couldn't tell you where ward melville was on a map okay but when we got pregnant my wife had a good friend here and said move here for the school district we did our due diligence okay um this was where we're going

131to put our roots i moved around a lot as a young boy and a man okay he's going to grow up in here we're not going away and the board outstanding idea to come up with q and a's because you're the board and we are the shareholders and we're holding on to the most important things our children i heard nothing but good things from all you children children children so q a here's the budgetary concerns i didn't move here thinking that taxes were ever going down it's long island let's not be silly but for the q a forum folks now's your time you're here representing us and our children so here's the two big burning questions that each of you need to answer in front of these tax holders and shareholders right now what's your

132stance on mass because we know they don't work everything you said is fundamentally untrue if you wanted to put your money where your mouth is hire sanitarians and hygienists because osha act of 1977 the first thing you ask with a mask is what's your idlh okay and for how long these things don't even they say right in the box do not protect against viruses so if you're in it for the kids i ask you let's not worry about the state it's the district we hold the authority you said yourself department of health six feet is all that they are interested in take off the masks you've said it yourselves in one way or shape or form in critical race theory my son gets special ed from alternatives from children if the masks don't come off

133and i've seen some of the documents myself from that's going around that our taxes dollars are paying for critical race theory here's the deal like martin luther king said we all came in here on different ships we're all in the same boat now folks okay he's not going to grow up to know to be guilty because he's white or to hire someone based on the color of his skin not the character dedication mr carlson that's what you want here you don't want to hire people just because of connie you got to fill some sort of a quota that's against everything that was doing for education folks come on because he can't he will not go to school here and then once you lose school enrollment that's what everybody's here for then the taxes are gone

134then your house value goes guys use your heads we're in it for the kids this is theater it's all it is so again i'm going to pull you again it's time to be accounted for for our kids where are you on your unmask and where are on your cr crt it's a q a forum folks where the shareholders okay i i will jump in please okay um critical race theory i'm opposed to excellent i think everybody masks on the other hand comac last week was it voted to eliminate the masks before the sun came up in the morning they got a memo from state ed that not only do they have to reinstate the masks but now stated or the board of health is sending inspectors to make sure that they are i've heard all

135about it ma'am and you're 100 so i'm not going to we've got three weeks more of school i'm not fighting with the state and what's the fight no one wants to fight ma'am what i'm saying these pcr tests i get it i understand pcr tests masks vaccinations are all under emergency youth authorization it is coming out in buckets in waterfalls that this is a false narrative so i'm begging you folks please because somebody's going to have to be held accountable whether you're complicit or you're culpable don't put yourselves in this position these are irreparable harm you're causing harm to children and you're knowing willfully doing this and we're hiding behind circles between a governorship a department of health the cdc is a private company man they're a vaccine company okay they make billions so let's

136be accountable for what counts grassroots our children i've heard it from all you all of you so stand up and be accounted for it's time to stand up and take us to take a side thank you anybody else want to jump in i guess not okay okay i have one letter that was sent please submit the following statement blah blah between my spouse and i the only two registered voters in my household one of us voted yes for the budget the other voted no after numerous discussions we both agreed that there was a fundamental problem of a lack of clarity in the budget leading to a lack of trust while we want to support our community and teachers we have provided no details on exactly why the costs per pupil are increasing what line items

137are contributing to the increase in our proportion there needs to be more information and transparency otherwise we are forced to speculate and i'm sure you are aware there is no limit to what this community can imagine in terms of questionable expenditures for example the 2021 budget newsletter states that the 2020 covert related safety measures were funded through the use of district reserves the districts must now begin to repay these monies in accordance with special legislative action while also planning to maintain funding sources this phrase sounds like we are mandated to repay the resources immediately but by how much and starting when exactly is there a mandate how large the reserves needs to be and at one value with the reserve be considered big enough could we wait to repay it to when more people regain

138some of their lost income second i would like to i would expect the safety costs to be lower this coming year is that not the case more explanation is needed there is a lot of other detailed questions but let me end with a broader question in the interest of community partnership and in parentheses and marital harmony what steps would you take to provide greater clarity and transparency in the budget development to the community in the future there is room for improvement there and it is signed by roxanne kariming kareem not not so much in response to that but i believe that um mr cornreich did talk about forums in the future and we will certainly move in that direction i i do want to address a little bit the um critical race theory issues that

139have been brought forward our district in no way is promoting critical race theory i want to be extraordinarily clear about that um on june 15th dr paul gold who is the head of our anti-racism and social justice committee will be doing a presentation at the board meeting and i believe that he will provide great clarification in what the goals and mission of that committee are we will then be launching our district website which will provide parents with information regarding that the the building level committees have been focused on issues of inclusivity of respect for others of empathy those are the focuses of what our district has been doing with regard to that anti-racism and social justice we had received a narrative and or you can call it a survey from our alumni who talked about

140experiences that they had while in school and we want to be responsive to what they were talking about microaggressions and feeling excluded from opportunities it is more about creating an environment where everybody feels part of something this is not critical race theory we're not looking to change curriculum and change history that is not what we're looking to do we're looking to create awareness and an opportunity for others to feel respected accepted and have empathy so i i hope that dr um goals presentation will be helpful is that the lack of transparency people from these committees have been sending out information um like actual documents from the committees and those committees say things like the curriculum that's being used as a race racism i can send you an all tomorrow and i don't want to argue

141with you at all i appreciate what you said and i appreciate that person that's coming to speak in a couple weeks because it's astonishing to hear you know you see everything that's happening in the federal government you see it happening in the state and then when you feel like it's happening in your school it is horrific so i'm glad that it was brought up tonight and i appreciate you addressing it and i'm looking forward to you know getting more information so thank you for your response i appreciate it and i'm gonna send you you know what was given to me so that you i appreciate that thank you and i will share that with dr gold as well thank you thank you going to defer that to mr carlson um can help tonight well um

142i mean we we haven't really discussed it yet but one uh and i i don't mean to put the the superintendent and and the board um uh to you know ask this question in public but um are we given the option to parents if they want to keep their i would recommend strongly that we give the option i would recommend to the board that we give the option to the parents because there may be some parents who would wish for the um partition to remain up and if that is their choice i certainly wouldn't want to take that choice with 17 days left of the school year away from those parents yeah so maybe um if they're gonna be if they're gonna see it this year if they're gonna go in oh this year absolutely

143oh yeah we want it this week yeah yeah yeah yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah this school year probably not this week i mean it's wednesday so we do need to communicate with our yeah i mean one way we just need to know who wants to keep theirs up one way and we right before coming out here and uh was when that was uh discussed and the board said take him down so um yeah we will get on that immediately tomorrow and we will get now that the little clips the feet that stick on the desk that might take a little more time maybe like over the weekend to get all of those off but the barriers themselves i mean that that's not a problem it's just we don't want to remove them all and

144then some parents say wait a second what happened sure hi you've seen me before i'm christy mcguire and we've spoke before miss pettisich i just wanted to as i listen to people talk about in quote u.s world reports the data that i care about is my second grader coming home and telling me how much she's learned and by the way my daughter does and thank you mr kutchman arrowhead which i hope you're getting some sleep right now for teaching my daughter how to write her name in cursive she knows how to write her name as a second grader in cursive and she's really excited about that but i i want to make sure that people understand that data from somebody who's in the san francisco bay area really it doesn't matter to me i i'm

145what matters to me is when my daughter comes home and tell me and tells me how excited she is to go into her classroom and learn and how she's having so much fun learning you know what she's learning and loving math and getting so much out of it my daughters hit the hat trick this year an hour ahead as being a second grader she's had amazing teacher after amazing teacher after an amazing teacher so arrowhead gets my vote they had me at hello i love the building um the way that it's run so they get my vote i don't care and i know this is gonna make people crazy but i'd pay i paid twice the amount just because i know what my daughter walks away from i'm an educator in a different school district

146and i see the difference three villages a difference there's a reason why we live here i bought here in four years before i had my first kid bought here for a reason i want you know i made that investment and like you said i think he left i know that when i bought here that my taxes weren't going down i knew they were only going up um but it's an investment you make it's the most important investment i think besides from your health and wellness that you can really make and i just wanted to make that you know clear please talk to your children see how how they feel when they walk out of school and that's really the data that makes the difference it's not what somebody's going to print in some magazine who

147knows who's had some kind of financial gain or whatever you know so i just wanted to make that clear sorry and thank you again for listening to us petition you you know and go crazy about all of you know the the partitions and everything it really does make a difference and just so you know my school district removed them over the weekend and on tuesday when my seniors walked in second period it was like they won the super bowl so like i can't wait until the educators that are with these kids every day see the looks on their faces when they walk in and it really does make a difference it seems small but it's amazing and thank you so much for every one of you for making that happen for our kids thank you

148okay being no other comments i just want to i just want to add one more thing because i don't i maybe i didn't talk enough tonight or something but uh you know i i really enjoyed the the conversation and everybody's comments and it's it's i i really find it rewarding when we can have conversations like this because it it it gives us an opportunity to realize that even if we disagree about the budget about masks about vaccines or about any issue that we feel so strongly about that we're ready to just fight about it but when we actually start to talk about things we realize and we're reminded that probably 85 of all of the other things we agree on and that we can work together and that we can have respectful disagreements sometimes and

149you know you're going to win some you're going to lose some um but you know when we all kind of try to trust each other and to try to trust each other that we're all you know working in favor of the 85 percent of things that we do agree on it really holds us together as a community and i really appreciate everybody here for coming out and giving us your opinions thank you entertain just one minute one second i would just sorry i just wanted to ask whether we when we can expect the next forum on the budget uh to happen okay should we discuss that now do you want the board well it would have to be next week is there is that where would we hold it here is this room picking up

150wednesday's yes depending on how many people i right i i don't believe that this room would be sufficient and answers like this we used to have it at murphy's cafeteria so i don't know if that's available or the the murphy's auditorium right um just so that we all know what what the rules are about um congregations of people in an indoor setting i just want to be clear we would not count on the board the cabinet would not count but there can only be up to 250 at this point in any setting so and families could be together but other people who don't reside together must be six feet apart so the um locations that this could actually take place in would be either an auditorium at one of our secondary schools would be conducive

151to that but this environment here would definitely not work as we can all see no the the high school may not be the most convenient because the musical is taking place and they'll be deconstructing the um the the show the sets um and i wouldn't want to put pressure on them to do that more quickly because i know how much work goes into that mr biscari mr ruffa do you have anything going on at murphy that would we would be in the way [Music] how many seats do you have in your auditorium right [Music] well we we can always explore we can always explore the high school also and like i said i i'm concerned about that but i know that at least 250 people can fit in the auditorium all in favor on post

152okay you