001i'm going to call the meetings order please i pledge allegiance of america to the republic for which it stands a nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice [Music] okay so we're going to start by opening a public hearing for our our town city school district code of conduct and i'm going to turn it over to superintendent lavar thank you the office of the attorney general state of new york concluded an investigation on an incident that involved a reenactment of a slave auction that occurred in may of 2019. as a result of that incident we need to submit a revised revised updated code of conduct which strengthens its current prohibitions responsibilities policies and procedures with respect to racial and ethnic discrimination and harassment as well as other prohibited behaviors after consultation with and input from
002diverse members of the community i truly value the feedback received from our community stakeholders and staff members on our code of conduct specifically with respect to racial and ethnic discrimination and harassment as well as other prohibited behaviors this group dedicated a lot of time into revising our current code of conduct offering suggestions that are outlined in red that strengthen our current policy this code of conduct has been posted on our district website for at least the past 30 days it's actually been a little bit longer than that for public comment and although there was only one public comment i'll get into that in a minute um i first of all would like to start off thanking the committee members for their dedication and service to this work the committee that worked on these revisions from
003not only the community but from district staff employees lasseter judy muniz ian menser pastor jeffrey smith catherine smith sarah king tyler to comey dr ty stone aaron king nancy henry colley gosher jason harrington stacy eager and tina lane i'd also like to thank joanne nevin one of our employees for submitting public comment comments as well when you look at those revisions that are posted you will notice that with respect to racial and ethnic discrimination and harassment as well as other prohibited behaviors there weren't really any revisions however in becoming more inclusive terminology was updated and added for example when you look at some of the definition of discrimination body type and gender identity were added and then in general just terminology was updated from words like pupil to student and many grammatical errors were fixed
004on another note on page 10 for example it said to report orally to the nasa coordinator any incident of harassment bullying or discrimination that they witnessed or that is reported and to file a written report and that was the end of it now with the revision it states exactly where you would find that written report in this case it's under the board of education regulation 7202.1 but additionally we added in this revision that there's a link to the dasa reporting form on the main page of our website so now when you look at this code of conduct if you needed to fill out the written report it now tells you exactly where to go and i thank the people who looked at this and through the revision said okay so if i had to do
005this written report where would i find it and now it's spelled out um other than that if we move from awareness to action with diversity equity and inclusion we also need to start our our focus and our shift of embracing the culture that we expect from everyone so if you look at pages 18 and 19 in the code of conduct this is one of the things one of the changes that i feel most proud of on the bottom of page 18 it's an age-appropriate reinstatement of this policy restatement of this policy and it basically if you just read the first few lines of that it says you should never feel that it is safe for you to come to school and participate in all school activities you should never be prevented from and it goes
006on in the revision instead of saying the things that you shouldn't do if we want our culture to be more inclusive and we want to promote um through the positivity project that we currently have going on or through our pbis framework we should start to say this is what the culture should look like and the revision goes like this all students should feel safe to come to school and participate in all school activities students should feel encouraged and able to concentrate on schoolwork and it goes on and then a little bit further in that age-appropriate um restatement of the policy it goes on to say that you may not act this way and so on and instead of saying what you may not do it's been revised to students should add to other students only
007in ways that make them feel safe and able to concentrate on their schoolwork so again i thank the committee for really taking a deep look at this um and revising i think the revisions are very appropriate um and i'm going to be bringing that forward to the entire world tonight during the picture resolution you guys have any questions going through it rather quickly but it's been posted for over a month a lot of people have spent time working on this no i i think in addition to the changes in content that the idea of flipping it around to what we're aiming for not what we're preventing is a helpful way to look at it another comment okay so at this point i'm going to close the public hearing for the florida city school district code
008of conduct and we're going to move forward with the rest of the regular board meetings are there any agenda changes there are no changes tonight i did not receive any public comments did you receive it okay do you have any communications okay so moving on to board and staff reports the finance audit and facilities meeting report from november 3rd yes so we just finished meeting um primarily the meeting tonight was hearing the report of the risk assessment and internal audit which was overall a positive report always you know there's always things they find to offer helpful helpful guidance on and we discussed briefly how the previous audit process went in terms of reporting back to the board and we had an opportunity to meet our director of facilities as of you know board board action
009in a few minutes thank you and moving on to items for consent agenda to resolve the consent agenda items abc whereas the watertown city school district's code of contact covers the maintenance of order on school crop school property including a school function which shall govern the conduct of students teachers and other personnel as well as visitors and provides for the enforcement they're all in whereas the watertown city school district's code of conduct was reviewed and revised in collaboration with district and community stakeholders and whereas one public hearing regarding the watertown city school district's code of conduct providing for the participation of school personnel parents students and other interested parties was held on november 3rd 2020 and now therefore be resolved by this board as follows number one the board of education adopts the above mentioned
010quote of conduct number two the quote of conduct shall be filed with commissioner no later than 30 days after its adoption number three this resolution shall take effect immediately can i have a motion please michael in a second students for the 2020-21 school year are hereby satisfiable grades k through 6 3 725 grades 7-12 2 fifty 850. i have a motion please back in a second thank you any discussion for all three students education fund northern new york community foundation for 3 the grant is designated for 750 dollars to be distributed to each k-4 school building to support teachers with education needs this donation is gratefully accepted approved and will be acknowledged and writing i have a motion of patricia b mcbarros the final following and your appointment is hereby approved catherine kimball school counseling
011and guidance effectiveness i have a motion please jason in a second any discussion all in favor any opposed following 10 year approved colleen murphy school counseling and guidance effective date november 4 2020. i have a motion please colleague and michael thank you any discussion all those in favor any opposed motion upon the recommendation of superintendent of schools patricia b labar john wilson the approved november 9 2020 for provisional appointment with a salary of 71 000 in the competitive class title director of facilities 3 under the rules of the watertown city civil service pursuant to the requirements of civil service law section 61. i have a motion please and a second and any discussion all those in favor the board of education hereby approves the following retirement resignations leaves of absences appointments permanent part-time long-term substitute
012provisional instructional substitutes non-instructional substitutes if i get a motion please jason in a second thank you any discussion all in favor whereas a resolution was passed by the board of education on october 20 2020 approving a probationary appointment of rebecca fairchild personnel report effective 10 21 2020 through 10 20 20 23 and be it further resolve that this amended resolution reflects a correction for the probationary appointment as follows resolved that the amended probationary appointment for rebecca fairchild is 1028 2020 through 1027 2023 and is hereby approved have a motion please and a second answer any discussion all in favor any post she cares resolved at a creation of a student information systems specialist position as recommended by picture shipping bar superintendent of schools is here right convolution please cheers any discussion can we just hear
013a little more about how that's going to work so uh gosh it was about a year ago at least we have we've contracted through the wreck we had a data specialist through the rick and that person was moved to another position so we have absorbed many of the duties here stacy being the person who has absorbed many of the duties and it's a it's a a huge position in terms of our data our student management system is kind of the trunk of the tree that feeds our all of our other programs both instructional our data warehouse all that data and school tools very important so this person will do everything from uh clean clean up school tool in terms of making the buildings uh stacy's done a wonderful job with that but ensuring as we
014go forward that the data is consistent uh the student the this person will also assist with schedules student demographics attendance data which is very very important to our essa reporting as well the integrity of this data is certainly very important at the state level as well discipline referral data program service data this person will support clerical staff with summer school schedules i don't know how much you know about the work that goes into scheduling summer school uh in itself so this person will be integral in helping with that plus the master schedules uh in each building as well that training piece for clerical staff on school tool and sys modules they'll manage curricular program and rostering and updates and they'll manage electronic student records when we first put together the bulleted list of all these
015tasks they're about four pages so we whittled it down uh so so again uh it's a it's an expansive position one that is vital um especially now that we have uh one thousand of our students in the virtual uh setting and then we have uh you know our other students on hybrid who are virtual the other days of the week so so as the integrity of this data fooding you know going into google classroom and csa and programs like that we need to make sure that those programs stay up and running and run with integrity so stacey paddy do anything to add regarding that position i think you've covered the scope of it um well while the person from the right did you know primarily the school tool management of it obviously we've purchased digital
016curriculum materials over these last six months or so and the mobility of our students is really what's driving some of that workload is you upload the roster once to the curricular program they sync it you get your access and then you have five other students move in that week and it's not as simple as just adding them there's about six different spreadsheets for each curricular program but that has to be resynced with the company um and we have right now three brand new digital programs that have to be part of that so that's the reason to add that to that person because it feeds directly from school tool so they're all interconnected in a way this person would work directly still with our office because you know kira elliott my assistant is the district data
017coordinator so all of the information that feeds from school tool is eventually going to end up in level 0 which she tracks and corrects errors in and works with all of the other departments special ed et cetera to make sure the reporting systems work work well and smoothly what's the financial impact of this position medium is in the budget and the salary range you know 40 to 40 000 to 42 000. is there any offset from not using the person from the wreck i mean is there any savings at all there i don't think so okay i don't know exactly what darcy was getting here before what we were paying her was um ultimately the equivalent of what we would pay this person any other questions okay all in favor aye okay any opposed result
018of the disposal recycle or donation of damaged updated and unused books and videotapes to the libraries at watertown high school knickerbocker elementary north elementary starbuck elementary sherman elementary thank you any discussion zero zero any discussion all those in favor all right any opposed emotion okay thank you up to the superintendent's sports report so at our last meeting we discussed a little bit about how we were working on a plan to get our kindergarten through sixth graders uh i received back four five days a week maybe towards like late january but i like to pause on that plan for now because we've had a number of positive cases in our community and i think it's really important that we have always prepared at any given time to go full remote if we need to and i'd
019like to share tonight what that plan looks like um but before we even do that you know when we get these positive cases safety is always our number one priority the safety of our students and our staff so when uh peta lane our assistant superintendent for personnel and student services she's also the copenhagen coordinator for our district and so public health will call her when we have a positive case and then i would like tina to share with you once she receives that call i want you gotta hear what happens because it's not just sometimes a a small window of time it can be a full day into the evening and into the next day so keena if you wouldn't mind can you walk us through what happens when you receive that pollen including in
020that what it means if you're in isolation uh versus quarantine because you know as we've been going through this process we realize this just isn't a one-size-fits-all model every case is so different and there are so many factors to be considered um and we really appreciate the work that you're doing thank you it's a team effort for certain so as as patty said um i receive all the calls from public health and what i do initially is i i go right to the school building where the reported case is i like to meet with the principal in person i don't like to give that phone call and then you know have them think about like i usually i show up and we get right to work i contact patty and stacy regarding the communication piece
021because that's part of our communication plan so i let them know drive to the school and then i meet with the principal slash assistant principals and we get right to work on pulling if it's a student and or a teacher or staff member we're pulling schedules we're pulling teachers names we're pulling class lists and we're beginning to compile public data for public health they do the contact tracing we provide them with all the information and contact tracing involves public health they have i have a spreadsheet template that i use and we bring in i meet with every staff member with a principal individually if if they are in contact with a positive case and i it's it's a scary time for everybody so i like to meet with them individually and we go through what
022to expect from public health because public health will get their name their phone number their demographic information and they'll call them and uh they'll i always you know tell the teachers and staff to make up a list of questions that you may have uh write those down and public health will be giving you a call later and what we do is we uh i throughout this process i'm on the phone with public health back and forth asking them questions about the contacts and we send the staff members home who have been in contact just as a precautionary measure and that's done under the guidance of public health and before we send them home like i said we meet with them and the principals provide coverage for their um many times we interview we'll call up
023uh the person who's tested positive or the student who's tested positive to find out you know is there something we're missing here who did you meet with that last day or year things like that so we try to cover as many bases as we can we're not trained contact tracers but we want to give public health all the information they need to front load so we interview all possible contact and i fill out that spreadsheet i interview each teacher staff member i note the nature of the contact and uh i provide public health with all the contact information for students and staff there's been a couple of occasions where depending on what day we are in the cycle we had an occasion in the past where the students in that cohort who had contact with
024a student were in school that day so we actually had to send those students home so we had a great team effort at the school where i was we contacted all the parents we had a beautiful system and the parents came to pick the students up uh public health has been overwhelmed lately so many times we'll call to give the parents a head up heads up on you know your your student has been in contact we you'll be receiving a call from public health it's a 786 number please answer it and the parents are given guidance from public health but we are we certainly provide them with all the information they need but i want to just make everybody aware that when public health calls public health is the official phone call they'll call the
025staff member they'll ask a plethora of questions they're on the phone for a long time with each of the contacts and the person who tests positive they actually talk to our students and they do they do a really in-depth deep dive into everything that's happened in the school the principles are an integral part of that and once once everything is compiled my administrative assistant lisa ward and she does a great job she faxes everything to public health the spreadsheets all the student demographic information then public health takes it from there but it doesn't just end there i'm on the public health back and forth we're talking about phone numbers and getting a hold of parents and other possible contacts so it's a as patty said it's a day or days long process and i want
026to talk a little bit about isolation and quarantine every time we have a case uh we learn something new so if if a person is isolated that's the person who has covered 19. and that person's in isolation for 10 days you may be wondering oh why isn't it 14 well a person who's under quarantine is a contact of a positive and that person is quarantined for 14 days because that person has an incubation period that person is not displaying symptoms so you have to give it a full 14 days of the last from last contact with the positive the isolated person already has it so they need the 10 days in order for the coven to run its course so that's the delineation between being isolated and being quarantined and after public health gets done
027with its contact tracing from everybody they'll send us a fax and they'll tell give us a detailed list of everybody who's isolated and quarantined and then we send that information uh to our nurses and to our principals in each of our buildings and we ensure you know first and foremost priority is safety i forgot to mention one important thing too once we find out uh where the student and staff member was and and class we we do deep cleanings all the time but we we give an extra deep cleaning uh as soon as we know that there's a positive case uh to to help to ensure that again our students and staff are safe so that's the process and it's ever evolving and changing and no two cases are alike that's for sure do you
028have any questions on that process it's really kind of an honor system right if somebody is quarantined and actually i think the public health will check on them every day and they'll text or call but it is essentially but i know there are fines involved if you do basically leave your yard um so that that's important because i've had to mention too important piece first student in charmaine they've been wonderful we also contact transportation she'll actually get on and watch the video to see where if it's a student where the student was sitting are they socially distance were they wearing masks so i just want to mention that too transportation is an important piece here but yes it is an honor system yeah for sure so with the number of positive cases that we have
029that continue we need to be realistic that at some point we may need to switch to a remote plan for everyone and what would that look like well students that are on the remote only five days a week right now and kindergarten through sixth grade and including seven through twelve their their schedule will remain exactly as it is because that's what they're already doing so then we next have to look at our k-12 hybrid students because right now they're only coming to school two days a week and their remote three this would put them on remote for five days a week and all of our special ed students that are in person five days a week would go to full remote five days a week and i'm going to ask assistant superintendent stacy eager converse
030to go through an example of what that may look like if we have to go to that model for our hybrid students so our remote-only teachers k-6 have been working really hard to come up with a schedule that works for students um and also is relatively easy to navigate and doesn't maximize screen time so as to be overwhelming to the child but also offers enough direct instruction back and forth conversation and support throughout the day the students you know feel like they have somebody they can go to for academics or just somebody you know to interact with and that they're able to interact with peers so we've taken some of those schedules and really analyzed them um and and while we're still fine-tuning this and putting it out to staff for feedback and thoughts and
031concerns and questions um our thought is that k-6 they will have a very similar schedule across the board and the one thing that we would need to iron out is specials at north where there are four special area teachers for most periods of the day and five classes at k12 but we are thinking that students would begin their school day similarly just in the home environment uh they would still have purposeful play and we would walk through that they would prepare for school they would have a morning meeting you know with positivity project embedded there would be time for direct instruction which would take place over zoom but obviously with breaks built in so the students are not sitting constantly that they're able to still do things like brain pop stand and stretch you know
032i don't say turn and talk because you can't do that very easily in zoom but create activities that offer them little chunks of direct instruction that are able to move their learning forward but also give them great appropriate or age appropriate breaks from that as well we still have opportunities for intervention to be provided we looked at lunch obviously embedded in there we've taken our ela program k4 and broken it down but students really would be in school with their teachers if you will over zoom for a good portion of the day whether it's the zoom is open and they're still just independently working the same way we would in the classroom um you know i've i've given you some direct instruction on you know working on adding fractions and then i'm going to have
033you do a couple of problems on your own and then we're going to come back together in 10 or 15 minutes we're really working through some of the nuances of it but we have uh created an overall schedule which has students receiving comparable levels of instruction and that would be across the board the other thing that we're looking at and and part of this will come up in a little bit when we talk about the family survey that's gone out but really trying to maximize the direct teacher to student interactions that occur if we are fully remote we know that they're limited already for students who are hybrid because they're only here with us two days a week but we want to try to find ways to maximize those using the tools that we have
034like zoom you know to keep things as synchronous as we can while still offering asynchronous opportunities for those students who may not be able to engage at that time so i guess i would like to talk about that little part of um our presentation with it's really we all need to continue to practice social distancing and wearing our masks and washing our hands we need everyone in this together to really do their due diligence because we truly do not want to switch to that remote option we know that that's not always ideal for all of our students so as a community we need to kind of step up and really do you know everything that we've been told to do because as a community um and as a district i feel like we are doing
035a great job our students and our staff are doing an amazing job following you know wearing the mask practicing the social distancing washing their hands and doing all of those good things that they need to be doing but you now know when you turn on the news and we're seeing covet in the community it's out there so right now we all need to step it up and really do our part uh to make things better for our community can i just ask some questions sure do we have maybe i i don't know how to pray this like a tipping point at which way we're going to go and who exactly makes that decision is it you is it in conventional public health um does the lord get to weigh in on it how do we
036know how that's going to go so i can speak to that sure every every case that we have is different so depending on the number of staff who are impacted let's say it's a group of teachers and then they have students in another building or children in another building just depends on how far it reaches out the tipping point is when we can't provide in-person supervision for our kids that's one of the things so it just depends on once we get that list established and we see how many people are affected then we see how it branches out into other buildings and we we get together and meet and with consultation with patty and stacy and i'm sure you and and the state has actually now provided further guidance and microclusters yes and being in
037yellow yellow red and orange zone so that will really impact the decision as well we meanwhile seeing individual buildings so it's a temporary remote for example around the state so i don't know you never know what dynamic that would take but you talked about micro a particular clusters not the entire district so again it's just a matter of what we're handling at the time right and if you look at our public 19 report card that's right on the state website you'll see that there really has been differences within each building and you know i'm keeping it along with team and stacy we're keeping an eye on you know where the positive cases are to see if there's any connections like recently in our community um you know we saw a real outbreak in a church
038situation so we want to keep an eye on making sure that we're also tracking and public health has such a great job for contact racing they've been great partners so we'll just continue to do our diligence on all aspects and you know hopefully we'll start to see those numbers come down in the community i'd like to just then move on along if you don't have any other questions on that part of the process because one of the other questions that i often get is how come their school districts around us when they have they report their first positive case they go to the remote just like that and i think when you look at a district our size with 4 000 students and the staffing that we have if you're in a smaller district and
039you have the same positive case that we've had and it outreaches into several staff members in a very small district they can't continue to move forward because they don't have the staff to be able to do that so that is one of the major differences when you look at some of the outlying areas or some of the districts across the state of new york i'd like to just take a couple minutes to do a few celebrations i'm very excited that uh katie kimball and connie murphy receive their tenure tonight congratulations to both of them i always before someone gets tenure i usually if it's a teacher go in and visit their classroom and do an observation with counselors we just have a quick one-on-one meeting and both of those quick meetings turn into hour-long discussions
040that were really great um and i'm very happy and pleased for both of them to receive their tenure tonight i'd also like to welcome john wilson again to being with us and he'll start officially on monday and he will hit the ground running because we've already scheduled meetings starting at nine o'clock so get ready you'll be great i'd also like to thank um the administrative assistant in buildings and grounds marcia hutchinson because she's been a tremendous support for us the past few weeks in this transition and she's helped us arrange the fire inspections that are due at this time of year she already put out a schedule for snow removal uh yesterday before we got a little bit of snow in the area um and she did a nice job going along with me and
041giving john a tour of our facilities i'd also like to commend the entire staff for their continued efforts in really working through this current model and i'd like to pass around a picture of something new that arrived at watertown high school and on my way to work a few days ago i noticed a big purple box sitting out in front of watertown high school and i almost turned around to come back say oh my gosh what is that what got delivered what did amazon deliver to that front door and then i got an email from mr fairchild so i'd like to pass it along and share with you at watertown high school just thinking outside of the box and how do we get through this i received an email along with it as an example
042and it basically said um my son who graduated in 2012 i actually brought this up later that day when i was at home that evening and read it and said mrs labar we have the homework for your stores ready for pickup please feel free to stop by the front entrance of the high school at your convenience anytime any day your homework package is in drawer number two of our football homework box and a paper bag with your name on it the homework box is not locked thank you again watertown high school and then mr fairchild went on to say that they're trying out a new idea for homework pick up so parents and students that can't get there during business hours and or don't need to come into the building can just stop by and
043have easy access to their work and materials so this is something that they're trying um we'll give it a few weeks and i'll update you in one of my further reports just to see how it's going i'd also um like to thank dell for helping out and getting that ready the fair child and his team talked about the idea and the concept and 24 hours later it was at the front door so those are the kind of things that we continue to do with our staff um that our staff continues to do just really try to think creatively and how can we get through this time and and really the safety of our staff and our students and our parents when we take a look at that idea we've also finalized our training plan with
044when incorporated and we submitted that to the attorney general and as soon as we receive that approval back we will be sharing the plan um at a further future board meeting um i think that beth and i both attended some sessions through nisbo this week the convention that was virtual for me um one of my favorite things the sessions are posted through december so i get to work my way through which is kind of new because before you actually just run in and sometimes uh one would be closed out a workshop would be closed out you would run to your second or third choice and now you really are open to all choices and having the flexibility of working through the december but the closure um was a few hour musical on school board meetings
045and i don't know that if you ever had it yeah and it was actually very well done um and it somehow if that ever gets out where everyone can view it it's well worth your time it's actually kind of fun [Music] i was able to co-host a virtual student seminar with superintendent don meyer from indian river and we met with probably 50 people who are doing student teaching right now through a virtual format and we got to walk them through the interview process and you know how things have changed and what they'll need to you know expect during an interview um and we gave them kind of tips and tricks of what to expect so that was kind of fun and then when tina got called out for one of the code of 19 when
046she had to report to a building she had already scheduled um 10 substitute teacher interviews so i had the opportunity and i had a little bit of flexibility in my schedule where i was able to step in and so when i was all done i kind of walked by uh stacy's office and i said i think i found a new job she's like you're leaving us and i said oh no but i think that i'm gonna happens for dina it was really uh refreshing and rewarding to interview people who are interested in coming to substitute for us in the district and it was just a different experience it was um i'm sorry that you had to be out for focus 19 reasons but it was a very valuable learning experience for me we also finished
047the third year audit of our board policy with the policy committees so we're going to restart the process and go right back to where we started three years ago at our next policy meeting on november 13th so michelle and i as soon as we receive that first set of audits that we need to go we'll just start the process over again a couple of updates from food service the meal distribution on november will be tuesday november 10 and november 24th and we have staff volunteering in the buildings to help service so that'll be a little bit earlier because of veterans day and then thanksgiving and food service started their five day and seven day meal pick up last wednesday and so to give a little bit of a comparison two weeks ago they did a
048three-day meal pack and they had 343 meal kits that they handed out last week they went to a five-day and they handed out 414. two weeks ago the five-day meal packs they handed out 307 meal kits and then last week they went to a seven day because now they had guidance that they could go up to seven days and they handed out 334 and so mr orvis shared that this is going to generate more income which is a good thing because the food service department although they just received notification from the state ed department that they have excess funds and available about 220 thousand dollars they are also losing money every month you know between forty and fifty thousand from the sheer fact that first of all people aren't coming to pick up meals and
049you have a thousand students that are remote and then you only have you know less than 50 of your kids in person each day somewhere around 36 37 he's not bringing in um the money that he needs to so although he has to spend down some of those excess funds he also has two grants that are in the works right now one is for a walk-in cooler and the other is for an oven and he'll need about probably close to 40 to 50 000 to offset those two grants so that will come out of his excess funds that are available and finally the last thing that i would like to bring to your attention is when we did the last calendar change we took parent teacher conferences off and said we would come back to
050it and now it's that time where we need to have a discussion for the next board meeting we'd like to recommend a calendar change um and this would include parent teacher conferences we're suggesting monday november 23rd as a half day we can't do a full day we've already used three full days before school started and we have one full day right now on the calendar for the end of the school year and we like to keep those in case there's an unexpected emergency between now and then to give us a little bit of a buffer but when looking at the semesters of the monday thursday tuesday friday split for the first semester both the cohorts monday thursday tuesday friday have school 35 days the tuesday friday group gets the two early dismissals into that as
051well and when you look at the second semester monday thursday group attend 37 days and the tuesday friday groups attend 34 days with two early days so if you look at it overall the monday thursday group has 72 days and the tuesday friday group has 69 days with four early dismissals so we felt that monday would be the better option and then also tuesday of that week we've already scheduled a mandatory emergency go home early drill which is mandated for 15 minutes so we didn't want to go to tuesday and we often know that attendance on that monday and tuesday you know isn't always where it should be so we thought that might be the best opportunity for us to come to parent conferences on monday to 23rd but again that's up for discussion and
052then we would bring it to the board for google at our next board meeting but we have that parent conferences so it figured out they may have any comments on that right now all right this is super senate for instruction um so right now in addition to kind of thinking about what would happen if we were to go fully remote our instructional coaches are actively working with our classroom teachers k-8 to really get them thinking about prioritizing curriculum one of the questions this year has been coverage versus emphasis on skills because of feeling like kids aren't with us as much where do we really put our our teeth into as far as what we're looking to dive into for curriculum so working on helping them think about what are the must knows versus the should
053knows versus the nice to knows in terms of skills and content that are in each class and while it would be nice to be able to say that everything that we have in our curriculum is a must know the reality is that 100 of our students do not walk away with every single nugget of content and skills so we really need to start prioritizing in terms of that respect what is what are the pieces that 100 of our students absolutely need to have in place to be successful at the next level what are the must-knows things that 60 to 70 percent of our students if they walk away with um and hopefully they will uh will add to their levels of success and then what are the nice to know is those things that enhance
054the content and the skills but are not necessarily going to detract from a student's performance if they don't fully have that content under their belts so we're working on strategies to introduce that and get departments in grade levels and teams thinking about that um i spent the last two days as much as i can and as much as i'll be able to tomorrow attending the department of defense education agency virtual conference with lisa blank and tara elmer gaining some knowledge about some new forms that they have for financial submissions but also just collaborating with colleagues across the country and in our region and what their practices are for dodea grants what's working what their challenges are what kind of partnerships they formed in the midst of copenhagen so some interesting conversations and i know lisa
055and tara have gotten a lot out of that next meeting we will have a copy of our 2020 through 2023 technology plan for you we already have the state of required piece that was submitted last year but we needed sort of the narrative built around it our tech committee met right up until copenhagen in march and then we had to take a a long pause but they came back together this summer and we just finished it up last week so we're in good shape and i will have that for you next meeting and then the last piece is you may have seen and especially if you're a parent in the district that we did put out a family survey the reopening plan requires us to check in with the community about how things are going
056and what supports they also need a few times throughout the year we felt like this was a good time to do a check-in it seems like some people are settling in but there's obviously still a lot of stress um and pieces that are overwhelming about the whole circumstantial situation um two families staff students etc so trying to get a good grasp on that we just released that survey uh yesterday we're going to collect data through the week right now we have 511 responses and what we hope to do is to be able to parse apart the data by grade level or by building by my cohort you know virtual fully virtual versus hybrid and be able to be transparent with the community and share here are the results and then also here are some steps
057that the district is working on taking uh to make things even better so even if something's going well we want to maintain that practice but if there's something that people feel isn't going so well we want to be able to take some steps to address them that's it assistant superintendent for personnel so our office says we've done interviews for our head custodian position one of our buildings patti graciously took over the interviews for the subs which we're always looking for sub so i appreciate that i'm glad you enjoyed that process it is a is a good one last week i attended uh the suny potsdam teacher education advisory committee meeting that was held virtually from suny potsdam there were several superintendents and officials from around the area including suny potsdam and it was a nice
058meeting it was an hour long and they gave us an opportunity uh to get together as a group and they talked a little bit about the student teaching process and placements but the probably the most uh beneficial part of that meeting was they put us into breakout groups of five or six people and we talked about things that are going well things that maybe are going so well and um best practices one of the things we talked about suny potsdam was asking school leaders what are we looking for in our teacher education programs we talked about the fact that teaching now has changed exponentially even over the last few months in terms of teaching virtually versus teaching in the hybrid model versus teaching in person and how do we keep students engaged so we gave
059potsdam some good feedback on that and i think it was a very beneficial meeting i was glad to be a part of that i hosted a we had a professional development half day on friday hosted a zoom meeting for anybody uh who was interested 60 minutes with the covet 19 coordinator i had about 35 people online and they had many great questions from around the district got on and they asked me many of the questions and many of the things that i talked about a little bit earlier with you um we talked about processes and procedures and when it's uh when you're not feeling well what should you do and we talked a little bit about contact tracing and female and everything in between so that was a nice session and it was well attended
060thank you school business manager since last time we met all of our state aides stopped the sd3 and stamps information has been submitted almost all of it's been cleaned 180 calendar but i just don't review that it's certified on rns everything should be okay work has started two of our bigger items with us financial transparency that's now available i do have a template close to working on that one but it's not until the end of the year and our budget work is also underway we are doing some budget pv tomorrow but the principal sometime this week we're doing the principles to kick that off and also meeting later this week to revise our cares application now that that's been white it's like it's been wiped clean and we have to redo that and as far
061as tax collection goes we're up to about 12.78 million dollars 20 dollars ahead of where we were at the same time last year so that's what percentage is that i want to save 75 16 and change plus the library all right so some upcoming dates in the district uh next wednesday district is closed for veterans day policy committee you guys have a meeting next friday at noon okay our next board of education meeting is the following tuesday here at wiley and who's the school that's joining us and then thanksgiving recess is that third week i'm busy for november um wednesday through friday off with the district being closed on thursday and friday and i'm going to take a minute and just go around the i'm just somewhat concerned about the quarantine uh being in a
062business myself and people not following the rules especially about quarantining and i'm worried that it like a substitute teacher who is quarantined that we don't know i'm still coming to work it'll seem funny but uh it might be just me being me it might not be anything i'm just worried and i guess i would just say that if you know that somebody is in control if anybody knows that somebody's in quarantine and they're sure of it and and they're not seeing that person corn thinking or in isolation they need to contact public health i think that's what we all need to do as a community is look out for each other and so if you know that somebody is supposed to be in quarantine or isolation then i think that you have every right to
063call public health and make that notification yeah thank you going back to current teacher conferences is that going to be virtual or is that going to be in person or it would be virtual at this time most districts you know i did a little survey of other other groups and i think some of the larger districts are leaning more toward the zoo meetings however every district has to do what's you know best for them and knowing that we have positive cases in our community i think the best option would be you know virtual meetings uh back to your conversation on coverage versus skill you recall the state was having those discussions prior to emmett you know we had betty rosa the interim commissioner she was one of the ones on the board of regents who
064first wanted to propose that they have those discussions so i hope at some point any local efforts that we can all provide in that scale can meet with the state and really very much come down to what post-pandemic graduation stand will look like and what an instructional framework can look like in the future resulting from some form of action so i really do applaud your efforts in trying to bring that together having the foresight to do it i hope will have ramifications broadly jason i'll just uh piggyback on patty's comments about the nisba convention anyone who has not gone to one um it really is um a combination of inspiration and information um and uh next year's is scheduled for new york city again but i think based on our experience this year that it's
065likely that there will be a virtual option so it might be a hybrid but the idea that you can pick and choose when you um when you access the information is really really helpful um and just um from the business meeting standpoint there were 19 resolutions that were passed i'm not sure how many of you had time to go through the the list of resolutions that had been recommended by the resolutions committee but all of those passed and uh the very first one actually had been submitted by indian river board of education so so it's it's a worthwhile experience whether you're there in person or or looking in so you know said it set it on your calendar for next year all right i'll entertain a motion to end the meeting thank you second all
066in favor all right