001good evening whoa sorry about that everybody out there good evening ladies and gentlemen tonight is our our monthly board of education meeting today is april 20th and tonight's board of education meeting will get started as our president is unable to be here tonight as she is traveling so in her stead as our vice president mr brian lynch i turn that over to mr lynch thank you dr douglas could everybody please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice [Applause] like to welcome everybody tonight as dr douglas stated uh president dale is traveling tonight so she's unable to be here at the meeting we'll move out right on
002to the minutes there's two sets of minutes to approve tonight could i have a motion so moved second any questions or comments regarding either set of minutes [Applause] okay all those in favor say aye aye any abstentions thank you next section is three we have one one time during the board meeting for community questions and comments there is a three minute time limit and if you are called and if you have a comment that's fine um please state your name address and then you have three minutes to uh present your concern so is there any community questions and comments tonight okay moving on we'll go right on to item four we'll turn it over to catherine for the report from our student representative all right so it's an exciting time to be a senior uh
003the class of 22 wrapped up our senior service project which the seniors made to bring us sprung greeting cards and hundreds of cards were delivered to the meals on wheels program to be delivered to clients along with their meals prom planning is in full swing so start spreading the news the class of 22 will host their prom on saturday may 21st with an empire state of mind a black tie affair theme lots of exciting plans in place and tickets will go on sale the week of may 9th senior week will be held the week of may 16th giving the seniors final chance to dress up the part with some fun theme days such as your future's so bright you gotta wear shades and where you going wednesday to model their future college military or career
004apparel in the senior trip planned for friday evening of june uh june 10th will board the seneca seneca legacy for a senior sunset cruise and senior day planning is also underway for tuesday june 14th which is the last day of regular classes and we're looking forward to mother nature's cooperating so that the 22s can graduate on the 22nd there's also 3 3 000 hours for the yearbook that we just finished yesterday and the pops concert is june 11th the orchestra concert is june 8th and the grp banquet and elections will be held in may and the national honor society is hosting its annual spring service project on wednesday today from 6 to 8 pm in the cafeteria and this year's project enhances the lives of residents for the elkhorn dementia unit and there are 65
005residents in the unit and many of them don't have anything hanging on the walls or the room for their friends that their friends and family visit so national honors society is purchasing brightly colored blankets three-dimensional large and through creating a three-dimensional large origami wall for each resident's room and additionally the nhs is donating several stuffed therapy pads and dolls as well as all zombie alzheimer friendly puzzles fidgets activity activity mittens and picture books for the residents and students are creating brightly colored mobiles for the common areas as well and the artwork blankets and objects will bring color joy and cheer to the elkhorn residents to remind them that they are loved also the national honor society has also established four new 500 scholarships this year for the graduating seniors called the pillar awards and these
006scholarships will be given to the four students who teachers feel best demonstrate all four pillars of national honor society scholarship character service and citizenship and faculty will nominate and vote on student recipients in may and the band banquet and hershey park trip will be in june and i have to attend to the national honor society project so will the board please excuse me you have a busy night thank you catherine for the update and it's hard to believe you guys are planning senior activities senior week activities and graduation already but i know it's right around the corner thank you for helping out with the honor society we'll move on to the next slide on the budget presentation and discussion tonight [Applause] so okay we have a green light i think ladies and gentlemen members of
007the board of education horses central school district community uh tonight is the culmination of over probably two and a half months of budget development going through the process of the state of new york and we are happy to report as a district administrative team to the board of education on behalf of our outstanding business department and all the people that brought about tonight's budget presentation the final presented budget for the 22 school year for the horsehead central school district at this time ladies and gentlemen you can see the presentation on board docs please don't skip ahead because we have a major announcement and i know you haven't seen it yet so on behalf of my administrative team katie we are happy to bring you this budget that which we think for the entire community is
008a very strong and sound financial plan as we've been trying to do over the past seven years miss pizzetti good evening everyone we're going to just update everyone on where our budget stands based on the conversations we've had over the course of this process all told based on our final state budget and our projections for the expense driven aids we're expecting a increase in our state aid items of 1.8 million dollars that does include our 50 phase-in of foundation aid uh projections uh expense driven aid projections for the transportation and the both these aids and the remaining building aid expected for our our first capital project referendum our tax levy limit as we all know is capped at the two percent far below the current rate of inflation current tax-based growth factor is 1.0095 and
009all told once the calculation bakes out our levy increases by 1.2 million dollars or 2.97 percent a total maximum allowable levy limit of 41 million 781 which meets the tax cap calculation and requires a 50 percent uh 50 a simple majority vote by our community so i've been working with the shimon county tax office over the course of this process to get our assessment information equalization rate information as they know it at this time in order to project what this levy increase means to our community as far as the rate the rate being how this levy is spread across our community and based on the the information that we received to date we are expecting a decrease in our tax rate um again based on the information today based on the equalization rates presented today
010our tax levy our tax rate could go down uh over six percent i got a job ladies and gentlemen this is the announcement we were uh sort of greeted to this today through all the hard work and i i've gotta help katie out the numbers you are seeing are not like just rough estimates these are conservative estimates and as we've done in the past we give you the conservative estimate which is negative three percent to negative six point three percent and you can see on a hundred thousand dollar home we are conservatively looking at next year if this budget were to be approved at least on full value of at least somewhere between 52 to 110 dollars per hundred thousand dollar decrease in taxes for seven years this district this board this administration this faculty
011and staff have put in front almost 10.31 in tax reductions on the rate averaging 1.47 a year we are forecasting that this continued trend is set for the next couple of years as we said even two years ago we are seeing major investment we are seeing major companies come in ohio logistics and that is going to continue the growth even if we head towards a recession so we this is that big news that we just put up so we hope that the board is absolutely surprised by this but we are one of the few districts that have put up these numbers consistently and you'll see a chart in a few minutes and that's what we were brought here to do and that's what you do every day and this is a good fiscal stewardship of
012the district so as you see that that's what we're proud of and i think that's what our community i would hope would say thank you because we don't see that often we used to have the days of three four percent increases a year and we're still able to keep everything and move forward as best we can during this time and still grow so we want to try to you can see why i'm elated uh superintendents don't usually get to give this type of news but as we go through this if you have questions please we will be using this like we have in our newsletters regularly that communicate that it's all about the tax rate and you still get the star reductions as well so that's what we wanted to emphasize any questions everybody happy
013here's our history we try to bring you facts the facts are very simple we this district has proposed six point seven five percent levy in two thousand six two thousand seven the tax rate was nineteen dollars and forty cents but the tax rate only went up by five five percent at that point zero five percent you can see the trend except for that one year and that was the budget that was developed right before i came but it was also right around the time where they've taken gas wells off the roll but in general everything from 2016 to the present is our budget and here's the biggest thing even with all of our budgets we have also completely just about completed a 94 million dollar first project and that's what happened to the tax rates
014and we projected them to go up we have approved the 124 million and if we continue this trend we are getting state money and lowering taxes and i think that's the best any district can do to the point i am hopeful that we steven beat that number because my number one goal and i think katie knows it is that number should become the lowest tax rate in the southern tier bar none even lower than watkins glen which is in the number one place hopefully that's what we want to try to continue to do thank you katie all yours so overall after all the adjustments and additions that were made to the budget this year we have a proposed budget to the community of 88 million 470 543 which is an increase of 2.8 million dollars
015or 3.3 percent this budget includes all contractual obligations of our collective bargaining agreements it includes all of our expected debt service maintains all of our programs and some additions that we've talked to with the board along the way to fund the budget we have our tax items in our state aid that we spoke of earlier tax items is a little bit different than that levy change we saw earlier because it includes a slight ten thousand dollar increase in our expected pilot payments and then to find out finish balancing our budget we're going to use appropriated reserves from our ers employee benefits reserve and unemployment reserve same levels that we've used the last few years it's a modest amount and still maintain healthy levels in our reserve balances we'll use 630 000 from our debt service
016funds that's money we have set aside to offset the cost of our debt service and um using one million dollars in fund balance which still continues the progression that we've been making over the years of bringing that number down so again 88 million dollar budget 3.3 percent increase reserve history for you our balance as of june 30th 2021 when we closed our books and where the balances stand today the differences that you would see in the balances today is that we have withdrawn the money from the ers reserve to make our december invoice payment but our balances still continue to main be strong and meet the obligations of the district and meet what's laid out in our reserve plan the unassigned fund balance is what we set when we close our books that's our four
017percent of unassigned fund balances allowed by law and the 1 million of sign appropriated fund balance to balance our budget so this budget includes as i mentioned earlier all current educational programs based on the needs and enrollment as of today as things change you know our programs can adjust with it but as things stand today everything is maintained we have additional funds for instructional equipment to continue putting more technology in students hands in maintaining the necessary replacement cycle a pilot program through boces for a middle school alternative ed program a pilot program in-house for girls wrestling and flag football an expansion of our secondary music program we've developed a sustainability plan for the various arp funded positions that tony had presented on back in march we're bringing a speech teacher back from boces so they
018have a in district full-time speech teacher we're contracting with both arnot and guthrie hopefully next year to have expanded athletic trainer services at our athletic events and we've allocated funds for high school lunch periods for student coverage as we continue our tag team we will be asking the community of horseheads to come out to act upon three propositions that the board has discussed proposition one would be the adoption of the 22 23 budget as we've just presented over the various two and a half months as the proposition reads and then also annually to keep our bus fleet in top shape and moving forward the purchase of the buses of course that is to acquire um seven full-size buses and one four-wheel drive transportation vehicle at a maximum aggregate cost of 1.4 million dollars which is
019offset by the five-year bonding and the state aid and then as we i think i got one more proposition number three as we're trying to be good financial stewards we've used capital reserves in the past for project number one and project number two and now we need to establish a capital reserve fund so that if the district has surpluses at the end of the each year we can try to offset that community local component for any third project needed to fully overhaul the entire district which is the final of the three planned projects and then it would be on to upkeep or any additional projects in the future which that's a long way off but we want to make sure we do good financial planning for it so there's the proposition for that all of
020these propositions only need simple majority to pass 50 percent of the vote plus one and that would be heading off to our election day vote on the 17th of may also on the 17th of may is the board of education election up this year are for three seats these three seats are up for elections and we've had four candidates that filed applications and the draw was held at nine o'clock yesterday morning in the order that they will appear on the ballots the candidates are daniel christmas osfar ozzy farooqi liz odell wheeling and marion holleran corbett the candidates forum will be on thursday may 5th following the 6 pm public hearing here in the auditorium with the public hearing going first in the candidates forum immediately following the public hearing that is basically the presentation of
021the budget at this point is there any questions or any discussion from the board um so going over the actual budget and as i'm seeing my time being able to use this sunset with my newbie card time um the boces there are some significant increases in boces i assume central data processing is due to the extra technology being brought on but it looks like both season capital expense curriculum and also um occupational education has gone up by a significant amount of money is there a reason for that yeah we've discussed this several times in our previous presentations over the past two and a half months boces cost for cte as well as the new pattern and platform for it technology have had seen significant increases one is boces has lost a number of students and
022that drives up the cte cost as well as the new formatting to try to maximize aid for the district is going under a new leadership of instructional technology mr steve andrus who was just brought in in the middle of the year and that is major budget adjustments for everybody and in one of those presentations tom you talked about you know having that conversation with boces is that something you see as a trend as far as advocating for us um it's going to be a trend with boces because as people develop services across 21 districts we have one of the three largest shares so if we may not even buy into the service we still have a larger share that we have to contribute as a collaborative of the boces program okay okay and then my
023last question um with the property tax report card with the line saying the adjusted restricted fund balance um column d saying the actual 2122 is 15 million 609 which was reflected but then listing the estimated 2223 at 7 million was there a reason for that reduction that comes from um with a successful project vote we allocated 10 million to the project we can move 10 million from the reserve to the capital fund which is offset by our year-end projection of what we think we're going to be able to fund in the new capital reserve if it's approved oh okay yeah it's it's a time it's a timing thing of the reserves and what how we're required to report it on the report card making this like a snapshot yeah just a projection okay it's like
024one of the things on the report card is look at enrollment the enrollment projection is i think 35.83 for this year well actually we're at 38.72 what it is they don't count pre-k and they don't count all the students that are district students that are out placement so they have a specific calculation which if we go by our actual enrollment right now our actual enrollment is 38.82 which is a little bit bigger we've got about an increase of three which means we're no longer going down but what's hidden and people don't realize is that we have an extra 100 students on homeschooling still because of kovid so if those hundred students which we do project to be back soon we normally have a hundred we have about 200 in home school if those hundred come
025back we've increased by 102 students over our past which is a sign of potential prosperity and growth in the district for our population yes oh you can look at i will give you the microphone right here you don't even know what i'm going to say being a horse ed's proud horseheads resident for going on 44 years now 44 budgets and taxes and so forth this is just wonderful wonderful does not seem like the appropriate adjective it's beyond wonderful and also seeing that we are not cutting projects we are not cutting program we are not cutting staff at the same time and then the list towards the end of your presentation of some new things that are being added extra help for the middle schoolers who need some extra care the athletic trainers having my own
026children who played sports plus the enhancement of this capital project and what our district is looking like these days thank you thank you katie and your staff and dr douglas and the administrators and everybody that put this together i just think it's phenomenal bravissimo thank you very much mr johnson you want my mic pretty good really loud tonight um i want to piggyback on what marianne said because i think this is the snowball effect that we've wanted for a while our our district valuation has been going up steadily um and then i think all of us saw like what cornine had done with their facilities they moved way beyond where we were at and they became a very serious rival to new families move into the area whether they would move into corning or move
027in here i think particularly under your leadership dr douglas what you've done is we you know we we invest in the facilities we did all the groundwork everything we needed to do to get this ball rolling i think the the public the community has noticed and i think that's paying off in dividends in terms of people now investing here people want to come to horse heads now see what these new facilities end up looking like which i believe will be on par what you know with what corning has if not exactly we're going to be better well i don't want to be too much of a homer but um but i think i think there might have been some fear before of like our high school is fine our test scores are great like ours
028our faculty is amazing do we really need like top-line facilities and i think this is the answer is yes yes we do we needed this investment we needed because it it this lifts all the boats you know this this work and i think you know dr douglas you've been a great leader in all this and you have that i don't know enthusiasm for the capital project and and the finances here um that have really elevated our game here and so i appreciate your leadership and katie's um trying to pull all this together and she has to work with me well and i give her full credit for that um le i do have one question um on the proposition for the buses it's not directly relevant to the wording but uh we all i think
029saw that the budget now has electric well uh emissions-free buses zero emissions by the start of 2027. is that going to start with this purchase or no not yet we're not ready here's one thing actually i'm going to be taking an impromptu trip to ithaca tomorrow because an electric bus company is setting up a demo of buses they're shipping to texas and they're taking a stop to let us know about their great services and that they'll help us with this we're going to have to proceed cautiously on that there are several reasons the zero mission is the right intent the hard part for school districts especially in what's considered upstate or rural upstate we have a 269 square mile district versus downstate where some of the districts are one square mile five square miles you
030can see the differences that an electric vehicle especially the size of a bus has to travel over a five square mile or maybe 20 miles to compete with 20 different schools versus horse heads that has to do 268 during the day and then maybe send buses out to binghamton norwich and so forth the capacity for the buses is very limited i would have wished that they would have said hey we will get to a percentage by this year another percentage up to say 80 or 85 percent and keep some of the fossil fuels and i'm probably be upsetting people i'm not trying to but the reality is our buses have to go up mountains and electric buses lose their load and charge especially over miles i don't ever want to say we can't go pick
031somebody up because the bus won't make it up the hill or we can't go somewhere because the bus will die before it gets to there and we'll have to pull off to a bus service center or another school district and they just happen to have different charging systems than ours because there's no unified charging system those are things as we met yesterday that are probably going to be amended and amended over the next five to seven years once the legislature understands that best intentions have to be well thought out not just done from january until now and say everybody's going to comply keeping politics out of it a lot of politicians especially western new york said climate change whether they believe it or not is one thing but going a hundred percent electrified buses is
032a wonderful noble ideal but when we get the electricity from coal-fired plants in all of western new york from pennsylvania how is that addressing the environment i think they're going to have to find some type of balance over the time so i think that's not part of this purchase we need to talk and consult and it's probably one or two years three years down the road we may invest in one or two and see how that happens but here's the other part we're about to put in a three million dollar parking lot for the bus garage the state requires 15 years before you can touch it again so how do i put that in which i'm i'm obligated to do now because we're closing out the project and we have to be done by december
033it goes this summer and then come in and put electrify electrification all throughout the parking lot because i have to break it all up and yet the state won't give me aid to put back down the parking lot those are some of the things they never thought about and there's probably 40 or 50 school districts that are doing that this year so if we can do it slow and steady we might be able to do the perimeters at first because you can get to those areas it needs to be well thought out we're going to take a wait and see but we're doing our homework now but here's the other thing and this it's good that you brought up that question seven full-size school buses they're about a hundred and forty hundred fifty thousand apiece
034seven full-size electric school buses are going to be 350 to 450 each supposedly the state is going to pay for all of it i've never seen the state pay for everything so patience is probably the better part of valor here thank you just briefly because i know we talked about the budget in depth at our uh budget hearing the other night but i just want to echo the comments of my fellow board members i think it's a very um fiscally prudent budget i'm i'm proud that we're able to add additional funds for programs across the spectrum of whether educational uh extracurricular athletic we're able to maintain an ad and at in a way that will you know thankfully because of the financial viability of the district will actually reduce the the ultimately the rate for
035residents so i think it i just echo the the commendation for for you dr douglas and for for katie and everyone that's worked on this and i you know i appreciate the faith that the community has had in us in terms of the support for previous budgets and the support for our capital projects and i certainly think this is a very very strong budget and a very fiscally prudent one so you know i'm very supportive of it thank you others i'll bring you a mic so ladies and gentlemen one last time i put this one up because i've never been able to put something up like this and these we we pride ourselves in and i know katie tries to hold me back at times but we pride herself and i pride myself to having
036katie do the diligence of the check when she came to me today and she said you got to see this and she looked and she's like i can't believe this so i'm thinking i made a mistake then she had and parasolo jacket no and even then it was let's call our tax collector and make sure we didn't miss anything all three of them came up with these numbers and that's based on most of the assessments are in we're just going through assessment challenge time but this is what katie has done she's tried to call them and there's not many people challenging their assessments so there's not a likelihood that this is going to change much if anything more assessments will be finalized and it will potentially press it even farther down and that's been our
037history i'm very proud of katie and her team my team because we pride ourselves on trying to make sure we tell the truth and we pride ourselves not trying to hype something and not have it come through and as you can see from this each time over the seven years we've said these same exact projections and except for 1819 1920 they still went down they just didn't go down as far but they were always within our conservative estimate or beyond like i think last year we estimated that it might go down negative two it ended up going down almost four percent so you know for most school districts in this area look at at the public hearing we're going to be putting up corning's tax rate we're going to be putting up elmira's elmira heights
038if this district taxed at those levels that you're going to see we'd have an extra 30 40 million dollars a year in horse sets and we don't need to do that but just imagine if we did have that what could be done for our community what could be done for our kids but the good part is we do it less than everybody else and still have some of the top if not the top outcomes so ladies and gentlemen are we ready to move on to the board meeting and adopt this budget that concludes our presentation i want to thank everybody for their help and we will put this in the trust of the horseheads community after the vote thank you oh did i do that i don't know if i did that i think i
039did just the dates real quick may 5th is the public hearing as well as the board candidate for them immediately following and tuesday may 17th the district-wide budget vote and board of education elections in the high school south gym 7 a.m to 9 9pm absentee ballots are available under application by contacting ms terry clark thank you ladies and gentlemen thank you dr douglas and katie for the presentation um dr douglas you had mentioned you know how we stack up against the other local districts and we we are very favorable we saw the numbers a couple nights ago and it's pretty remarkable that the many dollars differential between horseheads and and most of the other communities the other thing that's pretty amazing too is you'd showed the chart of the last 15 years and you know
04015 years ago where 19.40 our tax rate if you took a very modest two percent increase and kind of went 15 years out we should be in the 24 25 range per per thousand and which is which which is similar to the other district it really is and and we're going to be below 17 which is is just tremendous because 2 percent really doesn't sound terrible sometimes and and um but where we were 15 years ago if you would have just done a modest two percent it'd be 25 bucks so it's pretty incredible appreciate all the hard work everybody to put this together and uh it was certainly a nice surprise to see the final numbers tonight so thank you for the presentation and the good news we move on to item six the report
041from the superintendent i have given the best report i think possible for tonight but i wanted to provide time for not only katie but my other colleague mr tony gill my assistant superintendent to go over some of the things that we are doing now to start addressing some of our summer learning as well as heading into next year and some of our curriculum development mr gill thank you dr douglas uh yeah so i'm just going to mention a couple things that we have in the hopper and things that we're working on uh give some regular updates to our work uh one large piece of the work we're doing right now is our summer learning academy you would have heard us talking about the set-aside money and the grant money required uh we've been meeting regularly
042with um today we actually met with some um some teacher input we met with some and feedback from what prior who should we prioritize in this work as much as we want to open it up to as many students as possible to try to get into our doors during the summer to do this work we do have certain parameters when it comes to facilities and the way we have the buildings that we have accessible so we really want to make sure we have a clear you know idea of who we want to invite and um working with rich today you know thinking about who we're going to the transportation side of it because we know that often in the summer that's one of the biggest barriers to students attending a summer program is how do
043i get my kid there it's a half day program so we've removed that barrier for at least two years of this grant we're currently working on the parameters to who to invite and then as we go through that process we're looking at a very strong ela and math intervention but we also want to bring in all special areas we're excited to think about what what pe and working with charles on you know bringing in pe and some kind of the recess time and play within their learning we're talking about k through six students uh sixth grade uh engaged in this um throughout the about four weeks during the summer so we're in the stage right now where i would guess when the next two weeks we'll be going out to our staff and asking and
044expecting some some staff members to step up and support this program and to work obviously with compensation and to to do that work with our students and we'll be working with them on the curriculum we'll get the site supervisor we'll start getting things mike and i even just walking in today coughlin we're talking about where the locations are and all the logistics that will need to happen so very exciting work happening in that this is a program that is very similar to what we were able to offer as a district several years ago this is not a new program to the district it used to be a title grant funded money where students students that were called summer learning academy that were identified by the state assessments would be offered this opportunity however it didn't
045have the transportation and it didn't have a lot of what we're able to offer this time around with this grant funded money with success we'll have to think about the sustainability and that's how we continue this program into the future the main point of the program however for these next two years is to really consider those experiences that students lost in the last two years and how do we address what those experiences and how do we make sure that we're moving our students forward successfully we have plenty of data sets and things that we're looking at and teacher observations to help with that work uh and to determine uh how to best move forward so great input from our enl crew our rti team and our uh school psychs to really try to qualify that
046the type of student we would want to make sure we get there so that work is ongoing like i said next couple weeks we'll get that uh we'll start staffing that or at least canvassing and invites for the students we want after that priority is done we might look at other opportunities of space and what other enrichment activities can we offer but as you know our first priority is to address learning and those that are struggling the most so that's that work there i do i did bring briefly just bring up state assessments one just mentioned we did have our ela and we have our math state assessments going on right now it's been a hiatus from this for the three through eight uh we're projected to have the regions back in place in june
047um big change in our ela and math and the three through eight is we're going computer-based testing um we've we've had it at the seven eight and the five six for a couple of years now uh this is the first year we're moving down to grades three and four on these assessments and on the on the computer-based it's coinciding in a nice time period to which we're enhancing the technology usage with our students and the technology in their hands there's going to be some bumps and we i've often said from this podium that you know this is a one-shot measure of a of a teacher and the students and how they do in that class is a snapshot and it's not the end-all be-all of what we do with our students assessments happen every day
048and are continually happening with our teachers this just provides us an accountability measure and a nice good idea where we stand as a group and traditionally horses we've done wonderfully in this these assessments but the shift to cvt i'd be remiss to say some people are just making sure everything gets off all right and making sure it works okay so i think we're in good hands with uh we have sean mcdonough and bill giancoley leading that up and working with the principals to ensure success so computer-based testing and math happens next week in three through eight we've also been selected you recall previous years we've been selected to do field testing for the state to determine what tests they might questions they might take we've been again tagged to do some field testing we will
049comply and go along with that to assist and try to make it a minimal impact to our students day but i know that was a large conversation we've had in the past our big conversation uh the other heavy thing that's going into the summer is our curriculum work of course we've been allocated lots of additional money as well to support extra curriculum work to identify units of study to help students and teachers and instruction of students that might have had some missed opportunities these past two years uh really we're gonna we're gonna continue on with our ela and math it's important to remember that a couple years ago i i we talked about ela and math being on a three year to five year track lining up with the state assessment change with covid everything
050got bumped right every state assessment has not been uh they changed those dates we're still on track um we did take us you know the capacity to do the work did dwindle during covet it was just a fact that we talked about during our meetings here that we need to pick that back up our um with the addition of two instructional sport coaches that we had a couple years back and tiffany and kelly and the our instructional team we are kick-starting that and moving it forward quite quickly so our ela and our math work specifically in the in the primary and elementary levels is being kickstarted this summer we are opening up pe and looking at our physical education one thing that we hold very true and tight is that it's not gym class it's
051physical education it's lifelong learning how to be healthy and so we're making sure we meet that standard as far as our education and the professionals that we have teaching those courses we find the same thing in our music education classes it's not banned it's music education and we look to promote music education and the lifelong learning that goes with that so music as well we'll have some work intensive work this summer to understand the curriculum design and uh to continue their work pe will be new and charles will be working with tiffany and her team on that kelly and the special ed is making sure that we're gonna have a continuum and we're lock and step with general ed it's a great partnership we have happening uh that we're very proud of to make sure
052that our all students are having this experience something we hold very true in this district all students uh moving forward and the vision that we have to provide these opportunities and so the continuing of work that they're doing and then the sel i've mentioned this before the social emotional learning and the work that they're doing and looking at behavioral academic and social emotional assistance and as a the board has been uh generous to offer those social of the the social workers masters level and now we have them in each of our buildings to really move that work to the forefront and that also will be included in our summer academy we're actually going to imp with those students that we're inviting that are having you know academic issues primarily not to discount the social emotional
053so we'll have social emotional aspect to that work as well this summer so that's kind of a a quick capture i know sometimes if i talk too much about my passion of curriculum instruction i start to see some glazed over and that's the it's it's i want to make sure that i'm addressing and your guy you're getting what you need and they have any questions so i make sure i address them but those oh there's one other exciting piece of work of course we're doing right now and that's capital project design groups um if you're not familiar we meet with uh all we stakeholders we've been at ridge road uh we met our first group there we met twice now with big flats teams calling in each great certain grade levels the special areas and
054the kitchen group the cafeteria group and talking about design and layout and what they wish and what they wanted to look like we've met with gardner road as well we'll have a second meeting coming with gardner road and a second meeting with ridge road probably will not come until the end of the year or into the fall because of their timeline with the state and we'll of course bring center street what's important here is that we are very cognizant of the cultural aspect we have happening with with center street in the in the future and ensuring that they're part of that so even like for instance at big flats uh we had a team member come in and provide impact uh some feedback on design for big flats classroom that in fact in the project
055wasn't being done at big flats the reason was is that even though we weren't doing a third grade classroom at big flats we're doing a third grade classroom over at ridge road so we better get every third grade teacher the opportunity or at least some feedback loop from every building because it starts to set the precedent of what all the third grade classrooms might look like so we have to even though their building's not being touched right away in the current project we want to make sure we're getting that feedback now from all groups so some great feedback some great work being done with uh with hunt and the back and forth conversation to ensure that we design these rooms and we're matching at the same time all this curriculum so they're hand in hand
056we had a unique opportunity as a district when we did the 2030 to say we're going to change the brick and mortar and at the same time we're going to look at the instruction and we're not just going to do the same old thing in the in these new nice rooms that we're going to be cognizant of pairing that and matching that and bringing both standards up yes meeting the standard of corning but maintaining and exceeding our current standard in academics okay now i'm done [Music] questions for tony it's a quick question i know you said for the the summer learning academy yeah you're still working through the process of sort of who would get invited yeah but do you have a and if you said this and i missed it i apologize do you
057have a general idea of how many students it might serve great question so in the k-6 environment we're really trying to focus on smaller class sizes if we can get 10 to 15 in the class i think we have there's much more remediation and assistance that can happen and the student doesn't get lost if we're able to secure 10 to 12 rooms but you know the math involved we're hoping to hit over 150 students k through 6. so it's going to be a difficult task we are to to prioritize because of course we want to open our doors to as many as possible i think adding on that tony is also we have to have the instructional staff to do it yeah what's really nice is we've been having discussions with our hta and they
058have said that many people are interested so once we know uh we're relying on our staff to help bring our students along and we look forward to them stepping forward we know that this is something they very much want yeah yeah i appreciate that and obviously i know it's complicated in terms of the logistics for the locations and it's great that what you said dr douglas about the support from the the teachers uh and you know if we can reach that many students that's that'll be really impactful so that's great thank you yes i just want to say that i'm so happy to hear that the summer learning academy is on its way because when we did the tours of the schools back in march i believe it was and then had the after school
059chats with the teachers that was a really strong concern of theirs because of the gaps the children had because of covet and it sounds like you are well on your way to planning that and i'm just really glad that it's going to be happening for our children thank you and we did have all intent you know it was going to happen last year but then construction a lot of things barriers presented themselves and it was unfortunate but um i'm hopeful that we have sustainability in this it was a successful program in the past and even if we're just serving 50 students that need it through a process it's it does us as a system well with respect to the computerized testing of the children in grade school yeah were there any complications things that you're
060going to have to be aware of in the future did the students respond well to it or were they better with pen and pencil so um this is um we have some trend history prior to covid with our our middle school and is starting this process um i i think one thing that we're gonna have to see is and everybody's wondering and we've been talking about the keyboarding skills right and what keyboarding skills looks like at those lower age we you know we try not to age appropriateness of screen time is an ongoing conversation um as easy as it is to hand the kid a ipad and say keep yourself busy there's there's a screen time appropriateness in our classrooms but there's also a need to teach the computer skills required to go through that
061so we've had simulations all year available for teachers to give to their students to go through the simulations or you know various forms of the simulations i should say to prep for this the one thing that there's a wonder to be honest is on the use of a finger on the touch screen and how that how that plays out we've the part two of the math might require some of that but there's also a tool within the program that allows you to draw the shape so it's kind of like you could use a finger but you can also use the shape so that's one of the conversations we're having is the keyboard and the use of the stylus and is that something that needs to happen our early input says no as far as the
062stylus the computer program this past year we have implemented a back to a very basic keyboarding program back into our classrooms and we're going to keep continuing that work in our in our earlier grade levels with the understanding of how do we work that without too much screen time so keyboarding and stylus use are the wonders we don't have results as this test hasn't been offered in quite some time but it was important for me enough to put it on the radar to to wonder how what these results might look like and to keep in mind they're just a snapshot of one day of our work for you know 40 minutes or i can tell you that the ela first some grade levels had a lot of extra time they took the students took more
063time that's the biggest thing across the state is the state does the right idea of putting the concept into place but they don't necessarily have the real-time data and all school districts were saying it just took more time than the regular pen paper and pencil but i also believe it like many of my colleagues is it's because it's still new and they're still trying to figure out how to do it it's like tony's saying with the stylist or pulling a drop down for a square or a triangle each are correct but if the students don't know how to do the drop down or the teachers didn't know how to do their drop down when do we teach that learning and it's sort of like warren you know when you were teaching social studies all of
064a sudden that extra question would come out that nobody would expect it's the same thing but you've got to go through the cycle and many years i think it will become very standard hats so to speak but it's still a ways away yeah so you have a new idea of how to do the assessment cbt as tom says you have the the wonder on the the the level um of um student engagement in that task after covid and their their resiliency to do that task is a question that's out there as well and then i can say on the tech side the actual administration of the assess is spot on we like it because it's much quicker and more efficient and and the work to be able to get a student to be able to
065take the test you know the process is strong it's now how do we appropriately build to that without teaching to the test because that's something we're always conscious of as well because of that one's not a snapshot of this test so if i understood um the the test took longer did did everybody finish it or students are provided not the time there is no time limit we gave them plenty of time but the longer it goes it can frustrate people especially when they only expected maybe an hour hour and a half and it wasn't all grade levels this was the ela assessment we just found certain grade levels a student took sometimes you know three hours to complete it where in the past it might have been 40 minutes and there's the wonder was it
066the assessment itself was it the postcovid you know stamina uh issue was it the new technology there's there was wonders that go into that okay and could i have one other question um with the academy the summer academy is there in i don't know what the right word here is is there a selection process where you filter people out or how does that work i mean how do we select the students that we are going to service yeah that's i was referencing how we've gotten some input from some key stakeholder groups that are involved in their daily work with students as well as with our principals to determine how do we rubric this how do we determine you know who's selected it's it's not an easy task we have to consider first of all we
067have processes of like a sim process to which a student a teacher can recommend a student into a process to get remediation or get additional help right your student intervention teams so we have that to look at and plenty of data sets look there we have our rti teachers who do their their records their running records their their daily work and assessments with a certain group of students that don't get they could pull out services or maybe push in same with our enl team so where we have some solid you know like aims web data and running records and some solid data sets as well as the teacher narrative from who they think is struggling in their classroom social emotionally or academic our difficult task ahead is to how do we prioritize and how do
068we invite select you know because the capacity and the resources available so i don't have we don't have conversation happen this morning our brainstorm to kind of figure out what criteria we're going to look to first to determine qualifying factors i don't have an answer but those are some of the conversations we had we also talked about attendance we also thought about 100 remote learners and are they a struggling population right now what does the data set say on them um what do current report cards say so lots of what ifs and none of the people at the table want to discount a student but resources dictate we have to prioritize okay thank you thank you tony uh just on uh some of the other areas just to keep the border prize some of the
069things we're looking at um in the sort of the year to come we're looking at some advanced course at the middle school we're looking at possibly fundraising and trying to minimize it for educational opportunities to make sure every student and this is something that superintendents across the region have been discussing we sometimes have students that are in our district that maybe we have like a senior trip or a junior trip or an activity that some students don't participate because they may not have the funds and they may not say anything but as superintendents we are looking at it as there is educational benefit for students that are in our communities to sometimes get out of our communities to see the educational opportunities that a lot of kids get say like from a senior trip or
070a senior ball a junior ball that are immeasurable to the student's life and we're struggling with that so i want the board to understand that we are trying to talk as a region of how we can possibly make sure that our general fund ensures that all students have certain basic opportunities and it's not about fundraising and so forth my gut is the board would certainly understand that i think our community would probably appreciate that because often times we send a box of chocolates to grandma 24 times a year or pizzas or coronations or i know what are the red ones mrs holler the flowers that come out geraniums so i know i got to buy them in another couple weeks but what happens is we put immense pressure on people and sometimes the students don't
071come forth because they don't know who to go to and as much as we can i think we owe it to our community to try to broaden the horizons of all no different than from the state we want to broaden the horizons of everybody with food insecurity and i'm hoping that the state is going to go through with the universal food program as the federal government will be bringing it to an end at the end of this year in addition we want to explore some potential options of financial literacy uh in our business department so these are some of the things that just like i drive kd nuts i have to drive tony nuts too so as we go through it we will be starting to set some of those planks to move forward in
072the coming of the year but we may need also the board support to possibly codify it as potential requirements so as we do those studies we'll bring more back from the board but with this budget we have a lot of opportunities but that doesn't mean the opportunities just stop and we're ready to move to next year so just some of the things to keep an eye on that we're working on and after tonight if we get out in time our first girls flag football program is having their first practice tonight so please join me and go out to the field thank you all great thank you for the updates we move on to the president's report item seven tonight there was no audit committee this past month so i'll turn over to doug for the
073policy committee update okay we met on april 7th we tabled the diversity equity and inclusion policy for at least one more meeting we'll hopefully bring that forward in the near future otherwise we reviewed class rank and a whole slew of special ed policies we had a legal review of virtually all these policies and there was no need except for one to put forward any revisions or changes so we'll be bringing forth uh 43 21.4 independent evaluation educational evaluations as the first reading tonight with some changes but everything else was found to be appropriate in its current form great thanks for the update looks like a busy meeting so thank you move on to it i'm eight tonight the finance items for action uh it's recommended that the board approve finance items 8.02 up to 8.25
074can i have a motion second any questions comments concerns on any of the items tonight doug okay um i'll need a little bit of time here but first of all i've got a question for katie and i'm sorry i didn't pull you aside earlier on the 8.06 budget transfers report um there is a print shop charge there is that the boces print shop i assume it is but under um this is the first set of chart uh changes yes it is both in screenshot okay so with that then i will need to abstain uh well i have to abstain on sorry i should have this memorized at this point 8.09 which is the boces administrative budget my salary and benefits are directly in that budget so it would be a conflict of interest for me
075to vote on that and then to avoid the appearance of propriety as a boces employee i'm going to stand on 8.06 and 8.08 and 8 10 i think are all the boces related items thank you thank you doug any other questions or comments [Applause] okay hearing none all those in favor say aye aye any of you say nay any abstentions besides the four that doug mentioned 806 808 809 and 810 any other extensions okay great thank you move on to item nine tonight the um personnel items fraction it's recommend the board approve item 9.02 the hr recommendations need a motion questions or comments a 9.02 okay all those in favor say aye aye aye aye paul say nay and the abstentions thank you move on to miscellaneous items for action tonight under section 10. we
076have items 10.02 up to 10.05 we need board action so need a motion so move second any questions or comments on any of those four items doug again as opposed to the employee i would have conflict of interest in voting for boces board members so i will abstain on that item understand on that one yep any other questions comments all in favor say aye aye any opposed say nay and any abstentions besides doug on 10.03 okay great we'll move on to item 12. under the board policies we have only one item there for first reading which requires no action any comments or questions for the policy committee on that [Applause] okay move on to item 13 board member comments this evening warren go ahead did the um middle school intermediate school cafeteria open yes it
077did all right could you come up to the microphone please thank you i do i i think it's a good thing we should share good oh i was about to share something too go ahead i'm scared but uh that we uh we did open up monday for and you know kind of chaos at first you know first of all you got that ag kids for the first time but to see the smile on her face see him walking through you know that's what we do it for and um hats off to the food staff because i've already heard from multiple students walking around that the menu that we're providing you know we were in a temp kitchen let's be honest you know it's like getting at sugar creek but it's a great food out there
078but just all positive things you know we're working them out we used it for a couple other things but as of monday morning after break as we said they were back in there and uh the fondest thing was to see it tuesday morning which i'm going to get tore up because i cancel facilities for snow so i'm going to beat mr douglas i wasn't even going to bring that up um and i'm glad we didn't get it but it really warranted a lot going back tuesday morning to fix a few things that we walked into that were normal to come in so yeah we're open uh i would challenge anyone or they're up there maybe a board can get out to see it but the faces the kids to hear what they're talking about it
079was it was good all good to help you understand i have a 12 year old uh that is in seventh grade there and i've absolutely went on vacation came back everything else started to hit me forgot about it opening up and boy did i catch it when i got home because my son always brings his lunch because he was not happy trying to get certain food because it was a different environment like you said and he went in he was so mad because he brought lunch and they had pizzas and everybody was talking about the pizzas they're hot they're new they're fresh there's many pizzas um they're triangular they're triangular too they've got cuts yes uh and so he dumped his lunch and started all of a sudden ringing up food on the pay school
080account which we haven't used in a while and it said i'd owed money so that's how i found out and then the next day while i was thinking about facilities he called me and said they don't have hamburgers now my kid doesn't eat a hamburger to save his life unless it's plain but he said dad everybody was buying doubles and triples they ran out so that's what we are hearing from the kids and we knew that it's it's similar to what happened at the high school when it opened up covet has taken a whole different tone because of different things and different avenues but once we start reopening the high school sees so many different things i even heard from teachers they have a salad bar for us and it's not just for the teachers
081the kids have the salad bar they can go up in the middle school it's a little more open than the intermediate school but in each of our cafeterias as we plan these this is what is going to start happening i think going back to doug's comment it's sort of like the field of dreams if you build it they will come food service especially if you build an upgrade they will come and i think they're experiencing from the past to the future and we're starting to see it so without busting on mr coughlin anymore he is a wonderful person he is not mother nature and i am not either but he would have been more popular with all all my son's friends because they probably would have gotten a two-hour delay because i was also caught
082it for that too so but i hope everybody remembers right now we have a four day memorial weekend so that will hopefully save me hopefully that helps warren thank you i have a question about the um the opening of the gym with is that occurring or how is that scheduled go ahead i was thinking of the same all gems are pretty much open back up did report in my updates to you guys at the elementary as we as soon as the coveted rules changed we were able to do it middle school as the last one we've turned back over half of the large gym for the is which was a blessing for them uh we're still working on the stage a little bit you know we still got covered stuff to go with it so
083we took part of the gym which i got a very nice email from the music department which i met on monday up there to look so one small portion on the high school side we still have a temp kitchen in there i got to get it out i got fixed the floor um with that being said we were able to you know there's 60 kids doing band that's what i set it up for tuesday morning and uh we've been able to take the portion using the hard doors and they're set up and uh it really opened it up so fizz that in the chances to the gyms yep they're able to utilize them a little bit more with the exception of the little temp kitchen area we're fortunate to have them hard folding doors so
084we partitioned it off for safe i worked today trying to get a contractor in we got to you know get rid of it and save some of that equipment so there's some work we'll put focus on getting that space back over i think also going a little forward on i think some of your intent the question mr adams is that we're trying to be as open as possible and one of the areas that mike has tried very hard is in our area of our pool not only our gyms like big flats basketball outside communities we're seeing more and more of them now being able to get access but our pool was not able to and it wasn't because it wasn't available it is simply because there are no lifeguards out there trained at this point
085i know we're doing summer cohesion we're starting to see some of that i know mike is just starting to open it up i think it's starting to open up for morning swims for our community this morning 5 30 this morning pool was open for public swim along with others so that was something not even an update earlier in the week we were finalizing some lifeguards proper supervision where it works so you're starting to see us returning as much as possible to normal as long as the state doesn't get away we will we are open continuing to bring stuff back to rooms as they want to we try to get it back so thank you stay there you don't need that what happens to the equipment in the temporary kitchen can is there a demand for
086auction for that or that just goes well to the kitchen graveyard we we have a combination of stuff we have stuff we've borrowed from corning that we'll need to go back to them that we hung on to uh through bow season kind of a share joe kilmer work that out that uh i've reached out to the you know do they still want it back and where it'll go uh we have stuff from elmira city school district when they were doing kitchens we borrowed that we'll go back and we have some that we salvaged out of um our kitchens when we demo to set up a temp kitchen i really want to wrap our head around we're about ready to get into the elementary cafeterias and there will have to be some way of doing some
087type of temp stuff so joe mr kilmer and i are working right now what we want to save i there may be one or two things we'll look at auctions that'll go with that but i don't want to really give it away right yet yeah we have to with the elementary plans that are coming because we will have some kitchen work in each of them and we are in the process of trying to get that timeline just so the board knows we are either shooting for the end of june or the july meeting for the official timeline to come out on how we are going to do the next project because that timeline sets when center street closes when we have to move things around and how we are going to be able to try
088to build three elementaries as i've already told the board and several out in the community there's no way we can build three elementaries all at once so we have to pick what we can and that's what welliver and hunt are working on in that timeline once that's established starts our whole process that should be i'm pretty much estimating the july meeting any other comments or questions from the board go ahead just just quickly if you'll indulge me i i just wanted to echo you know the comments about the cafeterias i've got a fifth grader who and a eighth grader you know blown away by the new cafeteria and then also at the middle school i've one of my sophomore who would never uh buy lunch is like your son dr douglas and now buys lunch
089every day and so and i think you know the folks that work in the cafeterias that tend to be an underappreciated group right and they work really hard and that's such an important kind of common space for for the building and uh so it's really a wonderful improvement and the only one thing negative i would say if any if joe kilmer is listening is i did get a complaint that there was a lack of chicken tenders the other day so maybe they were a popular meal item i don't know but amelia i told you i'd ask about the chicken tenders so there you go somebody's ordering triples thank you any other questions comments thank you board i really good questions tonight and great answers too good to hear everything's opening back up so we'll move
090on to item 14 we just need a motion to it during the meeting second all in favor say aye aye any opposed say nay we're good to go ladies and gentlemen that concludes the regular board of education meeting for april and the adoption of the 2223