001So in a second, Dennis, all in favor? Aye. Motion carries. We will send in to the pledge of the flag. By the legions to be applied, the United States Army and the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Anyone that would like to speak to the board on any item they will be voting on the meeting, we can roll right onto our first presentation on the record. So that was where NYSERDA has been doing a study for us to meet some of the state requirements and then also provide valuable data to the state regarding the district's ability to meet the electric bus mandate of 2035. They're providing some of this data and research for other districts as well in the area. So they're here to present
002on their findings. And this has been over the course of the last calendar year, just to talk about our capacity, future planning, financial potential costs. Yeah. And is there anywhere in particular you'd like us to stand for recording or for your purposes? If you do come slightly this way, that owl will look your way by your voice. Oh. You need to look at each other. Okay, thank you. Yeah, we can go to the museum today. So I'll start. My name is Katherine Eckham. I'm with the main point of contact and project manager on this project. We all work very closely with Josh a lot of the time. Thank you very much, Josh. Jeffrey as well. James Hart and Eric Wood also assist in us in a lot of the data collection. So just a shout
003out to all the coordination from the... I'm John Averill. I'm the principal in charge on the project coming over at Wendell. And I'm the director of alternative fuels, which basically means anything that doesn't deal with gasoline or diesel. So compressed natural gas, propane, hydrogen fuels, and battery electric all fall into my area of expertise. My role in the project is to make sure the team had everything they needed to make sure they gave a quality product to you. And then we also have Miles Willis, who was a technical lead. He actually went to the high school, but he was just, you know, taking anyway, so it's okay, but you might see him within here at some point. Yeah, so just a very brief, for those of you who don't know who we are, we're an
00485-year-old company. The shed in the bottom is where we started in New York, in the back of the own. property. We're now 300 employees across 16 offices across the country. As far west as Phoenix, as far south as Atlanta, and north to Minnesota. We have a strong presence in the transportation sector. We've been doing transportation for many years. We do a lot of public transit. We're one of the recognized leading architecture firms in transit in the country. Wendell Lobos are our offices across, and as you can tell, in New York State. we have quite the presence. We also have a lot of experience in alternative fuels. We've been doing alternative fuels since the early 90s. We started with battery electric buses in transit in 2010. So we've got a lot of experience in these vehicles
005and what they can and cannot do. Just to recap, I'm sure you're very well familiar with the Zero Emission Custom Elevator. July 1st, according to the law in New York State, July 1st, 2027, all new school buses must be zero emission. Zero emission by definition from the state means zero tailpipe emissions. The only two types of vehicles that qualify for that are hydrogen fuel cell buses and battery electric. And there are no currently partially available hydrogen fuel cell buses for the school market. So that leaves battery electric at this point for school vehicles. The other major piece of that is by 2035, 100% of all school buses on the road need to be battery electric or zero emission. They have just recently, last budget, added some additional information, which means there's two waivers now available
006to the 2027 deadline. You can apply for two two-year waivers, first two-year waiver. The how you would do this and what it means isn't going to be coming out until December. New York State Education Department framework upon what that actually means. But we do know that to get the second two-year waiver, you will need an FEP, a Fletal Education Plan, which is what we're presenting here to you today. So you do have that. And so that's what we know at this point. The extensions do not extend to the 2035 date, just the 2027 date at this point. Just to quickly go over the scope of work for this project, this was a FlexTech program through NYSERDA, so it was funded through NYSERDA for the majority of the ultimate study. These are just the tasks that
007we will be doing during this meeting, so I'm not going to read through that. So to get us started, all of our assumptions are based off of all of our findings, recommendations are all based off of what you see here, which is a worst-case day, especially for western New York with the temperature. Negative 20 and 20 degrees you can see in the figure that really were these battery battery-electric bus stars equal worth sufficiency, same worth ranges. So that is the temperature that all of our results are based on. We also assume a full bus, full students, max capacity for full week. as well as HVAC usage, so heaters on the buses go a little time as well as preheating the buses 15 minutes at a point that you can go. We really tried to take
008into account the operations of these buses. We also assume that the bus has degraded down to 90%. Just like your smartphone, after you have them for a while, the batteries never last quite as long as it used to. Same as with the batteries in this vehicle, so we assume that there is somewhat of a degradation. as well as best practices for the battery. Two of those are that it's over 10% of its battery limit. So in the figure, you can see there's always that 10% reserve. That's for safety, as well as the battery itself will not allow the battery to go through. We also are not going to be charging the battery over 90% in all of our analyses. That, again, is for best use of the battery itself. It sends the life of the
009battery. And then finally, based on the experience in the transit industry, as John said, we've had a mix of many years now of working with better electric trains. We know that efficiency is not as well on the road where it's going on bridges and hills and bad temperature. Also issues with operational training in terms of driving the bus correctly. So all of those factors defined, we add an additional 11% onto the safety factor on to that efficiency as well. So really worst case. So with that in mind, these are the results of the problem analysis or the feasibility assessment. having the routes be done by battery electric buses. You can see that 79% of the first routes or eight of the routes cannot be completed by battery electric buses. 79% of that can be completed
010and worse, 89% degraded. These eight routes that cannot be completed by battery electric buses are, it's not something that is unique to one product. For the majority of the studies that we're doing, which is at least over 50 in New York State, 50 or 100 of these, I would say about 90% of the districts have routes that cannot be completed by that. We'll be going over them in a little bit more detail. You can see we also have minimum bus sizes that would be required based on the manufacturers that are out there today and the larger sizes needed. We have minimum charger sizes needed based on the course case. So during design, limiting the unique number of both bus types and models as well as charger sizes might go up to the larger size. But
011for the sake of our study, we look at minimum requirements. So for the eight buses with condition increases, this is a list of them here. You can see for the Type C, they all have a route distance of 70 miles. That's either the AM or the DM that we find. But a single route before it's able to charge, they can only go about 70 miles. The largest Type C is currently a 315 kilowatt hour bus, which is for IC. That will have a highest route distance and will be able to go about... 61 miles in our assumption of worst case whole day after being vaccinated. So the minimum types for those are about 361. And then for the type A's, after it reaches about 49 miles, they also are no longer being able to be
012performed by battery electric cars. So with all of the minimum sizes that we are requiring for all eight of these buses, we are anticipating that they will exist or come out with technology before the mandate period is over. We are already seeing all of these bus sizes exist in the transit industry, and we are seeing just in the two or three years we've been working with battery-lifted school buses, the technology and size of the batteries has doubled. So because we anticipated to exist, we are going to carry it through the rest of the study. So we still look at the charter sizes needed for these possible eight placeholder buses. We still have to load our costs of implementing them and the needs for them. But in terms of the study and the route analysis portion,
013they were marked as flags or constraints or not able to occur. And again, many of your states will be seeing the same issue. Many of them seeing a lot more of these routes and some very few are seeing less. Once we do that, we look at the battery size that we need and the time that we have to charge, we come up with what would be anticipated peak demand. This is how much energy would be needed to refill those batteries when they get back to the state with enough energy to do their next routes in the morning. Anticipated peak demand, this school district is 953 KVA. So that would require district side that you do for a double transformer and it's almost always requirement to get a new transformer. And in a lot of cases
014when you look at battery electric buses it's smart to do that anyhow because they're coming out rates specifically for battery plus charge. So needs for evil three phase electric service from the utility of 1500 kVA transformer 1600 and switchboard and then The utilities have basically come out and said, the state has been pushing on the utilities, but the utilities, well, regardless, National Grid, NYSEG, doesn't matter, have come out and said, we need to do a study of our system that we can tell you whether we can, we can't, and what it will cost. And that study will take six months. They want you to issue a work order before they do that study. And then that study, once it's done, is only good for six days. So it's recommended that you don't actually engage with
015them at that level until you're ready to start a project. But we do believe that there is capacity in the feeder. It fails at the feeder, but it passes at the substation. So they have power at the substation. They don't have power in the feeder. So they probably would have to reconductor the feeder to the bus depot to actually get it on power there. But it is doable. It's just we don't have an idea what the cost is, and they won't tell us. This is a great statement. National DREAD has stated that it does fail at the rate it was yesterday, stating that it does fail at the rate it was yesterday. So there will have to be upgrades, but they will not go into design in terms of figuring out what they are, what
016they cost until the district is ready to move forward and says okay to it. But the good news is it does pass at the substation level. So it's not major equipment at the substation. It's just a line between some of the school districts. This is a chart that we developed based upon how you could procure buses between 2027 and 2035 to meet the mandates. It's not saying that you have to buy this way, but to set up a plan to say how could you transition, this is how we laid it out. So you can see we laid it out basically to get to 57 buses by 2035, later in the years. And we developed a three-phase approach, building on each phase so that you don't have to replace anything that you did in the first
017phase with the next phase. So the first phase is actually probably the most comprehensive and costly phase. The next two phases are more just both lines to the first phase. And this number, this 57, all of our upcoming phases does include the 13 contracted buses that are currently contracted out. Again, to be conservative in case those are brought back in-house, we want to know what 100% electrically. And you can push those out to the TAM if you decide to implement early in back in 2033. So phase one. This will be where you put in a new utility service, new power distribution equipment, power feeds, power protection upgrades. The current codes do not cover power protection. Battery electric vehicles are ahead of the curve on power protection. By code, you do not have to do anything.
018But we are highly recommending you to do that. instances of battery electric fires that we do implement a fire protection scheme, which we have developed. We've developed it based on our experience in transit. We have insurance company approvals on it. We have 47 jurisdictions, fire marshals in both the state of New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, all over that this is the right approach to do for fire protection. So the costs are in here. It is not mandated, but we strongly recommend that you do it. And it's really for a couple of things. One is for the maintenance facility where these buses would be maintained. And then two, some extra hydrants around where the buses are charged so the first responders would have adequate water supply to not down a fire. Just briefly on fire protection. First
019phase will also include 20 chargers and 25 electric buses. And it's unsure of your own. Very much aware this is not inexpensive. Infrastructure total is about $3.8 million. DEB estimated subtotal is $11.4 million. Phase one estimated cost is $15 million. You have possible incentives, which Katie will go into a little bit more detail what those are. Incentives will give you back about $3.2 million. The total phase one cost is about $12 million. And some of those chargers of the 20 chargers are recommended to be dual-fired, which means that two boxes could be charging at them at once, which is why there is a difference between 20 chargers and 25. We are holding 25 charging ports. So looking at those rents and expenses, first we'll look at the vouchers for chargers through the PRSA program, which
020is an infant program. The base voucher would have been $25,000. However, since you have completed this plan or this study that we are presenting today, you'll receive $55,000 per voucher instead. There is a cap currently at $2 million total, which is basically equivalent to about 36 chargers. So that is... Where you'll be next out and start these out there's for these school buses through that same program the night spent program There are about three for both type a and type C as well as additional bonuses for scrap exists means basically you are willing to get a taking fossil fuel diesel gas Cool box and bring it down to its frame and destroy the engine for each of those that you Then you receive that bonus and the rest of the field term bonus. There is
021another cap that fees of six school bus vouchers and then six of them is planned. You receive a gift from four, but that is a cap of 10 school bus vouchers. That may change in the future. The state is seeing more and more funding coming into this program. However, nothing is guaranteed. That's been stated yet. And then finally, there is a utility program, the Make Ready program, which covers 90% of the utility side infrastructure costs. That is basically from a utility pole down to the transformer and then the new transformer. Everything past the transformer after that meter is going to the customer side. So the new transformer that would be required as well as the feeder failure, any upgrades requiring. This is the fire protection scheme. So basically you'll see that Coming in off the
022existing water, existing hydrant, we're proposing a six-inch water service. We're proposing an additional two hydrants for the outdoor bus storage areas. Given the magnitude of the water that's needed for a battery electric bus fire, we're recommending a power pump, which requires a power pump building and a backup generator. So the proposed generator that we're talking about here is not to charge the buses. It's for backup for the... which is required by fire code. So this is, and we broke the cost out of this in the report separately since it's not a code mandated item, so you know what it is. But again, we strongly recommend that if you go to battery electric buses that you do a lead with fire protection. So phase two builds on phase one. This is from 2031 to 2033. New
023additional power distribution equipment within your property to get some chargers. 16 new chargers, 17 buses. So there's one 2-1 charger in that 16 charger list. And phase two comes out of a possible estimated cost of about $10.8 million. These also include escalation. And a big portion of this is escalation. We're looking now at construction back in 2030. And this is all detailed out in the detailed process, and you can see exactly what our estimates were for each of these. And phase three, just building again, we're now adding 15 chargers, 15 buses, with total costs of about $9.3 million, which brings the infrastructure estimated total to $10.3 million, the BEB total, the battery electric buses themselves. about 26 million and possible incentives about 4 million so a total cost of about 32 million dollars to go
024from 2027 2035 for full implementation battery buses all of these costs for the buses are based on 2025 OGS bid And these box costs are not the difference between a battery electric and a diesel. This is the full cost of the battery. We also decided to show a 2021 and 2035 scenario. Because there are the two two-year extensions available, this is a possible. scenario for you that you were awarded both of those extensions. So you could possibly look at starting in 2031, however that would still need to be completed by 2035. So all of the same costs are slightly higher due to all of the escalation that is being added. We did not include escalation on the battery electric buses just due to be unknown with the buses, the cost, etc. But those are based
025on the OGS state pricing and it's at the north, um, on track by OGS. And then just a look at schedule. Again, this is another estimated schedule. This isn't exactly what you would be seeing. So they would start with both the utility design as well as the phase one design. The utility design being the start of the work request to the utility where they do their design, terrible upgrades are needed, and then start their upgrade once that's done. So likely for North Tonawanda, that section would be a bit longer because we know that there are upgrades there. And then for phase one design, we have detail design as the feed review. And you can see some long lead time items are going to be the delivery of switchboards and specifically the switch here. We've been
026in the industry for a very long time, and for years now we've been seeing these kinds of switch here all over the nation in about 20 months. Recently, within the past couple of months, we have seen it come down to about 15 months, and it has been moving steady. However, this is something this year, this equipment is something that all of the schools across New York State are going to require. possible issues with rates in terms of timing of getting this equipment. And then we also looked at a solar canopy project. This was to go over all of the proposed VEBs in the parking lot area. You can see with the comparison of what the consumption would be versus the production from the solar panels and the simple payback period. Obviously not looking very good.
02748.2 in a best case scenario. It really is due to the high demand of these buses. Districts often see that the demand or consumption of their bus garages is usually around 40 times the amount that it was before, after the election. So it is immense. It really is not something that can be covered with solar panels. And then just to go over some traits. One of the constraints, obviously, is the routes for the eight buses that can't be currently completed with today's technology. We're assuming that will be available based upon what we've seen in transit, but that is a constraint. Today, they do not exist. Major utility site upgrades, costs are unknown. We know that a feeder has to be upgraded. We don't have data on that. That is a constraint that is critical. We're
028seeing long lead times, as Katie indicated, on switchgear. We expect that to... be maintained or increased given demand based upon what's happening. And then clarification on New York State mandate may come out and make changes to the recommendations. We are constantly in touch with NYSERDA and the state. As we learn something, we will pass it on to you as to what we know about the mandates. If things can't change, it's fair and good. And then vouchers and incentives. There are specific timelines. Certain things you have to do first. You have to do the bus voucher before you can do the charger voucher. A lot of things like that. We can help you through that process. Also, your bus dealer, if you want to buy an electric bus, they can also do that. It actually goes
029through the dealer. And so they're familiar. But we would be happy to help you with that as well. But these are just some of the constraints that you're faced with. And these are some of the things that you can bring up if you want. to go to the board extension. Next steps. What a lot of the hospital districts are doing is deciding to dip their toe in the water to get one or two or three buses. We call it a pilot project. It's not something you're going to do in abandon. It's something that you would just start small rather than bite off phase one. What we would do is look at what existing capacity you have and how many chargers could you put in without doing a major utility upgrade. And then put in that
030number of chargers, get a couple of buses while the grants are still here. Try them, see how they work on your routes, what your drivers think of them, those types of things. It helps you also in the process with the state and say, hey, we're at least trying. But as you're facing these other big hurdles. So that's one potential. And we have eight school districts right now that are doing that. In fact, Sweet Home School is on its second pilot project. They've done three. They're now doing eight more. So that's an option. We can certainly give you a proposal for that if you're interested in it. The second option is to go straight into phase one design, which obviously is a major capital project, which we've required. and going public in funds it's a major
031cap and at that point start with a work request in ashley's grid to get that process started that one question so you had something the chargers you could potentially charge two buses yes so in the phases so we would have 57 buses and 50 point so one charger can do two buses So what we did was for all of your prep buses, we did a one-to-one approach to be conservative with our cost estimates and infrastructure. And then for your spare buses, we looked at putting the spare on a two-to-one and using that on a larger one-to-one. During design, we absolutely recommend that you look into going with what 20s or 60s would tend to use this two-to-one and limiting the unique number of cars or things. So a 120 charger with two outputs can do
032two buses in 60kW or one bus in 120. And we're also seeing a lot of 120kW chargers being used near athletic fields for visiting schools, things of that nature, so that a bus that is coming on your campus can charge and go back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Howard. Thank you for having us. We wanted to do a presentation on food service. It's a unique part of the budget with food service. It's not a part of the budget that the community votes on. It's very unique in the sense that it's its own entity and its impacts on the budgetary financial side can be positive, negative, neutral, and everywhere in the middle. But of course, there's ancillary roles in food service plays, primarily and most importantly, feeding our students for breakfast and lunch. Quick introductions,
033you know me, Josh, the assistant superintendent. Yeah, well, assistant principal and also doing my internship. Really collaborative. So we want to similar to transportation in March and technology in February, shed some light and inform everyone and all of our stakeholders of our food service operations, our strengths, our weaknesses, our areas for growth for that idea of continuous improvement. So, you know, for our food service program, the idea that we're going to provide low cost nutritious students, meals to students consistent with our policies and the various state laws, federal laws and the various programs that they have and try and provide that low cost meals. So going through our budget presentation. We want to look at some of our historical participation rates, looked at a little bit of our rates pre-COVID, immediately after COVID, and most
034importantly, when our district was given community eligibility provision status, which has been essential that last two years, and we're going to year three of that. The review of our current infrastructure by building from refrigeration and freezing capacity of cooking and serving, and then what would it cost to replace our equipment wholesale or piecemeal. because some of our equipment is older and needs to be replaced. Some of our recent stakeholder engagement on our district wellness policy that frequently touches in the area of food service, and that's a newer policy. We adopted a little over a year ago. And some of our anticipated challenges, similar to technology and transportation, what's on the horizon that we're always on the lookout for, that is more or less a threat to the program and the school district that we just
035need to be aware of, whether it's immediate or long-term. I'm going to talk about the community eligibility provision of CEP and historical student participation rates. So the CEP was eligible and we received it here at NT in the 2023-2024 school year. This allowed all students in our district to get free breakfast and free lunch, and this is renewable for five years. So just to look at a couple numbers, the first column, 18-19, is the pre-COVID number. So as a district, we were serving 16.3% of students breakfast. And if you jump two columns to 2023-2024, that is when we were first CEP eligible, and we were at 30.3%, and then this past year, 30.8%. And what that means in student numbers is 455 more students from 2018 to this past year ate breakfast at our schools.
036That's awesome. We're going to move on to lunch. Looking at those same numbers, pre-COVID, it was 46.6% of students were eating lunches in our cafeteria. And then this past year, 67.8. So that's a jump of 668 more students that were eating lunch. So with all those changes, we were able to fund some more money. And what we did with that is put it into revising our current lunch tables. I'm sure you have seen them. They have been. The old ones were brown, you know, not very fun. So we put a twist on that. And just recently in June, we updated the elementary lunch tables and the design at the bottom is showcasing what the screws table had on top of them. I'm excited NTI will be having new tables soon this coming school year anticipated.
037So it just gives students a sense of belonging and pride and tying them into their school. All right, I'm currently infrastructure from and the page is the life. Currently, currently, this shows what we have in each building and how long their life expectancy is. So you reach in free refrigerators and freezers. There's more in certain buildings that don't have reaching. So that's something that we would like to look into. Any walk-ins shouldn't be necessary. And this is how we could conserve. These are what those buildings look like, or how many they have in each building, and how long those would take. And this is how much it would cost to replace each type of building. They last between 10 and 15 years, but they can get to. And then this is our ovens and our
038dishwashers, our serving line. This is how much that would, not how much that would like to replace those items and how long those things. And then for district-wide to replace everything if we needed to, it's about $1.4 million. So when you see the number of $1.4 million, this is something that we would want to be certainly aware of. Of course, like any house, all of your equipment wouldn't necessarily fail at once, but inevitably, almost like a house, many pieces seem to fail all at the same time. So you're like, that would be unplanned. So understanding the idea of the useful life of some of our pieces of equipment, certainly something we want to be aware of. And then also the fact that we're a CEP eligible district and we're serving more meals, those pieces of
039equipment are being used more extensively. That's going to lower the useful life, seeing even the walk-in freezers every time you're opening the door. That, in essence, is the useful life that you're measuring as well. So as more students are eating, which is fantastic and wonderful and the goal of the program, the useful life will go down on some of those pieces. So it is something we want to consider and just be aware of as a district. So looking at some of our recent stakeholder engagement consistent with our wellness policy and our committee, we meet about six, seven times a year and we have representatives from all the buildings. teacher representatives, representatives from the community, Airmark, SNAP-Ed, they're present. We've even looked at the idea of adding some more high school students as well to possibly
040be some of our committee members. We, the wellness group, sponsors the district's annual wellness meet. We do a lot of the preparation in May for the district wellness meet week, which happens around Memorial Day weekend. And then we distribute at least two surveys every year to our students who actively engage them and we want their feedback. Specifically, the policy reads four through eight. We're looking to try to figure out ways to actively and proactively engage students at the K-3 level. And even some of that survey feedback recently during Wellness Week, our students got to sample new food menu options after we asked for their feedback of which new menu item we can be excited about, not be excited about. And then we asked for their feedback and we did some sampling right there to really
041engage them to get them excited. So some of our anticipated industry challenges. you know this inevitably is a negative term but it's just something that we're aware of and that's something that we should be considering and one of the which uh that we would want to say is the accurate reporting of our community's needs once that a district is cep eligible there is less likelihood of a family wanting to complete the income verification form annually. And our district almost remained the exact same amount of families complete, which is tremendous. Regionally, a lot of our districts saw a dramatic decrease in families wanting to submit that form back because they said we're CEP eligible. Why would I bother? Because that form was driven for our pre-reduced price meals previously. So there's the natural human tendency of,
042I don't need to fill this out because I already have CEP. So that is a real concern. Lead water testing and the replacement of some of the lines and additional filters for cooking capacity, not necessarily for our dishwashers, but it is as the lead price per billion goes down, that is some capital infrastructure upgrades we might need to consider. On the federal and state level, the reduced meal reimbursement rates is always something we need to consider. And then also the potential increase of certain poverty metrics to meet CEP eligibility, where we had just finally qualified as a CEP eligible district. The rules could change next year, five years from now, 10 years from now is what is considered a CEP eligible district, even though our district's needs may not have changed meaningfully. the bar to
043meet that threshold may have moved. And then finally, while we do not currently have a food and labor shortage and procurement issues, those can sneak up rapidly and they're intense. The idea of being able to staff the cafeterias, secure certain foods, and that would, of course, then lead to limited options for students and then a less enjoyable experience. And then food inflation, as we've all know personally, is certainly something that we are aware of and that is an industry challenge that could be meeting us in the future. So with that, we want to give an overview of where we are at food service, given that we haven't done a food service presentation in a long time, make you aware of the community where we are at currently. Really proud of. our work and partners at
044Aramark and that student participation rate really skyrocketing after CEP eligibility almost 25% for both breakfast and lunch. Of course, there's the natural goal. We want 100% of students having breakfast and lunch with us every day because we know that food shortages and poverty is a real thing for any community. So that is certainly the goal. With that, are there any questions that you may have for us? Do you think the ovens and freezers and refrigerators that are potentially at their almost end of life? Many of our pieces are at or near their end of their life, but they are still working. And it is a little bit of a challenge because Jim Hart's team has done a tremendous job with preventative maintenance and maintaining along the way and making sure that we take care of
045the equipment. So like anything, it can last a little bit longer. It was my primary concern of almost doing this presentation is when are they being replaced? We haven't done a capital project that's really touched cafeterias. And what is that impact that a bunch of stoves and walk-in freezers and combination ovens and serving lines all start to fail at once? My concern is always trying to protect the instructional program of the district, but we also need to have working ovens and freezers to feed students, and those can be conflicting. And wanting to be proactive and preventative to protect the instructional program for the district is really the catalyst for wanting to do that. Always be conservative for that is really the proactive piece of this presentation. I hope, sorry, did I answer fully as best
046I could? start my question in thinking about without me knowing the nuances of the surveys the differences between a walk-in freezer and a patient what does that mean so i'll not have particularly not have okay Okay, so there is not a walk-in in Drake and there is not a walk-in in Ohio. And they have a lot of reach-in freezers and freezers. So they're just everywhere in the building. If they can kind of walk in, then we can get rid of all of that. Yeah, we could get rid of all those standing fridges and freezers. And they essentially have more space in the kitchens or cafeterias. of hoping all the equipment hangs in there we've got to put the vacations which actually don't go away and thinking about providing those for the school so that they
047can have access centralized well controlled you know first in first out all of it running some of the people are presenting but also being able to provide added to the fresh food or whatever they want to do is there any plans in the budget to make sure that all these schools That type of work would probably require a capital project to do some of that. There are certain rules and regulations to encourage districts to reinvest the proceeds of your food service program back into the program. And that's a few ways. I guess there's three options. One is you don't accept reimbursement. select that option. One is upgrade your equipment and recently the cafeteria tables, some of them are 30, 40 years old. So that was an obvious area where we want to improve that experience.
048We could do the same thing with some of the equipment. And then the other option, which Aspiration is also very excited to do, is improve. the quality of the product that we're serving to our students because there are certain chicken nuggets that are serving quality on the quality scale. And of course, it has the quality of that chicken nugget goes up from like a ground up rib meat chicken nugget to a whole muscle chicken nugget. Like there is a price increase, but also of course, a quality increase for our students and having that good experience for our students as well. Both meet minimum standards, but we'd like to of course. do more than the minimum for our students, especially when it comes to eating and food. So there is that. We want to reinvest back
049into the program and look into some of those options. And that was honestly the wellness week. Some of those samples we had, some burger bites and some new chicken nuggets and I think a new chicken patty. Just going to the high school and sitting down with some of the students and asking what their thoughts are. That was going to be my personal budget answer. If there was any operation without capital, I need to get to walk towards it. And then as we go forward. Yeah, I mean, I just think it is something to just, you know, getting from an equity standpoint, but obviously it's on your side. We see in some of the schools, we've even visited other districts and some of their programs to get good ideas and they've got crispy tater tots because
050they're excited. Thank you for your interest. It's recommended the Board of Education approve the consent agenda where it was presented. Are there any additions to the agenda or changes? If not, I'm going to make a motion to see it sign. If not, I'm going to make a motion to see it sign. All in favor? Aye. We move to item 29.26. It's recommended the Board of Education approve the consent agenda. It was recommended by the Superintendent of Schools to sign the agenda. All in favor? Aye. Right. 10.1. It's recommended the Board of Education through the personnel agenda order is presented. Are there any additions, deletions, or changes? Now I'm hearing me and I will make a motion to see a second. Second. From Jeff, all in favor? We will go down to 11.32. It's recommended the
051Board of Education through all personnel items presented to see a motion. From Dennis, I'm second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Congratulations to our new probationary mentees. So we have NC Macintosh, the school psychologist. Derek, our new Derek, our biology teacher. Kaylee Carlson, a special education teacher. And we have two teachers that are here today. So we have Rene Chabalik, a biology teacher at our school. Congratulations to Rene, to Stewie, to Alcindor, to Dr. Soransky, our teaching assistant, and to Michael Coyle, our teaching assistant. Congratulations to you. Looks like we have two discussions. We don't need this first one. Looks like we have a couple things. I'm sorry. I'm jumping in. No one wants to know what this policy is. That's what we have to know. Yeah, revise. Revise. So this is a
052policy that we talked about in our July meeting and required at the state. So this is our internet-enabled devices policy during school day, which bans all internet-enabled devices from bell to bell, except for some very specific reasons, which are all included. Last week, we sent out our first copy, and I'm sure it will present some challenges as it gets to the next school's number, but the policy is moving, just like every school across the state. Any questions on the policy? 12.1. It's recommended we approve the revised policy to 7316 as presented in the motion. So, Jeff, a second? Melissa, all in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Now we've got a question. released to the states. Their title allocations, our district receives four title grants, Title I, Title II, Title III, Title IV, and then also historically
053some of our special education IDEA grants. This year on June 30th, Title II, Title III, and Title IV grants were under review. Title II is a professional development grant, Title III is an English language learner grant, and Title IV is called the 21st Century Schools Grant, and those are being currently being reviewed at the federal level. So the states have not received their allocation. Just to make everyone aware, that for us is approximately $239,000 as of last year. We don't have a grant figure, but that is just a figure that normally Mr. Tambroni's office is working through the consolidated application, and he's doing that work. That is still being held at the federal level. we've been receiving some guidance from ASBO and the state of what we should be doing within the application itself. But
054just out of the measure of transparency, like throughout the entire budget season, we just wanted to make you aware because that is a rather large amount of money for our grants, just to make sure everyone is something that is developed. that we are aware of. It was something that we also considered in many of the presentations. We made the possibility of a reduction in some of our grants and it's just something we took into consideration during the budget development season. Thank you, sir. The only update to the code of conduct from last year was with the policy change for electronic devices. So we changed our code of conduct to match our current policy and implementation plan for electronic communication devices. So that's page eight of the code of conduct. So that was the only change
055for the draft for this year for public to look at. We do plan on this year, we are doing a comprehensive review of the COVID contact because last couple of years we've made updates where we're going to require to make updates, but certainly we're going to get together a group of stakeholders to look at the entire COVID contact and see what the update is at 6.7. Questions? I'm interested to see, you know, what rules the New York State does come down with this bus and budget investment. For this thing, going forward, just one month away from school start. So I'm sure it's going to be a busy time. Congratulations. Pretty excited about the Ohio playground that's going to be going in. I know it's really important to have the adaptable equipment. That's pretty exciting. I
056know it's a big, very financial situation, but I'm glad to be on the road with that. And then thank you for all the presentations today. And yeah, I think the electric buses are... Yeah, right. But we'll get through it. So, but congratulations again and welcome. I also just wanted to thank everyone. There's been a lot of support here in the summer. So, gosh, thank you. Thank you for the internet enabled devices and the communication plan. You clearly must have rolled out because I feel like I got a lot of feedback that people do. So, I was very appreciative of that. All the energy and effort. That's a lot of stuff. Yeah, Dennis, thank you for bringing up some of the donations. We actually invited them last September meeting. We can thank them in person. They
057donated the screen for the Minority Center and Student Press. And we're really excited about tomorrow and Friday. We have our new teacher orientation. We've got about 27 new teachers coming in for orientation, which is a significant number, but we've got some great things planned for them. We really are excited to see all the new faces and energy. All right. Yeah, I think it's really good stuff going on. I'm very curious to see all these new classes. If we get any new users here, stay tuned. But yeah, so welcome. Congratulations, everyone. Happy to have you here. Excited. I've had these lumberjacks in North Carolina, but I won't keep too long with no further business.