28 Board of Education meeting, May 3, 2022

001good evening and welcome to the may 3rd 2022 gildan central school district board of education meeting would you all please silence your cell phones and stand for the pledge pledge of allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay first on the agenda we have public comment and we have one public comment this is elizabeth floyd hello my name is elizabeth floyd mayer i have a daughter in farnsworth middle school and i'm a member of the board of education's diversity equity and inclusion committee my comment is about the upcoming school board election on may 17th first i would like to thank our district's teachers administrators and staff for the work they have done over the past several years through the unprecedented

002challenges of a pandemic to our teachers many of us here in guilderland trust you and appreciate your efforts to help shape them into well-educated responsible and compassionate adults we believe that the materials you select and your teaching methods are well considered and age-appropriate and meant to help make all students feel welcome included and inspired to learn we believe that you know more about teaching than we do when i attended guildelin schools decades ago the composition of the student body looked very different now according to figures from the new york state department of education the 4 800 students in our district are 73 percent caucasian and 27 percent from other ethnic and racial backgrounds with the largest group 12 percent being asians black students hispanic or latino students and multi-racial students each account for four percent

003of the total population five percent of our students are english language learners and 12 percent have some form of disability a full 21 are economically disadvantaged we also know that we have many students who do not identify as cisgender or as straight guilderland is becoming a richly diverse world and the district is trying to respond to those changes the district has created a diversity equity and inclusion committee of the board of education with members including parents students faculty and people from the community to study and listen and try to gauge what kind of changes need to be made the committee tries to address needs of all students including those with different ethnic or racial backgrounds different abilities different gender or sexual identities and different economic statuses the district has hired a full-time dei coordinator who

004has been very busy listening to students and educators and creating or helping with initiatives throughout the district to benefit all of our students the new york state's regents issued a call to action on dei a year ago that urges educators in new york state new york state's public schools to avoid the dangers inherent in telling a story from only one perspective part of it reads we must tell the stories of all those who have contributed to the development of this country and all those who continue to make it the diverse and beautiful tapestry it is today one slate of candidates in the upcoming elections wants to increase and not decrease the voices heard by guilderland students please join me in voting on may 17th for the united for public schools slate kelly person gloria tolhilt

005kim blasiak and kd piero thank you okay thank you mrs floyd mayor linda are there any more public comments okay thank you so next on the agenda we have our budget hearing and i'll turn it over to neil good evening and the annual requirement of the budget process each year is to to share with the board and with the community what's called a budget hearing and this will be a recap of the budget that's being proposed for may 17th so in some and our budget for next year is 109 million eight hundred and eighty seven thousand eight hundred and forty five dollars that's a four million nine hundred and eight thousand two hundred and seventy five dollar increase over the prior year in terms of a percentage that's a four point six eight percent increase

006in terms of our estimated tax levy increase and tax rate increase those are both estimated to increase by 2.98 percent and again the way this budget is structured we would need a 50 voter approval for passage of the budget so we don't need a super majority 60 vote for this particular budget part of the requirements of a budget hearing is some formatting that we need to do to present information in accordance with state requirements and one of those is a three-part budget summary so as you can see from the pie chart the majority of our expenses as you might imagine goes toward our program 77.1 percent of all of our expenses go toward providing educational programs to students a lesser number or amount is for capital expenditures and then beyond a little bit less than

007that is our administrative expenditures so again a vast amount of our expenses are tied to our educational programming working with students each and every day in terms of the three components we have some additional detailed breakdown so comparing the current year budget 2021-22 to 2022 2022-23 you can see the increases there 81 million to 84 million percentage of the total in terms of those component shares last year's budget or current year budget 77.3 percent next year it'll be 77.1 percent and you can see some of the types of expenditures that we're talking about here so salaries and benefits all of our teaching staff but it also includes our support staff guidance counselors aids monitors nurses social workers psychologists speech therapists all of those services are included in this component as well as professional development all

008of our library media and computer services student transportation co-curricular activities in interscholastic athletics in terms of the administrative component of the budget you can see it's increasing from 11.8 to 12.5 million or 11.3 percent of the overall budget to 11.4 percent here we're looking at salaries and benefits of administrator supervisors and administrative clerical staff our public information and central printing research planning and evaluation central data processing tax collection in most of our legal services and school board cost so those are the components of that particular segment and then finally we have the capital component again we're looking at going from just about 12 million to 12.6 million or 11.4 percent to 11.5 percent this is all of our debt payments on our buildings construction projects related school bus purchases tax certiary and court ordered costs

009as well as operations and maintenance and that includes all of the salaries and benefits of custodial and maintenance staff in terms of the revenue budget total for the current years 100 and just about 105 million it's going to go to 109 million next year almost 110 million you can say that state aid had the biggest increase in terms of the overall categories a little loss in terms of local revenues appropriated fund balance is was zero and the current year is going to be about 270 thousand and our payment in limit taxes remains the same and an increase in our overall tax levy as was mentioned before just to see that in terms of a graph on the left is the revenues so property taxes comprise the majority of the district's revenues at 71.2 percent state

010aid is 27.1 percent of our overall revenues and local sources comprise 1.7 in terms of our expenditures not surprisingly salaries and benefits are our largest category is 78.6 percent again we're a people-driven industry so we're working with kids we need adults in individuals to teach them and to support them and that's the largest portion of our overall budget uh in addition to that we have contractual services at seven point two percent boces at six point seven percent our debt payments comprise five point one percent equipment and supplies are two point percent and interfund transfers are 0.3 percent in terms of the overall tax impact we have an estimated tax levy increase of 2.265 million that's an increase of 2.98 percent and again the estimated tax rate increase is 2.98 as well and we won't know

011what those actual tax rate increases are by town until we get a final assessment data over the summer and then we need to talk a little bit about the tax levy limit or property tax cap as a reminder it's an eight-step formula it's determined by new york state it limits the vast majority of expenses to an increase of 2 or less and the results of the formula determine the amount that the property taxes can increase and that sets a threshold for voter approval and that's really the crux of what this formula does a threshold establishes a threshold for voter approval so if the tax increase is proposed is less than the threshold amount the budget passes you have to have more than 50 percent so it's often shown as 50 percent plus one we need

012at least one more vote than 50 percent of the voters voting yes to have a pass vote past budget but if the tax increase that's proposed is greater than the threshold amount and that's not the case for us the budget would need more than 60 percent of the voters voting yes to have a past budget so we're in the category of the 50 percent plus one passage rate and again if the budget's defeated there's no increases in taxes permitted so you kind of have to unwind all of the increases and go back to what we have in the current year in terms of the overall tax levy terms of the actual calculation this is how it's laid out by the state of new york and this is what we must follow so it starts with

013the prior year tax levy what is applied then is what's called the tax base growth factor and that's looked at as bricks and mortar within the town so it's new construction it's not just increases in values of homes so it does the state actually comes up with that factor and provides it to us that gets us our subtotal for the prior year tax levy and then we have payment in lieu of taxes we add that for the prior year in this case forty five thousand three fifty three then we subtract what are called capital expenditures not of state aid so this is related to our borrowing we have debt expenses we have offsetting state aid so you take the net of those and that total is is the 1.223 million shown that gets us to

014our adjusted prior year tax levy of 75.3 million then we get to apply our allowable levy growth factor and again inflation's running about 4.7 percent by the state of new york we have a maximum of two percent or less so if the actual cpi is less than two percent that number would be less than two percent it can never be more than two percent regardless of where inflation is that leads to our growth adjusted tax levy subtotal of 76.8 million then we subtract out our following year pilots which is the same amount as shown above that gets us to what's called our true tax levy limit 76.7 million we get to add back again now our capital expenditures net of state aid for the subsequent year 1.6 million gets us to our maximum allowable tax

015levy amount of 78.4 million or 3.2 percent so it's a complicated formula it's the same one else we'll just have to use we all have the same set of rules to follow and in this case it's 3.2 percent for the subsequent school year this is another view of the same information but maybe a little easier to follow in terms of recognizing the difference between our tax levy limit and our proposed tax levy so as you can see on the left hand side our tax levy is 78.4 million our proposed levy is 78.2 million the different stairs were under our tax levy limit by about 167 000 in terms of the overall increase we're going from 2.4 to down to 2.2 again that's a difference of that 166 858 the percentage increase is noted before but

016at the tax levy limit we could go up to 3.2 percent our proposal is 2.98 for next year and again the note at the bottom because we are below the maximum allowable tax levy limit so the simple majority of 50 percent of the voters to have a pass budget we always like to show what's the history in terms of the budget vote approval going looking at the last six years what the levy increase was and what the tax levy limit was and then our rate of passage so as you can see going from the bottom up 2016-17 we've we're having budgets pass with a 70 margin over 70 margin more recently we've been in the mid 60s so 65 66 67 voter we had that 2021 when we had absentee ballot we had a lot

017of voters so that's an anomaly there in terms of the number of voters but that was our highest turnout in recent times and you can see the tax levy limit increases for those particular years as well so we need to talk a little bit about what's a contingency budget and within the context of the tax levy limit law so if the budget fails to pass on our first attempt the board has a couple of options options it can choose to either put the same budget up or some modified version for a second vote or they could choose to go directly to a contingency budget however if the budget is defeated a second time the board has no other options at that point they must adopt a contingency budget and under a contingency budget there are

018some strings attached to that so anything that's deemed to be a non-contingent expense and these are things like new equipment community use of buildings they must be removed from the budget and there's also an administrative budget cap component so as we look at at the various parts of the budget there's an administration administrative portion and you have to look at that and determine whether the percentage of that is higher or not in the new budget than the defeated budget if it is you have to remove expenses to get it down to match what it was in the previous budget so there could be some additional reductions beyond just getting it back to the tax levy limit from the previous tax levy from the previous year again the big one is the property tax levy may

019not increase by any amount which is zero percent over the current year tax levy so whatever we have in 2021 22 in terms of a tax levy that's the same amount that we would have for 2022-23 if we're under a contingent budget um it's a significant difference you know 2.2 million uh that we would have to find a way to get back to and remove 2.2 million so a lot it's a rolling of the dice in terms of a contingent budget if we have the board has one opportunity if the budget gets defeated to have a choice and then after that there is no choice if the budget is defeated to sex it the second time and we would have to go to a contingent budget terms of the overall budget vote propositions and board

020elections so for next year a budget proposition 109 million eighty seven eight forty five we do as we typically do have a bus and vehicle equipment proposition 976 thousand dollars and that's for the purchase of eight new school buses we do have an annual rotation so each year we've been buying a few buses and we take a few buses out of our fleet it maintains an overall good fleet average so we have a mix of older and newer buses older and newer technology we can manage our parts better we can manage our service better so that's been an effective way to kind of always have some new technology doesn't overwhelm our staff we can get the benefits of that and still have a fleet with a good average age again what's hard to imagine is

021like any transportation system people expect you to be there day in and day out on time whether you take a bus a taxi whatever you do you know what time it's supposed to be there and you want it to work and we have the same expectations from our parents so try to make sure we we maintain our fleet in good condition and purchasing buses every year and cycling through has proven very beneficial to allowing us to meet those requirements we have 10 candidates vying for four open seats and you can see the names listed they're in order from left to right top row middle row bottom row in that order so left to right katy depiro's first on the on the ballot followed by nicole followed by kim and so on in april so that's

022the order they will appear on the ballot and if you want any more information about our budget process go to goldenschools.org and we have a school budget news icon and you can find all of this information there and more detailed information as well again i'll just read the names didn't read all of them candidates katie dipiero nicole coonrod kimberly blasiak april mcallister mark riemer jennifer romano kelly person william kearney gloria total hilt and barbara frederico and then we would encourage everyone to vote so this is your one opportunity as a community member to have your voice heard please come out and vote vote date tuesday is may 17th the polls open at seven in the morning they run until nine o'clock at night you will vote at the elementary school in your attendance zone and

023if you need more information about which attendance zone you live in you can click on the link at the bottom of the slide and that will provide you with the information so you can find out what school you would need to go to you can also call our district office at any point to find that information out as well and with that that's the end of the presentation happy to take any questions anybody might have okay thank you for your time thank you neil next on the agenda we have the consent items this includes the minutes from the april 12 and april 27 board meetings the cpsc and csc recommendations a personnel action can have a motion to approve the consent items judy ii barb any questions or comments all in favor passes 9-0 next

024is information items curriculum and instruction um dr wiles yes i'll take these two congratulatory items the first is a story about our ghs students who compete in a programming contest so we want to offer our congratulations to gilderlin high school teacher rachel pesheri and the 21 students who competed in siena college's computer programming contest before our april break the yearly contest is held by the cncs department teams are given seven different programming problems increasing in difficulty in three and a half hours to solve and submit their solutions the teams earn their scores based on the sum of their completed problem times there are two levels within the competition green which is beginner to intermediate and gold intermediate to advance these also happen to be sienna's colors this year 23 schools were represented in the competition

025with 87 teams participating for a total of 311 students gilderland was able to make six teams this year with 21 students four gold and two green of the 87 teams this year we finished as follows in second place guilderland a abi nadella ian chen michael chen and joelle matthew completing seven out of seven problems finishing eighth was gilderland e with ram begut tianley q onshkar and michael wong completing six out of seven problems uh finishing eleventh was gilderland c grace way and clark matune completing six of seven problems finishing 52nd was gilderland d that was enzo mclaughlin jake pizzulo dylan o'brien and christian edict and they completed three out of seven finishing 57th was gilderland b aaron venkat colleen grim grimshaw zuan wu and abad rahman completing three out of seven and sixty-seventh was gilderland

026f jason yamashita akash mishra and siva bellam bellamarugan completing two out of seven so that sounds like a very stressful competition but with terrific results so congratulations to our teacher rachel pischeri and her amazing team and next we have some students to recognize for their competition in the new york state tesol logo contest so we're offering our congratulations to saba nasser a sixth grade student at farnsworth middle school sabah won the new york state teacher of english to speakers of other languages that's tesol a student logo contest the contest invited new york state multilingual students in grades k through 12 to create a logo design based on this year's theme of shifting teaching paradigms examining inclusive dynamic practices sabo will receive a cash prize of 150 and the winning logo logo will be featured on

027all promotional materials for the conference which will take place in november of the eight finalists chosen from across new york state five are gilderland central school district students in addition to saba the following students were chosen as violet uh finalists reika nasser suzanna cherian koali and iris chan so congratulations to those very talented students and you can see their logos are linked in your materials okay thank you dr wells superintendent information all right i'm going to go to the podium and for the long awaited school start time update and thank you mr sanders for getting that up there so i want to start this evening by thanking the longest serving task force in the i think history of the guilderland central school district we created our school times uh start time task force back in

028the fall of 2018 and here we are in the spring of um still working really hard to to figure this out and get it right so there's about 35 people on this committee who we started meeting in person four years ago and then after the challenges that we experienced this year we brought that task force back together we met merch virtually several times this spring in order to solve the the dilemma of how when is the best time to start all of our school levels so tonight i'm sharing the work of our task force so i want to say that these draft options they all come with pros and cons there is not a model up here that is perfect so what we are charging the board with is really weighing imperfections but we wanted

029to do the following wanted to create options that we are confident can be done through our transportation department given our geography you know where our buildings are located spread across our close to 60 square miles the traffic patterns that we know to exist on 146 and 155 and of course western ave and then the number of drivers that we actually have to drive these buses and that variable is probably one of the most challenging because if we could add more routes we would have a lot more flexibility but we can't count on that so as i said every one of these options has trade-offs and there might be additional pros and cons that others think about in addition to the ones i shared tonight i tried to capture the big ones and then all of

030the options require more work to refine and define the student and teacher schedules and we might have some contractual considerations to make but the one thing we can't tinker with today are the minutes of the runs um that's really the thing we can't say what if we took a minute here or a minute there you you have to believe me that we have been through dozens of options looking at a minute here or a minute there and what we don't want to do is make an option look more attractive because we adjust the minutes and then find out that we can't get our buses to school on time and our students will pay the consequences for that that's the challenge we lived through this year we're continuing to live through it and we want it

031to feel different and be different next year so i'm going to start with a reminder of the current year and what we're doing right now um because this you know it gets complicated quick so um on paper and you see lots of asterisks in this presentation on paper this is what we have said we would do that the drop time at our elementary buildings would be at 7 30 and classes would start at 7 45 that the end of the day would be at 1 40 and the buses would roll at 150 and that the late buses would work um 245 each day monday tuesday wednesday for a 5 hour and 55 minute day other than horrific traffic at some of our buildings the elementary plan actually worked probably because they're first things went more

032south after that on paper we said our high school drop time would be 8 10 and classes would start at 8 20. we planned for an end time at 2 57 and with the buses rolling at 305 and a late bus on monday tuesday wednesday at 3 45. the high school buses were never able all of them to arrive on time so the the de facto start time of the day was 8 30. this wreaked havoc with homeroom and just made for a very um disrupted start of the day for for many of our students but that's a six hour and 37 minute day and then the middle school again on paper had an 8 55 drop time and a 902 start a 331 end time and a 3 45 depart for buses and a

033late bus at 4 20 and we were only able to do the late bus one day a week at farnsworth and that was on wednesday you'll remember that well the middle school we didn't make any of the times but the end of the day was particularly difficult we ended up having a tiered dismissal where walkers and students who were being picked up actually were dismissed at 3 we got that traffic through the various circles which were redesigned several times and then the buses arrived at 3 45 so we had to provide additional supervision for students who rode the bus um it was it was challenging and i see mr laster nodding his head back there so this is what we wanted to fix over the course of our discussions here but we also wanted to

034be mindful of what our original charge to the committee was i mean we spent a ton of time in the first year of the task force looking at the research about adolescent sleep habits and the need for adolescents to get more sleep and recognizing when they actually get tired at night it's it's not like some of us which could be 8 30 but it's more like 10 30 11 30 12 and then they need to sleep later in the day so we were driven by that research that has been all over the media and we also wanted to know what does this look like for our own students so i'm i have a handful of slides here that i'm going to give credit to um to mike piscatelli and steve wolf who actually put these

035surveys together to gather data from our students and our parents and i'm going to share them just so you have a little bit more reference of what our students told us back in 2018 and then again in 2022 so just a little bit of sense of the number of respondents we had back each time in 2018 you can see the numbers of parents and students at all the levels who participated and then again in 2022 uh generally pretty equal participation um initially by the way for our gh ghs students this year our initial response rate was pretty poor so we actually redid the survey i can't remember if we did it in a class or a home room but we essentially encouraged every student to complete the data so we would have a good representation

036of what our students were feeling and experiencing so the big question what are the most common wake-up times and you can see them this is based on the parent survey when they tell us when their elementary children would get up and it for the vast majority of elementary it's between six and seven for the middle school again 64 in 2018 it was between 6 30 and 7 30 this year it's between seven and eight for middle school and then at high school uh 66 percent of students in 2018 said they got up between 5 30 and 6 30 and now it's 78 percent who say they get up between 6 30 and 7 30. so according to the students what are the most common wake-up times uh middle school 65 between 6 30 and 7

03730 and uh half little more than half said between seven and eight this this past year at the high school we still have 66 percent who get up between 5 30 and 6 30. um this year that's moved back an hour 67 percent and they're getting up between 6 30 and 7 30. um big question how much sleep do you get each night on average um i'll just let you peruse that a little bit in a couple slides we have some comparative information just point out the note at the very bottom back in 2018 almost a third between a quarter and a third of our high school students said they got between five and six hours of sleep rebecca what's the recommended hour for teenagers isn't it higher eight to nine i think is the

038sweet spot so you can if you look at the 8-9 that's a great question blanca um you can see kind of where our students line up there so let me go down to 2022. you want to go back to that eight to nine hour um and the note at the very bottom a smaller percentage about a fifth 21 percent of our high school students are still saying they get five to six hours a night but i believe let me go to the next one here so you can see the comparison that makes it a little bit easier to so we have fewer students getting six to seven hours over time you have more getting seven to eight a little bit more uh getting eight to nine and a tiny bit were and a tiny bit

039more are getting nine to ten this is a total of about 240 students and this is what students tell us and then we asked how has the leader start time impacted your hours of sleep this is the recent one for high school students 35 percent said they get more sleep said they get less sleep and about half said there was no change and at the middle school our middle schoolers more than half said they're getting more sleep 17 said less and about 30 percent said no change and then um in how is the late start time impacted your sleep habits um at the high school 16 said they go to bed earlier with a later start time 57 said no change and then 27 percent say i go to bed later in a middle school

040you can see that data 10 go earlier 65 no change and 26 percent say they go to bed later okay any questions on any of that data before i look um we walk to the three models okay you can always go back if you do okay so the first model i'm going to share tonight is really a modification of what we're currently doing and it recognizes that you know we want to be mindful of the length of the instructional day across levels and that became a challenge as we tinkered with these minutes at both the elementary and the high school level so in this first option it takes our current model and it actually moves the day a little bit earlier for our elementary students you can see the drop time at the elementary buildings

041is 7 15 and their school day would start at 7 30. that would be an end time of 1 30 buses would roll about 1 45 and the late bus would be three afternoons a week at 2 30. that's a six hour instructional day five minutes more than what we currently have at the high school we slid the start time back a little bit um from what is this year um and they would be actually starting at 8 15 with an 805 drop time the end of the day would stay the same 257n 305 depart and a 345 late bus that's a six hour and 42 minute day that allows us to do all of the programming to have a home room and you know have the full instructional day in order to do this

042the middle school gets that later spot um the drop time would be nine o'clock with a start at 9 10. the end time at 3 45 should look familiar that is in fact when the buses can get to the middle school they would roll at 3 50 the late bus would be at 4 20 and that again would be three days after school we're looking to go back to a monday tuesday thursday configuration and that's a six hour and 35 minute day so this is closest to what we're currently doing right now so it has some pros and cons i'm guessing you're thinking about all of those on the pro side this is consistent with the sleep research for adolescents where middle and high schoolers would have a later start time it gets rid of

043unsupervised time at the beginning and the end of day for guilderland high school we don't have that problem this year but if you go back pre-covered one of the problems we were always trying to solve was the time between 705 when the buses would drop students outside the high school and 7 30 when classes started that was like the no man's land of supervision very challenging for our administrators who were vastly outnumbered by students and we had a similar circumstance at the end of the day too dismissal was at 223 but the buses didn't arrive till 242 in that neighborhood so at the end of the day we had lots of pent up high school student energy and waiting for school buses this model eliminates that challenge in this model there's no need to shorten

044the instructional day at the high school there were a lot of concerns about that because we do every minute counts toward instructional time for lots of reasons lab requirements and so on at the high school and it actually adds five minutes of instructional time at the elementary schools on the other side of the ledger one of the problems that we have now and that this would not fix is that our career and technical education buses that take our students to the cte center and also to the tech center over at mohonasen they don't align with our day very well at all so we need additional runs to make those times happen for our students so they get to that program on time so that is that adds extra runs to our day and it's a

045challenge for the students the challenge for transportation it's not optimal the other con here is this will equate to a very early pickup time for our elementary students there's just no way around that it does lead to that late end of the day for our middle school students at fms and then we have the need for supervision in the morning at fms because school doesn't start till 9 10. a lot of parents need to get their children to the school because they have to get to work don't want them home unsupervised we've had that for years we have a way of managing it it's not ideal if we were to do this i think we need to add some additional supervision to make that better and then for in this model we have students at

046both the middle and the high school who because they participate in athletics miss instructional time at the end of the day dave austin put together a huge chart for the committee to show that it's a substantial number of minutes for a substantial number of students less at the middle school more at the high school but it's still a lot of students who are affected by that so let me pause there that's elementary first and see if there are any clarifying questions go ahead seema um so the the cons when you talk about the miss time for athletics that would also be like students who work maybe after school like high school students it would delay the point at which they can start their jobs for sure and when we were in the um the covet

047year of the 10 o'clock start in the 420 end we heard from many many families about the challenge of that okay thank you okay next is high school first and this is um similar times um it would start with a 7 15 drop at the high school with a 7 30 start the end time is interesting here though it's a 2 40 end of the day but if you see my little note at the bottom we would have the regular school day so the regular four blocks of the day would actually end at 202 pm and the time between 202 and 240 would be something that we're calling dutch connection which would be an everyday period of time for all students to have access to their teachers for extra help so there would only be

048one bus at the end of the school day at 2 40 and that would depart at 250 and there would be no late buses at the high school so we can talk about what that time would be used for but i think i have in the next slide about how that would play out so it's a six hour and 32 minute school day plus dutch connection so a lot of instructional time the elementary the drop time would be eight o'clock with an 805 start um a 45 end of the day a 155 depart and a 2 45 late bus you can already see the big con here that is a 5 hour and 40 minute day which is very short remember we're currently at five hours and 55 minutes in what we're doing right now

049and then in this model heist middle school can be dropped at 8 45 start at 8 55 end at 3 30 depart at 3 40 in a 4 10 late bus and that's a six hour and 35 minute block of time so some pros on this model this really solves the cte and mohonasen bus runs because those students can take their regular bus from their home to the high school and then get on a transfer bus inho tells me that this model would save about four runs two of them being contract runs which we don't know what the cost of them might be right now because we haven't bid them but they sometimes run as high as sixty thousand dollars so it's a significant dollar amount um another plus is an earlier and start end

050time for farnsworth it moves that a few minutes back there's less instructional time lost at the end of the day for athletes but it doesn't take that away completely there is still some lost time it's a later pickup time for our elementary students and then the other plus is that there's extra help or time to do our social emotional learning or our diversity equity and inclusion work built into the end of every single school day for the high school so every student would be in the building for that additional time you'll see the note would would likely require an moa with our teachers association it depends on how we would use that time if all we did was say students are going to be with a teacher for extra help we would not need to

051to negotiate anything but if we were to ask teachers to do lessons in scl or dei uh we would so we are thinking about how we might deliver that without needing to ask teachers to do extra instructional work but that's something we would need to figure out um the con side of this two big ones one it is not consistent with the sleep research so it would put gilderland high school students back to almost where we were pre-pandemic and then the need to shorten the elementary school day by 15 minutes from the current year our elementary colleagues on the task force really struggled with this i have to be honest with you and it would have curricular implications you know the elementary folks have a short day to begin with compared to other suburban council

052schools and it's not like the curriculum becomes less each year it's there's always more and more demands but that's the high school first and then the last one i'm going to share um questions oh sure sure um for for the middle school when it says late bus is that three days a week yes we would go back to three days a week for late buses and then i just one more question that um the dutch connection that's at the end of the day yes is there a reason why they didn't do at the beginning of the day um okay so what that would do is mean at 202 if i'm needing to get on a bus to go to saratoga to play um soccer i'm missing extra help which of course is the best thing

053either but it's not it's like missing class time okay thank you sure um judy and then rebecca uh the elementary late bus is the same essentially the same time as the high school how does that work do we not need as many buses i had the same question for in ho the other morning i'm looking at this like how does this work it does because there's a fewer number of buses needed i thought that but it looks kind of strange it does i had a moment of panic one of many rebecca then blanca be mandatory i mean we really didn't talk about it not being mandatory it's this is part of the program of the school day um because we don't want i don't think we would want you know cars showing up at 202

054to bring everybody home i think that would kind of defeat the purpose although i see mr piscatelli shaking his head so yes it's expectation is that it'd be for all kids go ahead blanca so clubs and such would also take place during between 202 and 250 they could be during the dutch connection too okay and uh two-parter sorry that's fine um have we considered how changing our schedule would impact athletes in terms of you know they have to meet other schools to play you know what i mean so yes um so that was these comments where you see um instructional time lost at the end of the day for athletes that's the data that that dave austin actually put together for us and it goes pages and pages and pages it's a lot of kids

055every day who need to leave early to get on a bus in order to get wherever they're going okay um go ahead kim will the students be assigned to a specific room during that time because i'm just curious if a student doesn't need extra help or they're doing well if they're just wandering the building until the bus comes so will they all be accounted for or um black four they would stay with their black four teachers okay unless they needed to say you know i'm getting an a plus in english which i have black four but i'm not doing so great in algebra two so the idea is that they were thank goodness yeah i think we don't want any wandering the building any other questions on this one so the third model i'll show

056i will i'll say this this one has middle school first in the elementary schools last this was kind of a late breaking option during the very last minutes of our very last task forms meeting so the committee really gave me feedback largely via email and and such because we just ran out of time um but there was you know concern that the middle school is always at the end of the day and what are the what are the challenges associated with that so the question was what if we did middle school first and this is what happens so again 7 15 drop at fms with the 7 25 start the end of the day would be 149 i'm not quite sure why it ended up 149 we have lots of round numbers but um and

057it would roll at 1 55 and there would be late buses again three days a week at 2 30 for a six hour and 29 minute day the high school would have an 8 18 drop and i want to talk a little bit about that one of the unknowns here because we've never done the middle school first is how long it takes to get the buses from the back of fms out to western ave out to their neighborhoods and then down to 146. in all the other models that we've talked about the ones today and then the 52 others that we discussed and the committee we thought it was about 55 minutes between those runs inho and jerry did a little time study and it's 13 minutes to get from the back parking lot to

058western avenue so we added 13 minutes out of the plan to give us some level of confidence that it actually could happen that all those buses with all that traffic could get out of the middle school get out to western ave turn right turn left do their runs and then get down to ghs you know we we thought about is traffic better at 7 15 on western ave than it is at 8 15 or 9 15. and the answer is it might be a little better but we have to like we are the problem i mean if you drive down western ave during february break everyone else is doing their thing and we're not and you can sail right through so that is you know something that i just want to put out there because

059i know in ho thinks about that too and we all we want this to work so that's the 8 18 start drop time with the 8 33 start at the high school this model also has the built-in dutch connection the regular school day would end at 3 10 dutch connection would be at 3 58. departure would be a 405 and there would be no late bus and that's 6 hours and 37 minutes go ahead blanca so dave austin isn't here so i'm not sure if anyone else knows but what time do meats usually take place so or matches or games so that middle one exacerbates the issue with it lost instructional time because right now we end at 257 this adds um so it adds 13 minutes which i think i have on the next

060slide so it makes the missed instructional time at the high school level greater and then at the middle school level what are the athletes supposed to do because don't they have to wait for all the other schools to be dismissed to meet aren't they typically like at four or so so i'm just wondering what happens for uh they would have some right a couple potential down time and then the athletes at the middle school who come up to play with the high school they also would have some there'd be some gaps in time there okay and then at the elementary level we're looking at a 903 drop and a 9 10 start at 3 10 end of the day 318 depart and a 355 late bus again three days and that's us back to a

061six hour school day and the pros and cons the pros are this is continues to be consistent for research for the high school students it builds in the extra help that we talked about already it eliminates the before school supervision at both farnsworth and the high school potentially it's less after school child care [Music] needed at the elementary level and it's less instructional time loss for fms athletes essentially none but the cons are it's not consistent with the sleep for middle school students because they're up early it increases the gap for the career and tech ed and mohan bus runs it that makes that gap even bigger it adds 13 additional minutes of lost instructional time for our high school athletes and then we're likely to have parents who need before school care at the

062elementary level so we may have some who need before and after care you know right now i was talking with a couple of our elementary principals at the middle school we do this before school care and the students go to the cafeteria area and they're largely entertained by their phones you can't do that with little ones we would have to have something much more structured at the elementary level if we were going to attempt to do that so that's all of them i think i've lived up to my promise to say that none of them are perfect um but i'm open to comments questions thoughts clarifications go ahead same i have a question for the second option where it says the cte and mohan runs a line better we know that for sure like those

063are set times already for next year um cte starts at eight o'clock over at the center over on uh at the water v water valley shaker road so yes that that would line up okay thank you could you go back apply so we see the times for option two yep everything um i have questions for the principals that's why they're here is that the time um now is the time andy we might need the microphone because i'm pretty sure um so i was just wondering if any principals have any strong opinions or preferences is anyone like laughter i like to pick on you just you know is there one you absolutely hate anyone or one that you think is the least worst or anything uh as a member of the sorry as a member of

064thank you for the question as a member of the start time task force since the beginning you know like dr wild said we've looked at many many many different options what i can tell the board is this year's middle school schedule is chaos i think one of the the challenges that we have is not having three days after school activity period eliminates the opportunities for kids to do extracurricular to do intramurals and we know at the middle level that's extremely important during the three years that they're with us so this year has been challenging because on wednesdays they have to pick which club am i going to go to am i going to go to intramural am i going to stay for after school extra help the equity piece the morning activity period that's real

065that didn't work students who need to come to activity period to get academic assistance they have a lot of them have a hard time getting a ride in in the morning so by not providing transportation that's a huge equity piece for me my priorities is to return to three days after school activity period we need to be able to provide that for middle school kids i'd like not to end any later than we are now i mean right now our activity period on the one day we have it is at 4 20. prior to the pandemic our activity period ended at 405 so we're really talking about 15 minutes here [Music] in the morning though i don't have all of my buses starting you know i have kids not arriving during homeroom either so that's

066also on the front end of our day a challenge so whatever level goes first second or last there's going to be trade-offs there's going to be some some you know decisions that need to be made and i don't know if any of them are perfect as a as a parent in the district my children and my family have had to deal with the three different start times one time we're early one time we're in the middle one time we're you know the later route so every few years we have to adjust and i think that's the situation for most of our families um i don't want a late day for kids at the middle level because i think it impacts them greatly but at this point we just need to to make a decision so

067we can start to plan some of the other things associated with this because there's a lot of logistics in terms of teacher contractual work day when we're going to have meetings when we're going to allow the clubs to meet so those are the decisions that also need to be made so that's why i don't know if i have a preference i have priorities that i'm advocating for the middle level child it sounds like most of them are addressed i think best in option two the only one with option two is is i would say the option two is the one that has the high school going back to the first route and you know that will you know the cons there is is the inconsistency with the sleep research um you know one of the

068questions i have is whether or not the the the the decision we made resulted in enough gains for high school students and i guess that's the piece that i struggle with at night because i really have not seen any data to suggest that the decision that we made resulted in huge gains for high school students academic excellence or involved in an extracurricular or you know what i can show you the data is the impact on the middle level child so i can give you the information there so that's i guess how i would answer that question okay thank you yep what about you mate okay mike sorry no good for you um if i understood correctly option one which is close to what we have this year but it does give the elementary more time

069i understand that it would give you the three days of after school yep correct yes with the with the first model uh with the first model we are anticipating running our late bus three days a week going back to monday tuesday thursdays which would eliminate that problem i would still have to uh you know we at the middle level with this model would still have to deal with the morning you know opening up the cafeteria option we open up the doors at eight o'clock so now we're talking you know 70 minutes of of of students between 60 and 65 minutes that we would have students in the building now most of the students in the morning at the middle level are either going to the cafeteria morning program attending some ensemble courses or some of

070our enrichment courses so we do have a fair amount of kids who do go to some programming in the morning again there's no transportation so parents would have to drop so so that would add a little bit more time to manage in the morning in the afternoon my concern would be you know kiddos leaving on a late bus if they're up on the hill you know they're getting home at 5 15 5 30 and if they have other commitments after school you know that puts a tax on families now over the years that has always been the case though if i'm not mistaken they're they get there later than the kids that live in west mayor so this model this elementary model first if you go to pre-pandemic we started at 8 45 and our

071late bus was rolling at 4 15 4 4 10 on a good day because our activity period ended at 405. so we're really talking in this model about 10 to 15 minutes a little bit later difference difference okay and the other uh advantage i think that i heard on this model uh besides that being consistent with the whole purpose of the the study and the research is that the high school would get back its room is that correct yeah okay with this model and also the the elementary school will pick up some time and i think we heard from the elementary principal that particularly number two is just totally off the radar because of the shortened shortening of the elementary day where they told us in the task force that it's shorter than many days

072in the capitol dressing and they still have to do the same amount of material yeah i think the majority of our elementary colleagues are most concerned about losing an additional 15 minutes of instructional time at the k-5 level so and then um can i continue or do you want somebody else to ask a question on number three if you want to pull that one up the high school would get out at 3 50 and if we're talking lost instructional time you're talking at least an hour plus correct for my level no no for the high school level for high school and the other question so both of you sort of concerns if the middle school gets out at 1 50 and the high school doesn't get out until 3 50. any of the athletes are

073they just going to supposed to hang around middle school for a couple of hours before they go up to the high school that that seems with with this model my morning management uh challenge becomes an afternoon management challenge so you know while we have our cafetorium open in the morning now for our morning program and kids can have breakfast and do some work in there i would have to create that opportunity at the end of the day for a student-athlete study hall or some some type of concept like that to have students because to your point if they're not if it's if it's a student who's playing up then they won't be able to start athletics until the high school is done modified athletics can start but still i mean we won't start interscholastic competition

074most of our games don't start till 4 4 15 against the rest of the suburban council so we'll still have to have something in the afternoon right to supervise students while we wait for the other levels to to get out specifically the high school if it's going to be a student athlete who's playing up right and i know a lot of our suburban council schools when the kids come in in the morning for the ensembles and choir and clubs and stuff like that um it is a responsibility to the parents to get them there and what i hear you're saying is that some kids can't get that right and so they would miss out on the ensembles and things such as that yes yes okay for sure thank you i don't even know if you

075guys can answer this so i apologize um with option one for elementary first how is that going to affect the self-contained classrooms at the elementary school because they're coming in from different districts because that's that's affecting three classrooms there um i don't think i can quickly answer that because it's possible like say every child in that class in those self-contained was from a different district we could probably flex the time a little bit because it's our buses that are pressed to get on the road again right um so i mean i think we could probably figure that out but i don't know if we haven't done that nuance of it yet but i can see in ho's wheels spinning here literally well i mean what happens on an annual basis is you know like we

076house the dhh program for middle level so we have students from other districts who get bused in and we tell boces look this is our start of our school day and then they work with the other school districts to get the buses to campus at a you know around the time of our start day so i would anticipate the conversations would be similar once we make a decision on when is our start time to say to the boces you know hey dhh programming at the middle level is going to start at you know 840 or 855 in this model so you mean you know you have to get the kiddos here by that time to start mike could you go back to my first question do you want requirements no go ahead okay um you

077know you asked the question a while ago about of what what preference i i can't wait to answer like mike every model has its advantages and disadvantages there's aspects of each one i like you know in the survey data when we asked the students about the current model what they liked we did get a lot of positive feedback from students about liking the later start time i think it's important to note when we're talking about option two with the 7 30 high school start like i think you almost got to think back to what it was like pre pandemic one of the reasons why the elementary days is shrinking in this new model versus what it was before is because when we the drop-off at the high school was 7.05 so that we could make

078sure that the elementary runs we maintain that that length of that instructional day but with the seven it didn't just have the problem of that we had these students unsupervised for 25 minutes it was also the if you remember the start time task force back then we were looking at pickup dates or times for those kids we had some students that were getting picked up at like 605 in order to make a 705 drop off so it kind of had a domino effect other than just that unsupervised time that i just wanted to call attention to you know i certainly as mike said we've lived through a 7 30 start we've lived through a 10 o'clock start and 9 30 start and now any 8 20 start i mean we can make anything work um

079like i like the dutchman connection for a lot of reasons that i mean we liked it before we started talking about any of the pandemic uh and start time stuff so so i think we can make it work um it's just like i said everything's going to have some cons with it that we're going to have to live with like yes no go ahead burt uh just to follow about in that dutchman connection originally when we talked about it and they just said everybody liked the concept but it was during going to be during the school day it wasn't an attack on that day at the end correct and we thought that it might require some negotiations it sounds like this is still going to require some negotiations potentially but why so it's nothing definite

080um that is sort of like the selling points for you know for looking at two and three but there's actually no guarantee and yet the ideal situation was to have it like during the school day itself oh yeah i think i think originally when we were talking about first of all when we originally talked about this idea it had the high school i'm trying to remember our times have shifted so many times now i think it was around 3 10 end of the day when we were looking at it and that dutchman connection we were going to link it to the beginning of third block was kind of the idea in this current model the reason why i was looking at it as it was right now was we we definitely have seen the problem

081with athletics this year and cutting into the fourth block classes we've had students that are leaving you know i actually just talked to dave this week about we've had some classes some teams that have been leaving at 215 and we're like wait well we we're cutting way too close into it so we're trying to maintain but even on a good day it's 2 30 and so that means and our day is ending at 257 so they're losing a half hour of instruction to go to these competitions so so when we were looking at that model was okay yes it's not ideal for these students for the athletes to miss judgment connection but it's better for them to miss that than to miss a class and that was the idea now i know rebecca's concerned with

082the dutchman connection is she wanted everybody to sort of have access to it and that sort of blows blows that away a little bit then well yes and no yes or no because it depends on it's game days right it's not every day it's game days okay yeah and then the sel portion or the positivity project whatever we decide to do with the dei stuff again that's going to have to be contractual because that would be considered lessons and we'd have to analyze that figure out how to handle that additional cost or whatever or have to change planning periods whatever you magical things you guys do i mean but to answer mike's question because i think it's a real point we need to settle on a schedule so that we can start answering these questions

083like i can't even we can't even have a conversation with the union right now to say will what is your viewpoint on this time because we're we've got three different models we're looking at so we do have to land on something so that we can have conversations design things and build our masters casual for next year which we're in the process of doing right now so i have two questions and maybe you dr wells can answer one you said all of these have a little bit of fine tuning right all of the options meaning what they just said um i don't think we can fine-tune the minutes on right not the minute but in terms of like contractual pieces and all of that yeah and then the second question is um so i know we're

084not going to vote on this until the next meeting but i'm leaning towards the high school first option and i know we have some time to think about it but i um i don't shorten the elementary day and then it it's but the elementary start time is later than it is now and i've heard and i think several of you have heard from a handful of elementary teachers about starting even earlier than the time right now is terrible which i agree with so you know if they had to balance i don't i wouldn't have elementary principle here starting later versus losing some time would you say that a lot of people feel like starting a little bit later for elementary would be um i think the two principals who were on the committee it was

085um dr lockwood and dr beanie were adamant that they don't want to lose time and both of them said um on one at one meeting or another that at the early start time they they didn't hear a lot of people complaining about the early start time this year they complained about traffic for sure um but their bigger concern was the lost start time you know these guys were there lots of hands go ahead i know you said that dave put together a big spreadsheet can we just get like an actual number of how many students are affected at student athletes are actually leaving early and missing time it fluctuates by my season right so i mean today is an example i had three teams leaving at 2 40. so the kids were released at 220

086all right so they're missing most of the last mod 13. in this model they'd um well actually this this model is sort of the way we have it this year so it would be sort of similar to that um now i don't have depending on the season it depends on how many kids play up who have to get up you know he'll have to get the high school buses to away games now this is also just for away games too so for home games it's it's it's less of an impact because the kids can you know can stay in classes a little bit later so anything that has the middle level later than this you know we're talking kids are missing mod 12 mod 13 if they're a student athlete and i have to go

087to an away game and it's all based upon where they have to go so going to saratoga is a lot different than going a colony so it's all debased upon distance and how many kids selectively classified to play up we have more flexibility at the modified athletic schedule because we can start that up a little bit later but it's those away games specifically to those you know farther away suburban council schools that tend to really really impact both level both level so it's it's really a matter of of which level is going to get the impact yeah okay just adding on to that if you think about like a high school athletic schedule if the varsity is home most likely the jb is away so there's always someone going away every every single day i

088was just trying to get an idea of numbers real i'm sure i think we can but i think it's hundreds yeah yeah yeah that's what i'm that's what i'm trying to get and again like mike said too it's like like right now track and field because we have so many students participating in track and field that has a big impact and they have their varsity jv and freshmen all at the same time so they leave at the same time kelly in the elementary first can you just remind me is the dutch connection at the end of the day or is it not in that one at all right now it's designed at the end of the day so it basically it's not in this one at all oh no i'm sorry with your homemade first

089no it's not at all we we actually we can't do that and make it work with transportation in that situation so no no no devils have dutch there is no dutch connection in the elementary first and um so we would just do a traditional three-day week after school activity period another question um the do we have any idea of like maybe not there yet but how much the the cte when honest and runs would would affect the budget if we had it says you know it doesn't align well just wondering does that mean can i give you an example just so so every schedule i feel like i have to figure out the cte schedule impact on it so typically a morning cte programs we usually transport at 7 30 and it starts at 8

090o'clock and then they leave their cte program at 10 30 and get back approximately at 11. and so whenever no matter what schedule you're looking at you're working with that schedule because that's not going to change and then the afternoon we leave at 10 30 for an 11 o'clock start and then they their program ends at 1 30 and come they come back to the high school at 2. so like even in this mile just to give you a quick example they're getting back at two that usually the bigger impact for us it's interesting the morning ct students have to be transported directly from their house right now to the cte program because the high school starts too late for them to come to the high school and go there so but then in the

091afternoon those students are coming back at two o'clock so we structured their schedule so they take the afternoon ct students take a first block class go to a study hall then go to cte come back and take another class but they miss anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes of class time because their program is ending right as we're just starting the fourth block class and that's about i mean to give you an idea of numbers that's about roughly about 38 kids in the morning session and and same in the afternoon just to give you kind of a ballpark mike said with the cte we have two buses sort of east and west divided and they will pick up the students and go straight to cte where if we went back to high school being first

092what ends up happening is because we align better with other schools non-public schools out of district schools we should be able to save actually two additional runs and that as dr wiles pointed out our contractors are the prices are increasing we we could be looking at up to 65 000 or upwards because we aligned a little bit better we can consolidate and save the district a little bit money because what ends up happening is then if we went high school first the transfer station will be at the high school so we will pick up all the students collect them in our normal high school run and then drop them here at the high school they will be divided and then we can deploy them to other district schools thank you god bless rebecca did you

093have a question um i just wanted to say i mean i think the bottom line is there's just immutable problems that our district has right that are not changeable so the geography is not going to change the traffic pattern on western avenue is not going to change if we could wave a magic wand and have all of the schools start between 8 and 8 30 or 8 and 8 45 i think everyone in this room would be thrilled right like that would be ideal but that is not possible so we have to accept the fact that we're not going to get everything we want i've been a strong proponent of late school late high school start time as a barb that's how i got involved in the board but i can't ignore what the educators

094are saying and they're describing you know the middle school experience this year as chaos i think that's the word you just used um the first option has the middle school starting 10 minutes later than it does this year so the same problems that you've experienced this year are going to be you know increased by at least 10 minutes if we repeat the same pattern next year so for that reason i really can't good conscious subconscious support option one option two has a lot of negatives not the least of which is that the high school would revert back to the earlier start time which is counter to the science and counter to the whole reason why we started the task force in the in the first place but i think the potential benefits of the dutch

095connection can hopefully negate some of those disadvantages and would ultimately be more equitable as it's available to all the students every single day and could even help potentially mitigate some of that pandemic learning loss i am concerned though about that shortened elementary school time and i'm wondering if if we save those those runs from the cte if we could shave even just a couple minutes on either end you're shaking your head there's no chances yeah i still think option two though it saddens me to say it but i still think option 2 would be my first choice at this point every minute counts and that's what we're learning and as dr wiles pointed out in the beginning if you shave one minute here then there is a domino effect that will follow um so that's

096where the difficulty lies is there one that you really are hoping we won't pick or well i if you're asking me out of the three which is my least favorite it would be the middle school first simply because we've never done that option so i just don't know what the traffic pattern will be and even before we can get out to on the road start picking up students we have to at least have 13 minutes and that's a long time this this question kind of pertains to you as well just with the option of the high school starting first i mean it does concern me that the elementary school would be missing the 20 minutes but would there be and this would be for you as well would there be any way that like let's

097say we had some type of enrichment after school where kids had an option to maybe do something that catches them up with that time would that completely throw like after school late busing like are are you going to like follow me to the parking lot for suggesting that or is that just the work has been done are you saying add more time well because i know for example like pine bush has three late buses and so let's say um there's something because that's a 20-minute um loss per per day that we say okay you know what we're going to maybe do some type of enrichment for certain grades certain days where they're able to maybe catch up on that that time that they're missing just after school doing things i mean maybe even change it

098up so it covers that but it's just i don't know it's it's too preliminary but would that be would that throw you off for buses like if a lot of kids decide to yeah i would have to know how many buses at what time to make sure that in the equation of all the different moving pieces that it would it would fit okay all right thank you last question go ahead now i'm just wondering about our students our trusty camera people i think some of you are graduating but are there you're all seniors right so you probably don't care but i'm just kidding is there one is there one here that would have you would have absolutely hated this year or one that you really think is great james answer the question um thanks james

099hello as seniors we have sort of we've been talking a little bit we have one sorry i was using cashews we have uh one sort of one sort of concern really which is in options two and three which is the dutch connection and how that works with maintaining clubs and time spent right now and after school sort of doing more extracurricular activities and if document connect is supposed to be mandated you stay with your fourth block teacher or you go somewhere else for help that eliminates a lot of opportunities for extracurriculars that we have right now in our after school period so as far as what i think we're most concerned about is option two and three and how dutchman connection can be used okay so maybe if we were to think it through a

100little more with two and three as to what if we can't we have extracurriculars during that time right so okay gotcha but we would have to take that into consideration okay yeah but it's just weird if you're trying to do dei or what's it called the social positivity project during that time and a lot of students are leaving i mean as they are it would be an interesting survey i know surveys are hard but uh of what of how students spend their activity period time i know personally i have never gone to a teacher in my activity period i always use it for you know my clubs and i think a lot of people do the same thing so maybe doctrine connect would not be it would be a big change from how we use

101activity period right now thank you yep thanks james so i know that we're going to um well first i first as a comment i just want to thank everybody on the start time committee because this sounds like well this is like pre-covered so this seems like it's going on forever and it also sounds really um like a logistical nightmare so thanks for everybody serving on that committee and so i just want to say that i think whatever we land on i'll feel good that we've done like due diligence and looked at all of these so much because right now i'm leaning towards like i mentioned high school first which i know which is kind of why we started this whole thing but um kind of like mr laster said before i feel like the gains

102that we see from changing what has changed already i don't see that and there's so many other losses i see that again they all have losses but i feel like that's the one that has the biggest but we will vote on this correct dr wiles in the next ordinance so we have some time to think about it go ahead barb uh i just i guess won the lobby for number one because it fulfills what we we're here to do and it restores the home room to the high school so that everybody will be together and we'll have access to a home room and that's where you can do some of the instruction that you haven't been able to do this year we've heard from the the elementary school principals that the parents don't mind the

103early start the kids love the early start because they're up and early [Music] and it gives the elementary teachers the time that they need and one of the comments that was made as we we had our meetings is that you know some of the response that that we've gotten particularly from staff sort of is more towards their needs versus the student needs and so you know i would just throw that out there we restore the the three bus runs after school bus runs to the middle school doing this we get the homeroom period back to the uh to the high school and the elementary um parents seem to be okay according to the you know this is what our principals are telling us that yeah i'm just saying that myself and every other elementary parent

104i know would think even starting earlier than what time it is my my daughter's bus comes at 705 in the dark and then my middle school kid comes at 8 45 that time difference of what i can do in the morning is insane so to go even earlier for elementary school because yes that's 7 30 start time but the bus pickup is like during the six o'clock time period in the morning which is insane for elements that's just my opinion i know we're talking about how we feel and they all have cons but i think to go even earlier for elementary school is i think we'll hear from parents is there an option for yeah the the elementary first it's like our kids in the winter are going to be out in the dark like

105little kids yeah and so i mean even with bus stops things like that it's just that makes that makes me a little anxious and i same with nate and sema i mean he's my hardest my elementary kid is my hardest to get up in the morning it's it's insane i don't think it's just teachers i know like what i'm thinking of with all of these what's best for kids and it's not just high school kids it's all the kids so they all will have some cons like i said but i don't think um you know i know that we started all this thinking about the high school students and the sleep time first but i just don't see the the games but i also don't think it's just i know you said that we've heard

106from a couple of teachers about the start time but for elementary school but i don't think they were just advocating for themselves and their schedule i mean they talked about the logistics in their classroom and the kids so well particularly the three classes at um altamonte yeah kids coming in from other from other districts right i think in whole or somebody said that when we we set the starting time then the other districts do adjust to try to get the kids there at that starting time so i mean that i read that letter and i was worried about the same thing but um we've just been assured that those kids you know by their districts would get them to whatever time you know we we said as our starting time yeah part of that letter

107they were also worried about the kids acclimating because that set of kids they said it was harder for them to actually have that change within their schedule and have to come in earlier then they still have to unpack and have their breakfast and do everything so they were worried that they were they were going to have issues as well quick mike what was that what's the pre-kovitz start time for high school exactly what it was 30 years probably yeah pre-cover we were 7 30 start 223 and and we had an activity period that went to 310. okay mike you said that the students do like the later start time from your experience yeah the feedback i mean this is based on uh the the comments that were on the student survey um i would say

108the majority were positive so and what is the pickup time if we do 7 30 start time for the high school like on average are the kids going to be out there at 6 uh 6 30. um i would have to look at that um pick up so we would be dropping at 7 15 some some may be 6 30 yes okay i mean this whole i i hear what mike saying i mean i who doesn't want a good i mean i would love to start my job later sure i mean it's that's that seems like a pretty obvious i mean but i'm looking at this this these surveys or what for what they're worth is at the high school level it didn't change their sleep patterns right which is really the whole reason is

109to get more sleep so what they're really doing is they're going to bed later so they can go to school later which is they just shifted yeah and it shifted their bedtime because okay i don't think school 8 30 or whatever it is i don't have to get there at 7 30. we're so not really it's not solving the issue of what we were trying to solve which is given more sleep yeah and then hundreds of kids are missing instructional time because of athletics yeah yeah i have a comment about this year the middle school i don't mean to pick on you but it was rough for kids who had um a mask so your your kid was also a mask they had to like find a teacher to beg that would house them between

110the end of the school day and before masks started um and i heard later on of some kids who actually would hide in the bathroom and eat in the bathroom because they didn't want to go to the group cafeteria you can't get them in trouble now because it's past um and so i just you know so that that struggle is real you know that really my own child was like oh i got you know mrs so-and-so madame coons said i could go there so we needed nikki that's that's a big problem i think anyway listen um the the the mourinho's um shortening of the elementary school day 15 minutes i mean does that fall within the required curriculum time frame like isn't isn't there a certain amount of time they have to spend on it

111and how close does it come to that um so it's not 900 hours so we are we make the 900 hours but it's close okay all right thank you yeah we wouldn't bring you a model where you were breaking that's a big chunk of time that's concerning um if we do go with that model where the elementary kids are losing the 15 minutes can we like collect data to see how we compare in terms of kids learning loss or something something qualitative or is it quantitative quantitative um it could be both i mean i think one of the challenges in all of this is we don't have a good way to collect data on our students experiences last year or really this year because their experiences were so unusual last year so do we see

112increased student achievement this year because we changed the start time no but a hundred other things went wrong in students lives around coven so it's like we'd have to be master statisticians to be able to tease out the variables to say which of the things that happened in the past two years had an impact so i don't know how much we could even measure what you're asking blanca next year because the you know where are we now is even hard to find okay um i mean i think that's one of the things that's been hard about this work if we didn't have pandemic and we switched the start time i think our data would be a lot cleaner but you know attendance is terrible this year but is it terrible because we started to change

113the start time i don't i don't think so i think it's terrible for other reasons we have a lot of students who are struggling academically but i think it has more to do with the interrupted instruction at the end of 2020 and the hybrid model we had last year than it does to whenever we start the school day and and that's really the challenge with with all of this so and the other thing i'll say because i know i'm sure there's going to be lots of people calling and writing and so on um none of this solves the traffic so traffic i don't care when we start fms mike it's going to be a nightmare because we the the one way in one way out the bus is in the back so many cars coming

114in all at the same time it doesn't make we could start at three in the morning and we're going to have a traffic problem at farnsworth and so and ditto with ges because that the runway up to the school is so short um and so i i want to perhaps tamper down expectations that any of these will solve that problem because they won't i mean the problem at the middle school is an expensive capital project um so anyway i want to echo what sema said to thank people about for their work on this and the thousands of hours that have gone into the what if can we do this can we do that mike had a couple over at the middle school who just pumped out options like like a computer right um into inho

115who has so patiently looked at every last one of these to say this works this doesn't work because we didn't want to bring you anything that in the end would um not work so thanks to everybody who stayed with us and um i'm sure there'll be a lot of anticipation to see where we land i wonder if spending the thousands of hours trying to find more bus drivers would have been more effective more effective solutions seems like that's the limiting factor of all of it bus drivers my plea i just have one comment so i mean i agree that the losing the 15 minutes of the elementary school is far from ideal and i wish we could fix it somehow magically but i think to underscore there's been instructional loss this year at the high

116school unrelated to sports right because no one arrives to school on time um yeah i mean i think we've said it before but i'll just explain again we were forced we originally when we started the schedule we we had the homeroom attached to second block and that's how we planned to start the year that's where we are planning to focus on all our sel and diversity activities and then when we started off the school year we were averaging i want to say nine routes nine so basically about one third of the routes were showing up after the start of school at the beginning of the school year and so within a week week and a half two weeks we were like we can't maintain this because first block is losing time every single day so

117we very rapidly change the schedule and shifted the homeroom block to before first block which i knew was going to be a disaster and it has been a disaster all year right now i would say we're probably down to probably two or three routes that show up after yeah after 8 20 and so most i would say by 8 25 we have everybody in the building but this year has created such a laissez-faire attitude about the start of school that it's like nobody gets to school on time like whether it's parent drop-offs student drivers or students going to get breakfast and then going kind of moseying and then back to class we're we're typically not starting first block till about 8 35 probably realistically so i mean one thing i will say about the the

118um elementary first model that's up there though is is one of the things we've worked really hard on is to make sure that those times work with transportation so when we say an 805 drop off that's an 805 drop off so we should be able to start at 8 15 with no problem still have to figure out the breakfast program that's that's going to be that's always going to be a little bit of a rub so we're going to have to figure out so thank you thank you okay i know i have one more item so my second informational item tonight is just to recognize the national school nurse day is next week may 11 2022 and then since 1972 national school nurse day has been set aside on a wednesday in may to recognize

119our school nurses national school nurse day was established to foster a better understanding of the role school nurses play in the educational setting and this year's theme is bridging health care and education recognizes that school nurses lead the way to support health and ensure that students are healthy safe and ready to learn perhaps this year more than ever we want to thank our school nurses saying they go above and beyond doesn't begin to capture the work that they do particularly for vast portions of the school year where it was because of them that our doors are open and our kids were in class even if they did come late so thank you to all of our nurses for all of the good work that they do okay thank you dr wiles next we have board

120president information i have four items the first are the nisba reference dates uh information was sent are emailed by nisba to each board member regarding submitting resolutions and proposed by-law amendments for consideration at the voting delegates at the annual business meeting in the fall the annual process sets nisba's advocacy efforts through the proposal of new positions and the continuation or discontinuation of those sets set to expire only boards of education that are members of nisba nisba board of directors may submit resolutions for consideration proposed resolutions once adopted made directness but to advocate either for or against a wide variety of legislative and regulatory issues about the state and federal levels and so you'll see there's a timeline there are key dates and the resolution kit is attached next we have the voter registration that's required

121for the may 17th vote budget vote and election the public vote on the school budget and board of educational board of education will be held on tuesday may 17 2022 voter registration is required in the gilderon school district to vote you must be 18 years old a u.s citizen and a resident of the gilbert school district for at least 30 days prior to the vote if you're not registered with the school district or the albany county board of elections you must do so prior to the vote you may register with the albany county board of elections or through the dmv the district has established three registration dates for residents to vote at the may 17 2022 budget vote and election you may register anytime between 8 30 a.m and 2 30 p.m at one of

122the elementary schools or from 8 30 a.m to 4 30 p.m at the district office on the following dates thursday may 5th monday may 9th or tuesday may 10th if you are not sure which elementary school to vote please refer to our web page link budget and taxes and use that link that drops down voter eligible eligibility and you can see where your if you're registered and where you should vote for school elections the next item is the upcoming board of education election the deadline for board of ed candidates to return their completed petition was april 18th there are four open spots three seats are for a three year term of office and one c is for a one year term of office the names of the candidates and their order on the ballot will

123be as follows katie depiro nicole coonrat kimberly blasiak april mcallister mark riemer jennifer romano kelly person william carney gloria toe hilt and barb frederico candidates do not run for a specific seat on the board from the candidates the individuals with the four highest vote totals will be elected the candidates with the three highest vote totals will each serve a three year term of office that starts july 1st and ends in june 30th 2025. the candidate with the next highest vote total will serve the one year term which will begin immediately on may 18th and end on june 30th 2023 the pta council will be hosting a meet the candidates night on monday may 9th this will this event will begin at 6 pm and will be live streamed on our youtube channel next we have

124a proposal to engage with progression partners the audit subcommittee which is part of the dei committee brings to the board a recommendation to work with progression partners as a consultant to perform an equity audit for the district the subcommittee has held multiple meetings over months to consider the most feasible approach to complete this audit as a first step in creating in creating an equity action plan the committee considered the scope of work the overall objective for the audit the kind of expertise needed and the amount of time required to complete it recognizing that the scope of work is beyond what the subcommittee can complete without assistance they consulted with cap region boces to re to research consultants with expertise who can perform this work the committee considered costs expertise and checked references with other districts

125in the capital region and new york state progression partners who is under contract with cap region boces comes highly recommended and is able to provide four elements of this work equity training equity action planning equity learning walks and focus groups with students staff and parents the cost is approximately 50 000 and can be funded through title iv and title ii federal grants and that's all i have next we have action items school business neil thank you dr vera first item this evening is a resolution to an approved agreement with ctb connections can i have a motion to approve the service agreement with cdb connections um judy second gloria any questions all in favor pass is 9-0 next is a resolution for available funds from the 2019 capital improvement project and the resolution states that the

1262019 capital improvement project can be accomplished in all material respects for less than the estimated total cost and as such hereby authorizes remaining available funds in the amount of 849 to be expended on needed heating and ventilation improvements deemed to be in the best interest of the district can i have a motion to approve the capital improvement available funds nate second barb any questions you all in favor passes 9-0 and then building off of that resolution we have another one that is an award for contracts for phase three of the 2019 capital construction over authorization and it's to award to the low meter low bidder meeting specifications uh contract number 18 which is mechanical work the jezreel mechanical and contract 19 electrical dnd industries incorporated can i have a motion to approve these construction bid

127awards gloria second kim any questions or comments okay any other comments or questions okay all in favor okay passes eight zero with one extension uh next is a resolution to declare certain items surplus and obsolete delegates the assistant superintendent for business to dispose of set items in america's system the board of educational policy and the list includes some items from our in-house print shop that is out of date now given today's technology can i have a motion to prove the declaration of surplus obsolete property um judy ii kelly any questions or comments you all in favor he passes 9-0 the next resolution is to designate may 18th 2022 at 2 pm for the canvassing of affidavit ballots at the district administrative offices and also that following individuals be designated as the central board of inspectors

128to cast and canvas the affidavit ballots that would include myself linda livingston and deborah soon can i have a motion to approve the resolution to canvas affidavit affidavit ballots blanca second rebecca did you have your hand up oh sorry um any questions or comments okay all in favor it passes 9-0 and finally this evening we have two donations we have a monetary donation from linwood pta for the purchase playground equipment and we also have a donation from joann ryan of a cello and two violas can i have a motion to approve these donations a barb second kelly any questions or comments just thank you to lynnwood pta and joanne ryan you all in favor pass is 9-0 okay thank you neil next we have board president action i have one item it's the appointment of

129election workers we recommend the appointment of the following individuals to serve as election workers at the budget vote in elections on may 17 2022 and you'll see the list of individuals who will be working at the budget vote can i have a motion to prove the appointment of election workers blanca second nate any questions or comments okay all in favor pass is 9-0 thank you next we have board committee reports we'll start with communications uh we haven't met since our last meeting we have a scheduled meeting of may 31st at 4 30. thank you and business practices we haven't met and we don't have one schedule okay and audit we have not met however we have a meeting on uh monday i'm just checking i think it's it may not eight o'clock yep may 9th

130um who am i missing uh policy we have a meeting coming up next week okay and dei yep we um sorry we talked about engaging the ptas within our subcommittees just going to find out what's going on there they're going to be working on engagement within the community also they talked about the research committee talked about surveys for teachers just about district and state provided resources and have teachers maybe talk about what works like if they have to use their own materials for specific topics also if there's a specific topic that they would like to talk about or take on we also talked about the equity audit which was discussed earlier um hold on flipping the page a lot of information at that meeting um we talked about um let's see communications was scheduled to

131meet on may 12th diversity in action there was a collaboration between ghs and tech valley which was actually pretty cool because they helped students of color have stem connections so they said if you can see it you can be it so they had higher ed from clarkson harvard microsoft google tick tock they had like a panel mentorship day sorry method i keep looking at you just to um also the ef tour which was amazing and just the cultural knowledge seeing the global citizenship it was a great trip mr p went on that trip westmear also for the celebration of ramadan they had the text read with the authentic meaning which is that's actually pretty cool i like that part also we talked about the membership that and marie sent out a ton of information looking

132for members um and then we talked about our learning component just like meaning makers whose perspective isn't heard or hiding in the background and then we talked about a possible student only committee just to make sure that they had a student comfortable space thank you kim um next is public comment number two linda do we have any public comments no okay thank you next we have board issues ideas and sharing does anyone have anything to share oh go ahead like something we should consider in the future i had a parent reach out to me about the washington studies trip saying that they would have really liked to have their child go but they would have appreciated perhaps a little more time to gather the 500 deposit so when they heard about washington studies and signed

133up for the interest meeting they were expecting that they would have to have the money due a little later on but the the 500 deposit there wasn't enough time to gather that and since we talk about equity and stuff i think that's kind of an easy fix right if we give them like a little more notice like yes this is the interest meeting but start saving ahead of time so that you're ready because then by the time they raised enough money all the spots were gone that's all i want to bring that up and put that and maybe mike's radar for next year other board issues ideas and sharing i just want to bring up because dr wiles mentioned and i i know i mentioned it in the past the idea of creating a capital

134project for the middle school and the parking lot and the traffic over there that i feel like it's um like it's just you know we can't always do it so it's just kind of kick down the road but at some point it's going to have to be dealt with and i feel like it's just going to be worse is there's construction across the street from the middle school so i feel like after this um vote and election is over um you know looking at board goals etcetera i really think that that's something that we shouldn't really push down and it's just been forever and it's just getting worse and worse and we have a building in the front of um the middle school that is vacant that used to be i think the district office

135like years ago it's like a waste of space so we have this like waste of space there and traffic so it just doesn't make sense but because you mentioned dr i'm just going to keep bringing you because it's not good i think wasn't a plan done like in a facilities committee a few years back for some reason i i picture uh mike just really excited over this plan so i don't know i looked into that a while back i think there was prior to the 2019 project yeah one of the proposals was to reconfigure the parking lot at farnsworth i think it had about a three million dollar price tag it sounds about right and the project was ultimately defeated and that was taken out of the first round so it wasn't it wasn't there

136but the old do has been on our list to remove uh again and again and again and again and um someday that may happen but it's not as simple as it should be we need sed approval and we've always had other priorities when money gets tight so yes it's on the list any other board issues ideas and sharing okay can i have a motion to adjourn uh barb second nate all in favor a pass is 9-0 thank you everybody have a good night you