001good evening and welcome to the november 9th 2021 gilroy central school district board of education meeting would you all please silence your cell phones and stand for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay first on the agenda we have public comment we have one public comment in person and one via email so first we have mr steven spalton if you could go to the mic thank you and we have a three to uh is it three minutes yeah three minute time limit for public comment thank you mike good to begin yep great thank you thank you so my name is steven spaulton i'm here to talk about our
002son ethan who is a type 1 diabetic we feel strongly for his safety as he should have his diabetic bag which includes all his supplies in glucagon which is a medicine with him at all times and the scenarios that we're concerned about is the emergency the worst case scenario like a school lockdown when he's locked in a room and the nurse who would have the medication under your policy couldn't get to him or he's in one part of a school and he asked and the nurse would have to come all the way to another part of the school with the medicine to get him or if the nurse is caring for another student another part of school how would she get to him and while he's only in kindergarten now we'd like to set the
003standard for his full 13 years at pine in gildewind school so i know pine bush elementary small but the rest of the schools are big and do get big in size and we know there's different scenarios like the bag that teachers and staff are supposed to hand off have been left behind we know it's been at least once left on the bus inappropriately which happens but if the student's carrying it i feel comfortable that he would be able to do it so the district's policy on self-carry medication form the our doctor will not sign and the doctor won't sign it because the medication we're talking about is used if he's passed out it doesn't matter he's a kindergartner any age this medications for when he's passed out if he's passed out someone can't administer the
004drug themselves which is why the law that i test out um section 19116b of the education law specifically calls out glucagon and that glucagon should be used um self-carried but not self-administered and i highlighted one section but i want to point out the law specifically calls out glucagon for self-carry and all the other diabetic supplies as self-carry and administer and i don't think that was an accident i think the law specifically did that for a reason so we respectfully request that the wording of the district form which i also hand out a copy gets revised to actually follow the law and provide safety for our students and i do want to say this has nothing to do the care that he's been receiving has been excellent so this is nothing to do about the current
005care this is planning for the worst case emergencies which i think is what we should be planning for so with that i thank you okay thank you mr spelton our next public comment is from keith plunkett he writes i would like to address the misinformation that was presented by public comment number two at the last school board meeting there has not been quote hundreds of deaths each day locally unquote within albany county in fact there have there has been 421 deaths in albany county since the beginning of the pandemic that would be on average 22.16 deaths per month since march of 2020 i would also like to point out that there have been 30 reported cases that would give our county a ninety eight point six three four percent survival rate i believe if my
006misinformation was publicly corrected then the misinformation from public comment number two should be publicly corrected as well okay so regarding the um first public comment i don't know if this was ever brought up to a policy before or if this would be the first time that you could bring it to policy and address it in in that committee meeting currently our medical director everything okay great so then after that then the policy committee could also look at that as well okay great thank you next on the agenda we have the consent items this includes the minutes of october 19th meeting cpsc and cse recommendations personnel action and the financials can have a motion to approve rebecca second barb i'll just make yep one comment for the um for the personnel agenda if we could strike
007is it linwell's name from the personnel agenda because she'll have a separate contract any other comments or questions all in favor passes 9-0 thank you next we have information items first is superintendent information dr wiles thank you my first item this evening is to recognize our school related professionals the day that we commemorate them is november 16th so we will be joining in school statewide to acknowledge our school related professionals simply put we cannot accomplish the many tasks we need to get done now more than ever without these uh wonderfully committed helpful school related professionals these are our custodians our maintenance staff our food service staff our aides monitors nurses teaching assistants clerical staff and our bus driver so i um accept please accept my our sincere appreciation and heartfelt thanks for their hard work
008their knowledge skill and commitment to the guilderland central school district and of course to all of our students and i do want to add today i learned that this week is actually national school psychologist week and we have a tremendous team of school psychologists here in guilderland who have done a tremendous amount of work to support our students and our staff through many many difficult circumstances so i don't have a formal announcement but i did want to recognize that group of of individuals who work so hard each and every day so we're fortunate to have so many folks on our team to take care of our students so thanks to all of our school psychologists my next item uh is a difficult one as we shared at our last board meeting meeting we we lost
009a dear friend and colleague and our assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction dr damian singleton and in the two weeks since that time we have in addition to attending to the social and emotional needs of of our team have really needed to give some thought to how we go forward in getting all the many tasks that dr singleton did how do we get them done going forward the community may not know that under his title of assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction damien was actually the leader of all of our technology in the district and um technology these days is different than it was five or even 10 years ago because it literally touches every part of our operation obviously it's at the core of our operation in in terms of teaching and learning and
010that has become even more so since the the pandemic but it also touches the heat our phone system our fire alarm system our transportation system we can't take attendance without technology so you can really name any aspect of our work including our work right here tonight and know that our technology and our internet and our networks and our need for security of our data and our systems is just immense and growing and as the community knows we we are in the midst of a capital project which is expanding our technology and we've just passed another that will do that again so in thinking about how best to support the school district going forward i'd like to um just share a thought with the board tonight about um thinking a little bit differently about how we
011go about accomplishing the work that damien did single-handedly when he was with us it is fairly clear that in a district the size of ours with the high expectations we have for teaching and learning that we absolutely need an assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction to make sure that we stay on the cutting edge of essentially what is our mission here but i would like to propose that we think about a leadership position a director of technology kind of position to take the lead on all things related to technology so it would include not only the instructional side of the house but also the operational side of the house and think about our data security our network security and all of those things that we've for one reason or another spent a lot of time
012talking about in the last several months this uh proposal has some financial implications we are just about to start our budget development process for the 2022-2023 school year that doesn't seem possible but we will be starting what we call stage one with our leadership team and stage two which is when we actually plan for the upcoming year so i wanted to put this out there and get some feedback or answer any questions that you might have gloria the ask uh knowing what the work that damian has done for so many years and you know he began in that position when this is just getting started so he has grown he grew with it yes and took it over but it's definitely become a position of its own i'm not surprised have uh other districts in
013the area moved in that direction we actually were an outlier here to not have a director of technology recently we did have one several years ago and then we moved away from it but i just met with all of our suburban council counterparts and all have a person who's dedicated to the oversight leadership of their technology programs so i think what we would be doing is actually becoming a little bit more mainstream but that speaks to the breadth of knowledge and skill that damien had that i think is going to be really difficult to replicate i just had one comment about because obviously this impacts the budget if i'm in full support of having these two positions if we could have just for spirit of transparency like a description of how those two you know
014basically his position is being split into two so how that's kind of divvied up and then also just maybe a reminder to us about how tran or sorry how technology that whole um team is structured so we can see who's falling underneath this director perhaps a combination of job description and organizational chart would be helpful so you know who's who and we're happy to put that together and i would think since you started off by talking about how technology's become such a part of everything we do that position is going to have to be linked in so many ways to so many areas yes so it's going to be key yes it's it's really linked to everything everything yeah other questions or comments or thoughts okay then i will forge ahead my next item is
015just a brief overview of the superintendent's conference day which was held last week tuesday so a week ago today that was on november 2nd we had a variety of professional learning opportunities provided to all of our employees some of which included new ways to integrate technology there's that again into their teaching and then well part of the day included time for grade level teams to meet there were a wide variety of workshops that were offered among them promethean board training differentiation best practices self-care and mental health blue kit training google tools self-graded applications gim kit training virtual science labs best practices analyzing benchmark assessment prac analyzing benchmark assessments handwriting edtech training investigations math equity centered trauma informed schools improving equity for students with disabilities and then our new dei director matt pinchnot also coordinate coordinated
016a workshop through nysa on diversity equity and inclusion that focused on implicit bias i just want to call out that many people contributed to the planning of this event you know typically this is something that dr singleton would pull together and bring people together to help with the planning but we had several administrators who stepped up but who also reached out to teachers in the buildings and our curriculum cabinets and others to make sure that we had a menu of learning opportunities that were meaningful and timely for our faculty and staff but also tied to our to our big goals around technology and diversity equity and inclusion and social emotional learning we had a mix of our own staff who facilitated and we had some guests who came in so i think overall it was
017a successful day i met with our leadership team earlier today and we're gathering some more formal feedback from various audiences to get input so we can do a better job even better job next time so it was a it was a good day any questions sure um are we going to do it this way again like next year with the elementary teachers having their parent conferences on the the days before so that they could in fact be part of this well that's one of the things we're gathering feedback on okay it seemed like i mean i think they were probably pleased to be able to have this day and it sounded wonderful yes um i met earlier today with emily mino who's the president of the gta and she did some surveying with all of
018the teachers but one of the themes that came out from the elementary group was how nice it was to actually be able to do some professional development on that day and they took on some big topics they had a very busy day the the trade-off is the number of half-days for conferences which was a lot and we're very sensitive that's very hard on parents so i think we want to look at that is there some middle ground to provide that conference day for for teachers without disrupting what i can only imagine i'm looking at sema elementary kid and i mean it's just a lot to have all those half days so we're always trying to strike a balance pretty soon we'll be working on the calendar and that's right on the list that's a great
019question i just had a question i think you may have mentioned this dr wells maybe gloria brought up before are we going to be able to see the feedback about or what the teachers had um given feedback about about the content that was um given as options in for professional development or for pdp so it's in many different forms so we had our our kazda presenters did their evaluations so i've got to see if they'll share those mike laster had done one with the middle school team emily did one with the teachers some of the workshops had evaluations tied to them through my learning plan so we have to pull all that together and then we talk today about possibly doing a thought exchange to get some just 30 000 foot feedback so we're whatever
020we can pull together we'll absolutely share with you guys that sounds great to me would just be it would also be nice to hear from the the teachers that went yes all right um my next topic is a update on diagnostic testing so we will begin diagnostic testing for covert 19 on monday the 15th we sent communication to our families yesterday to help them get a jump start on creating these profiles that need to be created on the quadrant biosciences app quadrant biosciences is the is the organization that's helping with our screening testing but we can also use these tests for diagnostic uh efforts so these tests are for symptomatic individuals so students also employees so this is you wake up in the morning and you have a symptom and you want to get a
021test but you don't necessarily want to go to an urgent care or your own physician you can come to our little testing center which is a little unit out behind cliff nunes office where we have an lpn who will be there from 8 to 12 every day you don't need an appointment you just go and they do the it's like a saliva swab test and then 12 o'clock we package them all up we ship them off to quadrant and 24 to 48 hours later we'll know whether the tests were positive or negative if negative obviously people can come back to school or to work so we're excited about this we think it'll be help to families some of whom we've heard have struggled to get tests weighted in long lines and urgent cares and then
022sometimes many many days to get the negative test so they can come back the goal here is to have kids in school so again this is for symptomatic students i do want to be really clear what it's not because there's been a lot of discussion about two other kinds of testing that are out there but not available here in albany county one is a protocol test to return this these are for quarantined individuals and it's a way to test uh at day seven so you can come back or you can come back at day seven or they tested day five you wait your two days and you can come back at day seven um this is helpful to shorten those of you who have quarantined children i mean those three days can mean a lot
023um albany county at this point has not authorized albany county schools to do this although in a survey today i was asked if we would support such a measure here in guilderland and i checked yes i would so this that's the test to return you may have also seen on the news something called test to stay which is a a test to allow close contacts of positive cases to actually not quarantine but they would come to school and be tested every day for seven days we would use the um by next now test those the ones we used last year where you get the result in 15 minutes you get seven straight days of negative results and you don't have to be excluded from school we are not authorized to do that yet either that's
024the pilot that's in saratoga county this is week two of three in that pilot if it goes well and i've heard anecdotally it is going well it'll be available to all saratoga county schools and we're hopeful other counties will jump on the challenge of it is the buy next tests are now very difficult to come by i think we ordered a thousand the other day hopefully they will come we would be very supportive of this as well it'd be a logistical puzzle but that's our current area of expertise is to figure out logistical puzzles about 125 kids out many of whom are non-symptomatic and could be in school if we could get authority to do that i'd certainly be in favor in the test to stay i mean it makes so much sense that i
025don't know why albany county is dragging their feet i really don't if the tests are available and you know i think that's the key why wouldn't we want to do it and keep the kids in school you don't have to convince me i'm the choir i'm actually breathing it right i have up here i looked at this before but is it for vaccinated and unvaccinated or is it is there any difference between which one tests well testing to stay right here it says unvaccinated close contacts i'm just confused myself it's kind of a question to me blanca or rebecca when we discussed it well you're not going to be quarantined if you're vaccinated okay unless you're symptomatic okay that's where i'm confused so it's going to be unvaccinated and vaccinated asymptomatic but then once you're
026vaccinated there's no quarantine you don't quarantine anymore unless you're symptomatic okay sorry yes it will yeah i mean this kind of leads i think also your next item um dr wiles if so can you maybe just explain so saratoga schools doing this pilot is following saratoga county and so we are required to follow albany county yes guidance yes so uh maybe two weeks ago the new york state department of health sent a letter to all schools basically saying they did not support those last two kinds of testing i just described but if you do them this is how and the um controlling factor of whether or not schools could do that was up to each individual county so saratoga county is interested in seeing how this might work so they have put their first toe
027in the water so to speak you know if the pilot goes well i'm hopeful that it will expand across all counties we're also going to have a new commissioner of health in a couple weeks so what i would love to see is just the state tell everybody this is how you do it so we're not county by county my my colleagues and i we cover in the boces saratoga schenectady schoharie and albany counties and none are the same so we're trying to work together as a team but we are have slightly different parameters for what it is we can do to manage this so it's really it's convoluted vaccinations will we have any the schools have any role in that so today i answered a survey from albany county they're interested in knowing if we're
028willing to host a vaccination clinic and i answered yes that we would um we need a partner to do that though so we had previously worked with gilderlin ems what the survey asked us to do was rather than start finding those partners ourselves they want to coordinate that so i shared my contact information and i guess they're going to go from there so it's a function of needing a partner because none of us can do it and then supply and then logistics so if we are able to do it we're happy to do it i think at some point we'll need to survey our families to see if there is interest you know some families want to go to their pediatrician and you know not come to the school but we'll we'll explore it and
029do whatever we can to support our community the county can't partner with us who can't the county can't be our partner they very well might be okay because that's what i believe what's happening in other schools some are partnering with pharmacies and some with the county it's a mishmash interesting um i wonder if albany county decides to pilot if you're listening albany county maybe guilderland would be a good pilot for that testing to stay thing i just i really want that to happen and i would love hey if the new doh commissioner is listening to we could really use some continuity in the state that would be amazing so i know you're the choir but i agree with you but in terms of like advocacy can you know i know that we so basically the
030only way we could have this test to stay would be if albany county allowed that and i mean is it possible for like superintendents for schools that are in albany county to write a letter to advocate for our district because i feel like it's becoming an equity issue as well like this is my daughter's you know this is her third quarantine knock on when i'm lucky enough to be able to just work from home but i think a lot of people can't do that and i feel like it's what november so it's going to come to a certain point where people cannot just it's not feasible to stay like that um superintendents of melbourne county meet every friday every other friday with dr whalen we talk about this every time she's very aware that we
031all very strongly want to keep our kids in school bring them back as fast as we can i think she's in a wait and see mode how the pilot will go i usually uh feel like they have the authority and they should make the decisions and that's it but um we also have to use common sense and this isn't sustainable no disrespect dr whalen but like this wait and see it could cost people their their jobs and it's harming the kids because they're not in school in the classrooms and we're not completely sure that it's necessary to quarantine those children so i mean maybe you know it's worth our board contacting this but they're always asking like how how can they help us and if all the counties are inconsistent and i don't know what
032all the counties are doing but you know the kids out of school is not good so i don't know if they could help advocate i understand that the vaccine is is available i mean my kid couldn't couldn't get it because she was quarantined so it's like i'm assuming that there's going to be other people that fall into this category and like i said it's it's i think a problem for the teachers too because you know these bus quarantine just like three four kids out of class it's not a whole class now it's more work on the teachers more work on the parents and the kids are this is november and i know that there's kids who've been quarantined more than i could which is insane we're all preaching to the choir clearly but i mean
033if you know we acknowledge it's hard on parents to have to do this testing it's hard you know the goal one of the goals when we started we had this whole discussion about math is making sure we keep our kids in school well the masks are doing what they're supposed to be doing they're keeping kids healthy but we're failing on the other side but not keeping our kids in school not us sounds like it's the doh you know anybody who's listening i would strongly advocate you reach out to whoever as many times and as loud as you can to advocate for this because this is this is a problem this is us failing our kids by not keeping them in school when they when they're they're perfectly healthy to be in school we're seeing that
034legitimately the folks who were being quarantined at 173 ended up being positive later but i don't think that that's the case if i'm not mistaken i mean ges had one positive case that resulted in 28 quarantines yeah that's insane that's not i mean there's something wrong that's a failure yeah and we know that i mean i know that this is just my experience but i know hearing from others that um that the bus quarantines is pr in particular like there's assigned seats and having different bus drivers sometimes on different days that's that's not consistent and so i think there are kids who are being quarantined who don't need to be and they're probably kids who should be quarantined who are going back to school because it's not consistent and it would be one thing if
035it was september but now it's getting to mid-november and this this is like this is a big issue to have kids out of school for this long and it's not like a whole class where the teacher can accommodate for the whole class this is you know kids home and trying to keep them off screens but their work is on screens and it's it's just a losing battle can i ask about it and i know you were going to talk about quarantine next so i don't want to like jump the gun but we're kind of already talking about it um why are there so many quarantines for contacts because it correct me if i wrong that the quarantine should result if they're not masked or if they're within three feet of socialist and if they're within
036three feet of social distancing so if our kids are amassed and they're maintaining that that distance why are we having such high numbers of quarantine well some of it's on the bus and um in you know to our credit our transportation department and our principals are pulling up the video and they're looking and i think they're looking with a critical eye not to just you know take out his kids you know in broad swaths so you know it's going to depend on the case and you know if it happened in the cafeteria when everybody had their mask off or you know all of those variables come into play so i don't know the i haven't been doing the contact tracing so i can't respond precisely but i do know that people want to be as
037precise as they possibly can and you know like jerry keenan was here on sunday watching the video to see who who needs to be quarantined following the protocols that we have that are pretty widespread those flow charts that we have on our website are fairly uh common i think they might be across the state at this point so do you have any idea you know for protection um do end up being positive i mean what's the percentage of these kids that we're partnering with it's very rare yeah there's like someone saying they're just tell us something yeah in general you don't get covet at school exactly but that doesn't that tell the state something even during lunch which surprises me to no end and honestly we had that remember there was people had complained because
038there was a sign outside one of the schools about being 15 minutes late and how many school days you lose if you continue to do that well this is like they're losing they're kind my kids are going to school on time and just being out of school unnecessarily but if other districts are all keeping these kind of statistics of how many kids they're quarantining and how many positive cases they're getting let's just read if we can pull all that together that would show i mean i think those statistics would show a heck of a lot more like i think yeah dr wiles i think was the one that gave us that information that that test to stay in all our saratoga there were 90 kids able to stay in school using that so this seems
039like an equity issue we got some letters a couple weeks ago from some parents they're a parent about the difference it seemed like there was a difference between what albany doh's close contact role is with how they define it and how the state defines it they don't seem to be consistent whereas the state had this exemption that if you're mass within three feet you're not you don't have the quarantine whereas doh for albany doesn't have that no they let us do that okay yeah it was not it's not clear i mean albany doh website speaking of technology they need to fix that because that's horrible um but it it's not clear so you know it's it's not clear to me who is somewhat interested in it it's not gonna be clear to anybody else yeah
040you know i think we need to i don't like the role i'm with you my kids been quarantined three times the other one two times they've missed more school in the last month and a half and they've been in school it's a problem and thankfully i i'm like see i have the ability to be home and work from home most parents don't and we gotta we gotta you know it's hard on parents this is hard on parents we doh you gotta figure this out i mean people are calling in their grandparents who are really not supposed to be around people who are quarantined because they can't take off time from work which is completely you know the whole it becomes pointless i'm not saying again i know you're we're preaching to the choir but i'm
041with nate like if whoever's watching whoever's listening you know power numbers to advocate i understand the vaccine is out but you know if if they're getting filled for another five weeks no yeah it's maybe we could put on our website contact information for people to either write or call and express their frustration maybe that would get some could we do that yeah you're meeting with them officially putting it down on paper that you know you have to look at this i mean we you're keeping kids unnecessarily out of school the whole point of all these rules was to let the kids be here can't you get your superintendents to agree to that well they do agree and so um i i don't know if a letter per se has been written the you know we
042the communications service is on all of our calls and and they do put pen to paper one of the things we did was gather data from all 24 districts and it was maybe a few weeks ago like the total number of students that have been quarantined so far this year and the total number of days those students missed school and the number was astronomical and i think that became part i don't know if it was a letter or a talking point a white paper or something like that but you know we will talk on friday i'm happy to bring this back to anita murphy our district superintendent to say you know can we write a formal you know a statement i mean she absolutely knows how we feel abs there's no doubt that she knows
043how strongly we feel about finding ways to get kids back to school the editor from faster complaining that this is ridiculous the other thing i think that would be important out of these 125 kids that we've had out of our schools and who said her daughter's been out three times i guess his kids have been out three two or three times how many actually ended up testing positive for coveted i i i would just say i'll give you an answer too did not i don't know about it no yeah i personally don't know anybody and i'm thinking of like in the teens number of children who have been quarantined several times and haven't been positive any of those times my kids uh my eighth grader since she's vaccinated has escaped it three or four times
044having to be quarantined and my 11 year old just by the grace of god hasn't been quarantined but she all of her classmates and her friends have and last week they were down 11 kids in the class so but i don't recall barb any of those kids being positive after having been quarantined and i feel bad for the teachers too because there's no way they can keep up with one week four kids are gone another week three different kids are gone or maybe one is quarantined twice like that's it's unbelievable for them to keep up with that like poor mr obi mr laster because i just wanted to make sure it wasn't us that that was like we were over quarantining people or being unreasonable or not following the rules and i really don't believe
045that that's the case at all i really do feel like this one is not on us it is i think and i feel bad for the principals having to continuously make calls kids or their parents yeah i mean at least for the board level we could um go through nisba but it would be but you know the squeaky wheel would be really great like barb said to get something in writing from the superintendent if it's not a you know formal letter tweet just some you know power numbers squeaky wheel like you know i'm pretty laid back about things but for kids to be out of school this many times when we knew last spring when all the you know the shutdown and how bad it was to have kids out of school this is worse
046because it's not even consistent i don't believe anyway to the classroom teacher during quarantine they don't so that's even worse than last year in a sense yeah it's worse because the whole classes the teacher could you know work with that class but now it's random kids here and there exactly yeah my kids have been quarantined their teachers have been very responsive but that's because they've gone over and above what what they need to do and so i commend my kids teachers and i'm going to pull them out i'm not going to say their names but they've done an amazing job my kids in and out but imagine doing that for three different kids this week four different kids in the following week and then you get a whole class and it's it's tough we i
047mean preventing i realize that like it's obviously i'm very frustrated about it personally so but again i think we got to do all this go to the superintendent write our own letter advocate to our community members to do the same i guess that covers e as well that's all i have okay thank you dr wells next we have board president info uh we have a whole list of policies i don't know what policy committee has been up to but we're into the repeating letters i see at the bottom i just want to make one note on policy letter t for school volunteers exhibit there was just one thing added to the bottom of the volunteer sheets asking for proof of coving 19 vaccination and i don't know if policy anyone on policy wants to talk
048about anything else because there are a lot of policies here things mentioned was the you know the public participation at board meetings and um we basically added a conduct type of situation of what we expect of our visitors and also the fact that um if you don't use your three minutes you can't give them to somebody else i agree with barb but i at least in the form i'm saying it doesn't have all those changes because i know i sent an email that it wasn't updated on the website but there should be another two paragraphs now i i just looked at it before the meeting and it was there oh well the one i have on my computer is not updated but so if it's on everybody this afternoon they fixed it this afternoon yeah
049but i'm just saying on my computer it's not showing up but if it's not showing it even now it's not showing i have one that has a bunch of highlighted stuff on it yeah is there more paragraphs i just want to make sure that it i know it i know what the changes are because i wasn't committed i just want to make sure everybody i don't know if it's missing anything because i don't know what you're talking i don't know about paragraphs i think it's just right so he's these two okay so those are the two paragraphs that we're missing and this falls in line i remember reading nisba's policy about not that people don't have to see their time to other people like speakers or that's not something we have to like allow so
050this falls in line with that now that can be changed if the board thinks you know no this is you want to first read so no yeah yeah sounds good so this will go the all of these will go up for action the next meeting okay all right uh next we have action item school business meal evening is a resolution to approve the classroom rental and ancillary service agreement with capital region boces for the 2021-22 school year can i have a motion to approve the service agreement on nate second judy any questions or comments all in favor aye passes 9-0 uh next is a resolution to approve the inter-municipal agreement with south colonie central school district to provide alternative educational services to gilderland students can i have a motion to approve the agreement with colony
051kim second barb any questions or comments all in favor passes 9-0 next is the approval of a memorandum of agreement with suny cortland to provide reading recovery training courses for grilled inland central school district teachers can i have a motion to approve the moa with cortland rebecca ii judy any questions or comments you all in favor passes 9-0 next is a resolution to approve the services agreement with bell's auto driving school to provide student driver education program services for the period from january 1st 2022 through may 31st 2022 at a cost of 175 dollars per student can i have a motion to approve the driver at agreement um kelly second barb any questions or comments blanca oh sorry okay all in favor aye passes 9-0 uh next is the approval of an emergency preparedness sheltering
052agreement for our school district to serve as an emergency shelter site for the our lady of mercy life center can i have a motion to prove the emergency relocation agreement blanca second um kelly any questions or comments all in favor passes 9-0 and then finally this evening we have two donations the first is lamp kits and lamp shades from katherine ryby and a wheelchair and a walker from natalie fisher can i have a motion to accept the donations nate second rebecca any questions or comments just thank you for those donations all in favor passes nine zero okay thank you neil uh next we have superintendent action dr wiles co-curricular club at the gilderland high school this is called the march for our lives at ghs alicia wein who is the advisor and it is to
053work within the school and local community community to advocate for sensible gun violence prevention can i have a motion to approve the club kim second blanca any questions or comments okay any other comments or questions okay all in favor passes 8-0 with an abstention from rebecca thank you next week thanks dr wells next we have board president action we have the dei committee appointment so i'll read the resolution it's resolved that the board of ed appoint the following members to the dei committee for the purpose of providing direction support and oversight for the school district's work to become more diverse equitable inclusive and anti-racist in its policies practices and programs the dei director matt pinchinat will join seymour rivera board president and marie weil superintendent and serve as an ex-officio member so we are appointing
054matt pinchanat as official member is a di director we are also adding our appointing kim blasiak as another board of ed member and then we are also appointing christina jager as the staff member can i have a motion to approve the resolution nate second kelly any questions or comments say thank you to everybody who applied and showed interest and i think all of our subcommittees people can still volunteer and participate in so it's really great to see people who see the community interested in this work all in i favor 9-0 uh next we had oh sure could they volunteer for one of the subcommittees sure oh yeah yeah that's what i was so highly qualified yes yep so the the subcommittee's um right like they're not they don't have people as official committee members but
055anybody can join as a volunteer on those subcommittees which i think would be great because they're pretty small and there's a lot of there's heavy lifting i think on all the subcommittees so you have people want to volunteer they should definitely reach out to the board thanks barb next we have board committee reports i'll start with communication we will be meeting november 17th at 4 30. thank you gloria second policy uh we'll be meeting december 1st business practices we had a meeting last week and one of the main things that we talked about was that i turner construction has agreed to be our construction managers for the the new project and we're very grateful it's good to have the same uh turner is working now on on the uh renovations and they will continue to
056to work so we have one construction manager team working on that we talked something very confusing about the library and what we're doing and neil can explain that i don't know that we need to say neil do you want to say something about that uh it's just concerning the um library school district memorandum agreement that we've had in place for a number of years talking about the relationship between the school district and the gilman public library and and one of the big issues in that document was insurance and with the addition to the library the library has now taken over the insurance for all of the buildings and uh contents so it's we're not sharing that and it would have been difficult if there were a claim to parse that out so that piece is
057gone but there's other pieces that remain and we're reaching out to respective councils to see if if we need to continue to have an mlu between the two entities or whether at this point we could cease having that so more to come on that particular topic and finally we talked about a pilot program a company wants to build a line along the csx tracks and have a pilot for that and it's a small piece of gildan board of education land prob i think probably an altmont and we agreed that it would be fine if albany we just went with what albany county is doing and that was the other thing we discussed and we do not have a new meeting planned at this point thank you judy and we have audit kelly we had a
058meeting on october 27th and we decided on our audit which i'm super excited to announce actually i am um we're gonna do the title nine athletics equity audit i think it falls in line with our our goals uh our board goals and we're gonna end it falls in line with some public comments that we've had in the past about equity over housing and transportation um so i've never been excited about an audit before but i am about this one so so uh that's exciting we don't i don't think we have a time set yet for our next meeting but it should be next month um that's that we have yeah i think it was nice everybody on audit was thinking along the lines of this and then neil um had also been thinking about this
059so yeah this makes it easy yep thanks kelly and uh dei uh that's me too i suppose uh welcome to our new committee members our next meeting is 17 november we haven't had one since our last meeting and you can we don't have to talk about it now but maybe um if you want to have the reporting you know over to kim so you don't have to report for two committees since kim is on that that's a fantastic idea i mean i'm not putting you in board issues ideas and sharing you'll notice at the end of the before before you go on the end there's a little blank it says blank meeting self-evaluation so if you want to do that form to evaluate our meeting the syllabus you could do it right there although someone
060had to show me because i'm having trouble writing but thank you gloria thank you oh i just i just had something i'd like to to say publicly last week i was taking my husband down to foley's garage and driving by the high school along the road there noticing how good things look how well-kept things are and so i sort of made it a point i went by linwood things looked terrific there i went by the middle school and everything just looks good in the midst of all the chaos of what we're going through i think we ought to take time to appreciate that these people are still working hard and doing their job and and it looks it looks great um and the same probably goes for any anything else i just happen to notice
061it with the physical appearance of the schools but i think we have a big thank you to the people who work to cliff who supervises them and i would probably guess we should do the same thing for the bus drivers who are just doing an incredible job of trying to keep everything together and in who in ho who has stepped into this job at a difficult time and seems to be doing very well so i'm just saying thank you and it's a good feeling to see things going as well as they are thank you judy uh nate yeah i just judy maybe when she was talking about business practices maybe think of something that i've been thinking about for a while and i don't know if this is how we necessarily like to do this
062but as we're looking towards this new capital project and i and this this is something i think we need to talk to jeff about in terms of putting together our bid documents i'd like to see us if possible and again we have to check with jeff whether this is legal or not is to include something in there to ask anybody bidding for these projects to work on these projects what steps they have taken for their own dei internally you know we we're we're we're spending a lot of money on this project that gives us a lot of leverage and i think it's it's in our community's best interest to see to show them that we are asking people that are going to work for us and that we are going to pay millions of dollars
063to that they are in line with our own goals when it comes to dei um it just would you know it i'm not saying it's a make or break but it's certainly something you could add to an rfp or a bid document and put it into the the analysis of a of a qualified bidder for a project again i i i have some understanding of it i certainly would appreciate jeff's input but i think you know when we start putting together this next project we need to keep our own internal dia goals in mind of how we are going to be hiring vendors and contractors to work for us and pay millions of dollars i mean i've seen that in rfps for the state so i think i think it would be fine and it's
064just it would go into the evaluated process it's not a break or break but you can certainly i would i don't see any it's we want to know who we're working with yeah that's a great point thank you nate barb nathan are you talking quotas you want them to say how many people you have on staff how many no it's not what i'm saying at all i mean we i'm sure there's we have nba you know i would assume they have mwbe requirements as any state contract would what i want to see is what they are doing internally to to advance dei i'm not whether i obviously this is something i literally thought off the top of my head when judy mentioned it it was in the back my mind what i want to see
065is what are they doing and quite frankly agc who deals with all these contractors has their own internal program where they're trying to develop and and grow ddi within the contractor community so it's more of saying tell us what you are doing show us that you're taking steps like we are taking steps to be cognizant of the goals of dei goals that's all i'm saying i want you know so we're not so that they're aware of it we're aware of it and again it's it's it's not a make or break it's it would be another you know when you're doing the evaluation of any bid it's just going to be another check check box or not a check box but it gives it gives people an understanding that when they bid for work for gildan
066school district we're keeping this in mind this is an important goal for us so each of the individual contracts they usually have a heating contract you have electrical for primes yeah and those companies would have to show you what what they're doing internally with their workforce i don't think you're saying that you're not saying and what i'm saying is are they doing something to advance dei goals internally yeah i'm not saying are they hiring x number of uh mwbe employees that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is are you doing something and quite frankly barb most contractors are large contractors that are going to be bidding for our work do do this but we want to say look at this is important to us tell us what you're doing we're not saying it's the
067failure to do so it's going to disqualify you that's certainly not even legal i don't think but it tells us and tells them that it's important i mean i see it as aligning with our goals and also knowing who we're working with which i mean i don't see it being i think having that information would be helpful it's not unusual for people to ask for that information i mean it's i don't he's not asking for a checklist it's just are you in line with goals most people nowadays are working that way where if they're partnering with someone or if they're working with an organization they want to make sure that their goals are in the same they're on step with each other i mean i'll tell you right now i i just had to look
068at an rfp for dazny today for legal services they revised it to include these types of questions what are you doing to advance and i'm just using shorthand dei dei goals what are you doing internally this is a question that you're going to every state contract rfp your bidding document is going to have now on and i just want to make sure that we are in line with that yeah barb the responses i've seen are typically we ask our employees to fulfill ex training requirements so things like sexual harassment training or different different training examples i've never seen anyone respond to that question and be like we have x number of folks filling this quota or anything like that i've never seen any kind of breakdown like that it's always like yes this is a
069priority for us and so we have our folks trained trained in these areas it's just been my experience yeah i mean i think the languages have to be crafted appropriately but it's i mean it's just a thought i think we need to keep in mind when we start developing our big documents for the next project okay any other um board issues ideas or sharing um oh sorry kim raised your hand so sorry next time i'll just show you um no just i i didn't know if anyone had a chance to see the play this past weekend um but it was amazing so um the real inspector hound so mack and his crew did an absolute amazing job it was really just i loved it a couple of the people who were in it are in
070the room today but i just wanted to give them credit and their props because it was just i know it was a labor of love and they worked really hard on it and they did a great job as always congratulations to andy and his team thank you kim i was wondering about if someone's going to mention that too thank you and ivanka yeah first of all was it online is that or was it though it was strange and if you haven't seen it yet you can still see it on november 13th so and it'll have the captions because they do amazing british accents so um yeah it was great awesome thank you um i don't know if we're able to discuss it further but the public comment we had about the glucagon if you said
071it's with the attorney and i mean has this come up before no this question came up at one of our buildings this week and um so typically when we get a request like this it goes first to dr silverman our medical director and um he has weighed in on it and i've sent it off to mr honeywell too for him to advise whether or not we should be amending this are you i'd like to say what his thoughts are or no um i'd rather not just yet okay but we're working on this okay thank you okay any other board issues ideas and sharing glory wanted me to remind you to please fill out the form oh i'm sorry one more thing it was supposed to like i can't even find it disappear or yeah i
072don't think yeah yeah i hit submit too okay but still sitting yeah in your inbox well i guess we can test and see that linda [Music] we'll submit form button it would connect to my email and it would like i didn't push some bid i probably get three of them see well i guess you can see what happens and we'll go from there questions please hurry you said that you are going to start planning the budget stuff right so when is a good time for me to respectfully remind that i'd put that idea out there about the addition of a resource officer because as you know on the safety and health committee we have it on our date we have it we have a board meeting december 7th okay for board input on i just
073wanted to make sure it was still on the radar from last year okay thank you just as a um in the last couple years we've actually done a thought exchange with the board to get the conversation started and then had a discussion so if you're willing to do that we'll do that again it'll just be for the nine of you okay remind people in public that they can come anytime give us input as soon as possible they can write us email us call us come in person but any ideas i'm welcome i just want to add i know when we talked about the director of technology position that there weren't that many questions but if um if dot is gonna you know go ahead and put the work in into describing the job and um
074the structure it would probably be helpful if any of us had questions or thoughts about it to do it sooner than later instead of having them do all the work and then we say hey what about this just putting that out there okay so we have a motion to adjourn nate second barb all in favor passes 9-0 thank you everybody have a good night you