001good evening and welcome to the may 3rd 2021 gilberton central school district board of education meeting would you all please silence your cell phone and recite the pledge i pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible liberty and justice for all okay so we have two items on the agenda tonight and i'm actually gonna do number two first because i don't think it's going to take very long it's just reviewing the process um so if you guys go down to superintendent evaluation timeline review uh so today sorry um so dr wild were you able to submit your evaluation today well i'm almost done before i go to bed tonight i've got one section left so i'll submit it
002tonight sounds good so dr wiles will submit it tonight and everybody um should have got the link that i sent you the super email link and were you able to log in okay so make sure that you can do that and so i think after dr weil submits hers um we all have our independent ones to do so we you know we do them individually and i'll send a reminder out probably mid-may um just so you're not at the very end trying to do a lot because there's several different sections i don't remember how many sections there are but it's um it's you know it's not like it's it's a little it takes up a little bit of time so i don't want to wait till the very end and then i will take all
003of the um i think gloria and i will take all of the uh the the reports from everybody and then consolidate them and then we can meet and come up with um some some things to submit to dr wiles does that sound like a good plan or does anyone have questions about that sima i just don't remember how to um log in okay i think it's yours the gilderland email but um like i don't know your password but i think if you just there must be something where like you can click forgot password you should go to more guilderland email and you should be able to set it up if you don't then let me know so i can ask i don't know dr wiles or whoever the district will help set it up thank
004you yeah you're welcome because i was here when we started doing this it was paper form and then it kind of transitioned over to this system but i wasn't for president i don't think when we did this so um i'm sure someone at the district could help but i know i had to um do the password reset but you should be able to with your guilderland email and there's a chat features when you're in there once you get logged in and if you run into any trouble there's a chat feature and they're terrific about like answering but it has to be between nine and five they're not staffed into the wee hours so if you're during the you know typical nine to five hours someone can help you with any technical issues sounds good does
005anybody else have any questions about that process okay so i'll send a reminder email out like i mentioned in a couple weeks and if you could do that before may 31st um or by the latest may 31st and then that way we'll have two weeks to review them and consolidate them so all right so we'll move on to the second item these are the board of ed goals these are working goals that we set in september so i really just wanted to you know when we first thought about putting goals together the idea was to check in right not just write them and then never look at them again and so we had these in september um ideally would have been nice to look at you know maybe halfway during the year but i think
006you know all considering everything that's happened this year it's it's good that we're able to get it now before the end of the school year and um you know and then we can go from there so i just thought we'd go through uh each one of the main topics and then within that table we have some specific goals we're in and it might be a good idea to just give an update on what you think or where we are with this process if you think we need to tweak any of the goals or maybe hold off i know with setting these goals at covet at the beginning of the year was kind of hard to predict what we would know so if you don't have any questions we'll go ahead and start with the first
007one which is close the achievement or opportunity gap so in that column s we have two specific goals that we that we stated in the fall about increasing student achievement and initiating conversation in pd around alternative assessment models um we did talk i think at the beginning about the year about the time line for this and how much can we really do this here and so i don't know if you if you have thoughts on that does anybody have thoughts about that bar i don't think there's much we can do about it this was such an unusual strange year that you know everything that you read that the kids are are going to be further behind than they were and um i think that's you know as we go forward we can certainly start looking
008at some of the data i mean some of the the destinies isn't even being done and um i just think we might have to put that on the shelf for the year i agree gloria yeah i had that first comment is mine i guess but uh there's insufficient data i think we just can't gather enough data to support making any decisions at least legitimate decisions that we can move forward upon uh with the data that we have which is pretty much non-existent uh i i feel that this should be a fresh start goal we should be starting fresh with this in uh in september gathering the data looking at it part way through at the end of next year and then then we can probably make some uh predictions or ideas can come forward but
009with the data we have now i don't think we should even try i mean i feel similarly i know last year or in the fall we thought maybe we didn't really know right at all what would happen at the end of the year i'm surprised that they're even doing any testing i don't really know what they're going to get out of this testing like i know my daughter had math tests today so i know some testing is happening but um the all the remote students can't do testing is that correct dr wells dr weil is remote students were not able to well some of them were um but if they had not come in by the time we had the outage of our technology then we ended up canceling because we were just so far
010behind with everybody and not sure about you know how quickly our internet connections would be stable so we just decided not to do the rest of the remote and many of them were very disappointed but you know we just couldn't do it and we ended up not testing eighth grade in ela either for similar reasons so the test that students did take though like this spring or that they will take um i know the regents exams they'll know the scores earlier but the other ones that are like the common core ones they'll find out right in the fall but are you gonna do anything with that or is that going to be kind of throwaway it's really hard to know what the testing data is going to mean i also learned that many of the
011questions on the test were also on the state ed website is practice materials so students around the state actually saw the passages ahead of time so between inconsistent assessments across groups of students and the potential lack of security around the questions i really don't know what conclusions anyone could draw from this data so i i honestly if we're going to look at data in the fall i would want to think about different data points that we might consider and maybe we focus more on social emotional data than test data so i think that's a really interesting thing to think about um before we start collecting that data like what is it that we want to know sort of related but unrelated uh i made the comment that you know a number of people have uh
012asked me what's happened to guildelin why are we at number 11 when we always used to be in the top four and i don't know what criteria are used but when i looked at some of the schools that were above us this year i was shocked so maybe marie or somebody can what data do these entities use to uh to rate schools as i said over the years we've always really been very close to our suburban council peers and this year we're way off but what are the news so barbara i don't know the full answer to that but i did look at that um it's it's the ranking of the high school only so it's not the district weighting and there were some data points in level of ap participation and percentage of students
013passing at least one ap test and those numbers looked from what was in the report that i read online they look low to me like not typical so um i think we need to dig into them if they are actually low then i think we have to ask the question why is that and if they're not accurate then we still have to answe ask the question why is that gloria do you have your hand up or is that from before i turn before i um it really makes a difference you know when i think i wrote when we moved to guildelin we were coming from california had no idea what anything was good or bad in this area and the first thing a young couple will do is ask what are the good school districts
014and they they pulled out this business review and showed us a few other things and so we chose guilderland and you know my kids are going to school as they said we were in the top ranking so any information that you can find out as to you know what has happened because it makes a big difference for new families coming in it really does i think i remember we talked probably in the fall about this bar but i um i feel like it's a balance of that because like you said it does matter to people who read those things but then there's also the i guess my perspective of the tests don't say everything not that they don't matter at all but i don't think that they address everything and um from my perspective i
015know my kids are not like little little anymore but i feel like i do talk to other families who look at other things too like the size of the school and um the different kind of opportunities but um but yeah for it's a balance of that with the rankings which i i don't know i kind of stopped paying attention to them but i know that like you said people some people do pay attention to them [Music] um go ahead gloria did you call me did you call me sema well you're unmute you're unmuted and i could hear your fan or whatever so i want well let me know when i can speak i might handle it go ahead i'm not sure where that um that piece comes this rating stuff uh in the business review
016and where that fits it's i don't know if it fits under this goal uh closing the achievement gap and the opportunity gap it doesn't quite fit there so i don't know if it fits under these priorities i understand barbara's concern about it um but i like you i'm not you know i think it's an interesting question to raise we should look into it and find out you know what the status is but i'm not worried about it and i don't see it as part of these goals so then would it make sense to i guess hold off with these goals because we really have i mean this specific one is focused on um achievement and you know different alternative models of instead of testing which are the alternative assessments which i really would love to
017invest more time in but i think i mean with everything that's happened this year and more recently this is probably not the best time to even start thinking about this so maybe when the school year is over or whatever you all think it sounds good to to table this that's an easy one yeah i think it sounds great i'm sorry i didn't wait to be called on sema i guess my concern is i mean i think that's fine for this but um and you may not know this yet marie but how are the teachers and faculty going to assess knowledge like a like a baseline knowledge at the beginning of of the school year 2020 1 22. um just with the expectation that there is some learning loss for lack of a better phrase so
018um you might recall that the um when we were getting to rio getting ready to reopen in september we had we had a number of subcommittees looking at various questions so our instructional subcommittee has um reconstituted in their meeting again and that is one of the questions that they're asking so how will we take stock in september of where kids are but they're also doing that in the spring not so much worried about state assessments but um you know uh fontes and panel reading benchmarks and other classroom based benchmarks to see where where are students um so that committee is working on the academic side of things and then there's a social emotional subcommittee who's and i think it comes later in this who's looking at how do we assess where our students are from
019the social emotional side of a return from school particularly for those kids who weren't in school you know all that time so those are working topics in those subcommittees right now sorry media blanca and then ben marie i seem to recall the catch-up funding right the funding from the federal aid that's um allocated for the catching up was that supposed to be in the summer i thought i remembered it had to be it was supposed to be in the summer um some of it is for summer work but we we do have some summer programming planned um but it's actually getting funded from you know there's like three buckets of federal money this is bucket number two that we knew about a while ago so we will have some for k-8 students opportunities for kind
020of catch-up for lack of better words in ela and in math plus a regular summer school for students with disabilities so we will use some of that but we will continue to have the extra bucket of federal funds that came just around budget adoption time that we'll have use for over the next two to three years so we can use that money for these kinds of programs once we see the extent to which certain populations of students might need some extra help okay yeah i was just you know to rebecca's point then we might need to do some sort of measurement right to see who needs it in the summer and so then that couldn't wait necessarily right they're working on it now then so um you know i i think [Music] i i saw
021in the uh document that sema was typing she said what do we really want to know about students academically question mark social emotional you know the ranking question i think matters if you're outside the district and there's nothing else to go on right once you're in district and you can kind of test the product yourself if you don't like it you leave you like it you stay um and my thought is that um in the in the goal it has you know increase student achievement and then also initiate conversations about alternative assessments but we don't even know how alternative assessments would play into rankings right because usually those are based on test scores to some degree and so i think there's some tension here and i think that maybe it's worth exploring that question what
022are we what are we actually trying to measure and boost right achieve what um you know one of my one of my students in equals mc squared wrote a book at the end of the year full book on uh morality without god and there was no grades in those in that class right he got he didn't get an a for that he got an s plus right satisfactory a little more than satisfactory and um if we go that direction right a more progressive ed kind of approach to education then it might be worth kind of reworking this goal to highlight that that that what we're trying to boost is not you know um you know we're definitely trying to close the gap on some of these state scores right we're using that data but our
023ultimate goal is is to boost everyone to something different something better something more individualized and if we can brand that right if the first thing you see when you come to the golden school's website is kind of this brand of of who we want to be whether that's um you know whether part of that focus is equity and part of that focus might be um you know alternative assessments or or whatever other kind of direction that we're moving if we kind of curate this brand over time as we kind of do this work such that good one becomes known as the school who did who did x kind of like um we all know queensberry as the school that redid their high school right they they had you know big plan and a big capital
024project and that's what they did and if goodland kind of had a brand then maybe people from the outside would be able to look in and identify the things they want from a school district out of what we're putting out and um and then those test scores you know serve a different function of of making sure that that no one's getting left behind i mean i mean i'm in total agreement with ben that um that the test scores tell something and some people look at that but it's really not everything and uh what do we really want students to get out of going to school we want them to get a high test score that might not mean anything i i think several years ago i served on the business council for um for work
025but at tech valley and i remember um they had business people from all over and it was kind of like an advisory council to get feedback and they were doing really great things and their students were growing and learning etc but their test scores i think at that point i don't remember how many years ago weren't like that great yet but so that was something that they were trying to focus on but also asking these business people like you know these test scores mean one thing but there's all these other things that we're doing that students are learning and enjoying in school etc so i guess trying to get feedback from them about you know what actually matters like do you care you know about this or that and so i'm in total agreement i
026don't know when but i would love to rework this goal to think about what do we want our kids our students to get out of school sorry as we did okay thanks um yes i agree with sema and ben as an example uh my daughter went to a montessori school for kindergarten and um frankly we just stopped being able to afford it but it was wonderful the um the students can take the state tests and many do just to kind of see how they rank in the state and compare themselves but they're not graded and they have capstone um assignments and and projects and everything is very much tailored to the individual student and i really felt like those kids loved to learn i feel to this day that some of you know my my
027daughter's already starting college and she's 16. and and i think she's advanced because of of that time she was in montessori school where they taught her to love to learn and it wasn't about the grades and it wasn't about the testing i think there's something to be said for that anyway the point is i think we should look at what other districts have been successful with or other private schools gloria i like the way the goal is framed in terms of beginning a conversation because i think that's the conversation that our staff has to have along with us but also our community because we reflect uh with what they want from us to do so i like the way the goal i don't think we're gonna solve that right now because i think it's very
028complex but i do think um we need to initiate that conversation seriously is about the question you know what do we want our students to get out of our our course say or our year in school or four years at gilderland what does that education look like it pose that to our staff our educators to wrestle with and you know i know speaking a little bit from like my work and here in the college side but like the test scores like an ap i know i feel like we'll get pushed back if we are thinking about this in like long term kind of thing that some people really care about the opportunities that they have for ap tests and it's all like there's so much stress about the ap test and i'll just say from
029my work side that there's a lot of people who also know that kids are really good and structured at taking those tests and still come and still have to retake a course or it doesn't really mean that you know i i shouldn't say that right because it does take away credits if they get credit that counts towards that but that doesn't necessarily mean they know the content really well it doesn't mean that they that there was other learning that they could have done that was also just as good it's just i think like a philosophy about what we value in in education and i know that there's a lot of people that i would say that probably think more traditionally about test scores and oh you can i'm not saying that tests are bad there's
030a place for tests but i think there's just too much emphasis on that and so i would love to change this a bit too but maybe you're right the way it's phrased right now is okay um but we're just this is not the best thing to start the channel i agree with a lot of what's been said we really have some good ideas it's not going to be easy to do going forward but definitely a good start one thing that maybe we could consider or well i guess i'm more of a question than anything but the goals under uh the title is closing the achievement or opportunity gap um i guess could we clarify that as a board like what we mean by that and how like uh addressing assessments and everything plays into that
031like i'll just tell you my opinion because i know that we talk i think about achievement gap by looking just like just looking at test scores i think from essa and looking at how students did and then i i think i don't think it was just me because i don't think i would add that but it was i i mentioned using the term opportunity gaps too because i thought that um the test scores show one thing but you know the tests are slight there's like an assumption that everyone has the same opportunity and then this is what they get at the result but you know that's just not true so i guess i was thinking of the both layers of the achievement but what opportunities are being missed for students i don't know that's what
032i thought but i'll open that up anybody else has good question oh then yeah no i think you know we we want to make sure that we're serving all students and um you know if if there's if there you know um you know one of the things that i like to say is you can't plan children you know and you shouldn't even try so it's not really that we're trying to force outcomes on the kids it's that if if the district is not performing in some way or or is dropping the ball in some area you know that's our goal to make sure that we're not doing that and that we are serving all students sorry i'm typing to gloria in a way we have uh i guess thinking about it we have made some
033progress here because we talked about opportunity gap and one before a long time ago when we looked at those essa results and one of the things we've moved on is this whole idea of inclusion and making sure that you know kids aren't kept out of classes just because the x y or z that we've had that history but that kids who want to take the class they're open to take the class that's something that we moved on and also within our dei committee the diversity equity and inclusion committee that has been a point of discussion that all students need the opportunity and should be offered the opportunity to either take a course or move forward or uh and not be pigeonholed and held back uh because of who they are so i think we've made
034some at least initial discussions about this and i think it's it's on our radar uh but i think it's an important piece for us to keep working at um so building upon what gloria said and ben said um i also think that our statement encompasses the advanced student because um i felt like my daughter was particularly ceiling and then she didn't get into tech valley high so we had to figure out a different plan for her and um to be honest we lost a good student and it's painful to me because she couldn't participate in sports and we lost a good guild willing student so i don't want to see that happening again i just want to make sure we're not limiting anybody's potential on either end oh no so i'll add another aspect um
035well so we talk about a gap are we talking about comparing ourselves to our own district are we going to look at uh the suburban council the state what do we want to use as like a criteria for comparison i mean i was thinking of you know wherever they are you know basically comparing to themselves improving and whatever that means but um i guess that's what when i'm thinking about achieving gap and opportunity gap i'm thinking about like the student individually but not necessarily comparing to other schools but there is a an aspect of that right like if we're talking about the rankings that that's generally who we're compared to um i know i don't speak for everybody i just really don't care that much about the rankings gloria oh i'm sorry barb and then
036gloria i'm glad uh blanca mentioned the the higher achieving students which i think it one of the things that really this district hasn't served all that well is your higher achieving student um we limit the number of people that can take honors classes uh we limit the number of people that can uh take you know advanced math as eighth graders and we've done this for years and years and years and by doing so i do think that that we're capping those kids and so i just hope we keep them in the mix as well and maybe open up more opportunities you know for more kids to to take the higher level classes um i don't know if it would help our rankings or not but i do care about the rankings as i said just
037truly from the standpoint of getting new people coming to the district and um i i tell you you talk to real estate people and as i said before the first question that that they'll ask if they're coming from out of town and don't know the areas you know which school districts do you recommend and i mean i think that's the facts of life gloria well to barbara's point the thing is that people are looking for different things some people will come and and see what we have and be very happy others will be looking for other pieces so our challenge as a school district is to make sure we're providing for all types of kids and all types of learners which is a major you know task uh and to what alonzo uh asks um
038the the because discussion began talking about our own kids we were looking at the essa data and we were seeing very clearly that certain groups of kids large groups of kids were not doing well they were falling through the cracks and that raised our concern and that's an issue we we took on right away when we did that as a board that special board meeting we had um so it began by looking at our own kids and making sure that our kids are achieving all kids are having the opportunity to achieve that's how the discussion began it did not look at how we were doing against other districts it looked at look at our kids and there are large groups of kids that are not meeting the minimal standards why we asked ourselves and that
039those are the kids we started to talk about and target because they were getting lost all right so um if you are already why don't we move on to the the second one since um i think we have a better idea of what we want to do with this but it's just not the right time yet but i think it's good that we have a discussion and add some notes to this the second one is um where's this focus on the whole child so to promote social emotional health of all students um i think that was the main specific goal in there correct unless you guys see something different oh gloria you have a question i'm sorry casino what does that mean oh you have your your hand went up i didn't know if you
040had a question yeah i just wanted to comment i did put in the uh the document that i believe that this piece the emotional needs for students should be the number one piece on our agenda uh i i don't know how we move it around but that needs to be focused on this fall i know we talked about maybe doing some survey or study of some sort of getting our fingers and our hands around what our kids are dealing with and what our staff are dealing with so that we can begin to offer them the support they might need to move forward but i think that's got to be number one starting in well probably in the summer thinking about the needs then we can begin um you know to gather the the data from
041the students and the staff and plan on what the needs are and how we can how we can meet those needs in whatever way but that won't be for 22 23 i mean we're looking at this is a long-term thing dr wiles have you um at the district i guess like everybody who's involved in this type of work have talked about like what kind of data or impact i mean i'm assuming that you're doing a lot of this in terms of the coveted impact um i know that's even before covid this is something that we focused on but obviously this can be a huge part of the mental um wellness piece anymore if you have anything to say well just a couple things so i mentioned a little while ago that the social emotional subcommittee
042is actually focusing on this and um we had we had pockets of some surveying done this year but i don't think it was comprehensive enough to tell us enough about where the gaps are and where the needs are for student population so i do think that we need to do some kind of a across-the-board k-12 you know developmentally appropriate check-in with all of our students and frankly with our staff too to see where everyone's well-being quotient is as we start the school year the other thing i just mentioned that i went to get the data that there's a couple questions in the um how do we measure calum for this one and there's a question about how many students are in the followed by the mental health clinic and we currently have 40 students who
043are being served by the clinic and then the number of mental health professionals in the district we have um 30 hopes we currently have 32 and by that i mean this is uh counselors school psychologists social workers there's 32 not counting our members of our leadership team that are also um school psychologists lisa knowles and kelly dioldi are both school psychologists and then we just created the new position so we'll be at 33 plus the leadership members um and then the other data point that i thought was interesting there was a question about caseload and the question was just about social workers but what i ended up doing was i took the total number of mental health professionals that we have because their roles overlap a lot i mean we've done that triple venn diagram
044to try to capture all of that but if you look at our entire population of mental health professionals we have um one mental health professional for every 150 students in the district and when our new psychologist comes on that will go down to 145 i think that's a very very good ratio so the question becomes how do we best use those people to meet the needs of the students so just a couple data points that i thought would be helpful to know those numbers sound really good but if you were to take out kelly and take out lisa and the new psychologists that we have on board they don't really have student contact in the sense of direct contact let's say a social worker or even they're not counted in that ratio i didn't count
045them in that you did okay okay that makes me feel better thank you oh rebecca i i think those are really impressive numbers i think though we have to acknowledge that it um is an underrepresentation because a lot of students get mental health counseling outside of school and probably i don't speaking just for myself i think the bulk of kids get counseling outside of and there's no way to really capture those numbers you know so i think we're looking at wonderful people who are serving this need within the school but there's additional many additional kids that you know aren't counted in that number that's a great point let's see blanca oh did you put your hand down there my comment was really similar to rebecca's except um additionally i actually thought that number was high
046but i'm wrong you know one case worker to every 150 that that's normal it's alarming to me as a nurse it seems like a lot of people but obviously it's different but that's a good number i think the um the working number is one for every 250 is what the professional organizations for school mental health yeah okay dr wells can you just remind me so you said the social emotional subcommittee is that um district-wide i forgot what that group is um so we when we were reopening back i think it was in june we created this um reopening steering committee which by the way continues to meet every thursday and there was just so much work to do that we created six other subcommittees and those are i mean there's facilities there's instruction hr extracurriculars
047health and safety and there's always one that i forget so and each of those has about 20 people on them including parents teachers other staff members administrators and they often broke into smaller working groups to do an actual you know topic or project and um so that's who's working on this now so those groups have continued to meet during the year all of the subcommittees do no the the overall steering committee met all year um and then the instruction committee and the social emotional committee just kind of got back up and running about six weeks ago um some of the other committees we haven't brought them back because there hasn't been an obvious need but should there be they'll jump back into action so um would it be fair then to like follow up i
048don't know hopefully or not but late at some point later in the year to see what the subcommittee is doing in terms of coming up with um a way to capture the mental health or the multiple students they're feeling at school it sounds like this was already being in the works so um when the steering committee meets on thursday the subcommittees always give a report so i can at that point ask them to obviously give a report but maybe they can put something together in writing that i can share with the board whether you know at a time when it makes sense so maybe it's maybe in june they'll have a you know they'll be at a place where they are they're ready to report out on where they are i think that would make
049sense because it aligns with i think his goal and what we wrote down as ways to measure that are hap you know what's happening i think you know i think we all think this is important even without covalent pandemics but this has been exacerbated after so um any other thoughts about this all right so then we'll move on then all right so the next one is focus on diversity so we have numbers uh so we just have number four is a specific goal and i would say this this um overall goal accomplished some things already um at least in terms of measurable um does anybody have any um comments they want to add i think there's a gloria that you wrote there denise yeah i would like to talk about that position too but does
050anybody else have um anything that they want to add before we start i mean i would say that um we out under measurable under measurable we put is a committee created are the individuals we need on the committee do they create a charge or charter for the group so that was done um and coherent framework i mean i think we all know that there are um that there's a lot of work still being done it's still at the infancy stage like dr weil says it's still pretty new but um there's definitely some things we've already addressed here but the dii position um we've never really talked that much about it so i wanted to hear i know gloria you put some thoughts down did you want to share yeah you're muted sorry i think it's
051important that the board get right on um establishing the parameters for this position the goals kind of thing that we work uh closely that we follow closely what this person will be doing working on um and the relationship between that person and the dei committee i see that as an integral relationship uh in terms of the leadership that can be provided to a very huge group of people and a very energetic group of people i have to add i think a very committed group uh and well well represented by the community which which i i think is an excellent positive thing um so i think as we move forward as this person comes on board we the board needs to be on top of um you know establishing those the clear job description before the
052interviews start uh at least having our input into that and then help to uh kind of keep track of the goals that this person is working on and monitor their work with the committee uh let's see luciano i think it's a goal that we've done uh very well with we met the the initial goal of creating a committee maybe we should modify it since we've already done that we have these committee established they have their charter and maybe we should uh change it to do the things that gloria just mentioned you know we could start to uh move forward with that and modify it to now set up the dei administrator position yeah that's a good point like i want to keep it that the original one so we can say that we did that
053because otherwise we won't have track that we did anything but then we can add to it i think you're right luciano that this is something now that we're adding to this because um the position was created and um that will be another good way to keep um a measure of how we're doing i um i just wanted to add that i don't know if uh we haven't talked dr wells about that position and what that will look like and i'm guessing that you guys have probably already done some some planning of what that is but um you know if we had a chance to give some input about that i know that because it's you know one person for seven seven buildings in the terms of who they report to and that kind of thing
054it would make sense just two things i'm thinking about one is that they report to you and into damien so um that way it's consistent across all seven buildings but then they're also physically in the buildings with the school with students and teachers you know what i mean so they're not at district office making decisions that will impact the buildings but they're never there you know what i mean so um i have been gathering sample job descriptions of this position in other entities i got a little interrupted on that work last week but i'm gonna go back and look at it because i'm i'm thinking we can draft you know um a sample job description the board can take a look at it i mean we wouldn't post this honestly until the budget has been
055approved by our voters so we're kind of gearing up for what are what are we looking for what's the role you know who would this person report to etc so we're working on that right now can hopefully get you a draft shortly uh blanca and then oh kelly did you have your hand up too yeah i did but i but i took it down i was just gonna say real quick as i was a little bit like i was kind of wondering i don't want this person to report to the board as far you know as far i mean i feel like it's you know the administration's job to come up with a description and and marie and sema you kind of just chatted about that a little bit so that's where i was going
056to leave it i didn't want to be like we need to get you know tell them what to do or what their progress is or whatever so that was my only concern blanca i'm gonna hold my comment i just wanted to respond to yours kelly like i didn't mean it in a way that was like micromanaging but in terms of like overall like philosophy that um you know that it's not just in one building and so to get it across all seven it's kind of like having a coordinator to see from you know from start to finish so you can really see how that work you know transforms over the from elemental to high school right yeah i totally get it i was just kind of just a little bit i'm like well i don't
057really know i i think it's a you know i obviously think it's a fantastic idea i'd love to see how other districts have used that position or like the the job descriptions like marie had said that was my only kind of comment i didn't want to um that's it thanks gloria you have your hand up yeah i would would definitely be against any micromanaging but uh i know that this whole diversity thing uh came from the board i mean we really wrestled with this and we brought it forward so i think we have an obligation and a responsibility to just kind of oversee and and keep an eye on things and keep it in our conversations at board meetings because it's a new uh initiative and i think it's a vital initiative our community is
058extremely interested in it uh so just kind of keeping it in everybody's in front of everybody's mind is a good way of keeping things moving i also wanted that oh and then i'll have you bonk i was just going to add quickly to um when that position eventually when the hiring happens to think just to be like strategic about who's involved in that um because it came because there's so many different i guess um you know stakeholders in it so i think we just want to be cognizant about and you know not just like whoever's available i know sometimes it comes down to that because everybody's schedules are crazy but just uh to think about that there's representatives from if we're saying that this person's job is going to align um somewhat with the committee
059or deuce any kind of interaction with that committee then maybe somebody from there is on there blanca um that's actually what i was gonna say um that it would be great if we could have other folks in the hiring process um not i agree with kelly i didn't want it to come across that way i'm more interested in like the hiring piece um i think it would be great if we could include members of the community you know sema because you work in academia like when they're going to hire a new professor they invite the students to do like a q a session with them or something i'm envisioning it might nice to give an opportunity for the candidates to be either interviewed or q aid by um you know groups in in the community
060whether it be the diversity and inclusion committee or us i don't know something along those lines right maybe somebody or maybe a student who's already involved in that work maybe there's a student represent rep uh representation on the hiring committee or something like at least for maybe part of it something like that i think marie could probably speak to the composition of these committees because i know they're very diverse parents are there pta representatives the parents the students are you know there's lots of different levels of these interview committees and maybe marie wants to speak to that to cut you know to make sure everybody is aware that it is a complex thing yeah i would work with regan on this to um draw from many stakeholders um i think probably beyond even some of
061our um you know typical we would reach out to the teachers association but i think we would also reach out to some of our non-instructional employees to see if they would like to serve on it i definitely think we'd reach out to well i think um this last part of this goal really circles back to our very first goal in the conversation we had about so how is it that we're going to define what it is we want for our students what does success look like um and i do think gloria's right and i know ben has talked like about this very thing too that if we don't know what it is we want to accomplish how do we know what the learning environment should be in order to make that happen so it's really
062a bigger discussion about what we want to accomplish as a school district and then how do we create the space in order for that to happen so i just felt like making the that it was important to make the point that i think we're full circle on our conversation here yeah that that is a great point that it's completely related to number one we can't just make something without knowing what we want from that first uh barb yeah you know we talk about future ready facilities um we've been talking for years now about turf fields and we're going to be one of i think only five districts that don't have a turf field it as the letter writers have stated it makes our kids uncompetitive because it's totally different playing on grass versus playing on
063turf we have really neglected over the years our athletic facilities and we've been unafraid to put it up as um as a bond issue i will put it up as a separate bond issue let the voters decide and you know the other things that i've been hearing again somebody mentioned the aesthetics of our various schools the landscaping the um particularly at the high school the problems with so many toilets having to be closed so often because our sewer system is like what 50 years old and has sort of been replaced piecemeal and i know part of that was part of the you know the larger bond issue that went down but i think i think neil was sort of hinting at it that you know maybe we don't do our five-year bond issues but we
064maybe next year um put forth a bond issue to do some of these basic repairs that you know we missed doing uh because we didn't get the large bond issue um but again i i really think that we really have to put that turf field uh to a vote and you know the the sooner the better i think we did some preliminary uh engineering investigation with our current bond issue if i'm not mistaken from cliff and marie maybe you can update me on that but i think he was because the engineers and stuff were there i thought he was going to basically get some dollar figures and um get a feel for for what it would cause what if any of you have ever been out at these fields i mean they're in the spring
065they are just total sponges and it's not safe for the kids and it it just as i said if all these other suburban districts can do it why can't we do it so i guess i would just ask how can we put it up as a separate bond issue and and let the voters decide because i think last year we got a petition what 700 something people signed it uh this year there's been you know a constancy about people from field hockey to football to lacrosse uh you know pointing out the safety issues pointing out the financial issues they have to go to afrians and rent space there so i guess marie when when could we do something like this if we decided to do it well tomorrow evening cliff nune will be um part
066of neil's report and he will be giving an update to the board in the last business practices committee meeting where all of these topics were just discussed so tomorrow yeah i was just gonna say barb i think i don't disagree with what you're saying but i think to not let's not get in the weeds today if we're talking about the bigger goals um luciano all right so i think this is a goal that we could improve on a little bit going forward uh you know this year we obviously cyber security was weak but you know we are working on that we're fixing it another thing like we had to close pine bush for a day because the one of the boilers broke there was no heat so we're talking about you know what we want
067the future to look like but we also have to balance that with maintaining the current situation that we have you know we got to make sure that the roofs don't leak that there's heat and you know aesthetics are important too but we got to make sure we have the basic stuff too and that stuff's maintained and updated regularly so that we don't have to close schools for days because that's that's really a big deal like that's a missed learning opportunity a missed day of school for those kids because we didn't maintain the boiler as we should have so we just got to balance it you know and that's that's an important part of the capital project that's coming up and we'll learn more about it tomorrow night but that's something going forward that i think
068we need to work on they saw some pants and then they disappeared so um kelly did you have your hand up oh no thumbs down okay um let's see i i mean i think you know dr weil said it really well i think this goal was tied really close to number one i don't think we even purposely wrote it like coming to a full circle like that but um you can't really do one without the other i don't think we can really talk about vision of facilities um but i know before kobe we had plans to go visit was i think queensbury and there was another school in massachusetts if i remember correctly um that i think pot had already gone to or they were in touch with um that was for work around equity
069and diversity it was needham um central school we were going to because aaron zika our former assistant principal from the high school is there um so for facilities we did talk about queensbury and i i actually did follow up with kyle gannon who's the superintendent there and whenever we're ready they're ready for us so okay so yeah whenever we are allowed to and safely um take a field trip and do it now oh we can okay i know that there's you probably have a lot going on right now but if you want to if everybody sounds um okay with that i would love to go visit you know sooner than later this was something that we talked about probably over a year ago political good idea then could we do that dr wilson sure i
070think i'll get some dates from um kyle and then uh deb can send her out of doodle that sounds great thank you um i love field trips this will be fun i don't go anywhere so um that's all i have for um the agenda items unless people have any other last-minute comments they want to add to the goals list i think this is great to keep track and then um and then go back and see it's really obviously strange here with covid so um they'll just have to be adjusted and fixed you know to whatever's happening in the school year um so i just want to say because it's only been one year for me i'm actually very um surprised pleasantly surprised at how many things we addressed on this so kudos to everybody i
071think you know it wasn't a perfect year by any means but we we did get some good stuff done all right so we keep it short so i think tomorrow we have a longer meeting and so i will ask for a motion to adjourn blocker second rebecca all in favor passes 9-0 thank you everybody have a good night everyone you