Boyertown Area School Board Committee of the Whole Meeting: 9-13-22

001[Music] welcome everyone uh to the september 13th committee of the whole meeting call to order roll call please miss deeroff mr hemingway here mrs hogan ms nyman mr panarello mr uptogrove mr zawada mrs scott mr brophy all present sorry there i went on i'm on now can we all stand for the pledge of allegiance followed by a moment of silence indivisible with liberty and justice do okay we had a previous executive session it was for two hours and it was regards to personnel up next for discussion and information i'm excited to uh to hear our welcome from the gilbertsville elementary school and thank you for having us good evening everyone thank you for being here at gilbertsville elementary school today my name is mrs stephanie petrie and i am the building principal here and i

002am very excited to be able to share some information that we've been doing for the first month of school it's been it's been a busy first month of school i my four students with me here this evening and they have been outstanding leaders actually starting in the summer so these four students gave up some summer time to help with new student tours kindergarten orientation our first great orientation and then volunteered to help with our kindergartners and first graders the first few weeks of school helping them find the right bus get on the right bus get off the right bus find their classrooms and they just really have been a tremendous group and really have started off our school year in a very positive way being very strong leaders and leading by example so i'm very

003grateful for their help this year and i'm thrilled that they have an opportunity to share some of the highlights of our school year hi my name is dominic and i'm in mr kobach's fifth grade class september is a busy month at gerbersville yesterday we participated in activities for a day to remember otherwise known as patriots day boytown area school district has a resolution declaring that the district is fully committed to ensuring our freedoms remain in place that ridding the world of hateful acts is of special importance to the district and that we pledge never to forget those who died on september 11th at gripensville we have traditions established for patriots day our students and staff are encouraged to wear red white and blue our scouts wear their scouting uniforms leave the pledge of allegiance and

004participate in the morning announcements with mrs petry by reciting a special reading hi my name is natalie i am in mrs angstrom's fifth grade class september is also childhood cancer awareness month for boyer town area school district another one of our resolutions states that our school board administrators and staff strongly believe that it's required to share the needs of children and adolescents living through and beyond cancer and seeks to raise community awareness of pediatric and adolescent cancer here at gilbertsville we share the story how do you care for a very sick bear written by vanessa bear and illustrated by rosie butcher the author is a cancer survivor and the book gently describes different things that might happen to a sick bear your friend might look different she might have less hair she might be too

005tired to play then it goes into what we can do as friends to help such as bringing them cards playing games or simply being there for them on friday our students and staff will be part of our annual district-wide gold out to raise funds and awareness for childhood cancer in addition to wearing our golden vest to school the gold out will continue through friday tonight friday night's home football game go bears hi my name is sage and i'm in mr kobach's fifth grade class in addition to raising childhood care cancer awareness the students and staff at ges are very service oriented in other ways mrs rather mel leads our 5th grade student advisory team this student-run club organizes advertises and manages our community service projects this year two projects are planned the first is a

006gently used book drive that is happening now for the students in kentucky whose books were damaged in the recent flooding the second project is our annual drive for preston's pantry at boyertown multi-service our drive is held in january after the holidays at a time when donations are slow but the need can be greater due to the winter months this project brings out the very best in our ges community and we are proud of this growing tradition not only are our students participating in community service but our staff is also this is just a sampling of the organization served by our gerbitsville educational team burke's county dairy beef club leader burke's county youth aid panel leader volunteer friendship huggin ladder fire company social quarters leader new hanover luthier church meal delivery volunteer ole valley youth league

007ole valley community education foundation project lim lib libertad helping newcomer immigrant youth volunteer reading olympics code hello my name is david petrus and i am in capitola 5th grade class saturday september 17th is constitution day most of our elementary schools are honoring the day on friday the 16th on september 1787 is the delegates to the constitutional convention met for the fir for the last time to sign the document that they had created here at ges we we uh over observed this important day in in our national nationals history by reading stories like the flag we love we the kids we the people and the writing of the constitution some classrooms write their own own constitutions and and view the schoolhouse rock video the pr the primal and there is a sense starter activity that begins

008with if i wrote the constitution and the constitution poem that not only teaches us about about the constitution but also allows us to practice reading reading fluency reins fluency and demonstrate rhythm before we end our presentation i would like to tell you about one final activity here at ges throughout august and september we are learning about our unity expectations when you travel throughout our our main lobby you will see a unity display u is for used kind words and actions n is for need to keep hands feet and objects to ourselves i is for is for i will follow for direct directions the first time given t is for take ownership of over over actions and learning y is for yields yield and walk silently throughout our hallway each time we are caught in the

009act of following the unity expectations we receive a ticket we can choose to have our ticket displayed in the lobby display enter to win a prize or take them home probably and put it this on display there this project brings us together with a common constitution concept concept language and and school rules giving us a chance to to shine as individuals in the school thank you for coming to coming to ges elementary school and thank you and and for letting letting us share our incredible month of september with all of you i just need to thank my four friends that joined us tonight with myself and mrs rothermel it takes a lot of courage to come in front of a lot of adults and have an audience behind you and i'm really proud of them

010and their their contributions to our school this year they really are a tremendous group so thank you guys for coming out tonight i did tell them they may leave after this so they do not need to stay for the meeting but they are excused and i will see you in the morning how are you enjoying school better have a thumbs up sign you got the rest of the year to go nothing is it because mine okay it's back um not so much a question but just a comment thank you mrs prietry is right it takes a lot of courage to get up in front of adults and be willing to speak so i appreciate it and thank you and have a great school year there we go i just want to say great great job

011guys mrs peach we thank you for having us and she said go bears thank you thanks everyone okay next we have a transportation presentation uh from mr style let's get out i'll keep making sure the red light is on uh for the presentation so uh next slide we wanted to provide an update for transportation for the start of the school year i know there have been some challenges and some struggles for our community and transportation um and it was imperative for us to communicate out to uh our community about what we're doing right now the status of our current transportation situation as well as some futuristic uh corrective actions that we've learned this year to help support us uh for future transportation needs i feel like there's an echo i'm gonna pull this away a

012little bit um so just to give a quick update we have uh had a retirement of our basd transportation coordinator of many years i think it's 10 plus years that steve missimer was here and really knew every nook and cranny throughout the district in transition from mr uh missimer's retirement we went through a couple supports to try to move forward and ultimately landed in a collaboration with quigley bus service to take on the responsibilities of the routing systems and take on the responsibilities to provide all of our bus services for uh the boyerton area school district in the midst of this as everybody knows we had a pandemic and we certainly had unique transportation needs during this pandemic for those of you that remember we ran a b schedules for a while we were uh

013in on certain days off on certain days and never had an opportunity to really capitalize on setting up a true transportation program for a start of a school year this truly at the start of the 22-23 school year is the first year that quigley has planned and implemented our basd transportation services and i think that's imperative to to realize to not get in the weeds too much about this slide i'll give a brief overview but we have two significant software platforms within our district we have infinite campus which i think all of our community members are familiar with that's our data warehousing system for our students scheduling is in there bus information is in there all of the demographic information for our families but what our families do not realize is that we have another

014software platform called transfinder transfinder communicates with infinite campus and when we update our information within infinite campus it speaks to transfinder and transfinder geocodes a family within our community and then ultimately potentially pins a student within a routing platform to provide transportation services so if we think about it they need to speak to one another and they need to speak to one another clearly because if data is not clean going in from one software platform to the other it can create issues so if you go to the fourth bullet on this slide it is absolutely critical for data collected within our infinite campus platform uh to be cleaned so that it provides accurate data to transfinder any minor error could cause a route conflict within the system and we learned a lot about that this

015year to make sure that data is clean so i can't emphasize enough to our community that the timing of new registrations for both basd students as well as our non-pub students is very critical because it can cause a delay in creating a route and most importantly the second last bullet is the importance of our parents need to make sure that they are completing their annual verification information to ensure that we have accurate data within the system we are also going to be working on uh sometime during the course of this year working on updating our transfinder software because we had not done that in the past and i'm going to say something that's going to sound a little silly but we have so many new communities within our residency we are literally looking at bus

016routes that are corn fields because we don't have updated maps in our system so we are going to be looking to update that software this year which is part of our evolution of moving forward the update continued uh late registrations for our buoyant area school district we had a lot of students returning uh to our district this year so it made greater numbers and i'm going to give you specific information shortly but i will tell you that i i have been helping to support transportation and trying to help get all of our students on buses but there was one critical error that had taken place that i think everyone needs to um to realize is out there and it has really caused a significant delay with respect to our routing platform and that is of

017this year's sixth graders and this year's ninth graders for all of our students that were in grades in elementary school second to third grade fourth to fifth grade seventh to eighth grade tenth to eleventh grade typically these the routes that were created within transfinder exist and they were easy to roll over to our new uh our new school year but grade six which was actually grade five last year rolled up to grade six they're attending a middle school different schedule different route system same with our eighth graders rolled up to ninth grade so i will point blank share with the board and the community that sixth and ninth grade the majority of our students to start the school year did not have bus routes and that is something we learned very late before the start

018of the school year and it caused a lot of chaos in our routing system because each one of those students had to be manually done individually to create a route and as i shared with you before you have to create a specific area where the bus stops and then you have to pin a student in that particular area to create a bus route for that particular person or family uh when we finally sorted through our sixth and ninth graders and we prioritized a lot of those uh routes uh we sent a survey out to approximately 275 students who did not have transportation posted an infinite campus i'll remind you again that once transfinder has a route that's created within the system every odd hour on the 45th minute it talks back to infinite campus and

019populates the transportation tab that families have access to see their information so many families in the community saw emails go out that said hopefully tonight your information will be updated and i can i can say uh with with a smile that anyone we put into transfinder did seem to roll back over to infinite campus for families to see that information so of those 275 students that we set a survey out to see who did not have transportation posted an infinite campus approximately 100 or so students still did not have transportation as of the end of last week and we are working through each one of those students to geocode them which means we need to put them on a map and then we have to pin them to make sure that we create a route

020that is now a new route for the student here are some numbers to give the board and the community an update on what we have within our boyertown area school districts as far as numbers our day eight enrollment and by the way we're past day 12 so i did not have the new information to update but we have 6627 students in our in our system in our boyertown area school district this year here is some very compelling information to look at of the 6627 students new registrations these are individual students within our school district we had 721 new registrations in our district this year 165 of those actual student registrations registered in the month of august so i go back to a slide a few slides ago and you don't have to go back there

021in talking about the importance for our community members to stay in tune to the start of the school year have their information updated as as accurately as they as possible and making sure that we can get on top of our new registrations so all of those if every one of those 721 students needed a bus route it's a lot of work that needs to go into the system as we have created presentations in the past and talked about students that are not served within the boyertown aries school district parameters some of our students are served outside of the bordertown area school district and we call those alternative education students or alternative education sites we have approximately 98 students that are outside of the boyertown area school district parameters that require transportation our non-public students with

022it and this was another surprise that i i don't know if everyone understood for a non-public student uh that goes to a non-public school within 10 miles of the boyer tennery school district we provide transportation for all of those students we currently have 490 students that are attending a non-public could be a parochial school or an outside uh warrior tennery school district school homeless students is another group of students that we are required to provide transportation to oftentimes we try to collaborate with the district that a homeless student could temporarily be residing in to help they might grab one half of the route and we might grab the other half of the route but these are unpredictable students and we support them the best that we can to get them to and from school and

023they could happen at any moment that we don't know to predict what a homeless student will be actual bus routes that we have within our system right now quigley bus service runs approximately 73 runs uh because as many of you know that some of our bus runs run double runs we have approximately 10 combined runs that buses literally leave a building take kids to their uh community where they reside and return to the building and do another run and we tried to be as efficient and effective in doing those particular combined runs for the actual van routes that we have within the district and as we talk about our as an example some of our special education students uh re attend buildings where specialized programs are like autistic support life skills support emotional support we

024have approximately 55 van runs throughout the district future focus and i think this is a a a critical slide as we move forward i know it's it's been a a difficult time for many of our family members to uh get their students uh their their children on buses we're working diligently to do that but i am uh incredibly optimistic that what we have learned during the course of this school year is going to really help us to create a timeline of events to really plan for the 23-24 school year and that's starting in october already we're planning a meeting with quigly bus services to create a specific template of timeline of events and this is an example of what we will improve upon from what happened this past year to not get in the weeds

025too much but we roll our 8th grade students over to 9th grade in infinite campus in january and we do this for the purpose of scheduling at the high school it's critical that our students have access uh to their schedules or they don't they don't personally have access but our counselors and our administrators have access to have the students in infinite campus as ninth graders to start scheduling for that upcoming school year so upon that rollover in january quigley bus service can start creating those 2023 2024 bus routes for that upcoming school year we did not start that process until later in the summer this year so that's going to help that situation a lot more effectively this year same with our fifth grade students at the elementary school rolling over to sixth grade we

026roll them over approximately february march and at that particular time not only can we create our schedules for our incoming sixth grade middle school students but we can also create our bus routes for those students at that particular time the rest of the calendar of events here and we will work on more specifics of what those processes look like as we move forward um but during the march to may time frame we plan for summer because uh many of our students uh with unique needs attend our summer extended school year programs within our district and we have approximately 60 routes of buses that we run over our summer to have our students attend our specialized programs in may and june we can't forget about our incoming kindergartners we really don't know until our incoming kindergartners

027register how many true income and kindergartners we will have but we also have our kindergarten and or non-pub routes start to begin to be created for our future 23-24 school year and as of july 1st all of our non-public education students have to create our complete and act 372 form which is an annual document that allows us to move forward with planning transportation for for families we will also work on we have specific parameters and specific guidelines based upon deviation requests example a family that might have 50 50 custody and depending on where they reside within the district and at that particular time we also will do the full rollover of all of our students in infinite campus so all routes can be created and i want to say it was approximately maybe august 12th

028of this past summer when we opened up the portal so families had access to see their um their routes for the upcoming school year and finally in august we'll finalize all the routes for the 23-24 school year so that is our future focus and our corrective actions that we want to work on to move forward with planning for the 23-24 school year so at this time if anyone has any questions please feel free to ask i also have mr quigley is in the audience today that can help to answer any uh maybe technical questions about the bus service mr zawan how many bus drivers still are we short so we're always hiring bus drivers i would say mr stout uh set about the uh 10 combined routes so you could have you know uncombined those

029routes that would be ten most of the combined routes are working pretty well uh i would say if we'd have if we'd have six bus extra bus drivers a day that would help tremendously we've had good success with hiring van drivers over this past month surprisingly from what we had seen were having a good flow of applications yes i know when i drove for you mr quigley we never drove past a student that was standing out is that continuing that that is that's our procedure if we see a student that is standing out will stop and question the student or our directive to the drivers is you know if you have a a boy or town student or a non-public student you know always take a minute okay thank you for that i was sure

030that you were still doing that but i wanted to make sure um mr stout you said about the sixth and ninth graders however most of those should have had bus stops already from previous years that would have been there so why would we still be having issues with that there they have bus routes but they are a new time frame system so because their bus route now is potentially incorporated with as middle school west has different feeder elementary schools as middle school east also has different feeder elementary schools these are brand new routes that are created that uh encompass uh different students than what have typically had happened and they are assigned different start times different end times one thing that we did find in the system because some of our sixth and ninth graders

031did have transportation and i'm just giving you a quick snapshot of what we believe why that was the case if there was a sibling it you and i are brother and sister and i'll say that i'm the older brother and you're the younger sister so let's hypothetically say that you are in uh eighth grade and i am moving up to sixth grade because you already had a run that was created in the middle school and you're geo coded in the system me coming up because i'm a pin to the same family i i did have a route but we know that that's not the majority of our students that have that ability to do that but it really is because they are in a new environment the system is set up that it has to

032create a new route okay and have we addressed all the unsafe issues of curves or whatever that somebody would come flying around a turd and won't see a bus stop we have we ask the drivers to report any uh situation like that whether it be a bus driver or a van driver that you know has a uh a blind spot you know it's especially uh important when the students crossing the road but uh you know the the uh the stops where the students are crossing have the sight distance you might run into some shorter site distance if the bus is stopping for the student getting on on the right side of the road and but for crossing is taken care of and if we're having any issues with somebody running the red lights are we

033getting the police involved and getting that taken care of because if you're having issues with the police look gladly or i'll gladly go after some of them we write we write the vehicles up as long as we get the license number and a description of the vehicle and turn that in we have to do that within 48 hours how many times has that been done this past year i i would have to get back to you now i don't have that on top of my head as i said we're doing pretty good on van drivers i would say probably about five to eight something like that would take care of of the situation that's all okay mr stout i wanted to oh oh i'm sorry i'm looking over here and i'm not working there i

034i apologize um i went on the trans find your website just out of curiosity of the software and everything so which package do you have the package that what they call the trifecta which is the route finder and the what is it called here the stop finder the route finder and the wayfinder do you have that one is that the one that you have yes we do okay the issue with the current software is the maps have not been updated yeah i understand i just was curious so is that stop finder is that going to be made available to parents at some point or is it already okay thank you i want to say too mr scott and mrs denicole i think that the other platform is web-based too which i think creates a little

035more efficiency for us to run the program because right now i think it's server-based which creates it's it's it's kind of like dial-up versus uh cable internet a little bit to try to get in the system yeah i do okay thanks um so we definitely had a rough start this year but i i know that you both were working very hard and i appreciate that so uh mr quigley please pass my appreciation on to your staff i know it's been a tough start um and i'm really glad to see that we're focusing on the future and taking steps to ensure that it won't happen again that's really great um out of the about 100 students it's how long do we think it'll be until they get routes not sure what's up the microphones tonight only

036one person can be red at a time maybe that's a good thing um that's that's a great that's a great question the person that i've been kind of working and collaborating with um is is getting them in the system the goal and i know if i say this it's gonna it's gonna backfire the goal is by the weekend to have all of those students uh just just an update to what what transpired in that hundred um i pulled the data from the survey that went out the wednesday after the survey went out that after the tuesday i pulled it again on monday and there was only about 24 uh families that responded which is good because we had 100 so what they worked on compared to what's there now i don't have a definitive number

037but when i spoke to them earlier because i had a little crazy day today and my assistant superintendent role and i did not get to collaborate as much as i would have liked so i did not get an exact number but when i spoke to them earlier they thought by the weekend they should be able to get as many of them in as they can but another critical piece of the element is that they manually put some of the uh families into the system or i strike that they manually tell bus drivers some of the stops so that we can get students on buses it might take a little bit longer for that information to actually be physically put into transfinder so that it can talk to ic so families can see the update so

038when mrs moyer pushed out the communications over the past couple weeks we were very clear to make sure you could actually potentially have transportation set up and not see your information in ic um because you've been communicated with directly from transportation um and then just one more question so um about the the amount of students on high school buses and middle school buses where kids are larger um just take up more space um have how are we handling that are we are like in high school is it two to a seat instead of three how is that being handled so that we know the kids are safe the high school it's middle school and high school is middle school and high school buses are basically 48 that's two to seat there might be some with

039that are three to the seat uh the thing about that is when you get towards the end of the route closer to school you get to the point where there's three to the seat and when you dismiss the three of the seat is left off first and it gets it lessened as far as the capacity on the bus overall we aren't seeing capacity problems i mean the the elementary buses are loaded but we're you know we're not seeing that we don't have the capacity to uh you know transport at the capacity of the bus one thing mrs hogan that uh came up in conversation with uh someone i've been working with in the office who actually does runs as well uh sometimes the older students have to be reminded to sit in the front of

040the bus because they might not be as inclined to sit in the front of the bus because their space and again we were all teenagers at one point as well but the reminder had gone out to make sure that we utilize front to back as far as all the seats that are available okay i appreciate that um and i i think that's important that we are utilizing all the seeds of course um but when it comes to having three high schoolers across the sea whether it's for a half a block or two miles it's concerning to me just because those seats are really what create safety since there's no seat belts from what i'm reading and understanding that they're kind of like in a crash they're the insulators so i want to make sure that

041kids are safe that's my main concern we are we are transporting from sixth to twelfth grade so i mean you know some of the sixth graders aren't uh you know as big as the high schoolers too so all right yeah quickly um one thank you for these numbers they make it a little more staggering i understand that the parent that didn't get picked up the numbers won't mean anything to them but it brings into light the significant amount of students that we do have and especially the other students that we have to supply transportation to it i know mr quigley and you both have mr stout i've been working your butts off and myself as a school board director appreciate everything that you guys have done anyone else i guess me for one thing we

042say um i like what i'm saying here uh for one thing we're acknowledging we have a problem which is which is always good because it's it's been a known problem and i think this year has been the best you're right now you're is your best push toward attacking it uh i believe your time frame to get in front of it is is the proper way to go about it and you know it appears that you've seen what some of your problems are your software is an issue some of the data transfer is an issue that so those things have come up uh so you're pointing them out and you're going with it to try and to try and straighten that so we don't go through this again next year which would be great for everybody

043especially for you so so so uh what kind of feedback loop are you going to put in here so that you know that this worked i mean so your list there from january on through is great to go forward with that but what it how are you going to look back at yourselves next year to say okay all this worked or we needed to change this this didn't work as well as we thought it would be or we still miss some routes and we think it's here you know what's your plan on that so part of the software platform is the ability to run reports and to run reports for accuracy on routes for the amount of students that are actually geocoded and pinned versus the students that are in ic again to be completely

044transparent i did not involve myself in any of the conversations until there was an issue that was brought to the forefront this year not saying it in critical way to any person but you know you solve problems when they come about i do feel bad about that but i also feel that based upon my experiences and what have taken place and knowing that timeline that the proof will be in the amount of students that are pinned for or routed and keep it into like a routing term that are routed uh come next august when we click the button when parents have the open portal uh that's the critical time when we say okay at this particular time as all of our parents are very eager to see their students schedules they're also eager to see

045their transportation information and if we would have been able to take out the hundreds of students that weren't assigned in sixth and ninth grade we'd be able to handle those individual cases and i don't want to pretend to say that there aren't going to be issues because if you go to any neighboring busing school community there are significant issues happening all around but i will say that i think we can minimize the opportunities for errors we're going to be continuing to look at that and try to continue to improve each and every year the other part i like is it's that quigley is now you've moved all the all of the work over toward quigley and you're just going to oversee it which i think that that that minimizes the handoffs and actually puts everything

046in one house which i think is the right place for it to be yeah just to give you a quick example of that transfinder system if anyone in the board or in the community has put in a gps coordinates in their car to go somewhere and uh you think you go from mr brophy you know myself to mr brophy that's how the route should go but somehow the gbs gps takes you to mrs scott then takes you to mrs nyman and then takes you to mr brophy for whatever reason um the transfinder system can tend to do that and the expertise that is in the quigley bus service looks at that and says you know what that really should not be bus 12 as trans finder suggests it needs to be bus number 11 because

047bus number 11 is more of a direct route and by the way it's got less students on it so there's all kinds of uh historical institutional knowledge that comes along with uh routing students on buses sure like when i ignore my gps in my car correct okay just one more comment and i know this is not an excuse but this is quickly his first time with this they have not done this before so it's not an excuse but i know brian is working on it and chris and i appreciate everything you're doing and i'm sure every year you will learn from your past mistakes at this so thank you for what you're you're doing and all the time you and chris are putting into this yeah mr quigley what are you going to do to

048correct the problem of being short on bus drivers and van drivers like i said we're always we're always recruiting drivers we had a good response with van drivers uh by using uh indeed uh that that we we had a good response and we're just going to continue with the advertising the yard signs the social media and it's just a constant it's it's a constant turn because the people that are driving the buses tend to be older and you you run into the issue of you know people get sick people uh you know it's uh their husbands get sick it's it's just a constant uh you have to keep up and and just keep keep training and and keep with it it's just we got with with the uh pandemic and everything and we got behind

049the eight ball as far as being able to keep up with the number of drivers we need and i i see us working through that it's it's better than it had been it's not great but it is loosening up and just to make a point to that um i forget what the exact number of routes that were up there i apologize but even if it was fully 100 staffed um i am coordinating and looking at emails at about 5 30 in the morning for mrs quigley about bus drivers that have called out sick so even with 100 of a fully uh staffed busing company um they are making adjustments every single day every single afternoon for bus drivers that are out which you you can plan for but you really can't plan for because it's

050unpredictable quickly how many cameras are on the bus and do we have any outside cameras because i would think if a car goes through our red lights i think the driver probably is more patience to try to save the child or but um i know they've been getting rowdier because they've been cooped up for two years do we have um cameras on the bus and is there anything that possibly we could put on the outside of the bus that would catch the people that are blowing these and they've been doing it forever it's not like this is a new thing i mean i've seen a number of people 25 years ago would pass a bus and there's total stupidity but but no i'm just for the rowdiness to help the drivers you know is there

051any kind of cameras on the bus on the we have uh two inside cameras on the vans one facing back the other in the back facing front on the full-size buses we have three inside cameras monitoring the driver and students and we have one inside camera it's a windshield camera that shoots out the front of the bus we don't have stock arm cameras that's coming into its own uh and that's something that would uh be able to catch the license number and so on and so forth of every vehicle that goes through mr quigley thank you very much mr style thank you for the presentation uh miss hogan has us some information from the bciu yeah thank you mr hemingway so um earlier today i sent board members an email with three attachments one was

052the what happened at the iu meeting on august 18th if i read it all we'd be here for four days so i'm not going to um the other one was the pennsylvania school code update i have both of those printed out if anybody's interested in looking at them and then the third was just the newsletter um today we had our cola meetings our committee on legislative action mrs torcher was there in person i was virtual so she got to be in the picture and i didn't so whatever but it's fine um so it's it's pazza that yeah that um presented today um and i i usually wouldn't take this long so a little bit of an apology but i think it's really important to share with you guys um so a lot of what they

053were talking about was advocacy and how important that is for board members um to be advocating and a lot of it had to do with funding so a few things they talked about were the teacher the teacher crisis and um so in 2010 and 11 pa granted 21 045 new education certificates in 1920 that number was down to 7 000. so when we're talking about um crisis and education and staffing we can see by the numbers you know that that's what it is and it's not pandemic related because in the three years before the pandemic pa granted an average of 7 350 education certificates per year so um it's pretty dire and it's it's going to be a big problem upcoming something we definitely want to keep an eye on um and if anybody's interested

054those numbers are from the pittsburgh tribune via the pde so you can you can check those or look them up um so another thing was funding so even though we've had a historic education funding increase this year huge increases right which is really something to celebrate but the commonwealth really needs to do better and uh needs to start paying its fair share we were talking about mandated costs and how they're outpacing the state funding so um between 2010 between the 2010-11 school year and the 2021 school year state funding grew by 2.8 billion while state mandated costs grew by 6.5 billion that's a huge difference there and all of those monies then have to be made up in your local district um so it's it's a big big deal a big problem for us locally

055um the other thing was pa is 45th in the nation for state education spending meaning the amount of money that the state allocates to local districts to support public education so this puts a huge burden on our local taxpayers to fund education and including again going back to all those unfunded mandates so there's 11 proposals that would divert money away from public schools in the forms of voucher and scholarship expansions so that's happening something for us to keep an eye on and there was a lot of talk about how funding public education is really about supporting the common good how you know public ed leads to a more healthy community people that can pay taxes and are able to be productive in our communities so it's something we really want to advocate to support um

056again i have it like in bold the importance of the board in doing advocacy work for public education so making sure you're speaking to your state reps and whatnot and then some of the bciu cola priorities for the year i just wanted to share them with you guys real quick at the state level they want to continue to advocate for school safety both physical safety and mental health funding advocate for basic and special ed funding keep advocating about those state mandates cyber charter reform at the federal level which we don't talk much about the federal level but we're talking about special education funding so i actually pulled this off of the national center for learning disabilities website and this is what it said when congress passed the idea they promised to cover 40 of the

057extra cost of special education in other words they would pay for nearly half of the additional cost required to educate students with disabilities when compared to the cost per student without disabilities unfortunately congress has never come close to fulfilling that promise the number of students with disabilities served under the ida has increased by 25 percent in the past two decades yet the idea state grant program was only funded at around 12 billion in 2017. federal government is only covering 14.6 percent of the additional cost so again those are huge massive costs that get passed onto districts and then get passed on to local taxpayers um and then one of their watch list items was an alternative um to school property tax which we know we've we've heard come up a few times so um i

058will get the slides in the next few days and i'll send them all out to you i know that was a lot and i appreciate um you listening so that's it thank you lisa right to the bctc there was a uh we had a meeting on august 24th at the burke's career and technology center in ole i have meeting briefs that if any of you would like to see all the approvals that went through a lot of them are fairly repetitive uh i would say the the one emphasis would be is to uh it's called the articulation agreements but basically what it is it's the agreement that we have with our partners in in uh whether it be the community college or the automotive so it all basically is is to support let me just

059go through a few of them the agreement between bctc and bctc continue education for plumbing your print of apprenticeship you have agreements with north hampton community college for automotive uh penn state first for bioethics chemical principles criminal justice early childhood so basically it was just base it was making these agreements with our our fellow partners in education through the bctc basic housekeeping type reorganization as far as position uh descriptions you know stuff like that um our next meeting and again if you guys want to see all these i can forward you the exact minute briefings for you to look at but the next regular meeting uh we'll be actually at the lee's port that'll be on september 28th there was one item in transportation that we're actually going to to talk more in length at

060our voting meeting mr says do you want to say any little teaser with that or okay okay that was something that's been we've been discussing for a while with the with the bctc okay i'm sorry thank you mr hemingway um yes the burke square technology center has been looking at changing transportation and returning the responsibility back onto the school districts because it has been losing the the career center has been losing money in providing that transportation to the local school districts so what they're proposing is for the start of the 23-24 school year that all school districts would be responsible in working with their um if school districts still have their own transportation within under their school district or or who you contract with so for us right now um quigley bus company transports our

061students to the bctc and back but we pay the career center for that transportation cost so the only change for boyer town next year will that will be that quigly bus will charge us directly for um the career center run uh there will be a resolution that the career center is proposing i did um include that for you in the newsletter this past week and it'll be there as well this week and then we'll be looking to uh vote on that resolution um it'll be a formality with regards to what the career center is looking to do propose okay thank you thank you for that explanation okay we're going to continue yes sir yeah yeah mr zawada i just wanted to bring up a little bit what lisa said um we happen to be lucky

062right now with our state representative that handles this area as far as funding um there are she mr brophy and i went and met with her and she gave us some areas that we could get funding especially for our expenses that are coming up for new ruse and stuff like that so i'm meeting i sent her the information yesterday i'll be seeing her tomorrow night she has three bills sitting on the floor to be brought to the floor to change charter school policy uh the only way the bill can be brought up is the leader of the house has to pass it so it's becoming political hopefully this gentleman is he's retiring this year so a lot of this stuff will be brought forward um the person that is that's running for tracy's position next

063year is a previous school board president and she's very well known for i mean she's familiar with the problems we have with the charter school and the funding and tracy is is running for senate then so she'll be able to bring that information to the floor and support us but she's she literally stays in touch with me and we had a very good meeting mr brophy and i with her personally and if any of anybody in our group here on the board to have any questions on that kind of stuff please give them to me and i can gladly tracy's very open um she's very easy to get in to see unless naturally if they're in harrisburg but right now i know it's a but she has totally went in and and totally dug into

064some of this other stuff where there are funds available for school districts like didn't realize that they'll help um support and approve schools you know um funding of buildings and stuff like that so yeah none so basically like i said we just need to stay on top of our reps and representatives not our reps but our representatives and senators and i'm sure there's money in washington dc but as usual that just also needs there and it's not but what we have right now is that we do have a lot of support with our with our um our representatives right now so if you do have any issues let us know um i'm sorry no i appreciate that um and i'm really glad to know that you guys are advocating it's awesome and it's you know

065the grant money and stuff that's amazing and it's i'd love to see you come here so no complaints there um but i just wanted to clarify when i'm talking about funding um because i don't think i think i just said funding and i'm talking about basic ed funding and special ed funding like the big pot um so we need to just keep pushing for those big increases like we got this year um to bring us back up to you know the levels that we were a decade ago we're trying to find a path to all those funds that are sitting there so there's also and i agree with you lisa there's a ton of different monies that's just sitting there so um it's just a matter of having the help of our representatives to show

066us that path and go there that's money has already been delegated it's sitting there it's like we talked about this before there's what almost four billion dollars sitting in there from covid and that hasn't been used and previously previous legislators said well we're going to save that you know to help balance the budget next year so no that's not what the money was for it was supposed to supposed to support our education system and and the businesses so i agree the whole order we just keep the petal to the metal with these people and you know a little sugar goes a lot farther in vinegar so but if you do have like i said if you have ideas or things like that i can at least bounce them off tracy and she'll send us in

067the right direction mr zawada if you think it's helpful since i have a different representative it's always helpful i i could go talk to them but if you would want to go over that with me at some point and then okay we have been in conversation with maloney also yeah we've talked to several times thanks yeah um it's torsion we we already pay bciu now right bciu they want to they want us to take their transport and do transportation for them it goes through berks county burst career technology center but we're not paying directly to the bciu for transportation we are but yes it is a contract that is through the berks career and technology center which they contract i believe with mr quigley or quigly bus to transport our students which sounds really dumb

068but it's the process that has been in place for a while um for my understanding and what they're looking to do is to return it back to the school district and we won't pay anyone but the transportation company directly years we've been paying them and now they want us to float the boat that would be correct and if you read the letter that was in the newsletter it will clarify more information for you okay on that note then is it going to be less money because i'm sure they were getting some of that i'm not sure what the cost will be but without working that through our our cfo there and um her you know working that out with our bus company but it shouldn't cost us any more that's for sure miss nightman okay

069thanks everyone move on let's just check in with everybody it says nothing at this time but for education and student services i still want to give the opportunity if you have any comments or no anything in facilities no concern oh we have a finance presentation from this data cola you are up um tonight i'm going to be sharing some financial projections um there'll be five year projections i'm also going to review former five-year projections that were shared by former administrators over the past number of years as superintendent torscha mentioned in our first meeting of the school year there has been a lot of turnover within key departments um administratively and you can kind of see in the projections they kind of were way down and then went way back up went back up i mean

070i'll show how the projections compared to how the district actually performed and then share um the forward outlook for the next five years so the former five-year projections again they were prepared by a number of different administrators because there was a good bit of turnover within this time frame so in 2015 there was a projection that showed the district would go to a very very negative fund balance of over 30 million dollars negative then in 2018 a presentation was shared that showed while it would be a declining fund balance it would still be a positive fund balance 2019 that projection was again updated that showed again declining fund balance um but not at the highest level that it was in 2018. 2020 it was yet another presentation by another administrator they again projected slight decrease

071in fund balance but much higher starting level fund balance where the district actually performed was an ever increasing level of fund balance now from 2017-18 to 2020-21 there are a number of business decisions that impacted that there were some furloughs there was the closure of a school building so all of those business decisions um likely helped that to show that increase in fund balance um so projections i want to caution you on they're only as good as the estimates they're prepared on and they are ever changing um as i share out the next five years these projections will be constantly updated based upon newest estimates newest known information so i just wanted to provide a little bit of the history of what the district has the district board has seen as far as projections and

072how it's kind of fluctuated over the years but overall from an actual standpoint fund balance has had um not a significant increase but a steady increase between 2017-18 and 2021 the current five-year per five-year projection is based upon again the most current estimates of revenues and expenditures it includes all currently known factors including collective bargaining agreements and existing contracts and again this projection will be continually updated and shared with the board the five-year projection for revenues um total revenue in our 2022-23 current year budget is 134 million 247 thousand seven hundred dollars then the projection for two thousand twenty three twenty four would be a hundred and thirty six point one million two thousand twenty four twenty five one hundred forty point three million two thousand twenty five twenty six one hundred and forty four

073point seven million two thousand twenty six twenty seven one hundred forty nine million and two thousand twenty seven twenty eight one hundred fifty three million built into this projection the largest increase is going to be in our local revenue again the advocacy that mrs hogan talked about is going to be very very important in pushing our state revenue numbers higher so we can hopefully bring our local revenue increases to a better level included in the local revenue is a tax increase each year and it does project um based upon historical analysis a bit of assessment growth so we'll have the tax increase and then assessment growth as well federal revenue you see the decline from 3 million in our 22 23 budget down to approximately 1.1 million in the remaining years that big big decrease

074is due to the lack of cares funding in 23 24 through 27 28 so we'll go back down to our normalized level for our title 1 and title 2 um programs the revenue factors that may impact these projections are again the real estate assessment values if we don't see as much growth obviously that will impact the revenue but if we continue to see an uptick in growth that will positively impact the revenue earned income tax is always a concern if we would have a large employer cease operations or short you know curtail their um staffing that would impact our earned income collections on the other side if we see more industry come in more employees that would positively impact as well state funding there's just been minor increases budgeted for inc increase in state revenue

075we did see a large increase in the basic ed funding this for this 22-23 year however i don't know that we can anticipate at this point in time that that will continue because we do know that there will be a change in leadership at the state level so we will have to you know update our projections as we see where the next administration is going to put their funds towards education and then again the federal funding the biggest decrease is the lack of cares act funding for expenditures um for 2223 total expenditures 137 million dollars the largest of that is salaries and benefits which is ninety million eight hundred seventy four thousand and one hundred sixty five dollars within the salaries and benefits the current existing contracts that are in place have all been included

076in the projections the salary and benefits number will be adjusted as we enter contract negotiations for our collective bargaining agreements and any other contracts that exist so you will see that's a key portion of the projection that you will see change for total expenditures we will be at 2324 projected at 140 million 2024 25 142.9 million 2025 26 145.8 million 2026 27 148.8 million in 2027 28 151.9 million the major factors that will impact these projections will be our collective bargaining agreements and other contracts employee benefits healthcare is a large portion of our budget so as we've budgeted a normalized increase based upon what the trend is in the education sector if we see our performance better than that that will positively impact and we will continue to look at programs from an employee benefit

077perspective to educate our employees trying to develop a healthier population to catch things earlier which in the end decreases those health care costs we also will keep a close eye on mandated costs the largest challenge for us is the cyber charter enrollment we have seen a very positive decrease in those numbers but we want to continue to bring more of those students back into the bordertown community and then again special education a mandated cost that's largely out of our control we cannot control the needs of the students that may move into our district or the needs of our existing students and as you mentioned mr token there's not adequate funding for that so if we look at the revenues and expenditures together the potential use of fund balance in each year is shown you will

078see a use a potential use of fund balance from our current year budget 22 23 to 25 26 but then in 26 27 27 28 you're going to start to see an uptick where we're starting to build back some of that fund balance that's a function of as we would do continual tax increases we're getting the increase not only on our existing tax base but also the growth so as you do that year over year you start to compound that and you can see that in the outlying years per um projected fund balance and we get to a much more equalized level of our revenues and expenditures which is where we really want to be from a perspective of a school district so to look at how that use of fund balance would impact our

079current fund balance you will see that has a steady decline but then it starts to grow back up i know this section from 10. 10.6 million roughly down to 2.7 million is very concerning but it's important to note that we can't make rash decisions in one year to correct our use of fund balance we need to plan each year to make adjustments that will carry us through so we will we're projected to use fund balance at a pretty significant level um but that's what fund balance is there for and then we'll start to tick back up to build it to a you know a healthier fund balance to support our continuing operations there will be business decisions along the way our goal is going to be maintain programs but these will be the decision points

080we make as we start talking about new programs there may be things we want to offer that we just financially can't so that's going to be the the tricky part of the next couple years budgets if we get no relief on those mandated costs we don't have additional income come from the state then we'll have to make some decisions um we want to maintain status quo but we might not be able to add to the programs that we currently have so the five year projection not completely bright but i can see that we'll head in the right direction if the factors all align and i will tell you the projection is very conservatively built so expenses you know the expenses are fully budgeted for the revenue numbers are budgeted for um of conservative increase so

081we will likely beat our revenue estimates that's the five-year projection and we will send out this um presentation in the newsletter and again this is something we'll continue to update and continue um to share with the board as things change and we'll inform you know the key items that we think are going to change in a positive or negative direction now will you be using fund balance for the purpose of expending for reoccurring expenditures like salaries yes now there is also included within the expenditures um transfers to support capital reserve transfers to support technology that may be a decision point at the end of every year to say we're not going to put as much away from it to capital reserve for our long-term needs of our buildings but those are the decision points that

082will come up on an annual basis this isn't necessary to you patty um basically i've been approached by two different supervisors of two different we'll call douglas montgomery and new hanover and they've asked that they could give a presentation to us to show what um basically the amount of houses that and businesses that have been already approved so to help you figure on revenues and stuff like that so i don't know and again i'm asking the question now possibly how to do this whether it would be in a small group or executive committee meeting or in an open situation like this i'm starting to reach out to jamie gwen and he would probably be a for a new hanover uh and i guess um pete would be with the manager yeah so it's a matter

083of making some phone calls see what we can see what we can do yeah thank you jeff yeah i attended a township meeting for a development that was pretty had some pretty scary numbers a lot of concerns uh undedicated roads we're talking about busing undedicated roads for an entire development you're gonna have masses of kids at the entrances it's gonna be uh gonna be a lot of issues and that's just one development in new hanover so get out to your township meetings and and let your faces be heard thanks mr hemingway um just a quick question when our fund balance is down like it was like two point something i don't know what the exact number was but um are there any impacts on us like i i remember and it was a while ago

084about like bond rates does that have anything to do with fund balance and sorry um a proper you know financial forecast along with a decreasing fund balance is not necessarily going to impact your bond rating because across the state all districts are experiencing that but if they see that the financial picture is continually addressed and business decisions are made to address that downfall in fund balance and then increase back up the important thing about fund balance to also recommend is or to recognize is that pde has requirements that we maintain um no more than eight percent in a unassigned fund balance which is a very very low number um but that's the pde mandate so we'll stay within that realm um but from a bond underwriting perspective they look at much more than just that

085first of all thank you for that um i have heard that grandview has been sold and it will not be grandview anymore so knowing that that is closing that's probably some significant money to us and i don't know if co parts going in there is going to be able to meet that revenue that we were getting i can take a look at that those parcels in particular and report back to the board on what the potential could be [Music] okay um it's not only a tax increase it's growth in assessment value growth and assessment value will bring in more dollars so don't be afraid don't be i don't want you to be scared by seeing that large increase and it's not just real estate taxes it's earned income tax it's delinquent tax it's per capita

086tax it is ida fund idea funding is actually included um in pde as local revenue so there's a slight increase shown for ida funding it's a number of different factors that have gone into that increase in the local funding line the tax percentage three percent it's kinda cool thank you very much and that'll and that'll be in our weekly report okay okay next we're going to have some more discussion on policy 707 from the scoresheet great thank you mr hemingway um i did ask mr stout to make sure that we have the current policy the way that it stands uh behind me so i wanted to review policy 707 because there are some inconsistencies with this regards to this policy and tonight we're only going to be reviewing the policy i'm going to be taking

087recommendations from the board with regards to things that i would be recommending as the administration be removed or and then looking for some input with respects to anything that may need to be added this is only about the policy this does not impact any type of fee structure the fee structure that is out on our website right now is going to stand until we collectively work on a fee structure that we believe is fair and equitable to every uh entity that's utilizing our organ our facility so there there are quite a few organizations um that do use our facilities over a hundred i believe i i included that in the newsletter and uh we have over 30 non-profits that are registered and listed and some are paying and some aren't so that's another work session

088so for tonight my my focus is to look at this policy because the way that is written it is not being enforced it is not being put forth in the proper way and if we want to be following policy then we need to make sure that it's what we are enforcing so i don't know if you were taking the time to review it but i can you know go through it line by line um the purpose would be the boyertown area school district facilities and grounds are designed to maintain to provide for educational programs and services on behalf of the students who are enrolled in the district the board encourages the use of school facilities and grounds for events that support community-sponsored sponsored educational and recreational programs and provide for community activities the administration does

089not have any recommendations for changes there but with that said i'm not sure if the board does or not so jot down some notes and when we get through it we can go back the authority would be the board directs the use of school facility and fields they shall be scheduled in the following priority educational programs and school functions for the school and school district events and activities sponsored by a school district connected group activities in which the majority of the participants are school age youth meetings of parent guardian staff organizations community sponsored activities and events to the public the board shall establish a feast a schedule of fees for the use of school facilities by approved groups district facilities and grounds may not be used for any activities or event forbidden by law administrative

090regulation or policy again there are no recommendations to make any changes there delegation of responsibility would fall to the superintendent or the designee and we shall implement procedures for requesting a signing class assigning a classification and granting permission for use of school facilities and shall distribute the necessary information to individuals affected by them an applicant for use of school facilities may be disapproved because of non-compliance with established policy and procedures by the superintendent or designee again i have no recommendations to change anything under the delegation of responsibility guidelines which include the application process is that the policy authorizes the use of the district's online facility usage request and community use calendar software program that's schooldude all requests for facility usage should be submitted by accessing the district's website along with a completed application the individual

091or group must submit the following payment of the specified rental fee evidence of organizational liability insurance to limits required by district guidelines and documentation evidencing the school district shall be held harmless by the user for any liability that arises from use of school facilities by the individual group under that part of the policy the only recommendation recommended change that is that we just state that a certificate of insurance with evidence of organizational liability insurance to limits required by district guidelines must be given to the business office so it's really just a change of evidence of organizational liability to a certificate of insurance application evaluation no application to use school facilities shall be approved if the proper proposed activity would result in any of the following a conflict with any school-sponsored activity access to school facilities

092closed due to renovations maintenance cleaning the school calendar or board action access to school facilities containing equipment or furnishings which would be detrimental to the operation of a district program if damaged or operated by an unqualified user the proposed use would prevent or encumber district personnel from preparing school facilities for their primary purpose because of the nature or duration of the activity and five individual or community group uses school facilities in excess of five times during any calendar year for the same purpose this limitation shall not apply to individual athletic contests for children or adults that are part of an overall athletic season schedule and the use is approved by the board so there is a part where we need to start to talk because right now we have organizations that are utilizing our facilities

093in excess of five times per year we're not following our policy as it is written the proposal from the administration was to strike that and not to put a limited amount of time on organizations to use our facilities felt that that was restrictive we understand that there are um different people that are in and are using our our facility weekly um sometimes two times a week we also know that we have um youth groups who are you know practicing so obviously you're going to you know be practicing more than one time um per or five times period for your sports season so that's where we should probably start some discussion on that part of number five my proposal is that you remove it completely but i am open to conversation okay i guess my first

094my question would be is it a non-profit group that's using it it doesn't matter if it's a non-profit or a profit group that you're not stating that there we will remove number five and we will not um subject any individual or community group to only utilizing the raise or something for that sure raise your hands if you're in agreement for me to take that away all right thank you okay thank you next under limitations when individuals in community groups receive written permission to use school facilities under this policy such you shall be conditioned upon strict compliance with the following individuals shall not use access or enter upon any portions of the school facilities or their contents not specified in the approved request form individuals shall refrain from any conduct or activities not specifically identified in

095the approved request form when advertising or promoting activities held at school facilities individuals and community groups shall clearly communicate that the activities are are not being sponsored by the school district and four school equipment used in conjunction with requested facilities shall be identified when the application is submitted users of school equipment must accept liability for any damage to or loss of equipment that occurs while in their use where rules so specify no equipment may be used except by a qualified operator provided by the school and paid for by the requesting individual under this part i would like to um add that there is no propping open of doors for any reason so you know we're doing um a huge overhaul with the way that we are trying to secure our buildings currently we've put cameras

096in all of our elementary schools we've added additional insight and outside cameras at our middle and high school and we have been operating our day-to-day school our day-to-day school business with our classroom doors locked we are going to be aren't or we are going to be electronically linking all of our exterior doors to alarms so that we know that doors are not propped open so at this point in order for me to ensure the safety and security of our buildings after our students leave we need to make sure that anyone that's using our buildings are not propping doors open they've got to figure out a way to bring people in and make sure that everybody that's supposed to be there is there and then you know obviously you're going to be in a section of

097the building and we don't have custodians that are watching people who are utilizing our facilities we don't have security on in at night because those would be additional costs so my my minimal recommendation here is that you've got to be responsible if you're utilizing our facility and making sure that you're not propping doors open for any amount of time comments i think at this point maybe um to set up a penalty for saying basically you know first time you get a warning the second time you're not allowed to use the facilities anymore yeah i'd like to see like what is the consequence of that if you if you do leave the door open okay what what's going to be the consequences i guess my second thought was how are we assuring that they're staying in

098the area that they're supposed to not going opening us up to the rest of the school so that they can somebody can come in and go somewhere else in the school while they're there it's another another question i also would like to see a penalty for that not first time second time uh there's we don't get that many chances with their children first time they're now okay um i understand that but if a basketball game or whatever that we have when you have significant amount of people coming in the door is going to be open you can't i mean we can't even stop that like in the mornings when our kids come in from having the door open when you have several hundred kids coming in at one time so i'm concerned how we're gonna

099implement that part of it my second thing is most of the schools have or used to anyway have like gates that would not let you down certain hallways can do we still have that i think that would be something to look at to if we have those gates there we put them we close them off so that they can't go down hallways but implementing the penalty system when we're gonna have a problem when you have like 100 people coming in 100 students coming in at one time and that door is going to be open for a little bit so you have an organization that's there or like the bell snickle you have people going in and out it's going to be open at times what are you going to do about that you can't just

100say so when we are receiving students in the morning there are people that are manning those doors and once students are coming off the buses or coming in from walkers those doors are secured and any strikers that come in have to be buzzed in so those doors are not being propped open without having teachers administrators um officer perez depending on what building he may be in so during the school day every door that is being used to receive students is being manned by an adult they're there greeting the kids and then they are shutting the doors so they're not being propped up open or unmanned for any amount of time with respect to sporting events when mr palladino has basketball volleyball whatever may be inside there are people that are working and the doors aren't

101being propped open and they shouldn't be left unlocked either uh there is typically somebody that should be working a door but those are things that we are working on as well so as we're saying that anybody that's utilizing our facility you know needs to be abiding by it we are going to be doing the same thing with respects to our our own staff and and our own programs okay that maybe we need to word it that they have to man the doors and make sure that the doors are watched i mean but if you have a group coming in it's going to be held open for a while it's inevitable that is watching and knows that they're coming in but when a door wedge is put into place or the door is pushed open and

102there is no one there watching or checking who's coming in um and unfortunately we have cameras and i can go back and watch feed so i i understand what's happening and so i do feel like it's a problem and it's a problem that's more of a concern because there's less people around to see somebody get into a building and get to some place where they shouldn't be absolutely have somebody standing at the door you know who's coming in and if they're coming after the door is locked a text or a phone call can somebody let me in could could easily work no cropping of doors i think is pretty easy i i just don't by propping i mean no not wedging something in a door so if you if it needs to be more descriptive

103or you know that you can't push it open and have it unmanned that would be a way of stating it you could say maybe something along the lines all doors will remain closed and secured with examples of not propping or i don't know i'm sure you'll think of something but enhance it a little bit just in instead of just non-propping of the doors use it as an example this may be a little bit off-topic but on this policy do we restrict the utilization of our facilities to how do you define community groups that's a different part of the policy mr sultanic so no we're not going to address that part tonight uh there are different classes that are broken down um and therefore then there's a definition with respect to what a community group is

104and what a school organization is i just want to make mention in a number of districts this week we've had a lot of issues regarding the use of facilities and was primarily prompted by some outside groups who wanted to use facilities because of open forum which have been created and those districts are currently exploring the possibility of saying in order to be a community group you need to have 80 or 90 percent of your members to be district residents does anyone see any other limitations that should be placed uh there with respects to um putting some kind of language with regard to propping doors who's responsible for cleaning up well certainly the group should be cleaning up afterwards our custodial group would come through typically depending on the space that's being used it may have

105been cleaned it may have not been cleaned already so at some point it would you know fall onto the custodians but i would hope that any group that's using any of our facilities would be cleaning up the any major part of the mess left behind again i'll go to consequences so if they leave it a mess what's the what's this what's the district's stance on it yeah i think you ought a word that if you bring it in you take it home because that way we don't pay custodians to haul the trash out some districts do charge users of the facilities for custodial services to clean up and impose a charge we do in some circumstances it is charged it depends what how big the event would be um and it depends on what the

106entity would also be so that that's one of the things that we're going to need to iron out at our next work session with respect to you know what are we expecting our depleted custodial groups to do with respects to people that are utilizing our buildings they're not just there one large building only has one person right now after tonight and we get through this part of the meeting we go to the voting we will be approving some more custodial workers which is wonderful but you know we're working with limited resources right now so it does become a burden you know for the school district yeah i was just going to say i do think we do charge some of the organizations fees for the custodial staff but i think that should be also limited

107if they're cleaning up should we be charging them that fee because some of the organizations i know do clean up after themselves so because you do have some small groups early there's only a few people so they could probably clean up on their own without a big issue just as long as it's clean i mean it's the big issue is it's is it's cleaned up and as good as when they came in whether we do it or they do it but i think i mean that's the issue so then moving right along to uh don't we still wipe all the chairs every chair down and every table down and all that so how are you going to tell who's going to do what because the custodians do that so i'm sure if somebody's running a

108say a classroom they're going to wipe every chair down in every tabletop desktop this is the time for us to be able to add that in and to make sure that they are complying and that they are keeping you clean i know but how do you know that in advance is my question how would you know that in advance if you were using the facility how would you know what to charge me in advance for using the facility you're not going to be there to see if i wipe every chair down in every desktop down what do you suggest there should be some type of feed in there well too it depends what it's being used for you're gonna have to categorize them somehow and how many people right now we are suggesting that later

109on there there is an area where it says that you could be charged for cleanup so we can address that when we get to that area so under those limitations were you know talking about you know propping doors open and trash being you know removed was one of mr updegrove's suggestions um prohibited activities that's pretty self-explanatory the following activities are strictly prohibited i'm sorry is there now the other thing that we'll have to rely a little bit on our custodians too i mean they have to report if it's turned into a total mess you know and it wasn't picked up you know so again if there's the excess the other way we should be able to okay this group now is on a do not hire list but now i mean we have to rely

110on our custodians let us know how the place is kept all right so under prohibited activities part of the policy the following activities are strictly prohibited in school facilities when individuals and community groups are granted written permission to use said school facilities possession use or distribution of illegal drugs alcoholic beverages possession of weapons conduct that would alter damage or be injurious to any district property equipment or furnishings conduct that would constitute a violation of the pennsylvania crimes code or state federal laws and regulations gambling games of chance lotteries raffles or other activities requiring a license under the local option small games of chance act unless such activity has been expressly authorized by the board of administration and use of tobacco products we should also probably add there it's not just tobacco it's vape we've um

111extended that in our other policies surrounding things that are not appropriate to bring to school so i will add you know that that vape part as well the security next part there there's no recommended changes to that part of the policy under prohibited activities with regard to security the superintendent or designate may require the sponsoring organization to obtain adequate um it says adequate police protection and or traffic control we're going to remove that wordage our recommendation would be to remove adequate police protection and or traffic control and just put security there for any given activity or event labor charges for security shall be negotiated between the organization and the and um the their personnel which would really be a negotiation if their security that would be needed it would be the set rate by the

112company that we currently contract with so when organizations have been using renting our facilities and it's a large group officer perez is typically brought in he's given the number of people that they're anticipating in there and then he determines how many security guards would be needed and then whoever is renting the facility would be responsible for paying the rental the the fee that we uh have to pay with that contracted security company it would have to be the security company that we're already vetted and utilizing um so the only change in there is to change the uh the to security from what we have there as police protection and or traffic control mr hamilton i think we ought to to keep traffic control just in case there is an event down the line at least

113it's in the policy that so if it did occur the organization wouldn't be able to say wasn't in the policy it's flipping our build whether it be road blockage or cones you know whatever it is it would be their responsibility to maintain that traffic flow well then speaking of that if it's at the high school would the gate be open to go out to montgomery avenue then no it most likely would not it depends on because it's not a it's not a sponsored school district event so our staff administration have the ability to open that gate otherwise that gate stays closed and you know now we would have to really look at it if it would be that large of an event or somebody that was coming in and we knew there was a lot

114of traffic going on then we certainly could stipulate that that's not it doesn't cost anything for us to open up the gate but the cones stay in place until the traffic light goes into place so there's no left turns and then the next part it says minimal participants the recreational activities sponsored by a non-school related organization or by a community group shall have at least 10 participants excluding officials any recreational activities that have less than the required number participants shall be cancelled it is the responsibility of the sponsoring group to notify the superintendent or designee with whom the arrangements for the use of the facility were made in the event the activity must be cancelled the recommendation from the administration is that we remove the minimal participants peace i i don't believe that that's relevant

115that's my opinion but any of you have some and then under violations the school district reserves the right to remove from school district premises any individual or community group who fails to comply with the terms and conditions of this policy and established procedures in the event an individual community group violates this policy or the terms under which permission was granted to use facilities that individual or community group forfeits the right to submit future requests to use school property district property unless otherwise decided by the board so that could be the um what you all were seeking as far as a consequence if they're not following some of the things that we're asking for with respects to doors and cleaning up those could be the violations any other feedback under that section i think as far

116i think as far as the violations that we put in there that's the ones that should eliminate their response if they go against the other policies we just talked about you know and we give them a warning and then you know the second time they're out so you know again i i know monsteroff said she wanted one and out i i think you know sometimes people you know new experience may need a warning and then if it happens again but i wouldn't put that in this section i just the stuff that you just said should be automatic termination of an agreement between the school district and that group and then lastly the fee schedule use of school facilities for activities directly related to the educational program and district district operation shall be without cost to

117users except that the user may be responsible for extra custodial fees and this does occur um at times depending on what the event is you know um and i i'm not going to be able to offer the top of my head quote which organizations within our school may have to pay i want to say for instance the school show i miss denicola i know that you work directly with your admin assistant who takes the resume so if one of our student activity clubs would hold an event they would pay for any additional custodial charges that were over and above a custodian's normal work schedule similarly depending on the type of organization we will charge custodial fees depending on whether or not additional custodial was needed or just part of the custodian's regular schedule the custodians

118um do notify um the business office when they're working on an event how many hours they contributed towards it so we do charge when when we need to the board will establish the applicable fee schedule in consideration of recommendations made by the superintendent or designee and the individual requester and or group is responsible for any and all fees assigned through the approved facility usage so this would be the policy and then the next work would really be to look at what our current fee structure is and what would be the next steps to take to make sure that it's being applied evenly um and equally to all organizations that are utilizing our building depending on their class so we really need to take a good look at that i will make sure that i get

119those uh fees out to you the way that we have them right now um that they've been received um but is there any other feedback with respect to just this policy i just have a clarifying question um so for the fee schedule when we're talking about sorry we were talking about fees that could be charged to groups um so we could potentially be charging fees to school clubs and ptos like if they're doing something on a friday night um that would be outside of the hours of the custodian like how does that work is i guess what i'm asking you that would be part of the next work session to talk about that be with respects to when an organization is utilizing our building and let's go with a saturday because typically we do have

120second shift custodians working within all of our buildings so if there's an activity that's happening right after school and it's something you know with respect to um you know ptos and they're you know having a fun night then you know certainly they wouldn't be paying to utilize the facility but if there would be extra cleanup that would fall on the responsibility of the um custodian that may make the custodian work longer hours you know somebody's going to have to be able to pay for that and and my feeling is is that it's not a budgeted amount of money that we have for that additional overtime it may be over time it may it may not be so we have to we're going to have to look at what are the costs that are being incurred

121so are there not times that there are organizations that are using our facilities that there aren't custodial fees charged i'm i'm not sure and if it is yeah it's it's not being applied consistently across so i really want a consistent fee schedule is what i would like to work on next if we have to open up a building on a saturday and no one's working somebody has to pay for for that person to come in so whose responsibility is that so when we're talking about because i from it's my understanding and i just my understanding i could be wrong but um it's my understanding that most of like the ptos and those types of groups are utilizing friday nights to um to you know to not have to bring people in on stars which so

122that's reasonable um so what you're saying is that if they're what how long like when does our second shift how what is that i believe our second shift comes in between two and three to ten or eleven so if if that person would have to work past 11 then we could be potentially charging ptos and school-based clubs for the extra time i would say so only because it's not it's not a part of our standard budget so we're not prepared to be able to pay extra time for custodial services for all of the different organizations that would be utilizing our facilities so if we know that we're working directly with a pto we know that they're going to be in there and typically they're not there till 10 or 11 o'clock they're they're usually out

123of there by nine o'clock maybe a little bit later because they are staying behind in cleaning up um but i would just say that i think that if we know that there's a time and and for instance we have organizations who are not affiliated with our school district for instance that come in and um they're from out of state they've used our auditoriums and they say we had strict uh rules saying that you needed to be done by you know 11 o'clock till you know all out they're there until 12 1 o'clock if we don't our person can't leave until they get them out so somebody needs to pay for that cost obviously they're not affiliated with us they're going to pay it pretty easily so the question comes to when we do have our

124own people in but it's still costing us additional monies for that person to be on payroll or you know be working who should be paying for that and that's the conversation that i think that we need to have with the board it's not my decision only but all we can bring forward is our the experiences that have been so can we i guess um i hear your point about you know ptos would mostly be out of there by that time um would there be impacts on like high school clubs you know because kid older kids are up later um those kinds of things is what i'm interested in as well i want to make sure that our kids and clubs that support our our students organizations that are like school based like ptos or you

125know they're helping support the students in the schools i want to make sure that those people um those those organizations aren't being penalized um unduly i i understand what you're saying but i think that there's an argument on the other side as well so i want to make sure that it's you know and and i personally would agree as as the superintendent and i do know and believe me i didn't set up this policy or fee structure this has been in place um i think it's 2014 or this one says 2017 um but and i didn't do anything with the fee structure but i know that there are some organizations our own clubs that are running bigger events and they do need custodial coverage so they do know that they're taking money out of whatever

126their um student activity you know monies are that are raised to be that are paying for that now that's something that that's been in place for a long time so that's happening with and i don't know which if it's student council or if it's a i don't remember which it would be one of the student activity clubs like for instance uh the the powder powder puff football i believe that because the stadium is open and the bathrooms are open now we're going to have to have somebody to come in to clean those that facility so therefore somebody needs to you know be able to pay for whatever has to be done that evening so i believe that they've been charged in the past don't now i think that's an example that i'm trying to give

127you it it's it's they're doing it as a i i and again i might be using a poor example and i'm sorry yes so these individual clubs do a fundraising to support their own activities um in the event that we would incur like overtime fees for custodial that's when they would be charged if it's just part of the regular custodian day they're not charged but they do the fundraising to support these activities under school code a student activity club the funds need that are raised for that club have to go to support the students of that club so that's that's where they're generating the revenue from and all of our largest student activity clubs are very successful in their fundraising efforts so i don't know that it is um causing any undue harm at this

128point to charge when we're incurring additional fees why not we just put a set fee i mean it's part of you know it's a clean i mean you return stuff to a rental service and it has to be clean but what i'm saying is depending not depending on any group but i mean if it's a non-school activity of students we should have a minimal fee and if they go past that with the exception of you know would have to be more so we're getting ahead of ourselves so the next committee the whole i will have um information for you so that we can see what clubs are you know being charged for the use of our facilities give you more of that information so that we can then make decisions on that fee structure moving

129forward tonight i just wanted to get this policy set and like i said the fee structure that is out there right now is going to stay in place until the board decides on something new and once we do make a decision then i think that we also make a decision that we would put that into place for the 23-24 school year so that people had ample time to get ready for any changes that might come out of that so for right now i'm i'm going to make the changes i'll bring this back the next board meeting to review the changes and then we can put it on for first reading at the end of october yes that's what i said we're right we're i'm not touching the fee schedule i'm just saying it's it is

130a part of the the policy and we agree that there should be one i'm just not making any changes to that feast the fee schedule itself just making some of the changes in this policy the way that we discussed what if we put together in the policy that we would have a three-person committee okay a board member the principal at school an administrator that would review each application you know and make the judgment call from there instead of just not not it i'm not idle now we have 235 organizations that utilize our facilities and and that's just the number that use it not the number of times so you'll do you want me to set up an office for you then i just i just think that's the board would be stepping into the administrations

131and really the administration's wheelhouse they have to get that and then bring it to us for us to say yeah we like it yeah you can sit there so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take the the notes that i have i will bring back to you what i think that we all agreed on we'll review it again um briefly at the next meeting and then again at the october committee the hole we can then uh have it for our first reading and we'll start the work on the fee structure at that time thank you mr all right we are up to public comment period number one believe we do have some speakers so let me read this first on behalf of the school board of directors i would like to welcome

132you to this meeting we welcome your attendance and input input from stakeholders to assist us when making recommendations and decisions related to the playertown area school district procedures and rules for public participation are detailed in basd board policy 903 this document is available on the basd website participants properly registered with the board secretary will be recognized by the presiding officer public commentary number one is limited to topics on tonight's agenda participants must preface their comments by an announcement of their their name all statements inquired inquiries or comments shall be directed to the presiding officer no participant may address or question board members individually administrative team members individually school employees are members of the public individually note that we value and will not compromise the privacy of our students and staff please see us outside the

133remnant public meeting if you have a concern about an individual staff member or student if your public comment includes a question mr a member of our staff we'll be in contact with you to confirm your question and provide you with information comments are limited to three minutes and common periods are limited to 30 minutes individuals may indicate a desire to speak a second time if there is time left in the 30-minute period finally note that we do record our board and committee meetings and we post them on youtube with a link on our website we request that you if you do wish to take pictures record the meeting yourself you can do so in a non-disruptive and discreet manner and use those materials respectfully and responsibly okay we have a barber hunter i'm gonna listen

134for the first three so yeah barbara hunter uh her topic 707 kevin patton also policy 707 and then barbara furman 707 so u3 will be in the in the queue so barbara hunter could you come come up please there we go hello my name is barbara hunter i'm a resident of the pine forge area of boyertown i spoke previously about the proposed updates to the facility rental policies and fees i was heartened by the support from several board members and by the decision to table the vote until more discussion could take place and i come before you tonight in the middle of that discussion as a parent of six school-aged children all of whom have used bordertown facilities for activities including optimist cheerleading and basketball and legionette twirling and as a former four-year pto president

135in the district i implore you to consider the financial burden that will be placed on youth and families in our community if you were to charge facility fees for youth sports and pto events all these programs provide positive outlets for youth in the boyerton community ptos and hsas give prolific amounts of money back to their home schools boycott administration has no problem accepting the generous gifts of playground equipment smart boards and library books from parent organizations or the extensive financial aid of the voyage music league in support of boyertown's award-winning music program yet the administration now wants to nickel and dom new organizations to rent space to hold the very events that fund these programs and serve the families participating in the fundraisers please consider waiving fees for youth and parent organizations for the betterment

136of boyertown i also ask for clarification on enforcement of policies current and future i serve in a committee for boyertown legionnets headed by my friend brooke patton who will be speaking tonight we have used district facilities here for decades and we treat them with great respect and leave facilities clean every time we practice wednesday and thursday nights during the school year at middle school west this week in requesting facility usage for our holiday party on a thursday night in november in lieu of practice we were told that our usage would be approved if we paid an hourly custodial fee of forty four dollars per hour not a one-time fee to clean up afterwards for an hour but forty four dollars per hour we referenced the published documents on policy 707 on the facility uses page

137the district site and i printed them out and we are a class 2 organization quote an organization within geographical boundaries of the school district whose primary purpose is the betterment for the community and providing of services to residents this includes but not limited to lions club rotary club kiwanis club optimist etc as we provide youth services that are sponsored by and affiliated with the american legion we continue to qualify as a class too the custodial service subsection for the rules for school use specifies that there will be quote a custodial charge unless the activity or event is held during a period when a custodian was previously assigned to work west custodians regularly worked past 9 pm on weeknights and our activity is scheduled during their assigned work hours upon appeal to mrs tortious he said

138that these regulations do not apply to our situation that the legionettes will indeed need to pay 176 dollars for a four-hour christmas party since mr grophy stated at the last meeting that the district does not make money on these fees and only breaks even i can only assume that our district custodians are handsomely compensated and the current job listing on the district website advertising a full-time custodial position for fourteen dollars an hour is a typo time ezra thank you kevin patton my name is kevin patton i reside in colbertdale i say i stand again before the school board is a resident taxpayer parent former school pto treasurer and current poor town legion at touring organization board member i am speaking regarding policy 707 according to the national center of education statistics students who participate in

139extracurricular activities have a 15 higher classroom attendance rate than students who are not involved as a result these students are more likely to have a higher gpa which also has a direct connection to higher education opportunities the social component of extracurricular activities instills a sense of community responsibility and involvement in a study conducted by the mayo clinic it was found that children who were engaged in extracurricular activities were significantly less likely to engage in recreational screen based activities in contrast long screen time was associated with lower levels of satisfaction with life and optimism which resulted in high levels of anxiety and depression symptoms shorter recreation was associated with favorable mental health and well-being with that being said when you look at policy seven of seven of the fees schedule and grouping that is be created

140by the board you need to keep all this in all the children that this will impact in mind during the august 9th meeting it was discussed that there had been several organizations have utilized the bordertown school properties for years even decades and provided many children with activities that are not offered by the district i think that that process needs to be divided by these groups from truly non-profit and business for example the bordertown league genetics organization is a non-profit organization as is registered as such most of the participants within the group reside within the school district and therefore school taxes are being paid by these families organization has a zero turn away policy and is funded by donations and funds raised simply put we have children organization that would be involved in nothing if it

141wasn't for this and as long as my wife and i are involved with the organization we will never return any child simply away because of money when discussing this matter tonight please keep in mind all the good things that come from these organizations teamwork social skills self-discipline sportsmanship and listening are just a few now as a former pto treasurer and still very involved in the pto the thought that the district wants to charge us anything to utilize the property completely and fury to me with no disrespect to some of the board members sitting in front of me tonight but i've never seen any of you at any peto sponsored activity and or fundraiser for border to elementary school this this summer we wrote a check for 6 500 hours to have playground equipment fixed after

142it was unusable for an entire school year the previous year during cove we put over fifteen thousand dollars into the staff lounge for the teachers and in years previous to that we wrote a check in the amount of twenty thousand dollars which was used to purchase necessary things throughout the school these totals do not include the thousands of dollars that we've utilized for the teachers to purchase supplies that they needed for their classrooms and all the money that was used for activities for the kids all this money was made possible because of countless hours of volunteers something that would be considered when you were thinking of charging the ptos for anything with all this being said i asked the board to seriously consider the negative consequences that implementing a fee schedule would have to the

143groups that i have spoken about tonight thank you rperman i had asked to speak if not that i don't want to speak earlier but mine was thank yeah uh brooke brook patton mr stapleton did you you want to do one or two correct yes okay so you you would be up uh after mrs you'd be up after mrs patton okay thank you my name is brooke patton and i am the organization director of the boyertown legion at twillers i've been a part of this organization since my oldest child was five she is now currently 19. the legionettes have been a staple to the boyertown area since 1970 and since day one have utilized the facilities of the boyertown school district in 2013 and 2014 members of the organization and our main sponsors the american legion

144post 471 you should know who they are their name is all over the baseball field at the high school stood in front of the board for the same exact reason i am standing here today back on august 9th it was on the agenda to change the usage facility policy so that the organization such as the one i represent would then be charged to use the district's facilities that item was taken off the agenda and it was stated by the administration that a public open meeting would be scheduled later and that our organization would be invited back and that would get it would get discussed further that did not happen and so here i am again the current policy for facility usage and rental states as follows policy 707 class 2 will not pay a rental

145fee unless the sponsoring organization charges a fee to participants or if an admission fee is levied we fall under class 2 as a non-profit school connected organization we strive to keep costs low because we have not had to pay for practice space we believe in a policy where no child is turned away and we have several students on a full or partial scholarship which means that which means that the organization pays for everything they need to participate in our event can you tell me of a sport within this school district that does that or within the surrounding organizations area our organization is run strictly by volunteers if you pass the changing of this policy and move us to a category that would force us to pay rental fees we will be subject to charge outrageous

146amounts that our parents simply cannot afford we rely solely on donations from our parents and outside community we use church facilities when the school is not available free of charge but the ceilings are not high enough to practice properly we end a season with enough funds to start the next one each year we hold an annual holiday party which consists of a theme and supply and we supply all the decorations games and prizes not only for our students but their siblings as well we ask parents to donate food items and it's a great way to end our season this year for the first time ever we were told we were being charged forty four dollars an hour to have a custodian on duty weaver we request to have the cafe from five to nine pm

147which allows us for set up party time and cleanup it would cost us 176 dollars which is more than the party itself for what to pay a custodian who is already on duty to take out trash bags and sweep a floor both which are his normal duties we do all of the setup all of the cleanup and there is no need for him to even enter the room until the minute we are ready to walk out the door again according to your policy for custodial fees class two there will be a custodial charge unless the activity or event is held during unless the activity or event is held during a period where a custodian is previously assigned to work it seems like the district only cares about money in a district that believes in no

148place for hate who's being the bully now thank you mr stapleton you're up thank you hello i'm debbie stapleton i live in colebrookdale township i'm here to address the board regarding the proposed fee schedule changes involved with renting any of the facilities i'm not here to be confrontational but i'm here asking you to open your minds and just listen to what i have to say i'm a dance studio owner in this district and have been one for 30 plus years i have done almost all my recitals at the boyer town senior high the only time leaving when it was under construction i love being there the dancers in my studio are my kids and i want the best for my kids having the best is the auditorium at bash i'm not i am addressing this

149topic not only for myself but every dance studio organization or person who wants to rent any district facility i am being crucified on social media by the people who are being positive yet here i am still fighting i won't give up your proposed rate increase would jack my fees up 50 over what i paid last year that's astronomical i believe the quoted rate of inflation is eight percent but fifty percent i'm holding steady on my rates just so i don't have to turn anyone away as a district paying tax resident and a district business who pays taxes to this school district is it fair to me that i pay the same rate as someone outside the district when 98 of my dancers are district resident residents as well in your new fee schedule which i

150know has been put on hold there is a wording of any time under the classification listings does this mean i can now come in any time of the year and request a facility rental or am i still limited to the last day of school if you increase rates by the exorbitant amount that you're putting out there won't you be driving away any other influx of income i'm asking you to please reconsider the reposed rates and make the rental rentals more affordable for anyone i should be paying for your facility that is not an issue with me i just want to be treated fairly thank you for giving me the opportunity to express my consent my concerns [Applause] so as a result of these fees you will need to find an alternative location to hold our

151party because the nonprofit giving scholarships for members we cannot afford to take a hefty price tag in summary i implore you to assess fair and reasonable fees that you're not burning boycott music families do not mean your budget [Applause] okay that brings us to approval of our minutes looking for approval of the august 23rd 2022 board of school directors meeting minutes hogan motions okay i have a first from mr zawada and a second from mrs hogan any questions comments so again that was the first from mr zawana the second is from mrs hogan uh if we could go to a vote please ms diroff yes mr hemingway yes mrs hogan yes ms neyman yes mr pinnarello yes mr uptogrove yes mr zawada yes mrs scott yes mr brophy yes motion carries all right next would

152be uh our superintendent's consent agenda especially all right tonight we will be looking for the school board of the board of school directors to approve the consent agenda as presented the items include the bid awards for spring 2023 athletics resolution of abandonment of employment for employee number 5549 and resolution of abandonment of employment for employee number five seven three eight i'm looking for a motion hogan motions i had a first from miss hogan a second from miss nyman go right to a vote ms diroff yes mr hemingway yes mrs hogan yes ms nyman yes mr pinnarello yes mr upto grove yes mr zawada mrs scott yes mr brophy yes motion carries next i have um under the superintendent's itemized agenda for the board of school directors to approve the capital projects for the 22-23 school

153year hogan motions okay i have a first from miss hogan a second for mr uh pandarello questions comments mr we can go to a vote ms diroff yes mr hemingway yes mrs hogan yes ms nyman yes mr pinnarello yes mr updo grove yes mr zawada mrs scott yes mr brophy yes motion carries next i'll be looking for the board of school directors to approve the personnel agenda items as presented hogan motions i'm in second okay i have a first from miss hogan a second from miss nyman questions comments miss diamond just concerned a little bit because i saw some food service workers and they're different rates is that the amount of time they're here or like some of them are 13 25 some are 14 that is correct food service developed the pay rates in

154accordance with length of time that they've been here mr ralph and then on the uh a personnel agenda if we could have the dollars and cents for some of the positions i'd appreciate it i have a question um and this is due to lack of knowledge um the leave of absences can somebody explain because there's a significant amount of time that some of these are put in there um would be a leave of absence allowable for fmla purposes there's also um allowable leave within the collective bargaining agreement and there is a policy out there that allows for uncompensated leave so the bulk of the leaves you're seeing are all uncompensated unless they qualify to use any accrued set time you go to a vote ms diroff yes mr hemingway yes mrs hogan yes ms nyman

155yes mr panarello yes mr uptogrove yes mr zawada mrs scott yes mr brophy yes motion carries okay brings us to comment period number two i do have a few signed up let me read this uh again on behalf of you yeah we had something else on here for was this pull the bid awards on behalf of the board of school directors i would like to welcome you to this meeting we welcome your attendance and input from stakeholders to assist us with making recommendations and decisions related to the buoyant area school district the procedures and rules for public participation are detailed in basd board policy 903 document is available on the bsd website participants properly registered with the board secretary will be recognized by the presiding officer public county period number two is for those persons

156wishing to discuss uh an item not appearing on the evening's agenda participants may preface their comments by an announcement of their name all statements inquiries or comments shall be directed to the presiding officer no participant may address or question board members individually administrative team members individually school employees or members of the public individually note that we value and will not compromise the privacy of our students and staff please see us outside the realm of a public meeting if you have a concern about an individual staff member or student if your public comment includes a question mrs tortilla or a member of her staff will be in contact with you to confirm your question and provide you with information comments are limited to three minutes and comment periods are limited to 30 minutes finally note that

157we do record our board and committee meetings let me post them on youtube with a link on our website we request that if you do wish to take pictures or record the meeting yourself you do so in a non-disruptive and discreet manner and use those materials respectfully and responsibly thank you first we'll have nicole's alexa nicole zellex boyertown um so i just want to address two things i heard at the meeting tonight um one in regards to the busing um really glad that we figured out what went wrong and we're able to move forward um to correct it and then move forward so it doesn't happen again however i think something was missed here and that was the communication to the parents in regards to what happened with busing or that the lack of communication

158i don't have a kid in the school i don't work for the district i'm just a taxpayer and i knew very early on that there was an issue so the fact that parents weren't provided with information even though you might not have been able to pinpoint what it was there was parents that went without responses for days unanswered emails being hung up on um those kind of things are unacceptable and we shouldn't be doing that to our parents they were already going through enough with trying to figure out how to get their kids to and from school to have that added stress um the second thing i want to address that was also talked about tonight at the meeting um was the or is the um sorry i lost my train of thought is the

159um oh i'm sorry i totally forgot what i wanted to talk about now that a lot has happened tonight um oh now i remember was the five-year projection um i'm glad we finally got one um but for the love of squirrels why was that not presented prior to our budget i mean honestly that would have been really good information for this board to have prior to the budget to make a decision in regards to the web where they wanted to go why wasn't it presented before the budget i can't figure it out i i don't know but i would like to know why that information was not provided to the board prior to the budget thank you mr amy red is on got it okay it's different than the one we had up at the

160ed center thanks john amy um new hanover township um just couple questions um want to echo the call for transparency this fee schedule i'm sure that a lot of the organizations understand that schools have costs and we would have probably been all happy to work with you to discuss good and proper fee structures it felt like something that was just thrown at us as opposed to something where you actually could have reached out and involved and potentially evolved some of the some of your partners in helping you raise money for your curricular and non-curricular programs here at the school would have been would have appreciated a little bit more transparency with that i want to echo the same thing with regards to transparency glad to see the five-year projection wish they would have seen it

161from the budget um you know i'm going to ask this when it gets presented to the public i'd love to see all the assumptions and if i don't see the assumptions listed there in the level of detail that i think you would be able to provide well you know what i'm going to do so i'm going to ask for it via right to no request so i'm hoping that you'll be proactive save yourself the expense and the time and for the sake of transparency community when you put those types of projections out you put the details and assumptions that went into it and also again some concept of how you expect these five-year projections will impact educational offerings at boyertown and like i said if you don't do it you know i'm gonna ask for

162it so save yourself some time um last thing i have heard some rumors that and i'd like a little bit of clarity on this and like i can have an email from mrs torcher or somebody offline because i've checked the policies on this and i'm not understanding seems to be in a new policy in place that when there's fundraisers that are being offered by either in school programs or um potentially sponsored by partner programs like art like the one that i represent the music league you're starting to ask for forms to be filled out to get approval by the board by the building super or building principle before those fundraisers are allowed to go and also some opportunities like amazon wishlits are being refused because they weren't approved beforehand all i see in the policy

163where you have to ask the board principal for any type of approval is if they're actually utilizing the students to fundraise and that's a protection for the students so they don't feel like as part of a captive audience they might feel pressured to fundraise when they don't want to like a little clarity on that um we're trying to raise money to help the schools i'm happy to fill out any forms and make sure we're abiding by any policies that we um could do but to me it just feels like another roadblock that's being put in and i'm not quite clear as why that's happening so i'm happy to take that offline in an email from somebody if they could explain why that's going on thank you jessica hartson hello my name is jessica hartenstein and

164i live in boyertown i am the president and a board member for the pto of borton elementary school for the past four years i have been active in the board since my daughter has stepped in the elementary school in kindergarten and she's down in fifth grade this organization is a volunteer run organization the very idea that we should have to pay any money for the use of the facilities is ridiculous and frankly it's a slap in the face every single penny that we raise throughout our school year goes directly back to boyertown elementary every single penny if you charge fees you are stealing money from our students faculty and school community the elementary schools need the funds for themselves we don't want to refuse any needs that are requested if these fees are assessed that

165will happen just one example last year we fundraise for brand new slides slides that cost 14 000 last year sorry i lost my spot not including the decks that needed to be addressed these slides should have been paid for by the district we are happy to do it because we knew there was a slim chance the district would supply the funds the building is full of needs the library carpet hasn't been changed since the school was built some 50 years ago the courtyards need to be refreshed and we just redid the teachers lounge which was in dire need and i cannot express to you how much that meant to those teachers and how much it filled support and they build morale there are needs in that building that i see day in and day out

166as i walk through those halls and i work in that school so i see it and it makes me even more passionate while our elementary schools have needs the high school looks gorgeous i graduated from buoyant town and when i go into that school it is unrecognizable in most areas where are the funds for the elementary schools why does the high school get funds while our school is left to raise money for slides and other needs i am constantly told by our school and our parents that things have not changed since they left the school some 20 years ago or more it's exactly the same they say to me repeatedly doesn't that speak volumes we aren't asked for brand new gyms snack bars halls etc we are asking for use of a building at the

167last board meeting we are stated that there were costs to cover these fees what cost the pto says pays for every single item that we use for events if we don't pay for it it's donated by the families at bes we clean up after each event our events never use any kind of electricity other than lights maybe a microphone that's about it the custodians are working anyway when we have our events 99 of the time we don't even use them half the time other than to get us tables and take out some trash bags there's even a parking lot and an hvac fee these are the events these events are needed for socialization for our students and families especially after the limitations of the last two and a half years due to covet it seems

168to me these fees are being used to raise funds for the district instead of covering incurred costs we are part of the district and we support this school charging the pto for any school use is ludicrous also we do have gates of bes so there is a way to lock it off and if you think we're going to be able to monitor that's it [Applause] if you weren't finished continue i didn't see the time on the back there's no way that we can monitor all of our students our families coming into that building and leaving that door open is honestly the only way we'll be able to do that not only for the fact as i noticed you said about the bell schnickel i don't understand how you think that's going to happen when we

169have very very low support as it is it's literally me three other board members and maybe one or two other parents that help with this board so please take that into consideration if these fees are assessed our support will go even lower thank you for your time barb you're up hello barb fuhrman new hanover township hello i am a proud public educator and my heart has been heavy for the last two plus years we are the land of the free in the home of the brave and on this 21st anniversary of 9 11 i reflect on the patriotism and bravery throughout this country love of country and first amendment rights what does that look like today here in boyertown it looks like thousands of people voting to preserve parental rights it looks like parents standing

170up for their right to attend and participate in public discourse as taxpayers and citizens and not be demonized for the greater part of a year parents and taxpayers have been discouraged from participation because the meeting location was limited by space certainly tonight's venue is much appreciated however rules regarding participation have been conspicuously driven by a policy of silencing whether implicit or complicit our expectation was that our elected officials would be guided by we the people not federal and state bureaucracy and at the very least that our voices would be encouraged as parents and citizens encouraging public participation is integral to our community's success as an educator i know that children learn best in an atmosphere where their teachers and staff fearlessly lead and empower them to think critically since 2020 children's health and safety has

171taken a back seat to mandates with the carrot and stick of federal money don't be deceived mandates are not laws masking children has yet to be debated and assessed as to benefits and risks test scores and learning development have been greatly negatively impacted by the local response to kovid and with the portrait of a graduate being proposed crt equals diversity equity inclusion dei equals social emotional learning i am bringing this to your attention as board members so that you will do the research for yourselves thank you all right that brings us to board comments uh debbie stapleton i still live in colebrookdale township two board members raised and i know the rules i'm not allowed to point them out so raise two questions that from applying to the school district i can answer your question

172maybe when i decide that i want to rent the border town senior high i go online go on to school dude messenger and i submit my application to the business department it then filters its way through the business department and it's either approved or denied from there the business department forwards it to the school where i want to rent which is the senior high and it goes to the principal when it hits the principal's desk it is up to the principal to approve the use of their facility for what i want to do with it every time it is advanced to the next person i receive an email so that i know that it has been activated and where the situation sits at all times so that's how you rent a facility when i run

173it and when i'm done i receive an invoice in the mail with everything that's itemized telling me how much i owe i do a dress rehearsal one night and i do a recital presentation the next day my dress rehearsal was on a friday from five o'clock until about nine o'clock there was a custodian that was scheduled to be on there and i was not charged for the custodian to work my event my recital was the next day in the afternoon from roughly two to five thirty there was not a custodian scheduled they put up a sign up sheet in the custodian department and someone will sign up to work that event because that is over time i am charged a higher rate at which my custodian fees come in at and i should be because

174that is the day that i want to do it i want to do it on a saturday those are all options that were always spelled out for me and i knew going into it what i was going to pay so that's how you get a little bit more approval that you don't have to have an office submit it for the board directors to approve ever board of directors to approve everything and that's how you know when you're paying over time and when you're paying regular time or when you're not paying okay i hope it's helped somebody enlighten a little bit i would help anyone if you ever have any questions you can find my number you can find it i'll help you i'm here thank you okay we want to move on to board comments

175terms nightman sure i'm getting used to going first um several items here i'm still looking and would love to have that presentation i know it's not a comprehensive annual report but that's what i'm still calling it the auditors will be coming to one or will be presenting at one of the october meetings they are also beginning their year-end 2022 audit in october okay well i still like to have that presentation because i think that's part of what we pay him for okay um i'd like to have a curriculum meeting scheduled i'm still looking for that i think there's i think everybody's been looking for that another request i'm going to do is i would love to request for this board all nine members of us to go through boyertown elementary school because this is not

176the first time i've heard there's issues there i've heard it several times before i've said it before that there's a lot there that needs to be done before something happens to that school so i'm asking now and maybe i need a second and we need to vote on it but i'm asking to have this board go into that building and do a thorough look at it and then i'm gonna ask for one more item i'm looking for copies of our legal fees for the last six months i would like to have uh the board get that information i'd like to get that information and other than that um 911 and we have a lot to be thankful for for this country um i do thank the ptos for for all that they do for our

177students and i guess that's it thank you mr up to go mrs hogan yes thank you mr hemingway first i wanted to thank mrs petrie and the students who came out they're really awesome i was it's really really really great to be back in a school building and i know it's late but it's great to get to see the kids and it just makes me happy so thank you um and then i want it oh so if is there a process to see the legal fees how does that work if someone wanted to see them is there like a i don't know i haven't been asked for the legal fee so it would you know certainly be something that you would be privileged to so it's a matter of working with miss denicola in her

178office and gathering them all inclusive legal fees would not just be our solicitor's office so it would be for everything that we're doing that excuse me so they're extensive they they would also cover special education costs they would cover um anything that's being done with with reference to right to know requests it would also be anything personnel related so we'd have to you know dissect what it is and and be able to just get a bottom you know line number how long do you think that would take i'm not sure yeah we would have to look wow what's up are we done that conversation or i'm not sure okay no it's okay i just wasn't sure if we were done um thank you yeah so and then i just wanted to take a moment and

179recognize um you know the passing of 9 11. it's a somber um memory every year and i and i always like to take a moment to just remember and thank all those who serve first responders military um it's just a reminder of how much some people are willing to give so i appreciate it thank you that's all scott yes thank you um i do appreciate the venue tonight it was nice being here seeing the kids in their element and and really what they presented tonight was very good as well it was it was very well thought out um i'm also appreciative to the parents that came out tonight and gave their input especially for the facilities because i appreciated uh hearing all the comments and getting to know um what you're met with and what

180you know you you need um also i am i did a committee meeting uh maybe it was about a month ago i did talk about having committees again and i do have some thoughts on that i don't want to take time here but mr brophy i would like to get together with you and just give you my thoughts on it i know that none of us want to spend every night or even three nights or two nights because we have a life and we have other things we're involved with with committees so i had some ideas but i would like to see a curriculum committee meeting um scheduled though however as well if we could do that so thank you the only thing with curriculum committees they would still no matter which way they go

181they have to be public meetings part of these meetings we can't have a special uh non-public meeting on the curriculum issues so it gets a little bit harder to set that up and they have to i would have to defer to to both mr paneral as to how that would go i understand that and i was i have a thought on that i i realize that has to be public it should be public so i don't have a problem with that mr off because of the hour i'm gonna let my comments go tonight thank you i just want to say tonight was worthwhile i know it's late for everybody but we got a lot of good information and working across you know with everybody it was great and i think everything was well presented and

182i appreciate this first neighbors coming out tonight and tell us you know giving us some more thought um i also want to say you know pray to god for 9 11. um i do know a couple people that lost their lives there and luckily my wife's train was canceled or was running late or she might have been one of them too so um again we had a good time i thank the administration and all their knowledge i have no comment but mr brophy will save you for last yeah what what we're moving to tonight which is what we did is making these meetings more a more working meeting so what you'll see is they won't be jam-packed with a bunch of different subjects because when you do that you don't get anything done so they'll

183be there'll be limited topics but that'll allow for more discussion on those limited topics so you know you won't see the jam-packed you know jam-packed uh committee of the whole meeting agendas that you've seen in the past okay upcoming meeting dates our next school board meeting uh will be at seven o'clock one september 27th that will be at the ed center october 11th the committee of the whole meeting at seven o'clock will be at colebrookdale elementary school and october 25th will be the school board meeting again at back at the ed center okay thank you gilbertsville elementary school mrs patrick thank you uh with that i'm looking for a motion meeting to adjourn to adjourn i have a first for mr panarello second from mr zawada meeting a german [Music] [Applause] [Music] you