001so we will start off with right away high school is ethan or his representative here [Music] excuse me we're having a hard time hearing on the zoom just turn on those speakers good evening i am the current treasurer in the past few weeks we've had a successful repeat and sold 361 tickets for an outside from 7 to 10 years although it was raised for a bit it was a lot of fun beside john hosted the joe o'neil invitational this past weekend at bellevue state park and had over 40 teams enter we saw a lot of great racing the field hockey team has been working hard this year and currently has one loss they are looking towards the playoffs again we are also looking forward to our fall ms scott can you hear me yes we
002can hear it okay are we on record now is there are we having technical difficulties with the starting and stopping of the recording piece uh we are on record and have we disabled the zoom chat or comments yes okay thank you that'll move us to concord high school maya reeves and alicia garcia hi my name is maya reeves and i'm the student body president for concord high school hi i'm alicia garcia i'm the vice president these last years have been a lot to take in and coven 19 changes the game for everyone and has made an impact on us and our fellow classmates on the first day back it was great to see all of our peers teachers and principal mr mayor he made sure we all felt comfortable with coming back and helped prepare
003us for what the expectations for this year are going to look like with maintaining good grades and focusing on our goals for the year and the future so far so good as just as we just had our first homecoming in a while with the pep rally and the dance being a success at the pep rally we had our sports team captains talk about how they were doing this year relays wrapping teachers with toilet paper and even got to pie teachers including mr mayor during the dance we had food trucks man bounces and a dj that made sure everyone kept dancing and having a good time even though we lost our homecoming game our football players plan to come back stronger than ever even with all the sports and activities that happen we have all managed
004to put everyone's safety first by making sure every student is wearing their mask properly in the classroom and during our events our teachers and administrators have also been supportive in our transition period of finding the normal with attending in-person school again they have tried to maintain distance between us to make sure nobody is too close to another and that all masks are over the nose and mask's mouth at all times and make sure no one's home sick another one of our main goals this year is to add more support around mental health the pandemic has brought a lot of issues and affected many students globally and we want to make sure that everyone feels like they have a safe space within the school sometimes this year we even plan to establish a support group that
005is for anyone and everyone who can just talk about what they need to talk about with others that could understand what they're going through we are also planning some fundraisers for clubs in our schools and even for the senior prom a couple ideas are being thrown around right now like a winter ball but nothing is concrete yet we are hoping to get enough money to have a good prom this year that everyone will enjoy for years to come we were able to make money from the homecoming but we will need to make more over these months starting from the first day our counselors and teachers have helped us and guided our seniors with applying for schools scholarships and getting recommendation letters we even have students who've already gotten acceptance letters our counselors have also helped
006us by letting us set up meetings where we can get what we need to to achieve graduating this year and attending the college we desire to go to they have been very helpful during this stage in our lives where we are about to become adults for our lower classmen they are still winning the ropes but many are already setting settling in we were able to give some of them their first prep rally and dance so as the year goes by we are hoping to provide them with other fun events and activities along with the other upperclassmen everyone is excited for what this year will bring and we hope to accomplish many things before the end of the school year are there any questions from the board no questions thank you for that thorough report next
007up we have mount pleasant high school catherine farabaugh and lily holmes good evening my name is catherine farabaugh and this is lilly holmes we are the current mount pleasant high school president and vice president of our student council we're excited to inform the brandywine school district community about the exciting start of the school year at mount the students at mount were filled with excitement as they entered the back into the building in late august the senior class was welcomed back to the building with a red carpet lined with all mounts faculty staff faculty and staff with a celebrity celebratory senior breakfast it was clear that both the students and the faculty felt right back home even with the new safety protocols mounts present students have been diligent with following the cobit guidelines such as proper
008mask wearing and procedures such as social distancing the students have also been enjoying added benefits of these new guidelines such as the outdoor mask breaks during our classes not only do mass breaks provide its primary focus of letting students remove their masks for a short period of time outside but it also provides a quick mental health break spending even five minutes outdoors has been immensely helpful in using stress and anxiety in our student body as we get used to this new normal a few weeks ago mount pleasant had their first homecoming carnival the carnival was so popular it sold out of tickets the week prior to the carnival the homecoming the week prior to the carnival and homecoming football game mount pleasant had a successful spirit week spirit week was especially exciting for the underclassmen
009who experienced this fun tradition for the first time the homecoming carnival the homecoming carnival while different from a traditional homecoming dance created a more inclusive and coveted safe event for all students to celebrate mount and its special community the carnival featured five different inflatables ranging from a ninja warrior course to axe throwing along with food trucks a dance floor a dj and a photo booth the community at mount would like to thank the school board for the continued efforts of keeping us safe and learning in person any questions from the board thank you for the report i do have one comment i know in years past there was a joint student council has that been resurrected or continued or does i guess anyone from the three high schools know if that's still ongoing so last
010year the joint student council did meet over zoom um with mr bradley and we were trying to form a kind of conference type workshop to also focus on mental health as last year was immensely hard for all of us um but we have not heard anything from mr bradley who was the leader last year about starting that up again okay yeah i would like to ask that the you know all the student representatives from the three high schools um work with each other try to resurrect that i'd like to see some communication through the three high schools just on you know some of the activities and initiatives that you're doing as well as you know i know with homecoming this past month um you know certain milestone events i think for all of our high
011school students you know we want to try to give everyone the same opportunity and just having some communications there um to make sure that you know everybody's doing similar things but still you know providing your opportunity to kind of make it unique for your school and put your own mark on it so um hopefully next month uh we can get an update on uh join student council as well all right let's just scroll down if i can just chime in to a comment you made earlier for those of you who are not familiar with brandywine school district board meetings it's been a traditional practice that we have students from the high school come and do a report to open each meeting i can honestly say that it's one of my favorite parts of the board
012meeting when you hear the extent to which our students serve each other serve their school and serve their community during the course of the year i've often commented i feel embarrassed about what i did in high school so i'm thrilled to have our student reporters back and sharing the the life of a student within the brandywine school district so thank you for coming out tonight and as always you are welcome to stay but we know that your time is precious and if you have assignments or other events to tend to you can certainly excuse yourself and we understand so next up we have our director of human resources ms delithia mcintyre to recognize our educational support professional of the year good evening distinguished members of the board superintendent holler all of the awesome yes and
013the audience this evening as well as all participants via zoom i am deleting a mcintyre the director of human resources and i am elated to stand before you all this evening so that we may acknowledge and celebrate our education support professional of the district for 2022. i would like to invite miss angela hamilton and her principal mr mark mayer to join me in the past just to set some context we typically had a very big celebration where all of our brandywine teachers of the year and uh we were hoping our educators support professionals of the year would be honored and then covet hit so we had to kind of change the format so now for this year what we've decided to do is acknowledge our district winners this evening and that subsequent meetings for the
014board we will acknowledge all of the other building winners for the education support professional as well as uh for the teacher of the year tonight angela we are so proud of you that you won for our district out of 117 paris you have lots of support and kudos to you we have a couple of gifts for you and then we're going to let mr mayer give some remarks about some of your contributions so there's a nice two gifts for you actually one for being your building winner and one for being our district winner and we are so very proud of you thank you so much thank you mr mayor um thank you board for all of your efforts and certainly appreciate your partnership uh with us at the school level i would certainly like to
015thank miss hamilton who i find to be one of the most unconditional persons that i've ever met she gives of her time of her heart to our one of our most neediest kids that we serve in our emotional support program she has the patience like no other and i've had opportunities to work with her and see her at work and she really truly is a fantastic uh person i would like to if it would be okay just to have one of her teachers who has worked with her for the past seven years speak to her for a moment and i'd like to ask mrs krakelas to come up please um it's my honor to speak for angie hamilton um i'll tell you just a little bit a quick story about angie and mr mayer's right
016she teaches a very challenging population but she goes in every day and as she says to plant seeds and that's exactly what she does she finds a growing opportunity in every student at any moment and make sure she plants the seeds and she covers it with love and care and compassion and that's the reason why our program has been so wonderful and we've been able to grow so many students we have students that are living have traveled to colorado who at one point wouldn't even come to school we'd have students that have a cna that one at one point didn't feel comfortable sitting in a classroom so all of these are because miss hamilton has been there planning these seeds with these students every day day in day out unconditionally so miss hamilton's planted season
017everyone including me and i'm so proud that she's here and i'm just grateful also that she's my friend so love you [Music] congratulations miss hamilton thank you for being a part of our district and i know you know times like this it's great that we can recognize everyone and i know education is certainly not something that somebody gets into for lots of recognition and rewards but to be nominated by your school and then nominated by your district um as the professional of the year for our district we're so grateful and happy for you thank you thank you thank you [Applause] i will bring back ms mcintyre to recognize our district teacher of the year and maybe an additional recognition yes we have an additional surprise okay so next we're going to acknowledge our brandywine school
018district teacher of the year she was the building winner for her awesome school as well as our district winner and i am going to invite ms bonnie your cannon who helped to facilitate that process with the teacher of the year and that committee to come and present ms joshua tabron with her district award as well as um it looks like mr hakima wicker has her building award followed by some reflections from mr roth and then i'll come back one more time with a special acknowledgement so mr ron please join us here mr roth you can come on [Applause] much thank down i think i'm going to start by handing these over to you uh just to to pass on the gratitude of of 87 staff members frankly good evening members of the board fellow educators
019members of the community and our honored guests my name is keith roth i'm the proud principal of brandywine high school and tonight it is my distinct pleasure to recognize excellence among us [Applause] many times we get so busy with a day-to-day that we don't always see and recognize the excellence that is around us at brandywine high school we are lucky enough to have 87 dedicated instructional staff members who do great things working with students every day many of them are here tonight but tonight we recognize one that has been chosen by her peers as the best among us following that her accomplishments have been reviewed by an independent group of people at the district level and she again rose to the top and stands out as the best in the district after that her accomplishments
020were reviewed by an independent group of people at the state level and once again she rose to the top excellence is the only word that i can think of to describe what she does every day with students every moment of every day every moment she's with students every moment she's interacting with fellow staff members colleagues excellence is the only way it can be described the passion that comes through in every interaction is evident and because there can never be enough applause it is my pleasure to recognize the excellence that we see here in education please join me in celebrating the 2022 brandywine high school brandywine school district and delaware state teacher of the year ms joshua tabron i just want to say thank you to everyone i'm happy to represent for my school for my
021district and for my state and i want to say thank you to everybody who came out tonight to support me brandywine high school i love you guys past present and anybody who has children future education is where it is thank you so much [Applause] thank you and so president scrobot as you alluded to we have our final celebration of ms tabron for this evening in that she is the state of delaware teacher of the year for 2022 again i'd like to just provide a little context for you and in a moment we're going to just show you a clip of that a few clips of that celebration which happened last monday evening miss tabron started out amongst her peers 956 teachers in the brandywine school district and she excelled in that category among her peers
022then as mr ross said she went on to the state level where there are more than 10 000 teachers in the state of delaware 20 out of 10 more than 10 000 were selected to represent their districts and charter schools in this competition i am deliriously excited to tell you that miss tehran out of more than 10 000 individuals who we know work hard who we know surpassed and shined in a pandemic who we know still reached out to children when people just thought we couldn't get the job done she along with her colleagues along with the other applicants really rose to the top but she excelled them all and made brandywine so proud so i would like to share this clip and then one final comment and then we'll let you sit down how
023about that okay let's see if we can get our technology to work this was when you first were made aware very proud okay now i'm gonna let you sit down and i'm gonna say just a one or two more flowery things about you because you totally deserved it um as dr bunting our state secretary of bed as well as our honorable governor john carney and their many accolades to you reported last week your process along with the other 19 applicants consisted of observers coming in to watch you do what you do so well with students they had readers that had to read in-depth reports and submissions and resumes and letters of recommendation as well as educational philosophies they had judges that were tasked with trying to determine from all of those artifacts and all of
024that observation who should represent delaware because they need to now go on to the national competition and at that state level as i said there were more than 10 000 teachers some highlights that miss tabron shared when she did her very very moving speech included we believe in children and we believe in education as a special education teacher i have witnessed the power of inclusive classrooms inclusion erases educational barriers embraces diversity develops resilience in students and fosters students perseverance and then she spoke to her teachers and her colleagues both at brandywine high school and the brandywine school district in the state of delaware and she said teachers our ability to persevere and succeed is dependent on the communities we build we cannot and we should not attempt to ever do this work alone our greatest
025resource is one another i learned that you will be offered a fully funded doctoral program at one of two of our universities or colleges in delaware [Applause] and finally i learned that you will be having or were invited to have lunch with senator carper and he said and i quote it's on me so i just want you to know if you want to take your hr director please feel free to do that we have one more award for you another trophy thank you for being our state teacher of the year and making us so proud we wish you well in the next leg of the competition [Applause] thank you mrs robot thank you and congratulations miss tabron um i just wanted to add you know i remember last spring coming to your classroom to give
026you the news and how excited you were and you know every year when we have the opportunity as a board as a district to go down to dover for the ceremony i always flip through the brochure and i look at all the past winners and how many past winners have come out of the brandywine school district so when i came to your class last spring i knew we had a pretty good chance and then as i was watching the video as it was streamed this year and listening to all the videos and watching your video i knew we had a really good chance so to see you win to see you be there to celebrate it with your friend miss pinkston the former winner that was pretty awesome and it just shows how grateful i
027am that we have such great educators in our district you know to to win these awards because it's just it gives the recognition to all the hard work that goes in day in and day out and all the nominees and all the teachers in our district we could have you know we could nominate every teacher uh every year um but it comes down to one and this year it's you and you're so very deserving and we're thankful and with that we will introduce uh principal mount pleasant high school curry calderon lacy and ib program counselor leslie carlson okay guys okay all right good evening mr holler mr skrobot and members of the board staff members and community members that are present here this evening my name is mrs carey calderon lacy the building principal of
028mount pleasant high school and with me this evening i have the two nyp and diploma coordinators for the ib program this presentation is here to demonstrate the work of the international baccalaureate programs in the brand wine school district and the work that we do amongst our students and teachers see that didn't quite move i apologize okay so ib world schools offers a global education offers a global education that aims to develop inquiring knowledgeable and caring young people who help create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect there are six key components um pedagogical principles that the iab program follows and these are the principles that are taught to the students in the middle years and diploma program they're based on learning inquiry focused on conceptual understanding students have to develop local
029and global context and they focus on effective teamwork and collaboration throughout their classrooms we work on differentiation and making sure that we meet the needs of all learners and that we assess the work through formative and summative assessments in alignment with the international baccalaureate organization within these principles iv educators are to assure that the students are engaged and encouraged in critical thinking and to solve complex problems they are challenged to think about the development of global issues that may impact our own society and as a result they become increasingly aware of their impact on the global society having an ib world school education opens the doors for students to be accepted to some of the highest ranking schools around the world and as well as locally good evening my name is jean beadle and i
030am the nyp coordinator at tally middle school and mount pleasant high school within these all the ib world schools are based on learner profile traits that are age appropriate for the program the middle years of diploma programs follow the iv characteristics of the learner profile each trait focuses on the soft skills that are necessary for success brandywine school offers schools offer diverse and extensive options in educational programming that meet the needs of all students research has proven that middle years program students outperform their non-ib peers in mathematics reading narrative writing and expository writing students who participate in the diploma program during high school are more academically adjusted to the rigor and the expectations of college as the middle years program coordinator i oversee the coordination of the program at mount pleasant high school and also
031at talley middle school in addition i'm a school counselor for the nyp students in grades nine and ten the middle years program centers around grades six to ten with a framework of academic challenge students take part in eight subject groups with service hours and their personal project in their culminating year which would be their sophomore year for families who are interested in the program at talley applications are accepted from fifth grade students and families the program focuses on the incorporation of our national standards for the courses offered along with the approaches to teaching and learning of the ib world schools for families interested in the program at mount pleasant high school applications are accepted from 8th grade student families the program focuses on the same approaches to teaching and learning that you'll find in the
032diploma program students also must participate in service hours for both 9th and 10th grade with a culminating personal project that focuses on developing independent research skills around the topic that the students are passionate about ib students are responsible for the creation of several in school organizations including our black student union volunteers our meditation and wellness groups and a local chapter of the jsa good evening i'm leslie carlson and as the ib diploma program coordinator and counselor i am responsible for the 11th and 12th grade students in the program this includes academic and college planning and ensuring they all meet the requirements for the ib diploma program as one of 5 000 ib world schools the ibo monitors the international standards applied equally through rigorous international assessments students enrolled in the diploma program take six to
033seven courses in grades 11 and 12 that are aligned to national standards but also must follow the standardization of the ibo course requirements if you reference the screen you will see the list of required courses in addition to the required courses full diplo full diploma program candidates looking to earn their international diploma must also enroll in the extended essay which is a topic of their choice theory of knowledge which challenges them to assess ways of thinking and to complete their creativity activity and service requirements over 18 months the diploma is awarded to students with a score range of 45 to 24 points and all ibs assessments are scored by internationally trained scorers the brandywine school district is the first public school district in the state of delaware to offer an ib world school education to
034the members of its community establishing the ib at mount pleasant high school in 2004 and talley middle school in 2005 the program started with 23 students and today has graduated 957 students our enrollment is diverse and representative of our student population it mirrors exactly who is enrolled at mount pleasant high school and represents diverse community our students receive acceptance to multiple schools prior to achieving their actual ib diploma colleges and universities accept our students based on the challenging and rigorous coursework that students have embarked upon prior to their graduation the majority of our students are accepted to the university of delaware however many of our students have accomplished some very successful highlights by being accepted to some of the top universities throughout the country and also internationally annually our students average over four 4.5 million
035dollars at the end of every year on scholarship and grants that are awarded to them again based on their candidacy for their ib diploma our students do not receive their international diploma until august post their graduation year so all of the merits that they earn are based on their current transcript and the credits that they carry in the courses that they take in ib diploma candidacy the benefits of an eye sorry the benefits of an ib education in the brandywine school district are that we offer a diverse public education with the international standards of an ib world school students graduate prepared for success in post-secondary education and life for families who are interested in applying for the 6th and 8th grade programs you can log on to schoolchoicede.org window open will open on november 1st
036and is open until january 12th and we thank you for allowing us to come here this evening to present the information about the international baccalaureate program here in the brandywine school district our contact information is on the screen please feel free to reach out if you have any questions to the board do you have any questions just a quick comment first miss beadle i apologize i missed you on the introduction i didn't have you on the agenda um so thank you uh and second thank you for all that you do to you know support this program and make it what it is the ib program has definitely you know become one of many of the shining star programs within our district and i think we're very fortunate to have it as an opportunity for our
037students and i think you guys are doing a great job with it thank you thank you and next we will hear from superintendent holler with some general news and updates miss tabron leave oh miss tabron is miss tape rod still here before you hit the parking lot while miss tabron is coming back i do want to comment on the ib presentation i first became acquainted with the international baccalaureate program about 20 years ago i went to several conferences about it was thoroughly impressed probably 15 years ago i got a phone call from my nephew and he said uncle link i just had my interview at harvard now he's my nephew on my wife's side not my side and the first question they asked him was do you have an ib diploma and he called me
038in a panic he knew that i had spoken about ib and said what am i missing um it's that prestigious so kudos to uh miss calderon lacy and her entire staff and the program that they have built over the past 24 years it is outstanding and gives our our students an opportunity uh to really excel mrs taylor thank you for coming back so ms stock was not able to be here tonight but she did send a message and i should have tacked it on earlier as i was speaking but um we're in a very unique position that i don't think it any district has had a sitting board member who was the previous teacher of the year be in the same school district as the next winner so i think that's pretty exciting but she
039wanted to send a message along that she says i apologize for missing this board meeting tonight i want to extend a huge congratulations to our brandywine school district and 2022 delaware teacher of the year joshua tabron i want to give her a vote of confidence and welcome her to the delaware teacher of the year family congratulations to all our building winners and for achieving this award during an incredibly difficult school year so that is from ms stock and i'm sure that you will be talking to her plenty in the weeks and months to come thank you there's more to come so uh miss tabron uh you've already been celebrated recognized and uh we're going to do that several times a little bit at the beginning of my presentation and at the end that's that kind
040of you got to stick around for the whole kitten caboodle but josh we've already formally celebrated and recognized you as the 2022 state teacher of the year and it is especially powerful to those who know you work with you because in a way uh wait you you brought the district such positive attention and that night we were all tuned in and anxiously anticipated the announcement of who the st state teacher of the year would be when it was made there was a shriek a loud shriek to the point where you know district office is very close to troop one troop once sent a car over that shriek was the screams of deletion mcintyre in her office on the other side of district office coming to me and she ran down and we were just screaming
041in my office so uh on behalf of all of us who won that night thank you and uh when it comes to teachers of the year yes brandywine school district has an amazing tradition so in addition to get that out of the way miss tabron we're also going to take credit for kim stock being teacher of the year forget red clay she spends quite a bit of time in brandywine as a brandywine resident and she is on our board of education so we're going to add her to the mix kim couldn't be here tonight guess where she is where you will be a year from now down in dc with all the other state teachers of the year celebrating that accomplishment so uh that's why kim is out tonight but uh here in spirit obviously
042but when we look in the past uh the number of state teachers of the year that claim brandywine is home is just staggering i'm pretty sure that we have the most state teacher of the year award recipients of course wendy turner still an active teacher at mount pleasant elementary and serves on the state board of education as teacher of the year representative and i'd be remiss if we didn't mention mary pinstead who is still a teacher here at brandywine high so name another high school probably in the nation that has two current teachers that are both can lay claim to being named state teacher of the year kudos to brandywine high school courtney fox mount pleasant elementary tanya tonya marsenkevich harlan elementary and p.s dupont middle school ronnie cohen who i believe was at clemont
043elementary school lynn newsom science teacher at concord high school fran o'malley social studies i believe a tally and last but not least miss doris stevenson who when i came to the district was in the role of human resources director for the district what an amazing accomplishment and to add your name to the list is all that sweeter so congratulations again on an outstanding accomplishment and making all of brandywine proud to be bsd good news for brandywine doesn't stop there we have yet another accomplishment to celebrate those of you new to the district may not be aware the dr mark holidick the governor's nominee for secretary of education was a student in this very district taught in this district was principal at concord high school and of course long time superintendent of the brandywine school district
044mark's nomination was not a surprise to those who knew him and worked with him for a long time we've all predicted that he would at some point in his career come back in one of two positions either state secretary of education or governor of the state of delaware well one down one to go mark also like to celebrate a new staff member to our ranks dr lisa pruder was hired this summer by the district as our social studies coordinator a few weeks ago i received an email from the ceo of the national history day project praising dr pruder for the work that she submitted to the national library of congress there was a position open or a consortium being formed 65 master social studies teachers from across the united states applied the team consisting of
045people from the national history day project and the national library congress whittled that 65 down into 10 people dr pruder was one of them and to get such a glowing email of praise for the work that she has accomplished uh over the past year and a half speaks to the the level of professionals that we have and continue to draw to the brandywine school district so again on behalf of the brandywine school district thank you dr pruder for already putting a little extra shine in brandywine last week we had about 600 of our high school students juniors and seniors who took the psat establishing and maintaining an environment conducive to administrating such an important test while the remaining students in the building carry on with their normal classes is an incredible feat in any given
046year to do so while adhering to social distancing guidelines increased that challenge even more so this year special thanks to all the staff members at our three high schools for their flexibility and support in making the test sessions as successful as they were but especially to the following our test coordinators lisa street kyle gaffney greg mitchell brian hines and rachel herscowitz administrators wally waite ella burton keith roth mark mayer curie calderon lacy ken hutchins and our director of secondary education dr yolanda mckinney high schools weren't the only ones that were hard at work the staff at claymont elementary were not just teaching students reading writing and arithmetic they were running a chocolate factory at the same time charlie assistant principal chris romano and several oompa loompas fourth grade teachers dressed the part to have a
047little fun while inspiring their students as they wrote essays to compare and contrast the book to the movie it's great to see our students back in school and having fun try a video that audio may or may not come on but even if it doesn't that's not the intent of the video take a look at the kids faces in this video especially the smiles and that says everything we need to hear from this video uh kids are thrilled to be back at school and this is a little clip from carcroft the kids just having fun at recess and some after school activities in intramural sports well that's not it i'm not gonna have the audio crisis says it all we think of school we often think all the value around academics not taking anything away
048from that but sometimes we don't pay enough attention to the value of that social and emotional development of children to be around their peers having fun smiling laughing things that we took for granted pre-code and now have just a little bit more of an appreciation for and to see kids having fun back at school again priceless speaking of covid good segue this is a slide that i showed at the last board meeting it's actually delaware maryland new jersey pennsylvania and you can see the date on it is september 20th and this was that spike this is delaware it was that spike that had me just a little nervous uh i mentioned before that we meticulously track cover data on a weekly basis to make sure that we are keeping our finger on the pulse of
049exactly what's happening in our district in individual zip codes in schools in the state and in the region here's that same snapshot a month later this was taken yesterday and you can see that downward trend exactly what we wanted to see we also showed you one back in september that had west virginia for a comparison and we can see west virginia has dropped dramatically as well we also showed you south carolina just to get kind of a regional view of what was going on and their drop is really substantial but again i bring this to your attention that that drop we see in delaware is is vitally important found this it breaks it down in more of a health and human services region delaware is in region three and you can see the states here
050that make up region three and that is a little bit hard to see so i did kind of blow it up and you can see that that zero to four year old is dropping that spike that we saw in that five to 11 year old range is dropping significantly and the 12 to 17 year old range is dropping as well of course the 5 to 11 year old range was i guess the range that made me the most nervous uh since none of those students have had the opportunity to be vaccinated if they so just chose while our 12 to 17 year olds i believe roughly 45 or so of our secondary students grades 7 to 12 have either received the first or both vaccines vaccinations which does come into play uh this kind of
051shows that same group it's region three and shows that steep decline and that data was from october 16th so very positive data uh of course not perfect until it's eradicated but much different than the data i reported sitting here just a month ago i also thought this was a very interesting screenshot so we've mentioned that we take a look at multiple models that forecast the spread of covet johns hopkins applied physics lab john hopkins at the university of north carolina and google all came together and have a different model there's various models and the ensemble or the collection of all of them has been fairly accurate so when we look uh a month ago here was the actual data of where things stood and this was the forecast those models were predicting so let's see
052how accurate they were oh i didn't see that up there i'm sorry that help is that better yep now i can't advance my slide all right so uh here was the forecast and there's the actual so very very close to what the forecast was and now here's if that trend stays the same and that forecast is as accurate here's the forecast for the next three and a half weeks so again uh very hopeful and we have to continue as a community as an organization to continue to take advantage of those mitigation strategies that we have in place the more we do hopefully the faster that will drive that number down so i'm very uh well relieved in one sense that we see it going down but we can't let our foot off the gas or
053take our eye off the prize related to this parents every time that there is a positive case in their child's school we have sent an email with a letter informing them no matter what grade level what area of the building if there was a positive case we send them an email well sometimes there might be three cases or four cases in a building in a day and then none for a couple of days and inboxes are getting flooded so we are following suit with what some other districts have done and we're going to develop a covid dashboard and it's going to be easily located right on our district website there's channels at the top so we put it in the family channel and very first thing in the family channel is covid dashboard let me
054show you what that looks like this is actual screenshot from today's data so our goal is to try to upload every day's data no later than six o'clock so that parents can go on and look to see were there any cases in my son or daughter's school today that way we won't have to send out that uh email letter to you every single day please know though we will remain committed to giving you a personal phone call if your son or daughter was identified as a close contact to the positive individual and again close contact is defined by the department of public health as someone within six feet of a positive individual master unmasked for 15 minutes or more over the course of 24 hours and our nurses as soon as there is a positive
055case they jump on that contact tracing so again if you're not called your child was not considered a closed contact and there's no worry concern around that if they were considered the nurse or an administrator from the building will talk to you personally and point you to resources on our website that explain to you what to do if your child has to be quarantined or isolated because of exposure or coming down with covet so uh trying to streamline things trying to be as transparent still as possible while at the same time not delusion people's inboxes with multiple letters on a given day if if that had to happen did i mention joshua tabron was state teacher of the year what a celebration for our district and when i said that we all celebrate and win
056a little bit take a look at mary pinkston someone who knows what it feels like to be acknowledged to that degree got to love that reaction and then the humbleness because if you know joshua she is a very humble individual our state teacher of the year joshua i know you left but hopefully you'll see the recording we are your greatest fans uh almost i think she has some other fans how thrilled i was to know that her children were there to witness the fruits of her their mother's labor in public service to the children of this community to the school what a testimony what an awesome role model inspiration and family memory that will be treasured forever and uh i thank mr roth for giving up his seat at the event to allow josh's family
057to be there and to see that in person and again joshua tabron all of our teachers of the year our support educators of the year that's what makes us proud to be bsd mr president that's my report for tonight thank you mr holder any comments or questions from the board on the superintendent's report uh just one quick question on the new dashboard is there going to be historical data on there not going back from today but um next week will there be a way to look at this week's data for example uh we we talked about that we didn't really come to a conclusion uh it it wouldn't be difficult to do that we could put a little piece down at the bottom like for the month or something but we did look at some
058models where there are they're tracking every single week so you have to scroll like crazy to find the next day to me i'd rather not have to scroll with like one straight shot see what the week is start fresh the next week but yeah we can add a separate maybe uh page just in that same channel that tracks it cumulatively you have a slide that um that projects a decline how did you determine the decline i couldn't couldn't quite hear the questions there's a slide that has a projection of covet cases that will decrease and so my question is how did you determine the impending decline yeah that's not my doing that is uh i believe on the cdc website um and they have a number of scientific models that have been vetted and uh
059if you take all the models that you can get what they call an ensemble or a collection of all those models and i simply backed up the timeline to see how accurate the ensemble was and you can see that it was pretty accurate and then i looked to say okay what are the next three to four weeks look like and that's where you see that continued pattern it's their best guess but the best guess previously was spot on so i'm hoping their guess going forward is just as accurate i know last year our district district cases and data was performing better than the surrounding community and the state at large is that still the case do we have that are we kind of on par with the surrounding communities uh right now i'd say we're
060more on par we were looking at that carefully but you have to remember last year when we had students back in and they ranged from anywhere from 80 percent in some schools being back in to in other schools so now we have all the students back so it's not really an apple to apple comparison but uh you'll notice we take the look on a weekly basis now in the friday packet and the friday packet is a packet that i send to the board every friday where we take a look at zip code cases and where our zip codes fall compared to surrounding zip codes or high level of spread zip codes in the state of delaware and we are on the lower end of the zip codes in the state of delaware newcastle county historically
061performs better than both kent and sussex their rate of new cases per 100 000 people on a seven day average is consistently higher as is the positivity rate i guess that's because well again our vaccination rates are higher as well and i know watching the video and listening to our high school speakers tonight you know kind of their their experience just shows you how resilient students are um i've never liked the term new normal because i i don't expect this to be uh the normal um as i've had conversations with people over the last you know 12 to 18 months and i may have even made the comments here at our meeting you know i know i've looked at this kind of as a transition it wasn't going to be you know flip a switch
062and make a change we went from you know shutting everything down to a fully remote model then we eased into a hybrid model and we had some summer vacation you know we came back with students in the building full time you know with masks and other mandates and you know as a district i know we have an obligation and a responsibility to continue to follow cdc guidance as well as you know mandates by the state i'm hoping that you know the trending of this data will continue and that will be able to ease some of those restrictions in the future you know as we're able to do so hearing no other comments we will enter public comment um just a reminder for everyone this is your time to be heard regarding topics related to the
063brandywine school district as with the last meeting we have expanded the time frame to 60 minutes but we've changed the speaker time to two minutes each for everyone to express themselves as always we ask that speakers and the audience be courteous and respectful and i do not believe we have anyone on zoom this evening so what i'll do i'll call a name come to either microphone and then i'll call a second name whoever is on deck to get ready and our first speaker will be brent burge on deck will be carol burge good evening so i'm sorry yeah as soon as you start the clock will roll and you'll have a counter on the wall so thank you good evening my name is brent burge our children spent critically formative years in the brady lane
064school district we continue to live in the district and support the schools through our property taxes i am frankly ashamed and discussed by what i have seen this this district become an underperforming progressive indoctrination mill you've heard many complaints and criticisms of crt and the overt focus on racial identity and social justice ideology from this podium in recent months i want to share a glimpse of the information that seems to carry such high priority in this school district i call your attention to the district website and the prominent link on diversity and equity resources for families note the term equity versus equality speaking to controlled outcomes versus opportunities the link leads to several others including anti-racism resources for all ages another tier of nearly 200 links for the unaware and unindoctrinated anti-racism is essentially a
065branded term to describe a specific progressive if not overtly marxist political outlook among those listed are woke baby we rise we resist we raise our voices a is for activist six books to help your kids understand race by ibram x kennedy the author of how to be an anti-racist including the black friend on being a better white person why don't we focus this much attention on the fact that only 28 of our children are proficient in math only 40 are proficient in english language arts barely half of seniors graduate with college or career ready status these are from your website thank you thank you mr burch carol burge with ted janice on deck my name is carl burge and i am a retired pediatric nurse and child and family counselor and i'm going to share
066with you a book that you have on the granny wine school district website the diversity and equity resources for families called not my idea a book about whiteness this book seeks to address racism but in doing so it highlights racial divisiveness classes all individuals by skin color and insinuates all whites are characterized by white supremacy i'm going to read you some excerpts deep down we all know color matters skin color makes a difference in how the world sees you and in how you see the world racism is a white person problem and we're all caught up in it in the united states of america white people have committed outrageous crimes against black people for 400 years white supremacy has been lying to kids for centuries white supremacy is pretend but the consequences are real whiteness
067is a bad deal it always was this book characterizes whiteness as a contract with the devil you get stolen land stolen riches special favors whiteness gets to mess endlessly with the lives of your friends neighbors loved ones and all fellow humans of color and you sign your soul below with there's a picture of a devil the idea that whiteness is the form of stolen land and riches derives from one of crt's founding texts white mrs property authored by cheryl harris in 1993 the author of this book directly adapted crt for elementary schools this book is an example of the indoctrination of our young children that is happening in this school district thank you miss burgs uh ted janus janice with uh rich anderson on deck hi good evening i'm ted janus um i am a
068uh an army officer which is of no real significance to brandywine school district except um we have a practice in the army for any um exercise or battle or anything the army actually does of doing an after action report and the after action report is where you admit as an officer uh the major failings that you uh committed while on that exercise or in that military action and it is incorporated into a report so that you can uh you know hopefully help people in the future not to make your mistakes very hard thing to do um so one thing i was hoping is that now that we have a couple of years with this covid thing behind us there were 13 states who virtually did nothing around the covid around covent mitigation and among those
06913 states there must be hundreds of districts that match ours demographically who have literally done nothing um in this entire pandemic and i'm i would like to see a study i think would be a historical study to see if we compared brandywine school district to one of their districts and see um how much weight our children gained over these last two years what was our rates of depression how many of our children died compared to their children i would call the depression diabetes and death study um would be a fascinating thing and i would i would hope mr mr lincoln that you could present kind of statistics and compare and contrast us with these other you know other parts of the country that are are still relatively free and then and then divide it up
070in uh in any demographic any way you would like in one race you can divide it by gender sexual orientation religion anyway thank you mr janice thank you for your service too rich anderson with ken dargis on deck thank you sir uh first superintendent uh holder uh thank you i saw you put a letter out saying that this district does not condone crt and our school district being taught uh second thing uh and which which is amazing with your progressive board and the teachers union that is uh very progressive very left-wing um the teachers were beautiful and they the kids loved them that's what this school should be about is teaching not indoctrinating and it seems like some of these teachers are just well liked um i just want you guys to listen to what
071these parents have to say it's heartfelt for our kids it really is and it's they're not racist i'm not a white supremacist i'm not racist i'm a i'm a fat old man i understand that but having said that um people from the of some of the people here have made disparaging remarks about some of these parents we're loons we're nutty uh one fine uh lady is uh two steps from a bad woman that's cowardly that's exactly what we don't want to see in our schools with our kids that's called harassment or bullying and that's that's uh it's well it's hard to stop bullying but you got to monitor it and and stay on it and uh make kids comfortable and and their own skin nobody cares what color they are or what their uh background
072is they just don't um mike from my kids who are in their 30s and now they're kids they don't care so i just want you to listen to what these parents say because we believe wholeheartedly um about this and i appreciate your time and nah congratulations said these teachers are beautiful they really are thank you thank you mr anderson [Applause] next up we have ken dargis followed by mark garfinkel a number of years ago a friend of mine told me that brandywine school district had only a 55 percent relative rating as far as students that graduate that are college ready that was two tax increases ago that's you know the tax increases where people save like the board we need that to educate your children to give them the best education possible the teachers union
073chimes in with the same story so let's see we gave you two tax increases so let's see where we are today today we're at about 53 percent of the students who graduate are college ready but more importantly in mathematics we're down to 41 that can perform to standard now many of you probably have gone to very prestigious schools me i just was able to get in finally into a small nondescript boys school but everyone in that school instructors administration students know that a 41 and a 53 are totally unsatisfactory grades either the district starts a program that's going to improve that or i would ask that the board considers seriously looking for a new administrative team that could turn this disaster around [Applause] thank you mr dargus next we have mark garfinkel and richard james
074on deck my name is mark garfinkel i'm a resident of the city of wilmington product of the mount pleasant school district mr superintendent if this were my i.t department heads would roll tomorrow morning for as long as i've attended these meetings they've never hit it out of the park hoping they will the next meeting also the last meeting where dr zerek was on this board at that meeting a woman presented an article to you about contamination of masks and sending them off to a lab and dr zarek said to you she searched google and there was no such article after the meeting i went up to dr zerek and showed her the article was published in several papers in florida and the contaminants that were in mass ironic ironically not medically approved and made in
075china reference to your we believe powerpoint i will be speaking at the next meeting and addressing those powerpoints um i was hoping last month's meeting would be on the web so we could review it and i could further be more accurate into what i was about to say so i yield my time to the next speaker and i thank you very much thank you mr garfinkel next up we have richard james hi my name is richard james sorry once again with uh jim suiter on deck i'm richard james i'm a district parent and resident of the school district and i'm really here to say thank you to the board for the great work they've done in these really hard times over the past two years i think it's been difficult it's obviously been difficult i
076think there's been a lot of decisions that have had to be made that are going to displease some people but they made the right decisions in almost every case and i speak for many parents who appreciate that and i wish that more of those parents could be here tonight so i'm also a librarian so i thank the people who've made some really good book recommendations in the early part of the meeting but i would like to remind them that those books are not required reading by students those books may not even be in any of the school libraries that's a list of books that you can choose to read or not nobody's being indoctrinated nobody's being forced to read them um certainly not students they're just books that you are free to read or not
077and that freedom to read is really important to me as a librarian and i think that it's um you know also part of what the school district's trying to do when it presents those resources that again you may or may not choose to look at my final point is that you know there's a lot of um dialogue about school district members being somehow outside of the norm for the residents of the district and i'd like to remind everybody that almost every everybody on the board is a parent has been a parent has a stake in the success of our schools um and dr holodeck is a really good example right somebody who came out of the schools and is going to lead them everything that he does is for the students of the state everything
078he did as a superintendent and everything that he did as a principal was for the students of the school including his own kids we all have kids we all have this state thank you again to the board thank you mr james mr suiter and amy jones on deck like two minutes could you bring up your website home page would i bring up my wife the your home page website the granule school door full district home page uh mr suiter i appreciate that i i don't want to get into pulling up slides for every speaker is there anything that you could just speak to that we could address at a later time regarding the website yes okay um that's part of my speech so you can start the two minutes if you like at the bottom
079of your home page there's a link to the standardized test results i wish you would move that up instead of being at the very bottom right hand corner very difficult to find move it up to student progress on your top bar it's your only objective evaluation of your performance and i think it shouldn't be hidden down at the bottom it should be up prominent that's one that's the main thing i wanted to point out uh some of what i'd like to say has already been discovered and discussed about the performance of the standardized tests i'm surprised you didn't go over them last month since they came out in july plenty of opportunity to discuss them and you knew we all knew that the performance was not going to be good you've taken action to try
080to get it back you've got new programs you realize that it's going to take 18 to 24 months to recover that lost learning you've got the programs to try to recover it but what are you recovering too you're recovering to about a 42 success rate in math a 54 success rate in english not very good and again these are results before covet and i've come to realize your performance is not all that bad it's about average it's average in the state the state is average in the country so as a country interpret this to accept to believe that we all are accepting a 50 failure rate and i hope that as you get back that lost learning you'll go way beyond that 50 failure rate and become more than an average school district in an
081underperforming underachieving national education system thank you amy jones [Music] hi my name is amy jones i have a student that goes to brandywine high school and i have friends that go to have their children go to concord high school and i guess the only reason i came well one of the reasons i just wanted to find out i know um concord had a pep rally and at concord's pep rally i guess one of the the i guess it was the the black student assistant union um were handing out items and i know there was a one particular woman went up and asked for an item and she was told she was not allowed to have that um i do believe it's because she was white but i'm not sure and that's just the way it
082was brought across and i guess i was just wondering how we are handling that situation are we encouraging it are we you know is that just a movement to say this is what you know racist was like then i don't know if it was a you know a just a an experiment i just wish they the school board could let us know what's going on so it you know if it was an experiment then that was it would be something that yeah people would understand what it was like being racist against but i guess i just want to know if you guys were even aware of it i do believe it was mentioned on fox news at least something similar to what happened at concord high school was mentioned on fox news so i guess
083i just were you all aware of what happened i'm not sure this is the first time hearing of it but i'm sure we can follow up with you if you would that would be helpful i just want to make sure if it was a i mean the the student's daughter came i mean the daughter came home and is very upset the mom talked to me and i'm like i just don't want brandywine high school to go downhill you know saying this is the information that's getting out there because we want to build up our schools and we don't want things to happen like that so thank you thank you very much so typically we take a few minutes not as a direct response to any particular individual but just if the board would like to
084make any comments in reference to items that were discussed this evening or concerns that were raised i'll open it to the board to share their thoughts yeah i i do want to bring to the superintendent and i did send this to you in an email um i'm not particularly happy with some of the links in the diversity section as well i think some of them fall into the category that these folks are talking about and i don't think it's something as a district we should be promoting i don't think you solve racism by encouraging racism and some of these things that i saw on links you know on our webpage did that i i don't know i don't hope our children are reading that horrible book because that sounds awful to me but you know
085i think we should be a little more cautious as to what we're linking to on web pages it's nice to have all the information and see what others are saying and understand other points of view you know i i live in claymont you you can't get a much more diverse community than claymon i'm sorry it's been like that since i've moved there in the 70s um so i think you know we should just be a little more cognizant of the work that this district has done because from the time that these segregation started in 1978 through to today we have always tried to do the right thing and i i some of the things i saw there i don't i don't think should be on there i don't think we should be supporting i think
086that it's important for us as a district also to not or individuals not to veer into areas that are not our specialty so i think that as a district we did a great job in hiring someone who is a special specialist when it comes to equity and diversity i think that we should leave that test to her and in addition in conjunction with our superintendent to excuse me i'm talking yeah are we going to be respectful but we we've come this far we're not going to have people shouting from the audience are we clear on that thank you mrs perry so mr ackerman while i appreciate your comment i do think that it's none of us are experts in this particular area to determine what books are appropriate for this particular subject so i think
087that this could be a longer discussion um in conjunction with the person that we hired to do to assist us in leading this efforts well i believe we're talking about marquia davis who is a great administrator and one of the best in our district and i would love to have that conversation with her because i have great respect for her i've known her probably much longer than you have and i would welcome an opportunity to chat with her and and get her feedback as to why some of those links she feels should be there that's all i'm suggesting i agree so miss mr ackerman um let me and mr scrobot let me make a few comments uh after last meeting a gentleman who uh spoke during public comment last meeting came up to me and
088and voiced his concern regarding some of the books that were or resources that were posted on the district website and again they are resources and he said i'll be back every meeting until those resources are removed and i said well i i can tell that uh you don't agree with those resources but i want you to stop and think for a minute what you're asking me to do the gate of censorship swings both ways once you start going down that road what you believe is credible or a resource another group down the road will point back to things that you find valuable and we've got to be very careful that we don't get into the game of of deciding and being accused of censoring material that differs from our personal point of views and again
089i'm gonna say that it it's not a means of indoctrination it was a resource i clearly stated last time that we district office we are going to look at differing points of view to understand perspective for us to think that parents don't have different differing views that students don't have differing views that's that's not the case so as resources not as resources in the classroom required readings or anything else those were posted there again i think we have to be very careful in exercising censorship as for the test scores thank you for coming out tonight and showing your support and if you've tuned in over the course of the pandemic we've stated from the get-go that we're not happy with the scores i don't think any of us are yes we can look back and
090say we've been the highest performing second highest performing comprehensive public high school in the state last year we were in the top 11 with all three of our high schools in that category but we're not happy that's why we took a different approach with our esser funds and for those of you who have been coming to the meetings you heard about our plan for those funds yes uh we we saw it as a window of opportunity we are rolling up our sleeves and we're delving into our math curriculum our ela curriculum our science curriculum and our social studies curriculum we have three years to bring in experts you heard about dr pam sorry not pam i always want to call her pam dr lisa pruder tonight expert nationally recognized and renowned is now in the
091brain dewine school district and in charge of curriculum reform around the area of social studies we've got a three-year window of opportunity where we have funding available to us for new curricular resources we have funding available for us to bring in professional development like we haven't in the past we've got our work to do i'm not going to say we don't but i'm also going to point out a little study that i did years ago at ps and it probably needs to be repeated now i was principal at ps i was brought in the year that they were facing state takeover only school in the state who had not made ayp first school p.s first school to face state takeover took data our sixth graders look back over time to see how many of those
092sixth graders were consistently enrolled in our building grades four five and six at that point if they were absent any portion of time and i don't mean absent like you're normal absent but if there was a break in service i went and lived with my dad and in red clay or i was a new student in fifth grade we removed them because i wanted to see what our curriculum was doing for the kids who we had for three consistent years and when we took a look at that data it was amazing across the board in ela and in mathematics as well as in regular education and special education the curriculum wasn't the issue the issue we found was that 60 percent of our students were transient in three years of upper elementary school grades four
093five six and ps had a solid reputation at that time as being a great school even though they hadn't made ayp but it let me tell you uh it was shocking to learn that 60 of the kids that started with us in fourth grade did not finish with us in sixth grade gaps and holes in the in the academic lives that transient rate i'm sure probably is as steady if if not maybe even more so as the economy bounces around and uh families are very mobile very transient there's a lot of factors that come into play and i'm not making excuses because i've already told you from the get-go that we've restructured thing and we're seizing the opportunity of the next three years of having that esser funds from the federal government to push forward
094in the area of curriculum and instruction and you're right to build back up i mean not only are we trying to improve but we're also trying to make up the deficit learning and it's going to be a challenge i don't i'm not too uh sure that i wasn't too far off when i said it's probably going to be a one to three year effort to get kids back i talked to several teachers just in the last week doing building walk-throughs many of the teachers said um my kids i think they're right there academically but you know what's not right there the maturity i got fifth graders acting like third graders talking to mr roth the other day and he brought out a point that i don't know how i missed he said link do you
095realize that the only group of students in brandywine high school concord high mount pleasant high that have been in that building for more than a year are our seniors as a building administrator formerly i can tell you that it's tough with that new group of kids coming into your building right if i was in middle school those new seventh graders boy you you had to get them together and help them figure out what life was like at your building same thing with the fourth graders ninth graders in high school you know challenging to get them to figure out the difference between middle school and high school that's with one new grade level right now our building administrators are facing three new grade levels at the high school level for our middle schools nobody's been in
096that building for a full year so they're acclimating not one grade level of kids three grade levels of kids right we also know that school climate behavior goes hand in hand with learning right you have to have that in place in order to have positive school culture dedication to learning commitment from the students to grow and excel so we've got our work cut out for us i'm not fooling you if this was non-covered we'd have our work cut out for us with the test scores i'll tell you that i don't think we have we couldn't have a better administrative team in place leading that work we made intentional decisions to move forward instead of having an assistant superintendent that oversees operations thank god for jason hale because he stepped up out of his role of
097cfo and has taken on many of those responsibilities why because we doubled down folks we don't have one super assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum and instruction we have two we have core scott and dr lisa lawson why because a year and a half ago we said we've got to double down we saw the test scores we saw them going down we know it's a point of professional pride for us to roll up our sleeves and engage in the work and it's going to take a commitment it's going to take a commitment from our building administrators our building teachers and our parents and our students because curriculum alone doesn't do it but you're looking at a group that is willing to accept that challenge and we're going to need support from the members of our
098community i know you have the best interest in mind i do i hear it as a nation we're at each other's throats and here we are in an auditorium and you get the same feeling us versus that and it shouldn't be that way it should be us for them and by them i mean our kids our future keeping america great it's our mission as a collective body if you think anybody up here is sitting back and slacking you're sadly mistaken come log hours with me come log hours with any member of this team if you think we don't have the best interest of kids in mind you're sadly mistaken and i'll invite you richard to come sit with me let's have a discussion let's talk through those concerns because guess what uh i have concerns
099too and we do have to keep each other in check checks and balances i agree and you've heard from me directly will we have teachers who step over the line we will and when they do we need to know about it we need to put them in check we'll have administrators step over the line we're human we all have beliefs we all have sediments we all push agendas one way or another but we have to do it respectfully and keep each other in check and balance so i welcome the opportunity to sit down with you and have that discussion i owe it to you i think you owe it to me censorship again i i am leery because i don't want to sit here five years well i won't be sitting here five years from
100now most likely but i don't want to read or be part of the community five years from now looking back and saying wow look what that led to and things that i hold close to my heart are being censored and not allowed because of some other group's desire so let's be careful let's be thoughtful let's come together our kids deserve our best effort and it's going to take it takes a village believe me we we've got kids who come from interesting walks of life folks things that we never in our wildest dreams would have imagined they come from we can't turn the blind eye to that it's not your father's oldsmobile it's a different breed a different day and age a different life a different economy all those factors come into play again not making
101excuses but we need to put on the goggles and see it for what it really is and call it for what it really is i look forward to your support and your assistance in making that happen thank you holder i always hate to follow you because you always make such succinct points and you sum up what the district is doing so well and you know perhaps our our marketing person could look back over the last year of the pandemic and maybe grab from our meetings the you know the wrap-ups the comments that you've delivered from your superintendent's report that really put it all together that people can go back and listen to because you know as you mentioned i i think it's easy for public schools to be the punching bag and to look at
102test scores in a vacuum i don't think anybody here on this board is a fan of standardized tests or the methodology of teaching to a test so we can can do well but unfortunately we're measured by the same metric as every other school district so we we should perform better we want to perform better but like superintendent holder alluded to we have students in front of us and have an opportunity to reach them seven to eight hours a day and we have children in our district in this city in this county in this state in this country that are dealing with things you can't even imagine how and these are no excuses this is this is just the reality of what education is we're trying to teach kids some some some basic proficiencies when they
103may have come to school and not had a meal in two days that's why school districts have by necessity had to you know provide food programs breakfast free lunch this is why we have to have food of clothing closets for students because they can't you know come to school properly clothed for the weather or don't have clean clothes and living in environments of poverty crime trauma that most of us wouldn't last a day or an hour in and you know these aren't excuses but this this is just the challenges of education and you know i echo those sentiments we have an incredible team we are always focused on what needs to be done and you know if you've attended any of these board meetings over the last however long you'll see all the steps that
104have been been put in place to address this and it's not just you know looking at a metric and saying we're failing it's just it's it's not the case there are you know many many success stories happening in our buildings every single day so can we do better we can always do better and i i think all the the data that you see the programs that we roll out the the efforts that we're putting forth should show that and you know i also agree with what superintendent said about being careful of censoring you know these resources and and the third party links that it links to they're there because there is a demand for it within our community and people want to learn more they want to have these conversations just having a list of
105books which probably have gotten more attention in the last three months than i don't know how long those links have been out there but you know certainly attention has been drawn to them but it is not curriculum they are resources and hopefully those resources will open up and have conversations um but you know the things i've heard in this these meetings in public comment over the last several months they're not you know not things i'm hearing or seeing in our schools we had a public comment tonight about an episode i think you know that's something that would need to be looked into it certainly if it's true sounds out of the norm and that's an opportunity for us to have a conversation with our students to find out what happened why it happened have that
106conversation bring groups together build some understanding so that it doesn't happen again but by and large you know we just had three high schools had homecoming events we had spirit week we had pep rallies we had football games we had dances i think they all went out quite successfully we have a diverse population in our schools we have students who interact incredibly with each other and you know i think so much is driven by the division that's seen on social media seen on the news it's a giant bell curve you know you see that stuff on one side or the other but the bulk of it in the middle they're not problems that we're seeing in the district so thank you superintendent holder for your leadership i appreciate you um any other comments from members
107of the board no with that we will move on to board member liaison reports uh starting with delaware school boards association executive board mr ackerman the executive board has not met since our last meeting but i did want to convey a message in addition to serving on this board i also serve as the president of the delaware school board association recently the national school board association sent a letter to president biden asking for federal help with school board meetings because parents were potential domestic terrorists the dsba denounces that letter we were not consulted that this was or asked if we were to be a party to that uh the sba does not believe that parents are domestic terrorists we believe that they are partners in the education of their children and all of our children
108uh we don't need federal help we have two constables here in this meeting we had a state trooper earlier we don't need the fbi i know one of my board members daughter is an fbi agent but we don't need her here and i just want to make that clear that the delaware school board association did not give permission for us to be part of that nsba staying nspa is a decent organization but for some reason they seem to have run off the rails on this one the pennsylvania school board association has announced that they are leaving nsba we will be discussing the situation at our next meeting in early november but i just want to emphasize we do not consider parents to be domestic terrorists we did not ask for the federal government's help nor
109do we ask for nsba's help in this regard they have been helpful over the years in some areas but this is one where they have simply thrown gasoline onto a fire not water and i think water would have been a better choice personally or just to say nothing leave it to us i think the individual states have handled disruptions at meetings i heard our president tonight you know kind of put the kibosh on booze and i agree with that but your partners with us your community members we need your support we need your help we need your support i don't know how many times i can say that how many different ways i could say that but the nsba was not helpful in what they did and we are going to ask for the resignation
110of the interim executive director and we'll see what happens and then we'll decide whether or not delaware will stay part of the organization but i just wanted to just clarify that because it's been bothering me since this whole thing broke into the news in every article i see i share with the executive director and he's just as upset as i am if not more so thank you mr eckerman uh delaware school board association legislative committee miss gordon uh i was out of the state when that uh meeting took place and mr ackerman went for me so he's going to give the report for that meeting as well and i did send the um minutes from that meeting to the superintendent i didn't see it in board docs but if you could put it out in
111a future meeting uh just quickly uh we had a very large attendance uh it was a really well attended um house bill 238 we supported uh we moved to support not unanimously but we did move to support it and that bill is the bill that would eliminate the five-mile radius preference for uh chartered schools and they would not be allowed to have a geographic uh preference house bill 247 was tabled we needed more information house bill 252 we supported um but there were some abstentions 254 was also supported with one abstention from india river there were no senate bills we did talk about the um dsba goals legislative goals for this year and priorities and two things we think that we have to add as a priority is technology funding and something to pay attention
112to the student transportation crisis i think we're probably doing a little better than some districts in terms of student transportation but across the state it's becoming a real problem with staffing shortages um some districts are doing some creative things to try to address that but that is definitely a concern and that was basically the the items that occurred at the meeting thank you mr ackerman district finance committee that's me uh district finance committee held its monthly meeting on wednesday october 13th we reviewed the september monthly financial report which we will hear from dr hale later in addition to a tax abatement request our next meeting is scheduled for wednesday november 10th uh maintenance advisory committee that was also me one second uh maina's advisory committee last met on october 5th at mount pleasant high school
113the committee reviewed status of all summer building projects uh several projects are behind scheduled due to material delivery issues related to the entire country's supply chain issues and manufacturing issues all of those should be resolved by the fall and a number of projects were completed last week during parent teacher conferences our maintenance team always does a great job the leadership of john reed to take advantage of time when students are out of the buildings half days conferences other days off to tackle tackle projects we took a tour of mount pleasant high school and discussed the conditions of the building envelope and building systems the school was fully renovated in 1995 and there has been a number of smaller renovations since then our next meeting is scheduled for tuesday november 2nd at 4 wood elementary parent
114council for students with disabilities is miss pigeon who is not here tonight but i did get an update from her [Music] parent council has held two connect and learned family workshops one was from the parent information center on advocating for your child and the second was from brandywine brandywine school district staff on supporting your child with assistive technology if anyone is interested the recordings from the session are available on the connect and learn family workshop flyer on the bsd website under special education or in posts on the parent council facebook page at bcdpcsd you can also check out the upcoming opportunities on that flyer uh the committee also met four-time we'll meet four times a year with designated parent council representatives from each school most of the representative spots are filled but if a parent
115or guardian is interested in being a representative or an alternate they can reach out to nicole warner at nicole.warner at bsd.k12.de.us and our first meeting is october 27th from 6 30 p.m to 8 p.m via zoom and lastly october is disability history and awareness month in delaware and we encourage everyone to learn more about disability history individual with disabilities and their rights more information on this can also be found through the governor's advisory council for exception children website and i do not have a date of the next meeting but we will get that too next up is parent and citizen advisory committee reverend perry uh our committee has not has not met since our last meeting do we have a tentative date for a future meeting okay uh health advisory committee mr heller there wasn't
116a meeting since the last board meeting however i did get an update uh i reported last month that the group was working on a mental health and suicide prevention survey several of our speakers tonight public speakers talked about mental health of students during the covet pandemic the group has decided to pilot that mental health survey here at brandywine high school for portions of the 10th grade health class and then eventually rolling it out to the entire 10th grade health class in the coming months i don't have a date for the next meeting okay thank you mr eller uh 917 wmph we have not had a meeting since our since this last meeting um currently the contract is under legal review and then to renew with delaware public media in the near future educator recruitment and
117retention committee ms stock who is also not here tonight but i have a brief update for that the educator recruitment and retention committee held a planning meeting this past month they are still in the process of goal setting and streamlining the focus anyone is in anyone who is interested to participate uh send an email to ms stock at kimberly.stock at bsd.k12.de.us [Music] and no future date for that next meeting any additional board member reporters all right thank you board members for all the reports you provided uh i will now entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda have a motion uh mr ackerman in a second miss perry all those in favor say aye aye any opposed motion carries personnel matters do i have a motion to approve the monthly personnel report as discussed in
118executive session have a motion and a second all those in favor say aye aye any opposed motion carries student matters do i have a motion to approve student matters as discussed in executive session second have a motion have a second all those in favor say aye aye any opposed motion carries old business last several months we've had updates regarding the brandywine country club mr holler would you give us any recent developments thank you mr skrobot um first i'd like to thank all the individuals who submitted letters of support in favor of the district being the recipient of the 43.91 acres of the brandywine country club currently before the planning board i believe that meeting is scheduled for tomorrow morning at nine o'clock public comment was open for the past 30 days and again quite a
119few members of the community staff members sent in letters of support in favor of that donation there have been quite a few things out on social media the district claiming the district is not willing to um into agreements with the neighbors uh around the donation of that property and that that is not true the district intends to be good neighbors it will enter into discussions around the wants and desires of the neighbors in that neighborhood we have already demonstrated a good faith effort as they brought forth proposed deed restrictions there must have been probably 13 14 uh recommended recommended deed restrictions and at a previous board meeting we walked through those one by one and probably agreed to nine or ten of those items um and have no problem agreeing to those again we wanna
120be good neighbors so uh shortly we hope to be the recipients of that generous donation by mr capano and again we'll then take the opportunity once that land has been donated to the district to sit down and have those formalized discussions after the board hopefully has had an opportunity to accept that donation mr scrobat do you want to share the content of the meeting that we had with um county council person durham uh rj miles from ccobh and bob valahara community member i think he's also a cco bh um yeah i just wanted to kind of reiterate with the the public uh tonight you know early on when this process started there were some you know smaller working group meetings conversations that were held as this idea was kicked around uh once a plan was
121put forth before the county we decided that it was important to you know put it on our monthly board agendas to discuss with the public you know to be open and transparent those conversations had gone over time you know from deed restrictions being held by cco bh past meetings the board has had the opportunity to discuss those you know and some of the hesitations surrounding that um the conversation had evolved from deed restrictions to potential conservation easements and you know we've maintained all along that we have every intention of being good neighbors uh we had gotten to the point where it didn't seem prudent to enter into uh any agreements since we don't own any additional property to enter agreements upon i think if that's something that's going to happen you know we'll need the
122opportunity to stand before the public engage the public you know talk about it in real terms you know if and when we receive this land donation you know we'll then need to be able to start planning for you know whatever uh school would be built on it what it would look like and that's the conversation we want to have with the public and have that input you know whether that means you know placement on the property setbacks traffic concerns the opportunity to do that is once we have a plan if we were to enter into any agreements beforehand um you know it's my opinion that that would restrict the district on unknowns what could come up you know once we start to look at the land look at the topography test soil samples look at
123wetlands we don't know what a building is going to look like on this site you know we'll need to get into the architectural and the engineering of the process to you know make those determinations share that information with the community listen to their concerns we've heard many of them you know to date and i think you know from the meeting that superintendent holder talked about where we had gone through the list of deed restrictions that were being proposed what we thought we found were acceptable and what we thought could be problematic and why we thought it could be problematic we shared that i'm sure we'll have an opportunity to share that again the land use i guess we'll be making their recommendation to county council tomorrow and i too thank everyone that you know wrote
124in for support of that project for you know the intentions of building a new early childhood center that's desperately needed in our community but you know it's my intention that you know we have to think about future boards future community needs uh future uh taxpayer needs and what you know not doing anything prematurely that could you know potentially be a problem down the road but you know i think if you look around when we talk about open accessible space to the community and look at all the properties that we have now that are open and accessible um you know to restrict that now i just don't think that's a good idea yeah so mr scrub just uh there was a request by two of the individuals at the meeting mr balahara and councilwoman d durham
125for the board to have a discussion tonight uh just around uh if uh there they would be amenable to any kind of conservation easement and again we we think that's premature to make a decision on but not not necessarily premature to have a discussion on and they asked us point blank where we stood uh mr skrobot and myself and uh john made it perfectly clear we can't speak for the other members of the board but we gave our personal opinions and i'm just wondering if anybody else on the board would like to comment in terms of um you know thoughts or opinions they have on um restricting a portion of that property uh in perpetuity uh for open space uh that is a very loose definition it can take many forms and again our immediate
126plans have a great deal if we get that whole 44 acres the vast majority of that land is going to be open space and we've made that pretty clear we have funds to develop the portion that would go to the new bush school but there are no existing funds for us to do anything else to those other portions nor do we have any plans at this point to do anything else to those that's why in previous meetings we thought it's already got a golf course topography would would we just go that route and maintain the grass and use it that way of course we made that recommendation and caught some heck for it but again we are open to and the rest of our buildings and grounds are open to the public for for use
127and are very open but any comments from other board meetings uh we both said we would take it back and and have it open for discussion if anyone would like to make comment on it before we get the land sure so um yeah in my opinion similar to i think what you two have said i i think the consideration of a conservation easement isn't something that's really necessary we have 16 shiny examples of property we have with buildings on them that shows how we maintain open space for the community it just wouldn't be reasonable to think that this would be any different as you mentioned we know that a big portion of this land if it was donated to us isn't developable anyway so i think to think or imply that we would treat this
128piece of land any different than all the others we have that have beautiful wide open spaces for our community use i just don't i don't think there's a reason to go down that path to be honest we do that anyway and there would be no reason to think we wouldn't in this case and i think that's part of the the public confusion in a sense that the original plan by the developer had basically the entire parcel uh developed with you know 500 plus units um and that's just where my concerns lie in making sure with whatever creeks waterways wetlands whatever lies on this lot that we don't box ourselves in to restrict some land that we can later you know not use if it's needed to move a building shift the building you know these
129are all engineering questions that i don't know the answer to but i keep coming back to it's hard for me to recommend putting putting restrictions or deed restriction or conservation easement on a property that we don't even know i think we need to you know see what happens with the process and if and when that property is donated then we can go back to the community and work together to develop you know a new school you know i i just want to say i think that um this is really a win-win situation um at the end of the day the district wins because we're going to get a school that's going to be 100 funded by the state that will benefit students we're going to build it in a way that we're not going to
130impact the traffic on the road to the extent that people seem to think it is i mean it's not going to be like a a handy or bumps on it well hamby is a good example not going to be like camby where it's in the middle of a neighborhood it's going to have enough property where we can wrap the car lines in a way that they're not going to be out on shipley road unlike springer where you know we're kind of boxed into the existing uh i think we agreed with nine out of ten of the recommendations that councilman durham was was asking for because that's what's good for the neighborhood there's no cut through road from concord pike to shipley there's no ridiculous traffic circle in the middle of shipley that you know it
131and the developer at the same time gets to pay his voluntary school assessment through a land donation which is very unique in brandywine hundred in fact i think it's probably the first time we've actually had that situation so to me this is this is a win-win for everybody um i and the original plan by the way uh president scrobot was actually i think around 800 units which is now down to 300 and change as i recall uh with an entrance solely coming in from concord pike adjacent to or right right across from the uh right about where the giant is or right through there so to me this this is this is kind of good for the community i don't know who's going to rent all these departments but at the same time we're growing
132and it's certainly a place that would i think be relatively nice once completed and again you know we're talking about a need that the community has for a building that's going to be the size that we plan to build to service the growing number of children that need preschool services and and kindergarten services so i i really i think you know people who are objecting to this are really kind of missing the boat and if they'd rather just have the 800 houses i guess that's that's up to them at a cut through road i mean i i think you know we've acted in good faith from day one on this and i'm i'm certainly willing to do a lot of buffering for landscaping and things like that uh you know we have people that we
133would get funding for who would maintain the property so it would always look nice i i really you know i think we have to and and i agree with you we have to we have to get the donation before we can start talking about the ways in which we might mitigate impact to the neighborhoods right and you make a good point about the funding because i think some of the you know some of the misinformation that's been floating around around there um you know whether it's social media or watercooler talk um you know normally if we were just to decide to up and build a school we would have to go to referendum for capital funding but in this case the the state is providing 100 financing so it's not tax-free i mean it is
134state tax money but this is state tax money that's already been collected and through the bond bill would be spent somewhere in the state whether it's newcastle county kent county or sussex county the money was going somewhere but this opportunity allows us to build a school 100 percent state funding which relieves the need for us to on our typical services would be what 60 40. uh 60 paid by the state 40 paid by our local county school tax dollars so it is a win that we don't have to go back to referendum to raise money to build a new school but it is still state tax money so in effect it is state taxes um but again that money could have gone anywhere in the state we were fortunate enough to get it into our
135school district for this this particular school because i tend to agree with so much of what's been said i don't have to add a lot at this point but i i have to point out that it's very obvious to me because i live very close to one of the elementary schools that the community uses our our buildings and our our areas around our buildings daily and so this would be another area in a slightly different area where an elementary at a school type of school would be set up so i think would be very valuable to that area to have that in that community i guess i'll make it unanimous and say that uh i'm not in favor of restrictions primarily because of what's already been said we've been good stewards of of the property
136that we have thus far not only is the donation benefiting those of the bernie wine school district but also children outside of our district to be honest because they will have access some will have access to the use of this this facility as well and we want to be mindful of not handicapping future board members and whatever whatever plans that they need to execute to accommodate and to provide services to children uh and future generations so um clearly i'm against putting a restriction point and i do and i do understand i'm sorry that's it um i do understand you know members of the community who appreciate open space advocate for open space and i do too i've raised kids in this area i've you know think i've taken them to every single park around here
137at one point or another um but when we talk about unprecedented opportunities and the gift of land for a new school that's exactly what it is unprecedented there's not you know the argument has been made for there's not a whole lot of land to preserve open space on the other hand there's not a whole lot of land to you know set aside for schools and that's part of the hesitation that not knowing what the future holds what our population growth may or may not be and how any of our properties would be used um but when i look around at i forgot i did the math 120 130 acres of park space just in a four or five mile radius of the brandywine country club site between uh tally day park kandu park bechtel park
138tally day park did i say county day twice um the new jester park is a stone's throw away so i mean to have 130 acres to you know consider blocking off another another portion in perpetuity when i think the property you know can and will be used in essentially the exact same way um that's that's just the hesitation that i have um but all of that is secondary too let's let's make sure we have a property that we can have this conversation on and i just want to add to what reverend perry she made a very good point just now and to not tying the hands of future boards because if we remember carefully years ago the university of delaware said that our population of school children was going to be declining and as a
139result of that we closed the darley road school as a full-time school and brandy was torn down and consolidated with bush into hamby and now hamby is literally bursting at the scene whose hamby which is bursting at the scene so i don't know what the future's going to hold and maybe at some point there there is going to be a need for some additional buildings i don't know i can't speak one way or the other but it certainly does not make a lot of sense for us to tie the hands of a future board when those decisions might need to be made in some fashion or another we certainly don't want to go back and repeat the mistake that the city of wilmington made when it built a high-rise school called burnett that we finally
140wound up closing and tearing down and turning into a nice baseball field uh that would not be a good answer for children right but i think the concerns are that you know somehow that back back corner or you know the back half of the parcel would be um would be developed with a building and i think to your point mr ekman if the needs of the district grew we might even just be talking about expanding the existing building but if we're boxed in to a certain footprint and we don't have room to expand there then that creates uh you know a larger problem for for the district logistically and and possibly financially and mr scrub there's there's no scenario where that what happened where we needed to expand or add something else they wouldn't have
141to go in front of the community for approval exactly in the future anyway exactly so all very good points anyone else [Music] okay moving on to new business um covet leave extension dr hale i know we talked about this a little bit last month yes good evening everybody here can you hear me oh there it is all right thank you um yes good evening um we come to you tonight asking for your approval to move forward with accepting the state's covet leave extension through 1231 31 information in the um board packet that we presented with you this evening was really just finalized within the last couple days but what we're asking for the board tonight is to allow us to move forward with um accepting the state's proposal to allow us to provide 10 days
142up to 10 days of covered leave for our employees through 1231 a couple of specifics on this is we would be seeking to allow for the 12-month employees for this to be retroactive to july 1st and for all of our teaching employees and and educators back to the first day of school which would be august 23rd so we have existing procedures in place that we utilized for the last time that we went through this process so basically what we're asking for the board's permission is to move forward with that same process that we followed previously but as part of the regulation here we do have to have the approval of the board to be able to do that so again there would not really be any changes in the procedure that we went through before
143which included um involving our lead nurse beth maddie who is involved in making those decisions as it relates to um you know how staff members have to either quarantine or isolate based on covet related issues we would then go through um that same process so we're asking for the board's permission to move forward with that and acknowledge that we're going to follow the same process that we did previously and i can certainly answer any questions that you may have hope to accept the superintendent's recommendation to extend the covert leave have a motion and a second and any further discussion from the board so if i may just to make sure it's clear mr ackerman can i restate that as you've made a motion to reckon to accept the superintendent's recommendation that the board approved the
144state of delaware's guidance on the extension of families first corona fires response act and the american rescue plan act effective july 1 2021 for 12-month full-time employees and effective august 23rd 2021 for all other employee groups exactly yeah all those in favor say aye aye and he opposed motion carries mr scrobott if i can just make one comment um this is tied to what uh ms stock was asking about at the last board meeting uh would there be a point in time when teachers if they are required to quarantine or be isolated at home for coveted reasons and are able to work teach remotely would they be allowed to do that and the answer to that question is yes and that's kind of what we talked about with ms stock last meeting but it had
145to be approved and formalized first and and we'll put something out to all the staff members tomorrow uh again we have a protocol in place that that they followed in the past to determine if they're eligible for that or not thank you and i know we had you know pretty robust discussion on it last month but we were just short of the action item so once we've approved the minutes this evening so last month's video will be updated uh tomorrow or soon thereafter uh if anybody wanted to hear the discussion on that which is why the discussion was so brief this evening with that dr hale uh moving on to salaries scales yes thank you over the last several months really i would say six to eight months to be exact we've been going through
146a careful analysis of all of our non-administrative district level support staff that are non-contractual and what we've brought to you tonight is the result of that analysis which is a revision to our existing salary schedules for that particular group what i have on the screen right now is to show you the existing scale as it stands what we've gone through in this analysis deleting mcintyre and i have gone through and have done um a lot of review of the individual position positions based on those responsibilities um and have learned over time that the existing scale has created a lot of confusion amongst our employee classifications because it encompasses pretty much every employee group that is non-contractual non-administrative non-building level employees so what we've done is we have provided a recommendation for you that separates these
147really into three categories one being what i would call district level staff which is to include district office non-administrative um non-administrative support staff our transportation department our food service department the other would be our technology staff and the third would be our facility staff but those two groups being very unique in the job responsibilities through this analysis what we've done is to look at all of the associated positions to ensure that that everyone is being paid equitably over the course of the um their job responsibility so what we found based on the existing scale is that over time that there have been some inequities within those um those payment structures so what this does and the recommendation we have had this conversation with the district finance committee as well um is that with these scales
148being revised will provide us the opportunity to ensure that we are equitably paying our employees in those classifications for their levels of responsibility and i would certainly be more than happy to answer any questions you may have so when you talk about scales you go to the next uh the other slide permissions the original yeah the current scale so when you talk about this is this a scale that was set or is that an actual the minimum salary and someone had the maximum salary those are true numbers so basically the way that this this um scale was structured many years ago was to provide um as you see a minimum a midpoint and a maximum the thing that's been historic in the brainy wine district is that we have not had anyone on those other
149scales with very few exceptions the total group here we're talking about is roughly 60 employees of which two or three of them may be not whether on on that midpoint so the way that we have historically worked within the brandywine district is that everyone is on that midpoint 100 um so part of the confusion um that that the scale creates is it provides what looks to be a maximum scale of 115 which no one is on that um on that step so the objective in recreating the scales was not to provide an increase to the compensation of um you know but it is to equalize so as you see if you make a comparison as to where it is on that midpoint the highest level of that midpoint is comparable to what you see on
150the highest level of the other scales so again the the point of this was not to create higher scales but what it was to make there be a differentiation between those classifications and then as well as ensuring that people with comparable responsibilities are being paid comparably right so when you're looking at page one is that the equivalent of the midpoint 100 percent yes so it is not higher than the existing scale so we've ensured based on where employees are currently being compensated and making sure that um that the individuals aren't you know again this the idea of doing this is to ensure um equitable pay for um an equal amount of responsibility right so i know there was some earlier conversation about a scale being a range of numbers yes so if we're talking about
151these numbers here being representative of the midpoint 100 yes is that like a a target that somebody who's below that now could work towards over time so individuals that a new person's hired in at that new rate how does that so anybody basically right now as an individual is hired on in one of those classifications they're paid at 100 essentially what we're doing is we're eliminating the two columns that are infrequently if ever used and going with this one one step scale and as you can see at the bottom there is a stipend that there's an opportunity for employees that have education levels very similar to what we have in our other classification so what you see there at the top for example for that senior specialist if that individual has a master's degree there
152would be additional compensation over and above that have we considered um i see your your your stipends are based on associate bachelors and masters but in the technology space nmc uh sc or a cisr some of those programs would definitely benefit our technology employees are they absolutely and that's been taken into consideration as we went through and developed and that's a primary reason why we separated the the technology scale from the others to take into consideration things such as that so that um because again for like same thing with facilities there's different levels of responsibility that may not always be tied to degrees so we wanted to ensure that for example there our technology staff are being compensated comparably to where they are in other districts but also as you're saying ensuring that those levels
153of certification and different things that benefit our district that they're being equitably compensated for dr haley noticed that that might be a typo at the bottom should that be 2500 so that it was consistent with the other master scale my apologies actually it should be that should be 2 000 right there vice versa yeah so i will make that correction thank you very much i appreciate that so to mr ackerman's point is there is there anything a definitive metric between between the technology ranks that if someone has um a certification that moves them to another level or multiple certifications move them to certain levels or would there be a benefit in the education stipend to you know put in a smaller dollar per certification i mean we can certainly i mean these scales are always
154a work in progress and we've had considerable conversations with our supervisor of technology as well as talking with other districts and how they compensate so i think a lot of it has to do with the individual airy areas there that you see those different categories and many instances are tied to specific types of certifications and things that they would need for example we have one senior systems administrator and that's the person that oversees all of our technology infrastructures you know that takes a very very particular skill set with certain certifications um and then as you relate you know each of the others you know there's certainly the potential for someone that's a field technician to continue to move themselves up to a systems analyst and so forth and a lot of times those things can
155be achieved and those goals can be planned out incorporating those types of like certifications again there's some certifications where you'd be required to go and take a weekend course others are coursework and so there's a lot of differences in in um in how that works it seems to be that when you look at an associate bachelors and masters you know there's credits associated with that along with certain amount of time um you know where that's why it's a bit different and that's why we have separated the technology department because it's so unique in the types of things um that they do get trained for yeah scrub of trying to plan out those specialized certifications in the area of technology and it has to be district controlled i don't know all the acronyms so i'm just
156going to make something up rss certification well we don't need seven members of our technology team with that certification but our goal is to be too deep two individuals deep on those critical certifications so in the event somebody goes out for fmla or something else we've got somebody in place who has that certification we don't miss um so this endeavor was was undertaken to make sure that individuals with similar job titles doing similar having similar responsibilities were paid similar compensation yes and no one will be penalized based on this process no one will receive less pay what we've done is ensured that as we go through this process that we're we can say that individuals that may even be in different um different departments that have comparable levels of responsibility are being paid the same
157which is very important dr hill yes i i think um if i remember one of the challenges with the old way was that for example specialist a b and c was sometimes somewhat arbitrary yes i was assigned to a position yes thank you so how um how with the new system for example is it very clear that this position falls at the associate level and not the specialist level or the coordinator level so i think part of that had to do with the analysis that we performed um and looking at you know for example in that district level that that top half there um you know that we have various individuals that have you know for example a senior specialist would be those um responsible for let's say payroll benefits human resources you know we
158have some things like you know the higher level and we have like our our specialist level that may be um comparable to what we would have seen in that specialist b category but i think as we've made more determination or we've made more clarification as to um the classification it will provide as opposed to someone before that would say specialist well there are multiple types of specialists what this does is it's kind of differentiating partially by name and that's why if you look at the midpoint of the old scale compared to this you'll see some comparable numbers there it's just taking into consideration that in a name sometimes that does help us make clarification as to what level of responsibility those positions hold okay i would i'll make the recommendation that we accept the scale
159as presented with the edit for the change on the uh one master scale that you had mentioned that's a motion i'll second it dr hale did you hear the yes with the correction yes yes thank you very much so we have a motion and a second all those in favor for any discussion all those in favor aye any opposed motion carries tax abatement request yes thank you um we received a letter in the mail um roughly about two weeks ago requesting um refund of taxes paid in error from 2011 through now from this particular taxpayer the information was presented to you in the in the board docs we've had we've also discussed this with the district finance committee based on the information that's been received here we do not have enough information for us to
160be able to make a judgment so at this time i would be making the recommendation that we deny this request typically what would happen would be in instances like this the first line of defense would be to go to the county so if there are issues related to a particular piece of property the county is the initial step in that process i had i made a number of attempts to reach out to the taxpayer as you can see on the letter there was no email address or phone number listed um so um in trying to contact them i was unable to do that so i have issued them a letter saying that i would be bringing this to the board and we did certainly have conversation with our legal counsel who advised us to we
161should bring this to the board right now and again if the taxpayer is able to go through the proper channels and get the necessary information they're certainly always welcome to come back um and represent this information but based on the information provided i would be making the recommendation that um that we denied this request i'm confused with the basis that they're asking for the text to be thank you yes free freestanding what what does that mean i mean i've looked at the i've looked at the parcel information i certainly had to do parcel searches all the time i don't see any indication of there being an exempt property or for any reason that and normally again that process would be something that would be filed through with the county um and if i had talked
162to this taxpayer i would have told them that they should first go through the county before coming to us but there is no legal basis in this letter for us to provide any any relief is even vacant land is taxed so you know freestanding sitting kneeling i mean i don't see what the difference is yes and you did you receive a response from your reply letter i did not yeah no i look at it and i don't see any there's no claim of a miscalculation or accounting error but even if there was i would have to go to the county first is that correct that would be the recommendation normally we have them do that because they're the ones that make the determination as to whether something is for example tax exempt or if there
163was an error in the process they would be the ones to make the determination as we're the only ones pretty much all we do is collect so they're the ones that make the determination on the assessed valuations and any errors that may be in the process so we ask them to go through that process first and that was not done in this case do we have a recommendation to deny this request it says loop to accept the superintendent's recommendation not to approve the property tax abatement second have a motion and a second any discussion all those in favor say aye aye aye any opposed motion carries all right lastly the information presented for september 30th 2001 this is the monthly report for month ended 9 30. you can see that we currently are at 103
164percent of our state revenue but i do want to make note that the reason the number is that high is because of the reflection of the 25 million which we will make the adjustment and the in the final budget we have finalized our unit count and have submitted that to the department of ed once that is finalized we will then begin the process of developing um our final budget which typically involves just making some minor modifications based on the finals finalizing of those numbers you can see today we have 14.5 percent of our local tax revenue and i'm anxiously awaiting the october receipts which is typically our largest amount roughly and probably be about 50 million dollars so once that comes in certainly that will help kind of balance out the numbers we've also begun
165the process of doing our reconciliations for our choice and charter we normally will bring in and we will continue on the choice side to bring in revenue where on the charter again each year we do pay out based on the number of students our consolidated grant has been approved and we're just awaiting you can see some of the funds that have been received but we are in the process of continuing to receive the rest of those funds i'm sorry i went out of order here i'm going to go the information here shows the expenditures everything up up to this point for the first three months of the year um looks as it should um you know we are tracking and we continue to track on a on a monthly basis our our salary expenditure you
166can see 726 which is like seven pay cycles of the year is roughly 27 percent and we are um on the local side about 28.3 which is reflecting um a uh you know the the summer pays which was a little bit higher this year as we've talked in mr holler mentioned that we did a lot over the summer with um with with uh services the prior year expenditure report as well as our essa reports are included so you can see so far um we've either obligated or spent roughly 2.8 million dollars of our of our funds and we will continue to report on those in greater detail as the months continue lastly is our cash flow statement we have three months of actual information i am currently i am continuing to estimate um based on
167our preliminary budget that we're going to end the year roughly 10.4 million dollars um so that number has not changed over the last several months certainly once we receive our october funds down that number could adjust slightly but we have reviewed this with the district finance committee and they've made a recommendation for approval i'd be more than happy to answer any questions no questions just a comment after hill um you know goal five of our strategic plan was was fiscal stewardship to the local taxpayer and uh you know i'm just sitting here and um thinking here we are in the middle of esser funds and um i have to compliment dr kutch her team especially michelle holly tracy selickman who applied for grants and received them again doing our our best to defer expenses to
168the local taxpayer john reed who went after uh i'm going to get it wrong fema reimbursement and got a tremendous amount of federal aid to offset costs right here at brandywine high school with the big flood that happened a year and a half ago and it's that type of commitment uh that is has prolonged the need for us to come back to our community it's been many years past uh our anticipated return that's because we constantly have very fiscally sound individuals who are going the extra mile to to save the local tax dollar dollar thank you any other questions on the board all right do we have a motion to accept the monthly financial report for september 30th 2021 subject audit second motion and a second any discussion all those in favor say aye aye
169aye any opposed motion carries thank you dr hale wrapping up with general information and meeting dates uh the next three board meetings will be dec november 15th december 13th and january 10th 2022 and all those will continue to remain here at brandywine high school as long as we're under the current protocols uh and with that i thank everyone here in the building that stuck in till the end uh thank you for your time and participation i will entertain a motion to adjourn question motion in a second we can stay if you want um all those in favor say aye aye any oppose nope we are adjourned thank you everyone this concludes our october meeting