Concord-Carlisle Joint and Concord School Committee - March 30, 2021

001[Music] all right um so it is 501 uh i'd like to welcome everybody to the joint concord and concord carlisle regional school committee's march 30th meeting i'd like to call the meeting to order for the region and after court calls to the concord committee we will do a roll call thank you very much the concord school committee is called to order we are home and we are being recorded thank you anderson's present who's present oh present is that present mustafi present really here wilson here all right so uh i'll make a motion that the concord school committee and concord carlyle regional school committee enter into executive session under purpose too of the open meeting law to conduct strategy sessions in preparation for negotiations with non-union personnel or to conduct collective bargaining sessions or contract negotiations

002with non-union personnel and purpose three of the open meeting law to discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have a detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body and return to open session at 6 pm [Music] anderson i uh booth i for both about i for both where's dad greedy i for both and wilson for region c we will be coming back into public session again uh for the audience at exactly six o'clock please [Music] hello again hello hello all right we're all back welcome back to the march 30th uh joint conquered and conquer carl regional school committees meeting we are back in open session this meeting is being recorded um uh we are going to start with our public hearing on school choice

003that we're going to do we're going to do the two the two the other so i think you just have to state that you have to state officially that we're opening the public hearing i'll be presiding over this public hearing today on school choice the purpose of this public hearing is to invite comments from the members of the public regarding school choice the school triceraton that's pending before the school committee the committee will hear comments from persons present who wish to speak for against or neither for nor against school choice and once the public hearing has commenced there can be no motions or votes until the hearing has officially concluded is there a motion to uh open the public hearing on school choice so moved for both committees second for both roll call so is

004there anyone from the public that wishes to speak in favor if so please uh raise your hand using the participants button there's a little tab there and there's a little raised hand button anybody would like to speak in favor and if you're having trouble using it you can just turn on your video and let yourself be known nope okay is there anyone who'd like to speak against school choice is there anybody would like to speak neither for nor against school choice okay i guess having heard all comments and the public hearing on school choice uh is now closed and i'll entertain a motion to close the hearing so moved for both committees second for both roll call anderson i for both i promote and i interrupt i'm so sorry before we do the roll call

005just a matter of process um so we opened for public comments do when does the school committee um discussion happen is it part of the public events or does it uh after before we vote it it will be after uh we can have our own discussion uh when there's a motion on the floor after the hearing is closed okay thank you so much i guess that for both mustafi i for region wilson for region and cynthia yeah media for both sorry okay and so now is there a motion to to vote on school choice and then we will have our discussion okay so i move that the concord and concord carlisle school committees vote to not participate in school choice for the school year 2021 2022. uh second for both uh discussion i think i

006would just add that you'll see in the memo that our primary reason is space as it has been secondarily is the lack of an adequate transportation system for kids to access um so nothing's changed from our vantage in the last while thank you very much dr honor all right hi so i wanted to share um my thoughts on an experience with with school choice i understand that this is about opening our our schools to students from other towns and i understand that historically we have voted no we voted not to participate in um school choice and i understand the reasoning and i respect that history i wanted to share you know i often talk about my my my life experience and how it informs my my choices and my decisions and my thinking and um

007you know that that personal experience does include school shows i have a first-hand experience of school choice and its benefits so out of principle and out of this experience because i know how valuable it is for um students and families who are not uh fortunate enough to have a school district in their own town that that is as strong as ours so i am in favor of school choice of us participating in school choice uh for that reason the uh argument of transportation and space uh so transportation it is understood for families who participate in in school shows and have to go to school in a different town they understand that transportation is their responsibility they don't expect the school to provide transportation so that's understood from the beginning and also the space if we

008commit to participate in school choice we can only take students if we are if we have a space so that would not be an issue if we don't have space that we cannot take them although we are participating so i just want i just wanted to share that and how i feel about uh school choice and how it fits in my uh personal experience again and my uh my stand on this i don't intend to um again change the tradition of not participating but um for diversity of opinion and for me to share that um i think it was important to uh to comment on that thank you very much do we have other comments from the committee please um let's just respond i really value bringing that up fatima thank you um and i'd

009like to understand more too because i know we have you know asked questions in the past lori you know is this a possibility because wouldn't it be great if it worked um so can you help us understand i know in the past i think because we're a region especially at the high school regional school district my understanding is that we can't say people wouldn't necessarily expect transportation because there are more restrictions around having to provide transportation um so can you give us a little more insight on the the transportation and the space limitations and and what makes things so difficult with those thank you for the question um again going back to my personal experience yes we uh i lived in a town you know where the school uh district was not a good fit

010for us so i opted to go to take my children to a different district and that that was a regional district and yes again it was it was a better fit for us and we it was again understood that the transportation was the responsibility of the of the family not the school both um the elementary middle and the regional high school so it was it was the same and it was very clear that the responsibility of driving was um uh was on the on on the family so it was never an issue knowing that it's not convenient obviously but uh knowing that um it was not an issue okay that's good to know laurie can you help us understand kind of the a little more than behind why we have always said it's just not

011going to work for us typically the transportation gets brought up as a factor fatima is completely correct um some districts and i think this is where our mindset has been that not all kids have that opportunity for families to to drive them and we're not very easily accessible i mean the t comes through but beyond that there's not like a an infrastructure of public transportation um so that that's some of the mindset that's been applied here um the bigger the bigger driver for me is the space um we have schools without any open classrooms typically give or take peabody where we made a conscious choice to you know really really enroll seventh and eighth grade together in sanborn and deal with the fact that there isn't exactly the perfect space to have them both there

012um and the high schools at its top capacity that it's been in a long long time at over 1300 kids so we typically districts and i'm going to speak generally and then you know we can look at the data of ours once you're to the place where you don't have available classrooms um it typically isn't something you open up um there's unknowns i've been in a school choice district we tried to do it in a very thoughtful slow way i wouldn't say it panned out the way we had expected um we had some room but not consistent room we were trying to get down to the grade level at a time to try to bring kids in very challenging just to navigate the bureaucracy of the process in terms of how you would enter kids

013at certain entry points if you're not going to just open it up to all grades because you do have some options to only do it at certain entry levels [Music] so you know the space the space is the issue um we'd have to there's always a and i don't want to talk about money because fata is totally right this is great for a lot of kids um but you know if you bring in enough school choice that you need another teacher it's rare that the uh comp the state offers right now five thousand dollars per child and we're spending upwards of 20. so there's there's there can be implications there not always um if you need to open another classroom you know you have to try to dive into all of these factors it's the

014districts i've seen thrive in school choice really were looking at either enrollment issues or fiscal issues and they committed to it and made it a really mainstay of the way they were operating and there were a lot of school choice kids as one district i know was very successful with it often a smaller suburban system that sat next to a urban environment um was able to really draw a lot of kids that really successfully thrived out of the urban setting and that was good for kids just like fatima said i think it's just it's complicated and complex and there's layers and unless you've got a space availability that's broader scale than what we would ever be able to look at i find it more complicated than beneficial if that is enough i'm not sure how

015yeah that's very helpful thank you yeah i just wanted to make one one additional comment since we've been talking about diversity we've looked at uh sculptures for diversity reasons and carlisle uh we looked at that uh question very closely and uh school choice does not offer the diversity and the student body the way that you would expect um social economic or even since you don't you you do not have a choice of who you are admitting for those spots you do not control those spots uh then you do not control um you you have no say in uh what kind of students you are admitting you are not able to admit students that um would bring diversity to your student body and would benefit the greater um the education of all of our students in

016district so that was one of the considerations that we looked at um attending the uh attending the masc conference for school committee members i had an opportunity to meet with many superintendents and school committee members from various uh districts and uh when um school school choice came up as a conversation piece um they were very very um there were not that many positives coming from schools that were losing the students because the money was leaving the district and there was no opportunity to improve the district um that was losing uh students uh to to to the school choice um uh at the district so it's not necessarily a solution to uh educational uh needs of our uh of our students um and it it does not improve and and again i was hearing the same

017thing uh it was uh parents of children that look like us in the district they're able to find those opportunities for those for for their own students it's not those diverse uh students with needs um to really go out of district and um find placement and um school choice that we're getting those spots that's why i will be voting and now so dr hunter um i i certainly heard the conversation but i want to bring us back to your memo which i think does does state the case accurately that uh we do have enrollment uh limitations and transportation issues that are real so notwithstanding the uh the uh the uh ideas that we've been sharing all of which are uh genuinely held i think we've got the real impediments that we have to deal with

018yeah space is a definite impediment no question sarah i think we might uh be ready for a roll call yes and i just want to remind people that the vote is to not participate in school choice and so a vote in the affirmative is to not participate and about in the negative is to participate thank you for clarifying so call anderson eye for both blue thigh for both about eye for both ms dead no provoke mustafi i for region not to participate thank you for clarification rainy eye for both and wilson i for region thank you okay and with that um the we can move to public comment and i do see i know i saw linda here and amy okay um and so i think before the public comment we will have our update

019from our student representatives um who are always wonderful to hear from and we value your time and know know all of the the demands on you so please let us know what's what's going on yeah so we want to kind of like talk about something a little more serious this time because we saw that yeah we want to you know you want to bring up kind of uh the school's response to the recent like racism against asian americans we kind of wanted to um share our thoughts on that too and kind of what we think that's the role of the school and the school committee to touch on that and linda's chinese and i'm half korean so this is something that is both important to both of us and i think that one of the

020things we're thinking is in towns like concord people often think it's not a local issue or not issue they have to think about because they just think like oh that doesn't happen here that's a that's a different area of the country thing that's not a relevant issue but i think it's really important to notice that it is an issue here and that's something that has to be mentioned and has to be talked about instead of trying to push it off and think it's not really something that happens here i think it's important for the school and you know the administration the school committee to focus on and try to notice in the community around us yeah i completely agree and i actually prior to this meeting i wrote down specifically what i wanted to say

021i wanted to eloquently get my points across because i feel that this might be the most important thing i ever say to you all and i want to start off by saying that amy and i are very grateful for our position in the school committee that we get to work with you all and ensure that there's positive changes being made within our school community and i think whenever a person of color speaks out about any sort of negative experience they've had be facing racism or discrimination it's obvious it's often misinterpreted as people of color pinning white people as some sort of enemy and that is so false that is not the intention whatsoever and by no way are amy and i trying to can any like blame anyone for possible um negative experiences we may

022have had throughout our time in the concord carlyle school system and it's just important that right now we have things that we want to share and we want them to be acknowledged not just by you all the school committee but anyone who wishes to listen this is recorded and i do know that some people do watch these recordings afterwards and like amy was saying i think unfortunately it is common for people to believe that our small community is immune to the racism and hate that we see on the news and while anus violence acts hasn't occurred in our community the microaggressions and the hate that stems in them is exactly what we're seeing on the news when i was in seventh grade i can say this from personal experience i remember in our class we

023were listening to sweet home alabama and i couldn't really hear the radio and i asked what song was playing and a classmate of mine said oh it's sweet home alabama any american would know that oh sorry linda and then two kids started joking about how i'm not american because i'm chinese well despite my eyes being slanted i did vote in the last election i was born here in the united states and i actually filed a tax return the other day it was not the fun experience i wished it was but i did it and although that can be seen as some naive seventh grader making a comment the unfortunate part is that there are grown adults in this country who will look at me and look at any other asian person and say they're not

024american they're a virus and someone had that same exact mindset and now delana ashley young paul andre michaels xiaojitan dao young funk julie park sunshine kim yo yu and park hyun jung are all dead and yes maybe people haven't died and conquered because of that hate but it certainly is an issue and we saw it over the summer when george floyd's name was all over the news brianna taylor ahmad aubry and elijah mclean all this hate and prejudice that is within everyone that they choose to just not reflect on is leading to people's deaths and it's 20 21 and i understand that i myself am super privileged i have the right to free speech i can i have a voice that i can use to speak to you all on and i you know i'm

025living under a roof i'm sitting on my bed as i speak to you all i have the privilege of going to a highly ranked high school and i'm going to go to a public i'm sorry i'm going to go to a private institution following that and i wouldn't be where i was if it weren't for my chinese immigrant parents they came here with just the clothes on their backs nothing else and they worked so hard my mother has two masters and my dad has a phd and i am so beyond grateful for the efforts they put in to get me to this point where i am and also i'm thankful for the hard work that i put in but despite all that i will always be seen as inferior to my white counterparts and there

026it just feels like there's nothing i can do about it and i know that there's probably a lot going on behind the scenes to tackle this issue in our community that i don't really know about and it must be a very difficult job but i also know that i'm not the first person to bring up this issue and i feel as though every single time someone brings it up we're automatically met with change isn't immediate positive change will take a long time but the reality is that racism has been embedded in this country for centuries it's not just a recent issue and i do not want to have to wait for my own kids to come home and tell me that they saw in the news that people were still being murdered because of their

027race in order for their finally to be positive change and i apologize if i come off as very aggressive or if what i'm speaking about is controversial but i am clearly upset and i and if anyone does find what i have to say too controversial or what amy has said to agree like anything like that i would just recommend that you reevaluate yourself because honestly the bigger issue here is that it's 2021 and racism still exists and it's still horrible it's atrocious and we aren't going to get anywhere until we look within ourselves rather than just pointing the finger at some other location whether it be like oh atlanta yeah that's the guy the shooter he was messed up yeah no kidding but when are we gonna actually look in the mirror and try to

028reflect on our own pr prejudices and our own white privilege or any other privilege that we have that's like this this isn't going to change until we do that and i thank you all for allowing me to speak and i apologize once again if this came off as aggressive but everything that happened was very impactful to me and to my whole family so thank you again linda no apology required none you you and amy are invited as always your honesty your your eloquence um and um and and we we value we value you both and and everything that you bring to us and continue to bring to us um and and thank you thank you for for bringing what you brought today i'd like to say linda and amy that i feel honored that you

029brought that to us i think that's it's a big statement um both on your behalf that you're willing to bring that to us and it's a statement of trust that we will take it and not just dismiss it um and and we won't um your words are very powerful you're both so well spoken i'm incredibly impressed um and i'm really i'm impressed and truly honored that you would bring this to us and and you've heard some of what we're doing and obviously don't you know stay through the whole things when we discuss it in more detail we really are committed to making change on this front and and are trying to support dr hunter the best we can in all of the changes that she's trying to enact um and you keep us inspired to

030keep on that and to keep moving and you're right progress should not take a whole generation and it is on all of us everybody to try to make that progress as fast as we can um so again just thank you for bringing that to us and it it does inspire us i just wanted to add that you girls are very courageous to put yourself out there so um honestly with your own personal experiences and these are really powerful and important voices because that experience translates to understanding what you are going through and what the community asian community is going through so i appreciate your voices and coming forward thank you linda i'm not going to be as articulate as you were but i want to try to say something to you and amy you you

031uh referred to the idea that you might always be considered inferior by virtue of your heritage your inherent characteristics um and what i want to say is number one i want to validate what you said that that's your truth and we need to know that and at the same time i want to tell you that this school committee categorically rejects the idea that we're going to classify people in that way and dehumanize people or permit it to happen in our schools uh you're looking at the embodiment of white privilege when you're looking at me so there's a lot i don't know about isms and about discrimination from personal experience the one thing many of us and i include my school committee colleagues and certainly the superintendent and her leadership team one thing we've learned in

032the last year is that there really is no such thing as not being a racist we're either anti-racist or we're perpetuating systemic racism this is one of our wake-ups i think that has been very very useful to us so you know before you head on your way to the next place where you're going to make a big difference both of you i hope you know that we and i think i echo heather here we we have been so so fortunate to have you in the room with us and you've got our heartfelt thanks thank you um hard to move on after that but um but now now we've moved to public comment um and a few reminders um to to make to put yourself in queue for a comment go to the participants button and

033push the raise hand button or put on your video so we can recognize you uh let us know who you are with your name and address when you begin speaking and uh new speakers or returning speakers speaking on a new topic have three minutes to speak uh you'll get a little reminder when it's time to start making your concluding remarks and then uh and as a reminder this isn't a dialogue with the school committee it's a chance for you to express your ideas to talk to share to ask questions um but please don't expect an immediate answer or response um so with that do we have any public comments today or i'm oh todd benjamin hello hi uh my internet connection is bad so hopefully you can hear me better than than i can hear

034you um so hopefully this is coming through uh without interruption um court congratulations on your re-election to the school committee i wanted to say that i wanted to also point out that there was no discussion about the school choice public hearing at previous meetings and i noticed that too about the budget public hearing and uh and i think it would be hopeful if in the in the meetings before public hearings that uh it was mentioned hey everyone there's a public hearing coming up uh just seems like a good thing to do from a transparency perspective also noticed in the agenda that there was no update on getting the high schoolers back to school i was kind of surprised at that and was thinking that this should be something that is on an agenda topic every

035every meeting there's plenty of discussion about the middle school building project and the middle school won't be built for three years but uh really don't see a lot of uh consistent discussion on getting the kids back to school yes we have had conversations about that in the past but what what is the update because not everybody's back to school yet then also the last thing i wanted to raise is as pertaining to the educational deficit uh for our kids um it's there's no argument there's no ambiguity that our kids are having an educational deficit because of the circumstances so what is being done about this this is another topic that is not being discussed and i really don't understand why it's not being discussed so how are we analyzing and evaluating the magnitude of the

036educational deficit that our kids are experiencing where is that educational deficit and what actions are being taken now to fix this deficit and again this is something that should be on the agenda for for every meeting and i just don't understand why that's not the case because from my understanding that is the mission the mission is to educate our kids but yet these crucial educational topics are not being discussed so i i ask and implore you uh to get these items on the agenda consistently so that we can fulfill our obligation to our kids to get them the education they need thank you are there any other members of the public who would like to speak i think i don't see any new cameras on and i don't see any hands raised okay um chairs

037and liaisons reports alexa i think you have a super report i'm not muted i do um so eva and i met with the cpac last week on thursday morning um [Music] the one of their big initiatives right now is that they're doing their teacher appreciation awards it was actually really nice to see one of the one of the bigger questions was what happens as a parent when i want to nominate more than one person um so i thought that was a nice sort of encouraging anecdote that came out of that meeting and then we moved on we offered the cpac even though we're having an april 6th hearing on the diversity equity and inclusion director we did offer those guys some time to sort of weigh in on their thoughts which they did and then

038additionally there was a robust discussion about the middle school building as well as the ed plan so much so that it couldn't fit in specifically to their agenda so lori um and the head of special education ruth grubby are scheduling a time for a follow-up meeting with those guys so um they have a lot going on and um and we'll we'll keep engaging with them moving forward that looks like it's going to happen april 12th just firming it up awesome thanks thank you eva anything to add that was kind of the gist right those are the big topics yeah that was kind of the just the um the group was trying to figure out if there is a way to hold those awards in person yeah it's really it feels like spring it feels like

039things are moving in the right direction when we have those conversations uplifting um fatima we're going to hear a lot from you later with policy so we'll hate on that one uh court do you have uh i can uh report that uh we uh several of us were at the finance committee meeting last thursday for concord and that will come up in the conquered uh uh part of the of the meeting later on tonight discussing the middle school and select board met yesterday and i believe the indigenous people's calendar item remained on their consent agenda last night if i'm correct and approved it i'm seeing some affirmative there uh and then finally again this will come up later in the concord portion uh but this is the time for liaison chairs the design subcommittee of

040the school building committee had a meeting slated for this morning uh but given uh the fact that we might be reopening some uh some essentials uh about the building and what needs it's serving uh we canceled that meeting as as a lot is in play that's what i have sarah yeah i couldn't make it in the end to the meeting yesterday so i don't know for certain that that the indigenous people's uh okay on that proclamation it was on their agenda to but um but i haven't heard anything definitive from them one way and that was in response to the letter that sarah sent to them on our behalf and the work of the middle school correct thank you yes um i'll just i wasn't going to do a middle school update since we're talking

041about it later but just while there's a more of an audience here i will mention that our next community forum is tomorrow evening at 7 p.m so that's very important giving timing as court said some questions are opening up now about um overall project cost and size of gym and auditorium and everything and the second really important piece of input collecting is now open which is a town-wide survey i'm trying to broadcast this everywhere possible we're going out not just through school channels obviously through lots of town-based channels but um just another announcement here for anybody who's watching on the on the school website on the building project website you can find the link uh to the survey and we're trying to collect feedback from everyone in concord if possible thank you um any other

042report one more just well we have i think what will be our biggest audience uh tonight at this hour and apropos mr benjamin's uh recommendation that we try to give people uh four notice uh as best we can uh point well taken um and dr hunter may have more on this uh but uh know a little bit more about uh the plan for next week it's already been mentioned at seven o'clock next tuesday april 6th a community conversation hosted by the school leadership team and the school committee 7 pm so that it's we hope a more accessible hour for more people and it will be an opportunity for us to hear from the community as to wants needs concerns and questions relative to the intention on the part of the school district to bring in

043a new leadership structure around diversity equity and inclusion [Music] the budget piece of this has been done the broad uh conceptual thinking about structure has been done and we deliberately want to pause and bring the community in again they've been with us throughout but we want to bring them in again before the work continues to refine what the leadership structure and objectives will be for next year i know others have been very involved in this dr hunter notably things you might add lori no i think that's well said the invitation um and notice to the community will go out either tonight or first thing in the morning so that we are sure to give people time to put it on their calendars and obviously we'll record it so it's available and certainly solicit feedback other

044ways if people can't make it if i may add um just an invitation to the community obviously you would agree that we want to have as broad a conversation um that we can uh we want to widen the spectrum of opinions questions and concerns and i would like us to invite the the members of the community who are not able to attend or be with us next tuesday to send us their questions send us their their concerns their stories like the stories we've heard from linda and amy today so please if you are not able to come let us know what you're thinking about what you are uh you would like us to to address it thank you thank you thank you for having that family yeah okay great um minutes from our open session

045of february 9th and february 23rd is there a motion to accept the minutes so moved for both committees second for both discussion thanks darren any thanks uh roll call anderson i for both blue thigh for both without i for both miss dead eye for both my stuffy eye for region greeting for both and wilson for region thank you uh correspondence in the region uh we had a correspondence about level literacy and another about the special education budget both of which were in conversations with the administration about and then one from a student reaching out regarding a scout badge project [Music] and for concord uh since we last met we have had a correspondence about uh uh the health implications uh surrounding reopening and another one about uh the size of the auditorium at the middle

046school another one about the current budget estimate for the new middle school another one about uh athletics facilities at the new middle school then one about uh asl american sign language at uh services provided by edco uh then one about the uh performing arts space at the middle school um hoping it would be uh uh enlarged further and then today several in regard to level literacy and curriculum and then finally uh one that is a second and final appeal from the celebrations committee for the town of concord extended to us through minuteman media if this school committee wants to gather on zoom or physically and distanced we're invited to create our own little short video that will be broadcast as part of a medley of videos that will take the place of the traditional patriots

047day parade deadline for our five minute video is friday and it would be pretty simple it would be a greeting to our fellow citizens from the school committee so if there's a sentiment toward it um we could make it very easy uh physically distanced or on zoom and uh uh see that this uh happens absent any conversation that would uh threaten open meeting law but simply make it a greeting and keep it simple and get it off to our local cable folks i think that it's friday friday deadline correct i'm going to guess it's going to have to be on it's going to be assumed yeah i think we're trying to coordinate all of our schedules in the next couple of days i don't know i'm happy to participate if someone takes the lead and

048can actually find a time when we can all do this online together all right so i'll put i'll put the word out uh i'm allowed to do scheduling talk uh in keeping with open meeting law we can do that by by email see where it goes okay thank you all thank you sir okay um so are we now at laurie yes superintendents report thank you uh i think you'll find that uh in weeks that i bring you a report we tend to incorporate all of the broad and the many items that are in here um through the report rather than as individual agenda items so i know in fact my report contains some of the questions that have already been posed tonight so um and i do organize this just a reminder to all of

049you and the public that this is organized in terms of the goals for the year and that's by design so it also helps us reflect on where we are in terms of progress towards my my superintendent goals um there's a lot here so i'll i'm gonna hit things quickly and let you then ask questions assuming you've read the report rather than going through every single item that's here uh we are going to be launching in may a district by protocol to capture the really great parts of the pandemic and where we've benefited from innovation and make sure that that's going to be work that we sustain going forward so that's a district-wide protocol not a survey it's going to be an exercise similar to what we did during the strategic plan so you'll hear more

050on that as we get closer right now we did survey a number of stakeholders that have guided the work in returning students to school and i hit this again a little bit further down we are ready for all the elementary kids to stay all day on beginning monday we met earlier today and looked at transportation we have been able to grant all of the requests for students to ride the bus to school so we're excited that we were able to work that for parents so that anyone who wanted a bus ride has one we've been working really hard at schedules and coverage and supervision and all the moving pieces of having kids stay for the full day especially around lunch and an outdoor time and how we're going to structure that as well as the

051afternoon beyond that which includes the specialists and i just want to remind you that we are proposing uh remote specialists for the uh continuation of this school year only there's a number of factors that lead to that top of that list would be we have one music teacher for three schools which has served us well up until now and will continue to serve as well if it was longer than you know a couple of months we'd be looking to do things differently and certainly for the fall we're in the hiring process right now to reinstate those positions we also just need to be mindful that teachers traveling that much they're not fully vaccinated yet so having teachers travel that much um does it does increase the risk of close contacts and more quarantine so there's

052a whole other set of reasons if you want more information on that um we are meeting with cpac as i mentioned there's uh questions and information we want to share and have a dialogue about programming and any other services per se we did just complete our tiered focus monitoring with the state they were in to look at special education ell and civil rights that is essentially a document review process they were on site but only to take files and go through them personally the initial feedback meetings that we had with them as they left last week were very positive full reports can take as many as 60 days so we'll be watching for that and keep you posted um it's really interesting having done these you know processes in the past to have covid over

053shadowing the whole piece actually added both a benefit and that we could get feedback from them on how we'd manage the covid aspects of things but also i think they were giving us a lot of positive feedback on on what they already had seen and taken away from what they heard i i did include some data from the fall and it's really the high level view of the data this obviously gets much more granular we used star assessment as both our screener for achievement gaps as we came back from the school closure it's also our dyslexia screener so that we identify any kids with particular needs um just to to have you note that the thresholds that are there we did not use the state or national thresholds that are set um with the star

054program we've actually created our own conquered thresholds and so any students that were identified not meeting the threshold or in need of intervention are relative to our conquered expectations not state or national and when we come back in may there's a i think a scheduled uh presentation for data overview on the may 11th meeting that'll be a much more in-depth look at what that data led us to where we think it's going for the spring and a real robust conversation on the interventions that we've been offering just it's worth noting that you know the the change of mode here is altering those a little bit and making having us reinvent them again um elementary especially we had a lot of uh small group creative small group work going on even across classrooms because the remote

055environment allowed us to do that and now we're going to have to um now we're figuring that out with uh six foot distance and kids in their classrooms so not that that's a negative it's just a fact of having to rework that so a lot more to come there but i did want to give you the data overall of where we started in the fall um and you know then we'll bring you the intervention plans and how they how they executed this year um it's worth noting aspen's our software monitoring system our software curriculum maps a year ago chris and herbert led work with the department chairs and leaders in terms of documenting what had happened last spring and what had not um and that drove our curriculum work for this year we will do

056the same exercise at the end of this year obviously the coverage is far more extensive than a year ago um and that will drive us going forward so we're being really fluid with the curriculum to be sure that priority skills are met and prerequisite skills are ready for kids to go into the following school year in terms of covid and the middle and high school pieces this this will loop us into some of those reopening plans at the older grades we have transportation in the works now with the hope there too that we can honor all requests to have students on the bus are we looking at dismissal especially in terms of just the volume and how we're going to work through that with concord police uh lunch by far is the the pinch point

057i both middle in high school jared how many tents have we brought in k-12 did we i think we lost count at this point many many tents on site at differing degrees at each building primarily to focus on lunch being outside but also for classroom and other purposes right now in terms of enrollments of students returning to us the community has certainly received the plan positively we're at about 25 kids at each elementary school 40 about will remain remote at middle school and the numbers as of this afternoon had about 100 kids remaining remote at the high school so that'll have us well into the 95 of kids in school um during the month of april which you know we're really excited about brings a lot of a lot of planning for sure as we

058look to have safety protocols in place and a particular effort to be sure that we keep those remote kids included and connected to the school environment and recognizing and naming that that needs to be intentional work on our part given that the numbers and the shift of of mode um we are also connecting with the private schools our transportation changes affect them so we've stayed close to them and had conversations with the afternoon runs especially uh the principals are taking the lead and sharing the details and logistics the elementary principles are all sending information out i believe tomorrow with a lot of in-depth information for parents as to what's going to be happening and what the needs are and you know some real basic information as to how next week will look we have added

059staff in terms of supervision for lunch and specials at the elementary school and we are adding desks at middle and high school in order to allow for the desks to go into the classrooms as they normally would in some cases in the middle school we had four foot tables which are very hard to do the right amount of distancing with and we want to be sure the common spaces are set up for distance just as they have been so jared's team's been working really hard to be cost effective with desk purchases and i think given given the challenges of it we feel we're doing it as cost effectively as possible knowing it's a need to to maintain safety um coveted wise we have had 171 cases uh we continue to follow our protocols you know

060i will continue to say we expect more quarantines with more kids back close contact especially at middle and high school with less than six feet we'll you know increase the number of kids who will be listed and named as close contacts the staff continue to receive their vaccines which reduces the need for them to quarantine and also will mean all of our teachers are back from remote teaching by the april break give or take one or two who needed a little more time to get the vaccine scheduled because of the challenges of that process pool testing is going very smoothly we continue to be looking for how to increase participation i included a lot of detail here in terms of what the numbers have been for student enrollment in the program since we started in

061february it is inching up as you can see we're at almost 1400 last week uh in great news the state announced yesterday that they will be paying for the program for the remainder of the school year so my procrastination uh strategy somehow worked on that one so we're glad for that and now just really trying to help people see the value um we've been really able we had two positive pools last week and we knew who the positive individual was within hours because we were able to navigate the testing process um so that that's i hope messages we can keep sharing that the quarantines don't become extensive unless there's the unless there's a connection to the positive case and we're you know isolating spread um to shift gears then just to some of the follow-up

062of the anti-racist and cultural competency work you've already talked on tonight i had another meeting with the superintendents association committee on march 16th there's a lot of really great statewide work going on there and i guess one comment i have to make that i probably take for granted um is the interest and willingness to have these conversations in concord and carlisle is not found in every every community some some districts are having a hard time even having the need for the conversation be valued and push back as to the why and push you know some dismissal of the real urgency and i think to just hear our starting point being so different than that um is really going to matter a great deal no question um i will be on a panel of some of

063the people the colleagues on these committees at the mass conference this summer um you mentioned the forum next week i had i met with uh mr nemichi and mr masjid we talked with some some of the metco families last week we've been part of other math leveling conversations at the middle and high school which it's going to be important that we communicate that a lot of those kinds of conversations about our structures is really part of that that work one of the biggest needs is to be sure that our students of color are not only landing into the low-level courses and can't find ways to you know promote and achieve or land where they should to start with so we're excited by restructuring and these are really hard changes in some cases as as you

064know there's also a recording of a recent discussion a number of students of color met with the science department at the high school and shared i think you know similar not as passionate as linda's and not as painful in terms of how personally um she shared tonight but similar in terms of their experience of feeling connected and um you know really stem being being something they're drawn to so there's a lot of great conversations going on i just want to be sure we share that with you um the hiring is up and running and we've been quite successful at having uh having candidates of color recruiting so now the committees are starting to interview so we will keep you posted on how that all plays out and i think i'll stay very high level with

065the middle school project since we're going to do that later tonight i am spending a lot of time on that as you would expect and i feel feel that that's been valuable both in terms of the internal time as we work with the architects in the middle school leadership and and teachers but also with the community outreach i think i don't have the number right in front of me heather probably does but you know it's been over 20 community groups i think that we've met with so far um in a really positive flow of information going to them and they've been really really positive in sharing that they feel like the process has been inclusive so um so those are the highlights i'm happy to take any questions and know that almost you know a

066lot of those topics could be agenda items in and of themselves and they will be as we put our put our plans together for the remainder of the year thank you half the number of testing participants as would be ideal so ideal um per the experts as 75 of the student population uh we are not we're probably about 40 right now so yeah you're probably about right all right thank you so for those listening in uh we hope you'll echo laurie's message and ours which is we'd love to boost those numbers the state public health dollars are there for us uh it's it's up to us to use them it's gonna help us yeah yeah last week was a you know we don't want positive pools but i think it demonstrated the the reason we're

067doing it was those those positives were caught and isolated and you know we won't have spread and have any potential potential ongoing breakouts i think too i mean i can't speak highly enough about this program i was i wouldn't say i was reluctant at the beginning but i was nervous for my kids for so many reasons and i have little kids still and i'm not going to go so far as to say they love it but i was actually really surprised i think this is sometimes a barrier to entry for people who aren't doing it yet the kids swab themselves it is not um you know for i think the vast majority of kids that makes it really less traumatic um it's not it doesn't feel like a medical intervention to them um anyway i

068that was i think in in my private discussions with people i think that had been one barrier to people getting on board with it and um i just want to make sure that people really understand that it is not it does not feel like a traumatic sort of medical intervention for any age um on the webinar i was on yesterday with the state they really had a whole section on almost the marketing of this and i heard it differently than i heard it before so i think we're going to get a little creative and outside the box here not that my serious messages won't keep going out but uh to your point alexa maybe a little a little more draw it out people know what it really looks and feels like and yeah i think

069there's some work we could do there yep my kids will show you on the video there there we go volunteer them in the nurse's office they actually are quite entertaining when they're in there getting so if we don't have the logistics to take kids through they're not going to go on their own especially at the high school level there's just no we so my district we take them through a mass breaks each class at elementaries goes through our testing tent um that i don't think any amount of marketing you do especially if it's a voluntary i'll take you know i'll go there when i have time um you really have to make it you know part of that day it there's no question that takes away from classroom time but you know it's sort of

070the trade-off you need to make yeah you had shared that with me cynthia and i did open those conversations up at the buildings this week about you know how do we make it more a main stay of the day rather than a one more thing kind of feel so you're right okay what's the participation of those who are signed up are they all going for their tests they mostly are now they weren't initially uh but most of them are now we had started with 1400 consents at the high school and you can see it took almost till the first month was over to get all 1400 to go so i'm gonna check in this week and see if if participation and consent still equal each other if we've got more work to you know more

071room to gain there just with parents saying yes and kids not coming so i know that on the high school side that uh email reminder was very very helpful because initially kids thought oh i did my duty i'm done i did my first test and i'm done um but then once that reminder um keep coming parents are also reminding kids go get tested yeah definitely and i would say at the middle school the process from i get from a parent's perspective it seems to be very efficient they literally do it on the way into school and so there's almost no way to miss it it's a it's a great easy obvious process they catch them on the way in and then they don't have to think about it all day so from what i've seen

072that seems to be working really well i was also just going to say overall thank you for all the detail on and all the work behind it on how we are getting the kids back in and i i wanted to comment um partially in response to mr benjamin's comment but that i think we we are seeing a lot of what's going on and and maybe it isn't an agenda item but it's really helpful to hear in your superintendent's report and to some extent that's our job is to hear what you're doing with the logistics of getting kids back to school are certainly not our our foray um so it's it's really helpful just to hear that and i appreciate it and i feel like we have a good feel for what you're doing and then

073it's all happening so it's great to see you heading back so lori just to get a uh maybe in our next meeting we should have an agenda item on the reopening of particularly the high school and i know the logistics around the match and i was just wondering what the future of the tent is because 14 spaces is 14 spaces yeah um i i've talked to the town leaders a couple of times they had put in for a regional possible vaccination i think they are they're not the primary side but they might be the secondary they were declined on that lorry okay so so i think we can ask um i don't know where they're at if they're ready to say it's not going to happen or or not we we did be speaking of

074logistics the high school seniors um the juniors have been told they're not parking in the lot until after graduation the seniors are all going to get assigned a spot if they want one we're starting over we're not going to undo and recon configure we're just going to assign spots to all the seniors for the month of you know last week of april and into may um so those are some of the details but we'll we'll be happy to share share more we needed to get that figured out before we asked about transportation those two are connected to each other yeah um so we've you know checking checking off the boxes as we go we're meeting regular you know surprise i'm meeting with each level at least once a week if not twice jared's there talking

075tents and chairs and money and desks and we're all there um ruth and kristen is there as well so we're really really the buildings or building leaders are running it and we're there to support them and what they need can i ask you about the star assessment you mentioned the star assessment and i want you to tell us at a high level that the thresholds are different in comparison to the state can you tell us a little bit why they're different and how what's the um what's the outcome of that difference right the outcome is that in general if we look at national standards or even often the state standards vast huge percentage of our kids meet those standards so because our expectations are higher here um we raise the threshold i think around 20

076points we'll clarify when we come back in may and look to be sure that we're identifying kids who might have made those other benchmarks but aren't going to make our local benchmarks because we all know if you're you know a student in concord not able to keep pace with what concord is doing that that's a challenge so trying to be sure we're identifying those kids who need those interventions and i'm talking regular ed right now this isn't special ed that's a different presentation and conversation um and then you know this this is that first data point to help us identify kids who might need those supports and then we do follow-up data gathering and obviously the interventions are targeted at whatever those needs are the goal always being if we can support kids in regular

077ed um and work through those little spots of gap that we close them and um we don't have special education needs um evolve but obviously in some cases they're the the first sign of a bigger picture need that needs further investigation so um we'll bring you a lot of detail when we come with the may kristen will have all the numbers and the the data that goes with all of that and the work that's gone on this year um k9 essentially thank you okay great thank you thank you uh jared some old business variance report great so i can reject it or so when you pack it you have three items uh you have a memo uh describing the um the region's two variance reports by 1000 which is the rolled up version as well

078as the 100 so what i can do is i can share this screen and sort of just go over it um i'll go over the 100 i mean the 1000 and if you have any questions um i can pull up the 100. all right so i need to start by saying this is a year like no other um we are normally around this time getting ready to start our closeout mode we are not near that point at this time we received about nine new grants most of these being actually 11 new grants but most of these being covert related grants and i'd say this has taken up almost half if not at least a quarter of ian reims's time managing all of these um so while our expenditure and our available balance may look high

079right now there's going to be a number of what we do every single year we do reclassifications we do to our revolving accounts to our grant accounts and then as the memo stated we do have some some one-time purchases that usually happen in the springtime so as of the 26th we had um we had an available balance of 2 million 964 um it's important to note that we are in balance we always keep ourselves in balance um so we do have we do have a positive balance and i know you guys received this report on friday and i'm wondering if you had any specific questions on this um so what i wanted to point out uh and show you um while we're not necessarily in closeout mode yet we are still thinking about closeout mode

080so again we have an available balance just under 2.4 million so some of the priorities that we identified um the first being that we'd like to maintain the five percent e and d to do that we have we're projecting right now that we need to end the general fund in a surplus of approximately 409 000. the reason for that is uh in the fy 22 voted budget you reserve 300 000 for end contribution for fy22 we're estimating about a hundred thousand dollars in shortfalls in revenue this year um just due to uh the interest as well as uh rental income we did lower our interest in fy 22 but we do need to make up that that delta for fy 21. in addition we're expect we're anticipating or estimating to need at least a another

0819 000 in underspent general fund to get to that 4.999 percent one of our other priorities uh would be to maximize the circuit breaker going into next year so we feel very comfortable saying that we are going to be able to be in surplus um many of the reasons for that is uh the cares that money the coven money did offset not now please the offset money did sorry of course i just get interrupted right when i'm going um it didn't it's okay um so the cares act money did um we were able to save some money in the general fund with uh with with the cares act money um we did prepay tuitions if you remember this past with fy 20 monies so there's a surplus right now in the tuitions we did uh

082prepay for computers this past uh in fy 20. so we are recommending uh starting to think about prepaying tuitions uh for fy22 as well as prepaying for the computer replacement cycle currently peter kelly is working on some quotes for that some other ideas that we've we threw out there was purchasing an electric bus um we would be eligible at the region right now to get chapter 71 reimbursement on this so that's um so that's a really good thing uh prepaying opeb could be an option you can prepay for next year or put monies towards opeb if you choose to do so the snow bus sweep that i brought to you in the capital budget for next year would be uh something that i'd love to to purchase if we had available money that would be

083split between the region and the um in cps another thing would be to fund the capital stabilization account now the way to do that would be now that end is certified at 4.99 the school committee could move monies from the emd to the capital stabilization account you would need to go back to the towns to see if that they if they wanted to fund this uh but because you have the money and you're not increasing your budget this would not have to go back to town meeting so if we were to do that um my recommendation would be waiting until the springtime when i'm able to project a surplus and what you could do is you could move that projected surplus or any amount to um the stabilization account and then that surplus would then

084offset um the loss in end to get us to that 4.99 if that's the target another thing would be to prepay prepay ecco that's a mistake there prepay echo if we know the cost and lastly would be to reduce assessments in fy 22. jared can you just talk on how that would work because it's yeah just talk on the process so um you are not allowed to end in a surplus it's it's i guess illegal is not the right word but it's very frowned upon and we would get a management markup in our in our audit um what you can do is you if you are projecting a surplus you can redo re you can reduce the assessments um for the future year you wouldn't just give the money back at the region it would

085be used to offset offset the assessments the other thing too it's it's important to say we will not be able to probably come close to getting ua well we would not be able to project the the uh surplus and probably until june but we will not end our year until probably august uh recently at the beginning of this month deci extended their end-of-year audits which is good news for us because we're trying to get school open among other things but what that is doing is if they do not have the end-of-year audits in they're pushing out their revenue estimates so revenue estimates might not come in until uh the final ones and for this year and for next year until sometime this summer therefore we won't be able to fully close out because we won't

086know all of our revenue especially chapter 71 for the region uh this summer um and am i missing anything on that that's sort of your warehouse whale house when it comes to the audits no no i think you got it but yeah that delay is going to make it so that way the state can't certify final revenue figures for the regional school districts until probably july or august so so every month every week i will get closer on projections we do we will have a lot of expenses uh in april and early may like we do every year so that available unencumbered balance will certainly go down drastically but it's only about just under a seven percent um unencumbered balance right now so um so we're treading very very well and jared what what of

087those of the of that buffet of options um i mean which ones are time sensitive to if if the budget's closing later then than usual does the the uh reducing the assessments does that one have to be done before the the town meetings or is there anything that's that's critical to from a time perspective no you can reduce it after the fact um since town meetings are in june as long as it's before i want to say june 30th i haven't been in that situation before um but but you know if if we do um if we do realize the surplus that was not mentioned before the end of june that they will offset assessments anyway um it's just a different process than on than us bringing it to you all and letting you know

088that we will end in a surplus uh by law we we can have fy21 expenses spent um up until june july 15 as long as they are encumbered so if you encumber say you say you want to um purchase an electric bus as long as it's encumbered by july 15th um then we're safe there encumbered by july 15th not incumbent by june 30th right okay that's correct right ian for some for something like that yes yeah but you i mean ideally you want to get an encumbrant before june 30th but that's what i can understand um since we didn't see this information until right now and i didn't have any time to think about this i really would like us to move this conversation until next week i didn't did we get this memo and

089no this was done because it was sort of asked for after the fact and this is just a very this is a brain dump for me to get the conversation going yeah i don't know i don't even want to spend time in this meeting discussing it because not it's not specifically an agenda item so i'd like to move it to our next meeting because i have questions on the encumbrance you know the information that we do have sure so i don't want to sort of shift away from that and move to this which is a very important topic um the only reason i brought it is just because of the unencumbered balance and that was on that first slide that i wanted to say that we have options and it's so it relates to the

090variance report but i certainly understand that and an option is to return the monies to the to towns or is that not an option that that is an option to return the money's uh by lowering the assessment let's make sure we're talking the same words you have to lower the assessment you can't just give cash back at the region you lower the assessment for the coming school year similar to giving it back but instead it becomes revenue towards next year's budget right cps if you end in a surplus um which will not necessarily projecting right now but that since we're just the department of the town that would just go to the free cash no i understand that yeah so you definitely can cannot help the help both towns if you choose to offset the

091assessments with what we have left i think this is really helpful um i mean yes clearly a more detailed discussion would be later but it's good to know for i'm glad to see for now that there are options and kind of generally what they are what is our timing for when we would need to make a decision on these things i'm assuming it's once you have a better estimate but i would say you know by may 1st i'm going to start having uh you know mid-may um but every week i'll bring ideas to dr hunter and and we can put it on the agenda if need be but may i'm going to start feeling much more comfortable than i am right now and for example i would say hardware 100 go to federal money yeah

092that's my opinion and it doesn't go through an appropriation budget but it does go through a school committee um jared uh quick question about stabilization but i concur with cynthia we'll want to get into this when we all know more um you refer to a state the stabilization fund do we not uh maintain two at the present time yes so we have two we have a uh a capital stabilization account that i believe was established in 1991 and uh and there's very minimal money in that um and then you have a technology capital stabilization account that i think was established on or around 2016 ian oh that one that one's uh 2009. i wouldn't got it thank you so if we can return back to the uh the variance report um maybe i missed it

093tell us a little bit more not tremendous detail necessarily uh about why some significant one-time purchases can't be encumbered but can be projected sure um so a lot of a lot of our budgeted hardware items um we usually spend those uh we usually buy purchase those in the springtime uh so we work on quotes that way when the items arrive it's sort of a summer project for them so that's one there are certain payroll things that are you know substitute costs for the most part we do have those encumbered but there are right now we are as we open school we are going to be hiring um some what we're calling new nades at the elementary schools those are not yet encumbered but there's available balance that will be [Music] sorry as things going on

094the background here um so other one-time costs and what i'm missing is that's pretty much yeah those are the big ones right now is we have some new hires and then we still have the unknown of reopening things that are going to come up so and then you know miscellaneous supplies materials um laurie and i do not like to do large blanket purchase orders so that's another reason why you may be seeing a larger balance than in years past one while we do trust our managers to have control of these blanket purchase orders it's a false encumbrance and at the end of the year many times if it's not spent big surpluses come back to the budget and while that may be a good thing um it's it's not necessarily because i'd like to know

095what is out there what is blanket so right now we don't really have any open encumbrances for more than about ten thousand dollars and that would be for like home depot etc um so a lot of our equipment that we are looking to potentially purchase is uh is not encumbered thank you that's very helpful um let me let me ask about one specific item because i think it'll uh educate me more generally um we moved uh money into food services at the high school in order to provide for uh sustenance um when we get into normal operation does that go back into a uh fee based or partial fee based uh system yeah so right now i just and i we we moved that in recently uh we're projecting about a fifty thousand dollar loss

096this year um at the uh food service at the high school which als uh all things being said is pretty good so we did want to just get that in the general fund we can eventually move that back um but and we actually do think that now that school is going to be opening up when we did this projection especially at the high school we didn't anticipate that additional potential revenue but for the most part our food service is i would say it is it is completely self-self-funding and what we're seeing here in the variants is strictly the appropriation so some of these monies are going to disappear entirely from this ledger and go to a cares ledger well the cares for the most part is all moved over ian does take care of that

097but you will there are things that will be going to the what we call the 240 special ed grant um and vice versa uh the circuit breaker uh revolving account um those are our two heavies and then we do have when we get into the cares act we do have suggestions for that um and i can talk about that and they can be replenished by by cares offsets but it's an indirect process if i'm catching you correctly yes i had a question for jared um do we have an estimate of the cost for this summer program was that accounted for uh because it sounds like from the um our superintendent presentation we're still uh waiting for those numbers um coming from testing we do have a budgeted amount and i can let laurie speak to

098that but we do have a budgeted amount and we also we we're certain that there will be some sort of funding for summer school uh once the new grant comes out um yeah i can speak to that a little bit so that the newest um recovery act that was past march 11th it includes a an amount that has to be earmarked by schools for extended day or extended year kind of things to make up for the lost time over the school year so i think the idea is that it's gonna like a certain portion of that money has to go towards you know summer school type of stuff we actually spoke about it in the morning uh with the with both kristen and ruth uh to talk on what they're you know getting for needs

099and planning ruth's going to have more kids you know to service than other years we also learned this week that in extraordinary circumstances we must offer remote summer school remote extended school year for special education and we hadn't planned for that yet so that'll be another moving piece and then we're very actively in fact i saw before we got on here the elementary and middle are still crunching numbers as to who will be invited and participate in the um any other programming that we offer there so it's a lot of fluid still because it's early but we're airing on the side of more service than less and the good news is with all with the cares money coming in we were you know able to say plan what you need and then bring us the

100number we're not going to give you you know you know what the budget is factor it in but plan what you need and then then we'll work through the money part so what is our plan at the region so we're still talking right now we're essentially focused on extended school year um we haven't talked on any regular ed component of of regional services we're focused on the special education so we'll bring that to you as we we make our way through it but we don't usually have a summer school at the region right now we don't usually they might have credit recovery that comes through often some uh ironically we thought it was you know creative at the time a more remote environment you know some of the vhs options things like that we always

101have some credit recovery opportunities for kids who need them but um on a much smaller scale so are you still doing all that work how you might staff such a program uh we haven't gone that far yet we have to identify the needs and then we'll figure the staffing because i think it's something like 20 for summer school or some number like that so it's a pretty life it's a healthy it was healthy enough based on what ian had sort of alluded to that i literally said bring us what you need for kids anyone who needs service because we know there's money coming so and that would be the rising ninth graders just so yeah yes yeah i know it's a lot so if there's ways we can you know we've got all these moving

102pieces with the typical complexities now with all the additional we want to be sure we're getting it to you in the most comprehensible way possible so and if i expect we need to come back to it it's not a one night discussion no because we really need to get that federal money number yeah i'm hoping that's in the next couple of weeks since the town got their number um because i think a lot of the it's you know we're going to try to have and i think the the date that needs to be expected is some september 1st 2023 or something like that um i heard last 20 24 jared okay good yeah 2024 yeah okay so we have to spread it out yes that would be the takeaway there my recommendation so the um

103the december money that was talked about uh we just learned of that uh earl earlier this month so that will be on in the next conversation when i talk about the cares act that was the that was the uh deci emergency relief two that came out in december but they just verified that um they just verified that amount i think this next the most recent one will move much quicker on my call with the commissioner last week um they had you know big picture numbers from the federal government but they hadn't actually gotten the allocation in the process yet to to to achieve it so but they were sounding like they thought it would move fairly quickly any other questions on variance can we go to two now back to the anything else on the

104you have a full up yeah why don't i why don't i show this and i'll just go over it really quickly so this is a memo that we put together uh as of march 26th uh all of our cares act in emergency relief money uh and i just want to start off by saying that you know we have pages of on pages of backup of all this we will be audited on it and like i said it is a part-time job for ian right now so as of march 26th we had about 1.3 million between both districts eligible costs of these about 268 uh were one-time costs so here are the here are the cost categories that are basically uh supplied to us by deci on how they want to see these numbers uh projected

105um and explained um so at the region um about 322 321 and at cps just over a million uh here is what is in the examples of what is in each cast cost category and then a nice little pie chart here so this has been updated so the cares act the cares act is uh that does have to be expended by june 30th um that will be expended um the 297 at the region in the uh 467 at the cps right now the two emergency relief amounts at both the region and at cps right now we're hoping that we can bring that into fy 22 and beyond um we know we will need it uh for next year uh we i know there is other monies coming but we don't know what that is yet

106we don't know how stringent it's going to be these emergency relief monies are there for emergencies um i feel that anything uh that any expenses to get us through june 30th um can either be used by cares act or or potentially general fund offsets of the tents pretty much all of the ppe that is all here in the encumbered or expended portion of the cares act money um so that is right now our uh my recommendation to try not to dip into those relief monies until we need them jared can i just ask the next time we see this updated can you also put a time reference to each of those because now it's getting to be a lot of them so right uh and i think i did do that before but uh absolutely

107um and i have something up here that i can even show you um why don't but yes i can uh you know what i'm going to quickly show this so something like this this is what we did in the past so this is from this october but this cares that money they did change this to 6 30 and then uh here the emergency relief for 9 30 20 22. and i think the latest one i the latest one might go into 24 but uh i got to double check that but we'll make sure we have that for you yeah that's helpful thank you [Music] so any questions on that well i hope that uh enu will extend our thanks to the people who work with you we know you're shouldering a lot of this with

108jared thank you very it's uh much more fun to count money when it's coming in then i have to deal with the opposite problem so i'll take it you are the you and jared are the stewards of the resources that make all of this happen thank you can i just say how lucky we are to have people who love this stuff [Laughter] i am going to make him blush but i'm going to say this he is unbelievable without him at this time right now i don't know where we would be um he handles all the grants basically all the other revenue other than general fund and he helps with that immensely but for him to keep track of all the grants is it it's a full-time job and he makes it look easy so just

109have to say that we love it and we appreciate it thank you thanks are there any other questions or comments no um with that i think i might propose that we take a five-minute break before getting into policy okay go back at 7 46 7 47 thanks thank you so eva's gonna rejoin on the phone which she's i think she's already connected i'm here i'm here okay so i think we are all back and now and now we're ready for policy all right okay so we are bringing you uh some policies that for first reading the policy subcommittee met on march 25 and um so we discussed the policies that we bring you today jj file jj co curricular and extracurricular activities um we have not made any changes we agreed that to bring it

110as it is just for again to put a date on it uh same for jja student organizations we agreed that they did not need any change and they are for you again to approve and put a new date on them um let's say uh [Music] um yes jje same as well is not changing uh student fundraising activities um and for jjf student activity accounts um i would like to bring that back for further discussion um if i may at the uh the next uh policies activity which is scheduled i believe for april 18. um and we can go over the changes that we made for um jjg um sorry father did you say april 18th right april yes aaron i was scheduled i believe it was april 18th right am i correct no he's talking

111about policy subcommittee meeting yeah the police of candy isn't april 18th a sunday about a vacation week we're not doing that i don't have my phone in front of me fatima but we did have 28 28 okay okay okay thank you thank you sarah thank you um all right so uh yes jj uh we specified uh so for student contests we did not change the uh the content of the policy the difference between the current and the proposed is that we're specifying the appropriate um administrator of the building straight instead of leaving uh in at the end of the paragraph involvement in contests shall be approved by the appropriate administrator we chose to specify and say instead the building principle that's the only thing the only wording that's changing for uh jjg and for interscholastic

112athletics i um we added cross references we added cross references to the external policies jkta and jla yes everything else was um conforming to the masc policy uh yes you're right we just added the um the cross references which is student insurance programs and physical examination of students [Music] that is everything fatima do you want to take these one at a time and invite questions all right all right um okay we can begin with jj any questions or discussion uh co-curricular and extracurricular activities no questions okay uh what about student organizations again uh so it's remains unchanged um if we have any questions about student organizations all right uh student fundraising activities sorry the question there no i see the ones that are that are the same right you spoke with dorothy right so yes

113and there are no changes coming projected on the horizon for any of these okay so uh jjf is the one that we're not discussing and uh contests for students like i said the uh the change that we made there was just too many sorry quebec i would like you to take jj e back and look at it under the umbrella of fundraising and student activity fee a lot of school committees have statements that they prefer you know fundraising occur in a certain way not in classrooms you know those kinds of things so um particularly to the region i think um or maybe the middle school um but i think the in my opinion is the most fundraising at student fundraising at the high school but there's some at the middle school i guess but if

114you could maybe take that back and look at them as a pair all right if i may ask is there any specific changes that you would like to see in in the masc uh jje so i could send you some of the other policies i've seen at other districts mm-hmm um but they often sort of either have an umbrella policy or refer to them as a sort of a pair okay okay yeah i could see how it would relate to uh jjf because that deals with um raising money and managing that money um i can already see the two of them um crossing all right we will do that uh if if if the rest of the committee disagrees then that's that's fine cynthia can you just explain one more time i i what um

115like what you were looking for just one more time having been intimately involved in this topic hit the high school um it can get very complicated difficult uh for especially when parents are sort of assisting students in fundraising projects um you know sometimes people start you know selling tickets and taking the money and going home with it and that kind of thing so um i just think it's good to put some rules and regulations so that the community and protects our building heads and our superintendent and even the school committee so um if you look at the master rule it specifically says school committee is responsible for this so i just feel like we need to put a little more um just a very open-ended you know the fundraising topic and i think it needs

116to be a little more prescribed that's mine you can go look at these other policies and at the end of the day come back and say you know this one probably looks fine but i just like maybe a little closer examination of it i i would support that and ask that the committee go back uh to [Music] uh any any issues that we've had over the last decade in this regard and we have had some uh with uh i think uh some semi-independent accounts in the name of the school none during dr hunter's tender tenure or jared's tenure but nonetheless we could learn from it in terms of uh reporting uh and managing and reporting and accounting and to cynthia what i also think i'm hearing you say is let's make sure that these policies

117tie together right yeah so that's the the history that you mentioned um court and cynthia that's the history that our subcommittee did not have and it's taking jjf back and uh thank you for uh adding uh jji yes they are very closely uh tied to one another uh so if there's no disagreement yes we will take it um i'm not sure about process do we vote on this or do we well if you don't move uh if you don't move them next week uh but instead move them only when you have uh brought any additional findings our way i think that would fit our protocol okay so that would be we will bring them back after our uh april 28 meeting now i don't want to waste anybody's time but i will share with you

118that in terms of which one fundraising the the first line just gives me pause uh it's i don't know how to fix it however but the the misimpression here is that in a district like concord carlisle where we uh go to such great efforts to uh resource our schools uh the the implication here is that we have to manage offsets or or deficits by supplementing the budget and i i want to make clear that that's not our intent [Music] all all basic needs have been met admirably and supplement really means go way above and beyond um i don't know how to word it better however so you would focus more on the fundraising events or means of increasing communication fellowship amongst parents faculty students and presenting a greater understanding of the schools as more of

119the yeah the leader that we're supplementing budgets like it's a necessity might convey the wrong meaning but again i don't feel strongly enough about it to try to wordsmith it further i do share that sentiment um when i read it that's the first thing that came to mind you know we meeting we had a budget surplus and then we were doing a with student fundraiser so maybe we can say to fund activities that are not typically uh covered by the budget not for lack of resources but for other reasons we can work with that in our policy meeting too yeah yeah i just wanted to point it out you know did it court a little discomfort that's all thank you i agree i just wanted to ask is there a particular uh group of parents

120i don't know pto or who would we tap for some of that um institutional knowledge on uh how you know how to write this policy that would really reflect uh best practices around uh fundraising well i think i'm going to invite jared and ian into this conversation ian's certainly been a big part of this discussion i also think we want to clarify differences between ptg revolving accounts and things like that that we might support versus student activities versus because they're not all exactly the same i don't i think maybe we should do a better job of explaining and talking this through at the subcommittee and then we can be very versed in it when we bring it back to the full committee if that makes sense i think that makes sense and you could look

121at the the the big knowns like uh athletic fundraising pto operations and then some of the uh the more one-off ones where the group of students will try to raise money for a independent cause right yeah we'll separate all those out and the nuances that go with each and i wonder if we perhaps will be needing also a legal counsel to maybe attend the meeting or we could discuss that in between but that might be another resource too in terms of laws and shouldn't that expertise come from dorothy yeah but i think between dorothy and your fiscal experts here in the room we probably are in good shape yeah and lori and dorothy has legal behind her at masc you can need it okay all right good thank you yeah you're welcome thanks okay student

122contests uh contests for students really questions or discussions well i do see that one wrapped with others in that it's uh sometimes the contest is fundraising um uh if i'm correct it could be yes it could be like a poster contest or um but there's that fundraising but or this may be more in line with things like uh a league essay contest or something like that is that really where this one goes that's what we sort of ex explained in our policy meeting we did not talk about anything to do with fundraising this seemed entirely separate to me but maybe i missed something isn't this akin to the um the spanish or the language contests um aren't they the contest for this it's sort of not in the classroom but yeah it could i think

123when we talk again i think with what alexa said we were looking at more than community organization and agencies versus the educator-sponsored ones because some of the some of the ones the educators sponsor come from the national organizations and such like that where this this read to us and dorothy included that it would be more like what you mentioned court the league sponsoring an essay contest that's right and not the math olympiad i mean yeah yeah civics be okay yeah all right good now i'm i'm content if we don't have any questions on that one um we'll see if we have questions in on the interscholastic athletics again that's what has changed was the added uh cross-references [Music] the question i have for you fatima is uh and i'm embarrassed to say i don't know

124the answer second paragraph uh participation subject to school committee approval as a practical matter what does that actually mean i don't know and i i thought about that as well and i wondered whether this falls again just like in other areas not sports but if it falls again under an umbrella of approving an activity of approving uh participation in interscholastics in general uh rather than specific competitions um does it mean we join miaa i don't know what it means yeah i thought it was more like the spirit of we the school committee approves the spirit of the idea that we participate as a district in inter-school athletics i didn't think it meant we we like football and baseball and i thought it was just the spirit of it that's how i understand it too but

125if you think it needs uh wordsmithing we couldn't talk about it as well um if it's not going to cause any difficulty i'm going to leave it alone i'm not trying to make trouble just trying to understand it you know because approval can sometimes mean something quite explicit and quite formal on our part well as dorothy brought up i don't think it was in relation to this meeting this policy but approval also can mean disapproval it's inherent in sure yeah but if it never comes before us in a way that we in fact approve or disprove why do we have it as a policy right yeah that yeah that's a that's the case again of again a lot of things uh like a lot of um questions like that came across and [Music] if that's

126not how we have been doing things before and i wonder if we can again start talking about aligning our practice with the policies that we have um but then to sarah made a point i think about the exchange student policy and you know is could we conjure in our minds a scenario where we would want to not participate in something and by removing that paragraph we now have been stripped of that ability and again i personally can't think of something scenario where we would say we're not going to have our kids participate um in the miaa but there was one in the news just this past week where we might pull pull away from a particular uh a particular event yeah yeah and lori might even ask the school committee to do make a move

127like that it's conceivable certainly given recent news i just have a question the fourth paragraph the first sentence i just don't understand what it means the school committee is aware of the team's team participation athletic contest by members of the student body requires that away games be scheduled in quotes what does that mean um i think that um again is to deal with um i don't know families of students who did not take that into consideration the travel the no traveling out of town um but yeah it doesn't require the the quotation marks absolutely um but i think that's what it means is to do to make it uh to make the expectation clear that this does require travel out of town and then perhaps we're responsible from a transportation aspect i i understood that

128it was that the that the school understands that the students who participate will be off campus but still under the guardianship of the school we're sending our rules with them that that's a lot of assumptions right i don't know okay and it will establish regulations to ensure the safety and well-being of students and staff members who participate in these activities but yeah to your point i think there's a more direct way of saying that than the way it's stated and we can certainly make it more explicit yes that's the language that's on masc it's like it's exactly identical um yes there's no reason why we can't uh you know change the wording to make it more specific yes it just seems a little awkward i think all of this speaks to how thankful we are

129the three of you are working working so diligently on policy that's this this what we're going through is unfortunately not a typical the struggle with policy yes i just want it sorry all right now and as i said last time we talked about policy all three of us are new to this committee so we appreciate your patience with us and your guidance too how i know the answer is going to be we don't need to be but like you know how sort of you know sort of i guess my assumption going into this was you have an expert in the room which is your mask representative and when the policies you know like so i guess what i'm really going at is i agree i think some of this the wording in a lot of

130these policies is crummy um you know from like a stylistic standpoint or like if i were an english major would i write it this way absolutely not but then like i guess to my like some of those conversations are awkward i mean not that dorothy wrote these but you know when you have your expert in the room to be like you know like i'm coming here from your english teacher perspective let's wordsmith this does it is that does that come across as disrespectful i guess i think she's there to offer service i don't think she would be offended if we like you said she didn't write the policies i don't think that this is something that would offend her for us to want to i guess the other problem too far you can sort of

131conte like it's also challenging to collectively let alone forget introducing zoom to the whole thing like write together like who writes a book with a bunch of friends you know i mean writing in and of itself is kind of a solo mission so i think it's been but i'm glad you keep bringing this stuff up cynthia because i do think that sentence is worth revising i just think it's hard to do in committee work when we're uh you know when we're all together like oh i like this word no i like this word um you know it gets it's it's a strange experience so maybe moving forward eva and fatima we can talk more openly about some stuff that sounds kooky and then figure out a process where i don't know some we allocate different

132ways to take a stab at writing it not in the committee but i don't know if that would work is that okay process wise as long as we're not exchanging information in the bid and drafts in between um i think there's no uh violation of the meeting and i wonder how it was done like a google doc that everybody collaborates on you cannot allow you cannot not in between oh okay i thought you were suggesting it i was like okay no no no no like fatima can have a google doc that she says hey everyone you can take a look at this and think about it right but you can't have any other editors and i don't think jj iv is doing any damage or if we go ahead and approve it as it is

133currently written i think it right perfectly okay it just this is was odd i thought and now i think we all do know what it means that you know everything's not going to be on campus and we you know it's it could require you know a three or four hour round-trip uh road trip so then but i guess what i'm asking that is do you think it is worth the effort if we all understand it but we all kind of roll our eyes a little bit thinking it could have been written better is it worth going through the process of rewriting it it is i think it is it is if it can be better i think it is worth the effort that's that's and i i think from my experience with dorothy also there

134are some things that are written awkwardly that if you ask her and say why like why this way of putting it and she may say look we had to deal with these are the three things that we had to get into these sentences and the least awkward word to do it was to say got it or it may it may just be this language has been here since 1975 and it's the language that's been right and and from that you guys can decide okay do you work on it or you know no yeah i don't have that screen to look at what was uh the last name of the update uh for the masd i don't want to lose my computer screen here but the masc continuously updates those policies as situations and districts happen

135where it becomes over um becomes a legal issue i just wanted to add that having that vague um a little bit of vagueness it's not actually a terrible thing when it says when a policy says uh school committee may uh approve what we think of may approve or disapprove but it gives it plans that role of the school committee voice in that particular policy that's it that's a good point well i i i would like you to ask uh dorothy at least what does it mean that participation will be subject to approval by the school committee i i can't answer that question for myself i don't know so i'm not eager to tear into this more than we have to and i know how endless the policy work is and i give you all a

136lot of credit yeah but as long as you're waiting for this i'm obligated to ask that question and thank you for asking um like i said that is our charge it's not uh extra work we signed up for this and we appreciate it um your your feedback so understanding policy is part of policy work and making sure that it's cleared we will do so um i think we could take everything back and then bring them back after our next meeting instead of parsing them out i don't know how you feel about that there's nothing here that i think is is pressing to to update so i think that's that's clean yeah agreed okay but we it seems like there was consensus that we could advance jjg okay should we take a vote uh it's first

137reading so we'll go on oh yep sorry jjg no jtg they're the contest for school they're gonna look at with the enf we just wanted to make sure it was aligned um that's all that could be uh just an affirmation by the subcommittee before we vote that there's nothing that uh interferes with the kind of alignment they'll look for in work with other policies that might intersect with this one and they probably won't because this looks like it's educational or quasi-educational not financial all right thank you so april 28th aaron can confirm and now we have our fy21 end of year update i think jared unless you have something else i think you ended up including that in the variance report yeah get it separated but it made more sense to do it together that

138was the look ahead to incumbents and options and we're returning to that anyway so yeah lori thank you very much um so then we just have one action item which is a vote to accept a donation to cchs for coving testing yeah can i just speak to that for a moment this is a family that had their child tested at the high school and was so grateful for the opportunity that they not only covered the cost of their child's but donated money for kids who may not have the funds to cover it and we're just really grateful for them you know pay it forward attitude they had about it it was it was a good good moment for us that was great well i'll make a motion that the conquer carlisle school committee vote to

139accept a 600 donation for covent testing at cchs with great thanks i'll second it can i ask a question yeah discussion all right let me just plug in my charger um i want to just understand and clarify um how the state funding now that the state is going to be uh funding the testing how is there a conflict there do we do we need it or is it just gonna yeah the state funding is for the asymptomatic pool testing this money is for the individual pcr tests that the nurse is conducting at the high school so it's two different testing processes okay thank you okay and there's a process if if somebody needs to have a test is there is there a way people know that there is aid available usually that's through the nurses

140when we need to recommend that you know consult with a family and say that i usually get a call from the nurse saying there's a need here can i send them to the high school okay the nurses have been excellent in the buildings that i've been in truly excellent truly excellent i would agree well i would certainly echo the uh the thanks which i think uh the entire community uh would uh join in on uh the kind of expression of support for all our kids as they work their way through this year so thank you yes thank you i think we're ready for a roll call yeah oh anderson hi for both this is a regional vote and if i'm correct yeah yeah okay booth eye about i that i most of the eye for

141region radii will send i great many many thanks and i will make a motion to release two of you and adjourn the regional school committee meeting for both but no for the region just for the region not for concord um anderson i bought eye out i thank you sarah thank you eva the concord school committee stays in session and i want to thank everybody for uh your stamina once again uh we're going to turn to you mr stanton please all right um so the variance report very similar to the high school variance report we are in balance we have an unencumbered balance of two million one hundred and seven thousand seventy dollars i did provide a memo um that outlined this report as well as the 100 report one thing that i did want to

142bring to your attention is that negative you're seeing in the fixed assets that's a it's a false negative right now we have to when we had to encumber the total amount for our leases so once we're able to um uh get rid of that encumbrance that will that function would then become in good standing is that an encumbrance with appropriation money that will be offset with non-appropriation money is that where it goes so basically that encumbrance once we liquidate it it's not so it's not an expenditure once we liquidate the encumbrance to the actual amount then the encumbrance would go down therefore decreasing the negative balance so yes so we we budgeted the the amount for the leases but they need to see a purchase order for the full amount it's not expended and then

143once um and then we can liquidate the um the larger po and that money will go back into the remaining balance it's just an accounting thing is any of this covered money that'll be uh offset no no it it's ian maybe i'm not explaining it well yeah no i get it i can put it out because it's uh so in the next school committee being there'll be a vote to approve financing for the new bus purchase and at that point we'll be able to liquidate the purchase order and it'll turn into a lease payment instead of being the full purchase price of the bus got it thank you yes all right should have called lunch in the beginning thank you it takes two of you to translate for me sorry um so other than that

144we we are a balance or in good standing um any questions i can answer on this and again same as the high school we will be having expenditures um you know in april and may that will bring this available balance down and by the beginning of may i'll be able to start um projecting where we're gonna where we're gonna land hopefully um i i have one and it perhaps relates to region as well um there's a uh a 100 level here 1430 attend level for legal service for school committee is it accurate to say that there is also legal uh embedded in uh superintendent and special education and i'm guessing here i don't know no so the legal function regardless is one function um so it's it's one line what we're doing is we have

145so when we report the data it's the same function um so no um so it looks so there are uh this is further subdivided uh in terms of your accounting in terms of uh origin of expense correct thank you okay [Music] other questions comments so maybe in a future meeting you can perhaps describe to me what district-wide hardware software is administrative technology excuse me my 1450 sure um i can do it now or i can do it uh at another meeting i'm going to propose briefly now and then you're going to probably take us into this in a very thorough way when we devote uh a good chunk of a meeting to uh hardware software in i forget a month's time or so sure so let me just pull up that expense cynthia that was

14614.50 yep and you know you and ian tell us if you need to come back to us on that yeah i need to put you on the spot it's up to you no i i thought i had it but i do um so yes so what's in the 1450 actually is um there's a number of things there's the clear there's the salaries for the district wide that's because peter and his staff and then the the um the admin assistant then we do have some admin uh software support for about 120 000 that's the probably the district-wide databases etc then there's some you know i t equipment that is again district-wide and then supplies and materials so basically it's everything that is spent out of like the what we call the 100 in the 900 location

147and and not in a school okay so maybe in the future you could just split out the salaries versus the other stuff in there i i can do whatever you do what do you what do you want me to do sure i can do whatever you want but so i could say so there you now i can see there's a lot of salary embedded there but and then if you could just put out the salary versus anything else that's in that when we could talk about technology not tonight oh oh yeah i thought you meant in the variance reports no no no no no no and to cynthia's point is some of that already broken out in the in the budget book it it it is it is it will be so in a month

148it will be uh we go by we basically every single location so for cps we break up into four or five different ways yep um and we we show you how much of salary is how much is um but yes and and if you'd like if you want to go in uh the i would say the budget book from two years ago and just take a look at it and if there's something that you know maybe not there that you want to see uh because we're starting to create it again right now we're happy to do that this body book is for you all in the public so uh and we just want to make the numbers as easy to read as possible and looking for any input okay yeah i mean for me to

149follow up um yes separating the salary i'm interested um i know that things were done differently in the past years but i'm interested to see the growth of our uh technology budget whether it's hardware and software um so separating the salaries from that will will help me see the the growth um [Music] yeah come on and that is in the budget book so we do to uh we do do comparisons um so we can i don't like to go back really further than fy19 because i started an fy19 and those numbers you know i i can defend um and really last year's a lot more than my first year but i can certainly give you we have 10 years worth of actuals but i think the last three years and we're going to keep getting

150better and clearer gov also does and i can send you all there clear gov does a nice job of separating um you know by by functions and everything uh as well so and uh to jared's point um if you don't have the log in for clear gov he'll furnish it for you yeah let me know we we do make an investment in that so we're encouraged to use it other questions comments hearing none uh i want to thank you jared i think we can no we can't release you sorry i don't know if you wanted me to show it maybe this is for another meeting show what i showed at the high school uh just some some ideas on on if there happens to be a surplus or do you want me to wait for

151another meeting no let's keep it consistent yeah what you did with the region was give us a uh a high level look at potentials and possibilities without solid recommendations yet why don't we do the same perfect so i i do not expect the type of surplus if any uh potentially at cps at this time um but right now if if we did one of my main priorities would be to make sure we carry over the full amount in circuit breaker uh we did prepay tuitions uh for fy21 so we should have a surplus and we will have a surplus uh in the tuitions um and so just to uh keep us all informed the the maximum is a percent carryover which is that the uh cps is about 650 000. uh it's a little bit

152more at the high school and those numbers are going down because we have less kiddos going out so it's about 650 000 give or take um for cps um thank you so uh the special education tuitions plus or minus about 250 000 some ideas would be laptop purchases i didn't put any amounts there the the the snow bus sweep for knox trail that would be the cps portion and then prepay echo if uh if the amount is known so again very high level um and just sort of a brain dump as of right now uh and every every week every uh i'll know more and more about the status of the budget so tell us tell us about either [Music] regulation or fiscal prudence in regard to edco what do you need in order to

153worry you to recommend a payment against that liability what would you need to enable this school district to do so so for my level i think i i wouldn't need school committee necessarily approval uh because you would prove it through the warrant process if edco was to invoice us for a date that is before july 1st we could use fy21 funds and there's been significant conversation among the districts asking edco to try to work through at some level of this process because a number of us are hoping there might be some uh use of this this year's money towards the closing costs so we'll know more but that was a pretty extensive conversation about that request at the last meeting and little risk of payment on account exceeding what we're going to ultimately owe right

154right so if you can't get all the way to the number can you get some part to the number so at least some of this year's money could be applied right yeah and i think we need to have more thorough conversations with both the select board and concord and the finance committee about the situation because um i forgot to mention the finn comment was announced that our free cash unfortunately dropped below 5 um due to a number of circumstances so um you know i think we have to be very mindful of a lot that is going on and um be sure that everybody knows what's going on um yeah because uh i guess the uh money coming from the cambridge turnpike didn't get into the into the accounting as soon as it should have so

155that's significant shortfall um so is that going to hit fiscal 21 or not it wasn't really clear what the ramifications of this are i mean so i i heard that conversation because we were waiting to present it sounded like a cash flow piece primarily with it's coming but not for sure when so it and it was impacting free cash so i don't think it's a fy 21 issue per se but i don't know that we're fully informed either yeah it's just conquered you know in the very recent history had nine percent and then we've been chipping away at it and now you know it's uh that that's not what we wanted what was it and two million of that is this is the stability fund for the middle school so we would want to name

156that loud and clear yeah yeah yeah all right more to come questions comments concerns jared thank you thank you um i wonder uh jared you're probably going to stay for the middle school project anyway so there's no sense taking things out of order for the benefit of you and your family am i correct correct okay so then we're going to follow our agenda and move on to the middle school building project things are moving quickly enough so that we thought it in our best interest to see that we are up to date and that you know what uh is in flux right now at the project level and what decisions uh might be forthcoming in the in the near term um and uh you heard earlier that the design subcommittee chose not to meet today

157because uh it was my opinion that uh the uh the discussion about uh changing what we thought was our design uh might be taking on sufficient import as to uh send us back to the drawing boards or at least somewhat back um so not knowing uh how that was going to come together because it requires some select board input and some school building committee decision making there was no meeting today there is a discussion pending on the construction method that will be a big decision that is likely to happen at the next meeting in the interim the communications subcommittee which i hope is more than a committee of one heather i hope you've got some help over there but i know you're doing a considerable amount of the the legwork um uh there's a survey

158underway and i think we should speak to that next yes we are a committee of two um although a lot of what has to be done is just kind of executing um and because we can't get together and and do it all uh live last minute um we're kind of each running with our own pieces of it uh the survey is live i think this is actually a really exciting thing that's going on right now and as you mentioned quite a really important part of this process we're at a pretty pivotal point in this building project right now um and i would even summarize it as this is a critical essential question about which what direction does the community want to see this project go does the community want it to be just what's needed

159for education according to the education plan or does the community want it to be more of a community resource and and thereby be willing to support more budget in that so that's that's really kind of the big question at a very high level that we're trying to get at in this survey there are some other questions in it also around priorities and everything um but the survey includes a bunch of the background info on here's here's what's in the accepted space summary right now and it and stating very clearly it does fulfill the requirements of the ed plan the education plan um but putting out there that we've heard community feedback that maybe the community wants this to be more of a community resource and so really trying to tease out what what the residents

160want you know this isn't necessarily it's not a decision the 17 building committee members should make in a vacuum by any means it's it's about what the community wants so that's what we're working on right now um the survey has gone out it is open until uh next monday monday april 5th and we are doing some really intensive work hands-on feet on the ground in every direction trying to get it out to all parts of the town as we've always talked about before reaching the school families is the easy part because laurie can send something out directly to the to all the districts so we're doing a lot of work on the rest of town um i can go into it more if you want to know but there are a lot of groups being

161reached out to directly i've seen it in a lot of different places that are outside of school good i'm glad to hear it i love it back by the way what's that just my anecdotal feedback it's come across in a lot of different organizations that are not school related we're really trying to get it out there it has gone you know to every concord town committee chair um and a reminder who's going to get it again soon we'll do another reminder at the end it's gone to all kinds of organizations the ones we often work with and then others um and you know i mean i've personally been and asking our building committee members to do the same sending it to everyone i know who doesn't have kids in schools in town and it's pretty

162well penetrated the business community okay good yeah it went out to the concrete business partnership and rotary and chamber of commerce so that they have access to it too um given that you know of course the funding for the project is taxpayers um businesses pay taxes also so it is both residents and business owners in concord and we're trying to reach everybody who has has an input in it um in addition as i mentioned earlier schedule wise the community forum is tomorrow evening so that's another really good chance for us to collect feedback and input on this process um there'll be a presentation with an update of course and then we'll be then we'll be listening to questions and comments and feedback there so in terms of timing we will collect the feedback tomorrow night

163we will have the survey open until monday the 5th and then we will quickly do a lot of uh crunching of that data in order to have information ready to present at the building committee that thursday morning april 8th and that's where as court mentioned there are some big decisions to be made and we'll be looking at which direction we head court does this like put a i mean because i watch a lot of your subcommittee meetings does this put a real damper in your timeline this sort of last minute um i'll call it last minute but this you know i'll i'll do my best to speak to that um there's a lot of timelines in play right now yeah um and one major one um that's uh speaks to the critical question of whether

164we're going to try to build this in 18 months or two years 18 months would be rather remarkable feat and i think put us at considerable risk but before we get to we've got a long way to go before we get to construction um heather knows that i'm not uh sanguine about this uh survey um and i've communicated that formally to the chairs um i believe that it could could uh could lead to some unfortunate outcomes um the survey apparently went out in the building committee's name but the building committee never voted on it it apparently went out from the school department through our mailing list but we didn't decide to do that it offers to my reading the opportunity to spend more than town meeting uh suggested sort of a one path bigger more

165expensive i'm not sure a survey uh should have provided only that option to weigh in on um so i i do have some concerns about it and i hope it doesn't harm the project ultimately our charge as a school building committee was to build a school it was not to build a community school now we're deeply into this and it's being redefined as a community school now i love community schools [Music] anybody who knows me knows that but uh we're pretty late in the game for a redefinition you know we've built a or designed a really spectacular school that meets the needs of the grade 678 and and it does do that it's going to be a school without compare to now just tack on extra extra real estate to to a design i think

166is uh perhaps a an approach that uh isn't as careful as it should be when we're going north of 100 million dollars when the design subcommittee did its work alexa we were mindful from day one that there were multiple constituencies that we were representing whether or not they had communicated extensively with us written extensively come to meetings we knew that first and foremost we had to support students and teachers we knew we had to support sustainability we knew we wanted to build a building that was going to survive 50 years uh and be a good investment and we knew that we had a 90 plus million dollar target those were known we knew that we also had a community sports uh advocate group or many groups we knew we had arts advocates and we knew

167we had fiscal sustainability advocates so the fact that they have emerged of late and necessitated a new survey uh might might uh suggest to some people that we're doing work now that should have been done before we started because in fact we're asking people to define what they want when we've already designed what we came up with in earlier efforts to survey this community so i don't know frankly where we stand or what were the early efforts to survey the community say again what were the early efforts to survey the community uh we had a number of forums at the i know the forums but those are like that's not a great way to like well that's a harder way to collect data right because everything is anecdotal and it's a lot of questions and

168i did so many of those forums back in they were more i mean the first hour of those were always presentations more than feedback solicitation vehicles right i mean i mean i i went to like a ton of them yeah yeah i think that's true and now we're collecting feedback uh with it with another methodology we're using a survey instrument and a certain kind of survey methodology this time correct and my my point i'm trying to make is i don't know uh and it'll be a school building committee decision perhaps with advice from the select board this is a town project as to whether this obligates a uh a a redo and then there is other factors that are going to come in play 22929 main street uh a town proposal uh calls for a

169field house there um so we may have to ask big questions about whether we have all our ducks in a row and we we know what we're doing but i'll finish by saying this my ultimate goal is not is to see that we don't jeopardize the middle school as a middle school that's my primary goal right now i had asked about the timelines so but do you think the timelines will be able to move forward and that this is something that can be my opinion is that the gap between the uh the town meeting and the election is perhaps uh too abbreviated and the construction period puts us at considerable risk if we try to pull pull off a 100 million dollar unusually nice building in 18 months i think that puts us at considerable

170risk but that's one opinion my construction uh experience is limited to about 10 years of my career it's not a big part of my career so i'm no expert in construction but i've been there so i have a few thanks courtney let me oh can i just sorry whoops is it follow i was gonna follow up on court's comments but if you have follow up on that cynthia go ahead no i just i have some questions i've been waiting to ask okay can i just follow up on what court was saying just before we switched direction just before a new topic quickly um because i want to agree with something court said in terms of not wanting to jeopardize this project i think we are there is no doubt we are completely on the same

171page there um and whatever we do in terms of collecting community input and figuring out a direction it is very clear the priority no matter what is fulfilling the educational plan and we want to do nothing that jeopardizes that so i just want to make that very clear we're not this is not a survey to find out whether education is important in this building that's a given and it's not going to change that's that's the priority um i'd also like to just comment on the timing question that alexa was asking um because i completely understand what the court is saying about it being you know it to some extent like oh this conversation should have happened earlier um and yet at the same time when i look back in hindsight both with the pause that

172we had to take and also with just the natural process of how things have i think from a high level the way i see the process is that the building committee was looking at a target budget of 80 to 100 million and so you have 100 million and you have you know it's like puzzle pieces you have your educational plan to just to establish what are your priorities you put in your priority spaces into that box of 100 million so to speak and you figure out what fits and and what fit was we're a gym in opera an auditorium of the size that's in the accepted space summary and i would say i think the both the design subcommittee and the design team and leadership did an incredible job of like court said designing an

173amazing not even designing a full building but defining what could go into that hundred million in the best possible way that we could and so for that hundred million this is what we can get and i actually feel like it's natural that at that point when the community sees okay for the target budget that we were talking about this is what we can get that people are gonna look and say okay well reality check is that what we want right and and and they're coming to us saying well if we're gonna be spending a hundred million on something let us have input on what it is whether it's 100 million or a little less or 103 million or whatever it may be and so i think it's an i actually feel like it's a natural

174point for this discussion when people see this is what you can get for 100 million and they're saying well wait a second maybe we want a little more we don't know for sure if it's going to go in that direction but that's why we have to ask so to me that's why the survey is so critical in order to collect that information and i and i know that the timing is frustrating but i also feel like it like i said that it's somewhat natural yeah and so we're going to do our best to to limit those concerns and risks that court is talking about because he's right we don't want to get to a point where we're trying to rush the construction end of things because of all this so at the end of the

175day the goal the primary goal is protect that education plan and in doing so let's look at what the community wants this building to be potentially beyond that or potentially not so just my thoughts on the timing also okay so and cynthia i didn't mean to interrupt you sorry i just wanted to follow up since that was all the same topic so um don't worry with your questions going to the uh question of construction method um i know this seems like in the weeks in a wonky um decision but it's actually a huge decision it's not in the weeds it's a huge decision don't understand why the building committee hasn't gotten a full presentation on this before they have to make such an important decision or did i miss that we've had we've had some

176information come our way i mean a full presentation about all the implications of such an important decision uh we we haven't wrestled with it around our table of 17 members no and that's why that's why we were not prepared to even consider a vote at the last meeting because the high school was great success used construction manager at risk great success i can't even tell you how successful that was from every vantage point from smooth construction to safety i'm going to focus on safety you're going to be building a new school next to a running school on a very busy street the implications of the safety just that alone of having construction manager at risk is so much safer for the people working in the school the people driving by the school it's just huge

177and i don't know why we would ever put that up against spending a few more dollars up front to have a safer project i just it makes no sense to me whatsoever that alone well so i would say first that's really important input that we can take back as you know as we've all said courts in my job here is to take the input from the school committee and bring it back to the building committee um we've heard that input from some other people also and i i think to your point about presentations we've gotten some information i think a lot of people individually have been reaching out to the chairs to ask questions i know i have um and i've heard that feedback also um so again i'd like to collect you know any

178other thoughts also but that is certainly feedback that we could bring to the building committee because what will happen at the end of the project the construction company is done they leave then the demo company comes in nobody oversees that really except for that person that you put the bid out to and can i you know what can i just quickly define the two construction strategies for anybody who doesn't know what this is so i'm going to back up for a second really quickly when you build a building there are two different ways that you can hire a construction firm to work with you one is kind of the standard way called design bid build and it's basically a process where you create your design you send it out for bids um you pre-qualify those

179bids but among the pre-qualified ones you take the lowest bid you don't choose you just automatically take the lowest bid um and so in in many cases that's seen as a less expensive way to go because you're definitely taking the lowest bit um construction manager at risk is a little different as opposed to at the end of design sending out the bids you bring on a construction manager earlier in the process and they are your partner from earlier on all the way through as cynthia says demolition now there is there's there can be a little extra that you pay for that that partnership of having them on early and of having them take you through it all at the same time you through that process can get a maximum price that you'll never have to

180go over so as cynthia's pointing out that was what was done at the high school um and in some cases can seem like a even though it might be slightly higher at first it can be a less risky option in terms of the upside of where the numbers can go and like cynthia says that construction manager at risk is your partner and is working with you um in theory more hand in hand on safety issues and transfer issues and demolition afterwards and all that kind of stuff so those are the two different options that we're talking about i just want to make sure everybody's kind of clear on definitions okay a quick question heather are you define the um design bit build as standard um in comparison to what and what makes it standard in

181comparison to the other option yes it's and i don't want to make the other one sound like an exception historically it was the standard um then the state and i'm not sure how many years ago maybe 20 for a while was giving incentives to use construction manager at risk financial incentives and so a lot more schools move to that in fact when we were building the high school most school building projects were happening by construction manager at risk um since then the state has stopped giving incentives and it has probably evened out again so some schools have so the the trend has gone from almost all construction manager at risk to probably more even half and half i i'm very rough on this jared you can correct me if i'm wrong on that which i

182might be um but it's move i think he's trying to unmute no you're doing good okay all right so it's moved back to kind of even so when i say standard it was more historically standard but right now both are very common thank you and i wonder how also we feel as a community i think there's a consensus it's safe to say there's a consensus that we want a good school we want a a beautiful building in the street in the last 50 years um and i wonder how that lowest bid is going to serve that purpose um the lowest bid comes with uh reduced quality and reduced commitment um so i i um um yeah i don't know if perplexed or uh puzzled is is the right word um but it's not something it's

183not a concept that um we are used to in concord the lowest bait and for me it means low quality and i am wondering what's the appeal there uh for the lowest bidder for the design bid build well there's a couple of arguments one is cost um and if you look over the last year the the timing on the recommendations for the design bid build or the hard bid came at the same time that we topped out at 100 million so one could ask uh is it a cost saver we can't make the automatic assumption that quality is going to be harmed but to your point we i think the evidence is clear that we increase our risk with a hard bid i don't think anybody would debate that but you pay to mitigate risk

184or at least at this point you pay up front and you hope that the insurance policy will ultimately benefit you in the long run and if not at least you were protected to me this is all about risk fatima it's it's all about risk we start with kid safety first and foremost but there are other risks uh the sheer size of it the uh the complexity of the design this is not a box this is uh this is a lovely building um uh the risk is in the budget the budget itself is still uncertain the cost estimates are uncertain and that's even today uh we don't know how volatile the the construction uh trades will be two and three years from now um so that's that's one of the risks the timetable can be a

185risk especially if we want to accelerate it having a non-negotiable move in time is uh is a risk because we can't just move in whenever we want we need to do it on a date certain for it for kids and teachers risks are around teamwork and coordination issues that's a big piece of a construction manager to to help choreograph the the hundreds of people and the dozens of contractors on the site a risk is its proximity to the current building and being on a busy road also approximate to the peabody school a risk is it's next to town water the risk is it's on a hill a risk is the demo afterwards um we we had two million dollars in contingency alone for the high school demolition and we used more than half of it

186and we're lucky we had it um so we certainly encountered risks there the fields aren't fully figured out yet so that's an unknown unknowns to me are risks sustainability we are only doing part of our sustainability objectives there we're lucky to have the light plant coming in but we've got to coordinate that and i think a construction manager also deals with a lot of procurement issues which could be problematic a few years from now where we're very fortunate is that we've got a physical condition on the part of the town that can sustain this if it chooses to a big one where we lower our risk is we think we know the site we don't think there's any surprises in the site so that's that's something that i think mitigates risk but it is a

187serious question and i i hear what you say which is this town typically tries to mitigate its risk especially if it's trying to protect people and protect quality and there's a lot of quality to protect in this design anybody who's looked at it knows that so just to um thank you court i think it's you know here there are certainly risks that you're protecting from with c cm at risk um like he said the architects had had expressed an opinion at first that they didn't necessarily think that we needed to do that but i know there's discussion coming just to kind of keep us moving along are we here it sounds like we're hearing a consensus from the school committee that we should bring back to the building committee that at this point school committee

188members would would send a recommendation that cm at is that risk is again preferred option again it's the we all know it's the decision of the building committee but if we're there representing you are you asking us to represent an opinion of preference for cm at risk i would not be opposed to that i don't know about the others but okay now that said i think it's also to your point cynthia it's a big discussion at the building committee meeting i i know court and i probably don't want to go in you know with our hands tied that we're supposed to vote for this no matter what because the school committee said it so i think if it's fair we could say okay we're hearing a a probable preference from you all that you think

189you would lean towards cm at risk but we obviously need to listen to the professionals in the discussion at the meeting and make our decision based on both of those factors together is that fair right and i want you personally to emphasize the concern about safety absolutely um just one ticket item i have um the community got to respond to both the gym and the auditorium because we have very specific numbers size seats etc i do not see that kind of specific number on our outdoor spaces and the campus is not an infinite amount of space so i would like to hear are we replacing fields with the exact same size fields larger smaller different configuration and then what are we planning for outdoor other spaces outside of athletic fields so i'd say there's a

190the outdoors is still more of a high level concept at this point because it's not as detailed like the space summary thank you it's so important that it not be high level because we're thinking about a bigger building perhaps more parking etc so how does that i think we we need to have specifics about the fields and their configuration yeah oh in terms of yes in terms of the space left if the building gets bigger and everything that's something we're actually supposed to hear more information from the designers on at our next meeting um and and jump in laurier court you might have more insight into this than i'm sharing i was just kind of giving that the one other thing here is unknown unknown is that the the uh the glass or translucent bridge

191that connects the cafeteria admin wing with the classroom wing will be over a natural ravine and it lends itself very nicely to an amphitheater kind of space um so that's one naturally that's in the topography but beyond that uh we don't know yet so that's one thing how can we have this transformation without knowing heavily i mean talk about you know heavily used those fields are heavily used oh they are let me also add in the in the current sketch of a design concept there are also fields sketched onto the site so the the fields would in the current sketch laurie correct me if i'm wrong or a court record if i'm wrong are equivalent to the fields that we have now but can somebody check that i mean certainly we can do that yes

192laura's just nothing so that's that's what they are now and what we're waiting to hear more from the designers on when we come back is would that be affected by any increase in building size and that's an important question so so you're right this is critical to the discussion in terms of how much space is there for fields i when i was saying it's high level i wasn't saying so high level that we don't know what's there i only meant that um that what we know is the sizes of the fields and and at a high level what's included a baseball softball field of you know soccer fields but it is equivalent to what we have now and we need to look at if there are changes to the building how that would be affected

193so that's certainly in the discussion because personally i like the the large field we have now it's very flexible yes to be chopped up in a zillion different ways i like that the baseball i think i saw a sketch where the they flipped you know the baseball the basically softball fields you know the home base is you know on this side of the field i think it's so much better to have it the other way around so i mean i think it's just important we're getting such minutia about the gym and the um the uh the auditorium and that's good but i i think the outdoor spaces is something that is is really important and i think the community should have a pretty clear understanding about what's how it's going to be replaced yep absolutely

194point taken and we'll make sure that we are clear in our communication about that also if we took a whole field at the high school offline during the construction and people would want to know exactly what was coming back mm-hmm yeah heather if i'm just gonna add thank you for for coming to us to take our feedback to the building committee and yeah so i i do want to register my concern about the survey um you know when i first heard about it i just went back i don't want it to to to take the place of a referendum because our referendum was town meeting and i worry that the survey is trying to kind of uh unintentionally circumvent town meeting and for the range for the budget that town meeting approved was 80 to

195100 so um to your point earlier that's the range so we could start at 80 and then look around and say what else can we do we have you know a window of 20 million what can we add to this building rather than start at and then add to that i would like us to start to to yes to start from the lower end of that window and use the extra which town town meeting voted for to hopefully have this building that's that's um wonderful while still staying within the budget that was approved at town meeting yeah i definitely hear you and that that has been a concern all along that the the balance and the the concern that we're starting too high close to 100. um and i think part of what that comes

196from is is is finally understanding what it will really cost to support the ed plan that we are committed to and so to stay start at 80 we could we could present a building building at 80 million but it is not going to support the ed plan it it's just not even going to come close to be honest and so the 80 to 100 was actually it was this that range itself the 80 part of it at least was established as a target by the building committee when the building committee was first created um and we've come to realize that with our ed plan 80 is not a possibility um with our ed plan we're closer to a hundred um and that's just kind of the reality of where we are and because we're we're

197committed to that ed plan we're not looking at you know how would we cut it to get it down to 80 we're saying this is this is our bottom line and so then it it you know it's a community question of what does the community want from there i hear your concerns and so i i appreciate you sharing them i just wanted to give that context on the 80 and why we're not looking at an 80 million option and also didn't the town meeting vote was to spend the one five on the feasibility study it wasn't to approve a budget range for the building right correct it was no one voted on this budget no right there was an expectation sorry court the information presented uh was produced in a slide that said the estimate

198only an estimate was 90 million plus quote unquote yeah absolutely that was the that was you can call it the understanding you can call it the hope you can call it the aspiration or you can call it the guess but that was that was the number that people used when they voted the 1.5 to get started tricky it's hard right right yeah and and i don't think we can overstate the uncertainty of construction costs uh a mere two years from now and how they might how things might get volatile um hopefully not you know hopefully uh this isn't gonna the the the economic tides aren't gonna turn for another few years but we don't know that just just point of reference the slides did indicate cost escalations and for the two years from town meeting

199which is this spring of the building costing 95 to 105 million so the data was there i understand people grabbed the 90 but we tried to show anyway i don't need to get into the details i just want to name that the 105 was actually out there so um so are there other thoughts that you'd all like us to take back to the building committee just that i really would like to hear more about the outdoor spaces okay great thank you and we'll begin by just verifying size for size uh known today and anticipated um they've got a very capable guy named mike doing who's working on that great yep okay if there's no other discussion on that we're going to move to our final item and uh gloria i believe it's you and jared

200to bring back the capital plan this is uh in accordance with the town manager and his side of the budget and how it uh interfaces with ours and we have been over this but neglected the vote so we're coming back for a quick review and a vote tonight jared are you on i am okay thank you sir yep that was a good summary right so we just need you to formally move and vote um the warrant to go forward and i think you've got the language there all right now just for detail this was nine hundred thousand dollars uh a good bit of it was the energy recovery unit uh at one of the buildings another one to come in future years we've got some life and safety money in reserve for middle school buildings

201in this capital plan i believe we've got some floor replacements at an elementary and what's escaping me anything did you mention the uh the rooftop pods did you say i did not thank you good i knew i forgot something okay so we've been over this i believe we were in accord with it we can reopen it if we have to but if not we will call up a motion here that laurie and her team have put together for us to the effect that quote the concord school committee votes to approve the cps capital plan as presented in the attached document and that document was indeed in your packet also accompanying it is a motion for we have a motion on the floor second and cynthia a second discussion please uh those in favor roll call

202please anderson i out i missed ed aye radio all right great so with that uh once again for the few people who stuck in with us thank you so much we hope to see you next week when we're going to host a community dialogue around our initiatives toward diversity equity and inclusion leadership and that'll be uh tuesday night next week at 7 00 pm uh and with that is there a motion to adjourn please still moved second cynthia thank you so much roll call please anderson eye out eye they said i randy i thank you all take good care be safe [Music] you