Concord-Carlisle Joint School Committee and Concord School Committee - February 9, 2021

001[Music] all right so stefano is going to join us later i think it is what time is it now 501 we can call to order and have a roll call for the february 9th comfort carlisle regional school committee and court and the concord public school school committee this meeting is being recorded and we can have a roll call please anderson present booth present oh present ready present mustafi present wilson present okay and uh i move that the concrete school committee and the concord carlisle regional school committee will enter into an executive session under 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

0026 00 pm might i have a second thank you for both you're both oh cynthia you can have it and my motion yes was for both thank you very much uh roll call please anderson and i for both eye for both about i for both mustafi i for region reading eye for both and wilson for region excellent so we'll be back at six o'clock and uh we'll be heading off thank you good evening andrew good evening how are you tonight well watch yourself good thank you thank you sarah i'll follow you okay welcome back to the public session of the concord carlos regional school committee and concord school committee joint meeting uh but dude did fatima yes so we'll do a roll call just to hear from who's here very good and uh roll call

003please anderson present booth present wilson present uh so it is 601 we'll begin with uh i'll just note again that we're being recorded uh we'll begin with public comment and as a uh for people who are new here if you'd like to make a public comment please raise your hand using the participant uh button on the zoom uh please present yourself your name your address uh please keep comments to a three minute maximum and um and as a reminder this is an open we are in a meeting in the public but not with the public and so we tend not to respond to two comments um but we look forward to listening to all of them and if anyone has any comments please raise your hand julie o'brien good evening everybody sorry it took me

004a while to find the raised hand usually i'm monitor facilitating these zoom calls my name is julie barrett o'brien uh 67 macarthur road in concord i am the mother of a concord carlisle regional high school junior and i'm here this evening to encourage the district and town to reevaluate and realign our 14-day quarantine policy i speak to you as a mother but i'm also a professional who worked in global health for 15 years with an organization that dealt with everything from ebola to sars to um well hiv obviously um but i'm also currently leading a non-profit that deals and operates at the nexus of youth mental health and digital overload so i'm extremely aware of and work every day with particularly college kids who are overwhelmed and socially isolated and very depressed um so i

005feel like i have more than just my mom had on here i have a bit of professional background first and foremost i really want to commend uh the committee dr hunter mr mastrullo mr miller miss stahl whom i've really enjoyed working with over the last three years with my son at cc and the teaching staff for their amazing and exceptional efforts during this unprecedented global pandemic and truly appreciate the frequent and transparent updates regarding the positive cases of covet 19 in our school system and the steps being taken to trace and contain further spread of the deadly disease i know this is nothing you all signed up for and we are grateful that you are keeping our children safe a recent decision in which four cchs students including my son were instantly quarantined for 14

006days because they made a very risky decision to carpool to dunkin without wearing a mask has magnified the need to reevaluate our school and town's quarantine policy so that it directly aligns with recommendations provided by the center for disease control and the massachusetts department of public health yes the boys should have been wearing their mask the question is whether they need to quarantine for 14 days even if they all tested negative i offer two points of consideration first the science does not support the town or school district's policy as per the road map to recovery students in close contact with someone with covid should quarantine for 14 days the u.s center for disease control and mass department of public health both offer options for stopping quarantine after 10 days without testing and after seven days

007after receiving a negative test result but that test result must happen on the fifth day in in the case i mentioned above no one in the car at the time had tested positive four showed symptoms of or had been exposed to someone who had tested positive for covid19 and therefore we believe should not have been required to automatically quarantine for 14 days neither neither one of these science-driven evidence-based institution recommends that students who have not been in close contact with someone who tested positive should be placed in quarantine for 14 days as in the case above as a community that believes in science we should be making decisions based on science second the physical and social isolation that comes with quarantine can yield unintended consequences on the mental health and well-being of our children and

008we have seen this time and time again confining students like those noted above to a two-week life in quarantine away from their peers when it is not medically necessary is detrimental to their public to their mental health and that is the national institute of health of report and study itself cdc studies indicate that we have an alarming increase in rates of teen suicide during the pandemic and we all know that depression and anxiety have escalated isolation and loneliness are key aspects of that depression and anxiety in fact a cigna report in determined that gen z was the loneliest generation in america and that was before kobit the consequences of covid19 related trauma and the impact of living in isolation through digital intermediaries without authentic human connection have yet to be fully understood despite this generation

009being born digital and i know we've all encouraged our children to get off of technology they are very eager for a need to nurture authentic friendships and human connections and there is lots of research on that as well our children are undeniably at wit's end we all are the hockey team for example is changing in sub-freezing temperatures outside rings before and after sweaty practice games and if you've ever seen a hockey player get dressed they have to get like completely undressed practically so they're down to to bear nothings students learning remotely at home are barely rolling out of bed if they do and you can ask the teachers to quasi-learn through zoom and the coveted high school experience where adolescents learn valuable life lessons and emerge as young adults has been stripped away we once

010again ask that you reconsider and realign the quarantine policy so that it puts the mental as well as the physical health of our community and students first i do not want to underestimate strain and complexity of the job that you are doing all of you during these unprecedented times it's not lost on us and i would not want to be in your shoes and we are not asking you to change the mask policy at all we are 100 behind that and acknowledge that we're just simply asking for for a re-evaluation and a realignment of the 14-day quarantine policy i know people are saying you could it's only 10 more days it's only four more days four more days to a kid who is depressed is a lot four more days to a student yeah just

011one moment just want to know you're at the five minute mark just playing well that's great alaska exercise remarks i don't want to shut you down right now i just want you to know word five okay well i'm i'm i'm pretty done but i do want to end on one note i met and dr hunter and i and and mr miller and mr mistrill i mean i have the utmost respect and i we've had some great talks about the situation that we mentioned above and we and really grateful to some of the efforts being made and i'm here today not to reverse what happened then but to challenge you all to rethink this 14-day policy because it is just um as it is it's it's too much it is too much for these kids and

012it's not aligned with with the national standards thank you yeah thank you i apologize for interrupting no worries i'm timekeeper tonight thank you thank you um todd benjamin hello hi everyone um pardon me uh thank you for uh letting me uh speak tonight i wanted to take a moment and follow up on a previous question that i had uh asked the committee at uh i believe it was last week's meeting uh particularly i'd like to uh understand some of the challenges um that the committee sees in getting our children back to school in person full time now i'd like to understand it from from your perspective from the administration's perspective and i'd also like to understand what are some of the action items that are being taken to get our children back in school full-time

013and in person now um the last thing that i would say is i'm a little confused by miss wilson's comments that um that there isn't an answer uh for any of the questions that we pose uh that that's i to be frank that's a new one on me i i in my experience in being on committees and being with the with the with the town um in elected positions when uh public comments are presented there is a a back and forth discourse so i would appreciate uh some answers to those two questions a what are some of the challenges that the administration and school committee sees to getting our students back in school in person full-time and what are some of the action items that are being taken to get those students back in school

014in person full-time now thank you thank you thank you and um thank you both for for your comments and i i will just reiterate that it's it is standard practice that we are having a meeting in the open but not with the you know with in the pub and foot but not with the public we take into consideration all viewpoints shared and appreciate everybody's comments and thoughtfulness and um and i know that we all we all love this community and we all have very strong opinions and thank them so to follow up then when when or when and in what manner would uh responses to my uh questions be provided i think i could weigh in here sarah and say as chair of the concord school committee ms wilson is chair of the concord carlisle

015school committee she and i will be developing the agenda for the bear with me for a moment february 23rd agenda uh in the very very near future um and uh we will uh take take your request uh into into consideration we'll also be dialoguing with the superintendent as we routinely do to prepare for that okay thank you john madden hi everybody um so yeah my name is john madden i live at 1394 main street in concord and i have two young children ages three and six and my question was um why does the elementary school and classes for children in in the lowest risk categories uh age below eight through ten continue to remain on a half day at school when there is no science to support this exclusion and the risk to teachers of

016contracting covid is less than that of a grocery store worker a trash collector administrative clerk and other jobs within the community uh who never refused to return to work throughout the pandemic and what is it that's so risky to these teachers um compared to say a doctor or a nurse um when teachers can't actually socially distance they're not dealing with uh fluids contaminated uh aerosol and and issues like that it's not a high risk job and my second point was you know i was disappointed last week with the remote learning being cancelled um there wasn't a valid reason for that that was on tuesday the second uh there was a snowstorm on sunday night uh continuing till 8 a.m and monday morning and the snow got cleared on monday but i wonder why there was

017no remote learning for students on tuesday how did that get affected thank you mr madden i think if um i don't see any new raised hands i think court then we can move to the reading of the minutes all right i want to thank our public uh participants uh now that our next meeting is uh as i noted february 23. uh i will entertain a motion to accept the minutes of december 22 2020 and january 5th 2021 please the movie removed for both committees and uh uh we'll record that as heather's motion uh ms rainey without a second uh those in favor please anderson i for both booth i for both that i for both mustafi i for region is dead i for both rainy africa wilson for reading thank you all right cheers and

018liaisons report and student update i see that linda and amy are both here um or should we let them yeah if you'd be so kind uh amy and linda we'd like you to uh uh share with us what you wish and uh give us a chance to dialogue with you thanks for thank you for being here tonight yeah so something's happening right now is uh moot court just started i'm doing that and that's uh started last week and the first cases are happening a week after we get back from break that's like the mock supreme court we do at the school and then uh the radio play that we're gonna be doing at the end of the winter it's also starting right after break we're holding auditions right after we get back with just that

019monday and other than that not much happening just like i think everyone's really excited for break right now and excited to kind of like get a lot of snow coming in and kind of feel more wintery than we've been feeling the past couple months so that's something and um in addition this is another this is a small statistic speaking from myself i started a new um study method where you work for 25 minutes and then rest for five and with that i've been able to time how long it takes me to do my homework and so the past week just for the past five days because i also had um homework to do on the snow day um it took me about four to five hours each day on average and take that as you

020will i'm a high school senior i do take three ap classes and i also take comma and amy can attest to this because she took it last year commas named definitely the hardest social ace class because it is a really rigorous course with some really good um course load and material to cover so i'm not sure if um just want to bring that statistic out there not sure if it's like that important but so do you have a pomodoro timer at your house linda oh i have one on google i didn't realize that anyone would know the name of it i should have just called it great okay thank you and uh tell us generally uh we know that you are two uh representatives um uh now speak for the entire student body uh everybody's

021eager to get to get to winter break uh what else uh is the spirit strong are our students doing okay would you say i know i know that's a gross big generality but what do you think i think that getting the stretch from like december break to february break feels very long and like not i think a lot of people don't even know that february is next week yet because people don't really talk about that much so it kind of feels like you're kind of in that long stretch of like the middle of the winter people been missing school a lot because of virtual days and snow days so it kind of is kind of a little bit down but i think like around like fridays when things usually turn around like oh yeah we

022don't we're not coming to school for another week yeah and i think people were definitely really excited about that snow day it is a little sad knowing that it's probably our last snow day ever but you know it was just nice to have it anyways and i think it was like normal they can feel normal too like being able to kind of like feel like back to normalcy having a snow day definitely brought that back a bit yeah i have to say my college kids had kids the classes canceled last week two girls so maybe yeah my my dad teaches and he and he had all his classes cancelled too i think he was fully virtual he wasn't sure why they were canceled but they were all cancelled too yeah and i think for amy

023and i um as for how the school is feeling so amy and i are both second semester seniors and there's always the whole talk about senioritis and pretty soon you know we'll be seniors who also where everyone knows where they're going to college and that's so exciting and i mean i think a lot of us have the assumption that prom's not happening we don't even know what our graduation is going to look like so yeah i think that's definitely i think for us that's a bit of a i think for seniors it's like a bit of a downer still like just knowing our second semester senior is not going to be uh what it usually is but i think we know like there's not much we can do about that so that's a little bit

024but like i think we're still kind of like oh yeah we've all applied to college or gotten into college but we're not going to get like the end of our senior year that we're supposed to get yeah we're working on some plans though don't okay it might be different but we're working on it yes don't worry i feel like a lot of us are setting the bar low like they expected and we're gonna pleasantly surprise you with anything keep it nice and low so we can really impress you what do they say sometimes amy and linda under promise and over deliver right maybe that will happen for us all yeah well i i know i speak for my colleagues and and all of your your teachers and uh staff that support you as well as

025the the leadership team that you and i work with uh when i say you know have a very safe uh vacation and and enjoy you deserve it thank you you too thank you thank you for coming great um do we have other chairs and liaisons reports i'll move into liaison territory with uh with heather and say that the middle school building moving to the concord side the uh middle school building committee is meeting this thursday 7 30 a.m uh and that's publicly posted on the concord website and there's a link of course through the school website and to add to that you can say you heard it here first because the flyer that was just finalized has not gone out yet but we're about to announce that we're going to have our next community forum

026on the middle school february 24th at 7 p.m so watch for all the news flashes we'll be sending that out to the schools and throughout the town as much as possible um that's the news hottest off the press um and just in terms of the the communications and outreach of the building committee we're also um meeting with a lot of smaller groups very often in their own space so to speak on their own zooms we sent a message out to every town committee chair in concord and to many other groups offering to join their meetings to give updates and answer questions and take feedback and everything so we're setting up a lot of different basically listening sessions with different groups in town so that we can really make sure we're getting broad input in this

027process here the schools and the administration have been uh attending in communication with the concord uh finance advisory committee uh so if it's not already uh evident we're certainly paying attention to uh their their deliberations and their guidance and recommendations yep and one of them last week if anybody follows the league of women voters they always do a first friday event and we were the guest of honor there and had a great discussion with uh league of women voters members as well as other groups but that was a that was a great example of a community collaborative event and there will be many more happening we'll keep you posted other uh liaison reports please i'll just um add a quick shout out to all of our maintenance crews and building service crews who got us

028back into school after the storms um monday evening and who were out there i know shoveling and clearing i'm sure during the super bowl when we were all cozy in our homes so i just wanted to send a big thanks out to all the teams who are out there getting us back in on monday some of them are busy as we speak i was going to say they're back at it right as we said exactly tomorrow right now and the work they'll probably do on friday again speaking of snow days right exactly that one's going just to the south i heard that's what i'm hoping sarah could we move to correspondence correspondence yes so we had some correspondence about leveled math in middle school in high school and we had correspondence about maths we have

029consulted with the school officials um on these topics we feel we are very well informed on them and um and that the administration is is handling these relationships we've had a uh another correspondence following up on uh matters related to the safe routes to school program a state program uh that promotes bicycling and uh non-car transportation and i think that was it for me sarah great so i think we can move into our discussion on the overview of professional development and cultural competency i think kristin taking the lead here yeah uh i just need someone to share the screen with me so i can uh or make me host so i can share my screen and i'm just going to note that dr paula martin and andrew nietzsche are here as well um and we

030as always are glad to have you all three with us for anyone who's new good so can you see it can you see my screen yep great all right so andrew is going to kick us off this evening sorry i unmute myself all right good evening everyone my name is andrew dimich and i'm the medical director for concord public schools and concord carlisle regional school district i am joined this evening by my esteemed colleagues kristin herbert director of teaching and learning and dr paula martin our district's edco ideas cultural competency consultants first and foremost thank you to the members of the school committee and dr hunter for having us this evening to present to you an update on our professional development efforts for faculty as it relates to our district's ongoing commitment to cultural competency

031and anti-racist education next slide please as we have uh shared in previous presentations our work is grounded by our pre-k through 12 cultural competency and anti-racist steering committee with a mission statement that was drafted during the 2017-2018 school year our mission is as follows we strive to be a more culturally competent community we support our diversity of race gender religion national origin gender identity color ancestry sexual orientation and ability by our choices and actions we promote all members to feel recognized respected and valued we have set our intention to be responsive proactive and empathetic to all facets of culture and diversity the goal of continuously developing our cultural competency is that it will enable our students to develop the values skills and behaviors needed to effectively interact in a culturally diverse community both locally and

032globally with dr hunter's vision for our school district we have a strategic plan with four objectives the first one which is not noted on this slide but i'll still cover it the first one being employing teachers to offer multiple paths to success second one being insurance student achievement through uh student well-being the fourth pillar uh is uh or um creating an innovative environment that catalyzes student learning through safe healthy and innovative indoor and outdoor spaces and lastly our third pillar which is noted here on the slide is inclusive culture and our goal here is to create a collaborative and inclusive culture in the schools and community that values diversity and recognizes the contributions and uniqueness of each learner so under our strategic objective on inclusive culture are five strategic initiatives these initiatives have been presented

033before the school committee over the course of this school year strategic initiative 3.1 as you see there was a presentation we had back in august strategic initiative 3.2 is what we are presenting on today related to professional development initiative 3.3 was an update we gave back in december of 2020 regarding our culturally responsive curriculum initiative 3.4 we had a presentation just a couple of weeks ago back in january on hiring and mentoring and retaining a diverse staff and initiative 3.5 we gave an update back in november regarding ways to engage students as well as students who are in our community via the metco program thanks andrew so um we have a robust professional development program for all of our faculty including our professional teachers social workers guidance counselors and all of our tutors and we

034rival that of districts that are much much larger than us by all of our um all of our offerings um so we have uh sort of two sets of ways that we deliver professional development along with our professional development beliefs what what makes sense what helps adults grow in their understanding and their learning and then therefore their ability to serve children so the first set of workshops that we have for teachers are workshops that all teachers go to and all tutors go to and they're really meant to inspire to have folks dig in and do the tough work thank you kristin so our professional development journey uh in the 2018-2019 school year when we secured three empowering speakers during our opening day for all staff the following speakers dr beverly daniel tatum principal baruti caffele

035and dr derek gay uh brought messages of culturally responsive practices that we can implement in our schools thank you andrew during the fall training days leading up to the 20 20 20 21 school year the faculty in each of the buildings had a cultural culturally competency workshop with myself kristen urban and andrew um not only was it a workshop if you see at the bottom it was a what are you going to do it's a call to action so at the end of the workshop we asked every faculty member present what anti-basis cultural competency actions are you committing to for your own personal growth and then the same question we asked what are you committing to for your students and every faculty member had an opportunity uh through a live document to to type in

036and using just initials uh jd i will read unconscious bias in schools a developmental approach to exploring racial race and racism by benson and fearmen and also said i will complete an adult audit of my classroom literacy library to make sure that every child sees themselves reflected in authors and titles offered we also had several workshops that um benefited teachers during faculty meetings during monthly faculty meetings in particular i was at willard and the middle school the principals reached out and we were able to do um a couple of workshops related around unconscious bias or how to have difficult conversations um again a call to action creating community it's necessary to involve and consider the faculty in this work that we do so that was the workshops that are offered for all faculty at the

037same time they're sort of the mandatory times where the richness comes for our faculty is in the choice so there were over 65 workshops or courses or groups serving 471 educators over the last three years so i just want to say that again because we're a 3 000 kids school district so 65 workshops courses and groups for our educators just to give you a sense when i worked in a much bigger school district brookline there wasn't even half of this offered so a lot of great things a lot of teachers really learning and growing so these workshops are choice they're part of our belief around adult growth which is that if people get to choose what they're going to they're actually going to learn more because they feel like they have more agency and they

038know where they are in their development and career so these workshops are are to for the depth so we want to heighten awareness around particulars we want to build understanding and we want to develop teachers skills so an example of these choice workshops are the professional development paths that we have this is we're currently in our second year of offering them um they are three afternoons over the course of the school year so one of the great pieces about the paths is that we actually make it's literally the only time over the course of the year when our pre-school to grade 12 faculty are mixed together and they can share ideas with each other and get to know each other in smaller group settings so these were the professional development paths in the 1920s school

039year and as you can see many of them focused on cultural competency and special education and so forth so dr martin andrew myself we've been leading some of these for years um so we're really excited to have them and they went so well that we now have them again this year um so again we had a lot of offerings on cultural competency one path d was led by dr martin and myself about creating a more culturally competent curriculum this was a workshop model so p teachers brought a piece of their curriculum to work on and focus on with some resources that we gave them another one path e unconscious bias in schools andrew was there to help facilitate a discussion with dr tracy benson who was the author of the book unconscious bias in schools

040and that was the picture you saw on our opening slide with all the teachers holding up all their books so for all of these professional development paths part of the power is that any book or supplies they needed to do the work was provided for them so within um concord public schools in concord carlisle high school we have lots of other offerings that teachers can take for free for no cost to themselves so we have summer professional development how to have different difficult conversations about race broken down by elementary school and middle school there were discussions of books and readings at the high school we worked really diligently at our ninth grade to work on culturally competent curriculum willard school cms alcott school all had their own book groups going where they selected a book

041we purchased it for them and they had a facilitated conversation around it so you can see a lot of going on around the district and then i'll just also lastly highlight we have a series of classes taught over the course of the year it's about one a month called conquered fellows and these are courses that are taught by our educators for our educators so that's a really nice place for teachers to meet each other from across the different schools and grow together i'm very excited about this series uh because we're in our second year two years ago was approached about what can we do for the adults for the community um you know we hear the work that's happening with teachers around cultural competency we hear the work that's um happening with with with students

042um as a as a end goal here we created a series called can we talk um it's a five series workshop format the first year was in person the second year has been on zoom members of the concord carlisle community signs up for the series um and through that they are entitled to all five workshops there is a morning and an evening session um taught by the same um led by the same workshop leader uh but the topics that are covered are unconscious bias again how to have difficult conversations uh media cultural appropriation uh gender el uh lgbtq and um let me think there's one more uh native spirits uh these are offered again throughout the year from the fall and the last one ends in june uh what excites me the most about this

043series is it connects community with the school with students so many participants said i like this because i can talk with my children or i understand when they come home and talk about you know anti-racism or cultural com i'm understanding what that means i had a lot of grandparents which was fabulous and they said you know when i came up we didn't we didn't talk about this and we want to talk about it now we want to understand what all of this really means um so we have had uh the second one was in february and there are still two more workshops of the series to go ending in june where um i come in and i wrap it all together it's like can we talk these workshops are also led by other emi um

044ideas instructors um who have an expertise in each of those topics so not only do we offer classes for all teachers and tutors and staff members within concord public schools and concur carla high school but we also are partners with other organizations that offer classes this is especially important in a small district like ourselves where you know as the leader of professional development for concord you worry about the folks who are in very small job-alike groups so for example you know you have 10 maybe 11 teachers of physical education so or you have 12 13 counselors that work across the district so a lot of times we want to go outside to learn best practices especially when we're in our small job-like groups so you can see one of the examples of a workshop that

045some of our librarians went to at the bottom of your screen is becoming a diversity practitioner for school librarians again we only have five school librarians so it's good to go outside so these are all of the most of the courses that folks took from the outside and for most of these we are members of a group so we pay a fee to be a member of edco which is where the ideas group is housed that paula works for and with and we're also a member of primary source which is predominantly for social studies but they do some work in cultural competency and equity and both groups the work is at the very highest level so we're excited to always partner with them in this professional development and in all the professional development that they

046offer thank you kristen uh jamila pitts a former teacher assistant principal and now an educational consultant and an equity and justice strategist for the teach intolerance organization says anti-racist work in all schools is essential it is the exercise of hope the practice of undoing and dismantling systems of oppression the practice of freedom and of truth talent in order to be truly anti-racist we must consider all at all aspects of schooling not just having this work belong in the classroom it has to belong to everyone here on this slide you will note some groups that are supporting our district's effort and taking a holistic approach towards anti-racist education and ensuring that this work again uh involves everyone not just uh students um but also involving teachers in our community our pre-k through 12 cultural competency and

047anti-races racism steering committee as you have heard in past presentations supports our district's initiatives on hiring mentoring and retention of educators of color the inclusion of diverse voices in our curriculum and of course the committee has been instrumental at designing and implementing some of our professional development uh opportunities that you have heard uh here tonight our cms allies group is a professional learning community uh group that is led by sita de russella and sarah bullwinkle the group engages in activism by advocating for marginalized student groups in the middle school community the allies group provides a space to talk about anti-racism and provides guidelines for teachers to have difficult conversations there is also a strong focus on improving the racial climate at concord middle school for staff and students the concord carlisle high school anti-racism group

048for educators also known as charge is another professional learning community group that is working to increase understanding of identity issues of equity and inclusion particularly as it is applied to the conquer carla high school community there are a number of faculty members and staff involved in charge as participants and they are they they are provided a uh with a foundation of understanding identity implicit and unconscious bias uh struck and structural racism through an hour-long uh meetings which usually occur in the afternoon charges led by caitlin smith patty wirth nora murphy and dr david nuremberg our next group core uh which stands for communities organizing against racism as led by aaron fife is a parent teacher and community group committed to racial equity and social justice this is a growing group of conquered carlyle boston community

049members who are deeply invested in anti-racism work personally and as a community together they are learning to uncover their own understanding around race and racism our pre-k through 12 literature review committee is fairly new uh this year organized by chris and herbert is a 12-member committee a task to review our k-12 literature choices and look for balance in our cortex ensuring inclusion inclusion of diverse voices in our texts and work to create a process for vetting those texts lastly our concord carlisle high school anti-racist curriculum review committee also fairly new uh is led by joanna glaser and a group of teachers uh from literally every department at cc uh who are examining what we currently teach at the high school and looking at and and looking for opportunities to embed an anti-racist anti-oppressive lens in

050our curriculum at the high school the group has had some good discussions already within and between departments but of course the work is only just getting started that is all so i hope you've enjoyed the presentation i think the big takeaway that i would love for you to have is um as a small district with roughly 500 professional staff we have almost everyone included in the work of anti-racism and cultural competency and um that momentum has built over the last five years uh i'm really really excited i know that we're making a difference and that we will continue and as i've said in multiple settings but since this is our last meeting planned meeting on this topic of cultural competency it's going to take a long time for us to make a dent um and

051we are uh very very committed for the long haul and i think um it's gonna take more than just you know the three of us or the four of us individually but you can see that there are 500 educators working on this very very hard so questions comments thank you um i think it's it's worth noting that the district has been working on cultural competency at least from the 80s from from from what i know but it's really impressive to see and i i think imagine this year too like the amount of offerings the the reach of of possibilities of uh of training of resources um has really expanded um and so i think you know in this process of this hope this freedom this truth telling this dismantling as we go build stronger i

052guess and and uh and move to what shall be um then i think uh i feel that we have a lot of supports within the community obviously um and without and so it's wonderful to see you guys really on all of that yeah i'd love to comment just on the amount of i don't even want to call it buy-in because it's not like people have had dividends that had to have been sold but the initiative that's being shown on so many people's part here you guys have been an amazing leadership team on this initiative um the way you talk about all of those courses and how many people served and the fact that it is choice-based and optional um it it just makes me feel very happy to see how many people staff teachers are

053so deeply engaged in this conversation like we are is so important to us and it feels really good to see that it's so important to so many people out there and i think that's why we're making such good progress and that's why this feels so good and so right and and why it is moving along so well and like we've said many times before this isn't something that you can check off and be done with we will continue to work on all this um but it really feels this year like we're doing really good work and making even more progress than we ever have before yeah and um looking at professional growth uh you know and trying to sort of change a culture we look at sort of three phases uh you have your pioneers

054who try things out they take courses other places they make come together in a small group uh then you have sort of the bulk of your people looking at those pioneers making sure okay is that going to work am i going to be uh successful if i try it oh look they're doing it okay it's okay and uh and then you have your you know your few folks at the back maybe more resistant taking a little more time and i would say we are fully in uh everybody's doing it everybody's trying it uh it is the way that we're operating now and that's a big tipping point to pass it's the hardest to get to that really critical mass there so well done kristen um i agree with heather like it this when you see

055like those numbers of people and the breadth of the offerings it tonight is like the first night for me where it really clicked and it felt like this is actually really authentic um you know what i mean like like you can offer these things and whatnot but this is i don't know tonight it kind of clicked for me seeing how much as heather called it buy-in you know whatever word you want to tack on to it but there really is authentic interest and commitment to this in a way that tonight was very evident and visible i have a question for you those the slides about the paths um are they really like so it looks like there were three there's three professional development dates so on those dates is it basically just the word path

056is just sort of confusing is it basically just on those three dates those are the offerings you can select and no i don't know can you explain it so you choose one path yeah go to for all three all three so it's like sort of like a little seminar that got it okay importantly you know that's a big learning on uh adult learning which is um that is it has to be more than a one-shot deal and you need to be with a group of people that's constant to to make that change in people's uh behavior and attitudes so that you know the timing of it with about a month or six weeks in between the three sessions each time um it's it's really important for people's growth because because then it never leaves the

057the front burner um in terms of choice but you know just to comment on your earlier um comment as the person who's like signing everybody up for all these courses and everything i mean i kind of knew but it wasn't until you you all asked me to do this presentation that i had to search our database of signups and i was like is this true 65 courses we've 471 people have signed up for them how can this possibly be knowing that there's like 500 so i kept going back to this so so thank you for asking us for the presentation so great um another question that that might be repetitive because we've said it before but of course we all have debated you know what what is our role in this and what can it

058be um and i think a lot of it is this it's understanding it so that we can support you and of course you know we we have budget responsibility and there's always the money bags that can support things with it when needed but other than that i would put it out there and there might not be answers today but the question is ongoing how can we further support you and so i think i think i can speak for everyone here because everybody has said similar things before we do strongly want to support this and so please keep us posted if you have ideas and thoughts and things that we're not doing that you think we should be please let us know how we can help if it's more than what we're doing now yeah i

059can say three things and then you know please my colleagues join me the first is to have a strategic plan that includes this work as very clearly what where we're moving forward with the district um you know that is something we can stand behind and make sure the work happens so that that is a very public statement of your support the second is pretty obvious but i'll say it in times that are tough not to cut professional development when we have to cut the budget because that is how you make change so you know when we can get teachers a calendar where teachers have the opportunity to have good uh solid time with their colleagues with professionals that can lead them in good conversations and activities that's how we make progress so i know you

060know if you look at the numbers for professional development it sometimes feels like that might be a good place to cut and and and we have cut over the years and we just always want to make sure that we're not cutting over multiple years so you can kind of take a hit for one year but taking a hit for three years is um is you know you're you would see the death of an initiative that way uh and then the last one is you know i think questions um come up um from individuals on this work and it takes a lot of courage on the part of teachers and administrators to move forward so knowing that we have your full support and doing this work empowers us to be able to do it and i

061would say thank you for that because it sort of feels like the pinnacle of my professional career to to make this change in a very special district so thank you great that's wonderful well i think the stated support is easy and you know the the profession of specifically pointing out professional development i think is very helpful obviously we're in budget season and we and none of us were clamoring to cut professional development bindings but but to tie it that specifically and for us to be able to tie our stated values and priorities to the tasks that we have to accomplish like like approving a budget is really important because we can look at that budget and say this really supports our priorities because we have strong support for professional development in it um and that's

062a really helpful tie so thank you that's great i'd love to put a tough one your way if i could you we've discussed unconscious bias we're a teaching and learning institution we've got to have some tolerance for experimentation and and mistakes frankly my unconscious bias may not be evident until i offend somebody until i make a mistake and i'm not convinced we are highly tolerant of mistakes that that harm people uh so how do we leverage mistakes in our in our institution in a way that doesn't add to the harm that's already happened when when when we make a blunder because we're not aware and then we realize that we've got some attitude and ability issues around uh understanding differences court i think if if i could one strategy is just what you said the

063acknowledgement that i've made this blunder i i said this and did this um i wasn't even aware that i i had this you know bump in me and i'm aware now number one uh you apologize and you know i i am sorry that i said or i did that made you uncomfortable because you see the apology is not about us it's about how that other person is it feels um and three to really then seek out um other individuals or allies or someone that you can talk to to say this is what i did um you know i i i think i need to maybe maybe i need to take a course maybe i need to have further conversation everyone is going to make a mistake and what you do after that is the sign

064of growth um you can't continue to go through and say i'm not going to say anything because i might say the wrong thing yes i might say the wrong thing but it won't be an intentional and so naming it acknowledging it asking forgiveness and then seeing what you can do to examine is there something else in me that i'm not aware of there's this um and we all have them that's that's the that's the piece so acknowledging that is is is the first step um yeah sure you can take a course um and that dialogue is going to help or workshop may help to uncover even more things because it you know it's like this backpack what i call it is what's in your backpack we don't know what's in there because all of our

065life messages that have been caught and messages have been taught have been stuck in there um and our parents raised us with good intentions and guardians however it wasn't what they raised us with then is not suitable for now so that we really have to look at what we're carrying and acknowledge it and say all right now that i know that what can i do to make sure this doesn't happen again so that makes sense that's helpful um what what that leads to for me is a a hope or an expectation that uh that the experts among us will teach us how to uh how do i say this uh call us out on the mistakes in a way that isn't shaming because to be called out can be instructive or it can be shaming

066and that's a pretty nuanced kind of thing there um uh so i hope we're teaching and learning the business of helping others be self-aware in such a way that they don't they're not shamed they're not embarrassed they don't have to hide because that's not a good learning space you know and i know it so well the one of our guidelines in ideas is when we set guidelines up whenever we teach a course and it and it says they'll there's no shaming there's no blaming we we we own and we own what it is you know that we have so yes i agree um it is working through that thank you uh quick one more quick question um kristen maybe this goes to you if as a teacher i do some pd and i express some

067commitments around my my learning goals will that enter into any of my where i teach and into any of my professional goals that others are aware of so i've got that observer effect going on that and maybe even a coach so um we have a system of supervision and evaluation there are four standards that all teachers need to meet and they're evaluated on them every year um and uh being more culturally competent is part of that it is in two of the standards so the second standard is reaching all students and so that is something that is assessed by evaluators mostly the principles principals and assistant principals at uh the cps and at cchs it's the department chairs um and um so that's the student part of it and then the family part of it

068um communicating with families in a culturally proficient way is actually part of standard three and so those goals are made public similarly all educators every year set two goals one is for student learning and one is for their own professional growth and we have a lot of our educators choosing to become more culturally competent or to make their curriculum more culturally competent for student growth as part of their goals so those goals are are public and we can give coaches as part of it and suggest through the supervision and evaluation process of meetings suggests people take courses uh we've offered mentors so yeah we've done a lot of support for that but it is sort of uh systemically something that we uh gather uh support and then we actually report to the state about uh

069where where our supervision and evaluation is so yeah it's it's tracked us very systematically thank you uh i uh if i may i just wanted to uh say that i really appreciate the process that uh the group has taken uh in um bringing the um the prop the work done on uh cultural competency starting with listening to the students because um the the purpose of of all the work that is done is really to benefit the students so i really appreciate um the course that this conversation has taken um you have uh kristen you have already answered uh one of my questions which was about the metrics i have two follow-up questions one is um how um do we how is the professional training continued for onboarding of new teachers um what's the process there

070and also um can we talk that program uh that is based in that is based in community um in the past i heard that uh some uh conquered uh high school teachers would give students that participated in uh those kind of programs uh credit um is that is that still continuing yeah so i'm happy to answer the first part of that and then maybe let dr martin answer about the can we talk um series but uh the first part is about uh new staff i think and how we acclimatize them that this is the work that we're doing so um even as part of the it's there from the very first day that they apply because of course it's our part of our strategic initiatives um so when candidates come for their interview we have

071a set of interview questions that we ask all all the same candidates interviewing for the same job um and there is always some question in there around um cultural competency it depends you know what grade level they're working with or what subject area but there's something about that because all of our questions are based off of our rubric for supervision and evaluation so we're always asking about it and so right from the beginning they know it's important and then as they're being hired they have conversations with the department chair the principal and dr hunter is always the last stop and she talks about it in those interviews as well and then when new staff start they come to a two-day orientation usually at ripley and we orient them to the strategic initiatives within the district

072so we talk a lot with our new folks about um how we're doing the work and that they can take professional development and so forth but they're sort of entering into a conversation that's been going on for a number of years so i i would say they're very well aware um and sort of the last piece of it is uh as we reported to an earlier we've been hiring more faculty of color so that room that i work with of new staff over the last eight years has become increasingly diverse so you can literally see uh the the fruits of the labor and you can look around and know that we're walking the talk that we're trying to do this so and um dr martin can you answer the question about can we talk uh

073could you restate that for me please so yes thank you i heard it in the past that uh some uh some of the cchs uh teachers would um offer credit to those students that participated in uh in that series uh uh do you see participations or interests coming from students as well as the community members do you know yes i've um and so in a couple of my workshops i have seen students high school students and i've had some teachers who've also taken the course taken that series and i believe there was some professional development credit offered to the teachers uh so yes there have been uh students who have you know reached out and workshops were held at the high school so that was also kind of convenient for them i think administrators there

074too yes yes yep some administrators and it enriched the conversation because with a student there and a community and a faculty person um the community the conversations were enriching they're exciting um and appreciated uh with all of this work dialogue is what matters if we can talk about it we can begin to make a difference and we can begin to do differently did i answer okay i'll go um thank you so much for all the work that you've done and the presentation you brought to us and um i continue to be encouraged i continue to be excited about this work um and it is it is an enormous undertaking in addition to everything that you have to do especially this year uh so i'm very very appreciative of that i had um and a multicam

075questions comments and answers but they all they are tied together and i'm going to start from um where we just stopped the can we talk right um so and it also ties in with the way that we the school committee can support you and what does that support look like so i want to talk about how i see that support and um i would like also to ensure that it's um it's understood so v can we talk i want to focus on the weak right who is the we uh so that was a very example a very good example of the the programs that happened at the high school that involved students and parents and educators uh that is the kind of conversations and dialogues that uh that we need um the programs that are

076offered at the adult and continuing education are also wonderful i have attended um some of them i wonder if they are as effective as um they if if they were happening directly in with our school with our parents communities for instance right um we're talking about um what what's happening at the schools and this this is almost you know it's part of the district and it's it's a little bit separate um so i would like us to engage in that um in in the definition of of that week um and also about difficult conversations um when you mentioned uh kristen when we introduced difficult topics and difficult conversations and in your training all of you um you have encountered this difficult conversation that you have skills in your teaching skills on how to um navigate

077and have these conversation and reach uh the desired outcome um so when we're introducing difficult topics that families or parts of the community are having trouble with um i am wondering where whether we could apply the same principles or the same strategies to those conversations my concern my worry is um whether any uh i know we're not going to have a hundred percent satisfaction when we're talking about these topics my concern is to have to be um to exclude we have a lot of educating to do if a community member is uncomfortable or feels um not accepting of a topic that's been introduced for instance or perspective um how can we engage them in those difficult conversations so that we don't arrive to a point where would they become the other or where the district

078needs to be protected against this other intervention i would like us to be in the context where we're having those conversations they are difficult and nobody feels the need to be protected from the other so that's the point that i want to make sure that is understood um again just like when we talk about iep for instance sorry implementing an iep you could wave the iep as a legal document in the face of a teacher or you could have the buy-in and um work on the best ways to educate a special needs child student um so that's uh what um i would like to um [Music] to engage the three of you um with and there's another question actually that also ties um into that and that's a question i have for dr martin but

079um andrew and kristen you may have the answers as well uh so in the same theme um i know we talked about uh having um uh completing an equity audit and we're taking our time because we want to do it right in the absence of the equity audit dr martin what informs your curriculum for professional development in terms of the needs of our community right um how um yes what informs the the choices that you make in order to meet the needs of the conquered car lot community um in your uh training and again this um inviting andrew and christian also to um to answer this question when you're choosing your professional development and uh i'll stop there it's a lot i can start uh by giving you the genesis of the can we talk

080series um so i sit on the board of the adulton community ed which is a part of the public schools and we had a board member another board member a white woman come and say she was in a particular situation at the grocery store in town where there was another woman wearing a hijab and um there was a white man who was saying negative things to uh to that uh woman wearing hijab and um the woman who brought the situation to our attention wanted to be an ally she just didn't know what to say she literally didn't know how to intervene and i think that's the silent majority and i was really encouraged to me that was um a little canary in the coal mine saying this community is really ready to bring these conversations

081out um and so that was how we started it and started talking about being allies within the community so i you know that's where it came from that's that's the we um and just in terms of adult learning um you know it's all optional and we gotta work with people when they're ready and they're open um or we could turn them the other way you know on any situation if we're sort of uh um not giving them the option to um do it at their own pace so dr martin i don't know or andrew yeah yeah i mean i think for me personally you know i take this work um you know the lens that i have within this work is you know comes from a very personal place um i think over the years

082just listening to what our you know and again i've primarily worked with our bots and uh student population you know just hearing about their experiences um informs a lot of the my approach to this work um and you know i think for me um being in a district like concord uh i know just very recently it kind of dawned on me about you know i you know there there are colleagues out there that look like me that may not feel safe you know whether they are the only black man in the district or the only black woman or the only person of color in the room uh to engage in this in this sort of work right because at the end of the day when you are talking about race and you happen to be

083the only person of color in the room you know you can get into a space where you may not feel safe enough to engage yourself in that work and and and feel like you are the spokesperson for that work um so for me i think i have i've you know i have sort of you know my approach to this work is knowing that you know dr hunter for example um is leading by example right you have a superintendent that has made this work her priority and that vision trickles down all the way down right you have a school committee that is that is very committed to this work there are other school districts out there that have school committees and have superintendents that will shy away far away from the site work because it is

084difficult right but for me personally i don't have the luxury to say you know i simply don't have the luxury to shy away from this work right because i live it i you know i i i hear it from my own students and it is sort of the the work at hand right it's it's that long it's it's it's it's it's exhausting work but i know that at the end of the day i am impacting those around me and those who willingly engage in this work so you know the commitment we all have towards this from from dr hunter to our you know to the school committee uh to christian to dr uh martin and even now as you heard from our our professional development uh uh our presentation we have faculty that are very

085much committed to this work you have students that are engaged in this work you have community parents etc and so for me that that gives me hope and that gives me the energy to continue uh to engage in these very difficult conversations and and as i have mentioned in the past uh with folks you know i grew up in a in a in uh sort of in the world or you know back in ghana where this was never a conversation right you saw another person as just another human being right and so for me i it's it's it's always you know i always reflect back on on the personal aspects of this work because i know the impact is is so large and and for us to be so proactive about this work and so

086intentional about this work um i think it's it's it's it gives me hope and i know for many of our boston families the fact that we even have these conversations the fact that the school committee wants to engage in this work i i it says a lot to them um and for folks for families of color who live in concord and carlisle who i'm sure are paying attention as well although we you know we may not hear from them as often but i know they are paying attention you know i know this work is near and dear to them as well um so that's you know as as you know the support that heather uh was mentioning you know i think the continuous sort of support you know support in this work you know supporting

087dr hunter supporting our admin team our teachers and families who want to engage in this work you know i think i think that is what is needed to to make that drastic change that drastic shift uh within our culture so thank you for the question thank you for the question also uh let me see if i can um answer this in terms of curriculum i've been doing this this work teaching courses uh 35 years now uh with ideas and organically like kristen said there was that person in the grocery store that said i i don't know what to say i don't know what to say i don't know how to say it if i say it will i make a mistake if i make a mistake will i get judged so how to have difficult

088conversations the workshop the course emerges so when when teachers um and even even parents because the strategies are applicable it's it's not just about race but it's about the other isms when they say i i really want to know how to do this that course emerges um when um someone says unconscious bias well you know i don't see any color i don't see color that's that's yeah you do or you should and here's why and and that's a biased piece so let's talk about why you may be uncomfortable seeing color what does that mean to you in terms of where you came from and where you're going so that opens up a conversation about unconscious bias um teachers say well what about my curriculum you know you say let's you know how do i fix

089that well you know the lens through which you view a yourself be the world falls into your curriculums again though it requires a systematic approach so the you know like the the the pre-k lit review really looking at um what are we teaching what are the words that we're using um and so that you know i i sit on the bias committee for the for mcas um and they've been there since inception 1999 and i also sit on the board with the sap psat college boards they are actively going through material for bias you know because if there's bias there that means students all students can't enter which is different than all students having the knowledge uh so when we look at curriculum it's can all students access this is there something in there that

090might bump is there are there the mirrors and the windows we talked about does our does our curriculum reflect what we see students seeing themselves or are they constantly looking sort of looking out the door so that drives how we look at developing how do we review curriculum uh so there there isn't this mandate in order to be the perfect anti-racist educator you know you have to take this this this and this um these courses and workshops are there and provided um first for teachers and faculty and community people who are interested we do offer a what we call ideas 101 which is anti-racist practicing practices for teachers and that covers all you know sort of takes in all of the workshops that we may offer and gives you know it's almost like a buffet

091if you will that's a graduate level course and then teachers can go deeper into i want to do a little bit more about um identity i want to do a little bit more about um curriculum and so on so i does that am i am i close to what you asked with an answer yes very much thank you i'm consulted you know i could talk for three or four hours so you gotta you know in my mind i'm going did i answer the question succinctly well dr martin that might be my segue um uh and i'll address this uh to you and kristen and andrew through dr hunter um if i'm correct we don't have another session uh with this team this school year uh but i think we might want to look toward that

092um if we can ask for your participation again because uh clearly this conversation says that uh we we want to engage as a school committee with you and we appreciate it yeah we're happy to come back we feel your support and we know you have a huge agenda for tonight so so i think we should table it uh because literally i think all of us could talk about it all night yeah all right good thank you thank you very much dr martin thank you thank you thank you certainly uh ms herbert thank you um i i want to uh uh look at the agenda for a moment and uh i think uh cynthia rainey asked you would you be amenable to uh a shift because i think that you uh are going to lead with

093the uh conquered capital planning if i'm correct is that so yeah can i just um as i was very neglectful of a topic i wanted to bring up tonight and my liaisons report i was going to use this kind of as a uh um so i'll i'll be happy to to move the capital planning discussion later but uh the calendar committee met and uh while we're still not have not finished our work on the calendar i didn't make a commitment to um that group that we would have the um discussion with uh the town uh select board about having indigenous people stay and also in recognition of the letters we got from our eighth graders um i think it's an important thing so i'm just curious um if we could perhaps with dr hunter's help

094send the letters on to the select board with the request that they consider um discussing the topic of having indigenous people stay on the calendar for 2021. dr hunter are you amenable to that yeah very much so very much so so we can talk whether you want to put a memo together from the school committee and then i'll help get them delivered so i guess just to have the right process we do we have to have a memo discussed at the next school committee meeting or could we be a little less formal i'm just trying to decide um i think if we acknowledge that that's an activity coming out of the calendar subcommittee that would suffice do the members agree yeah i think you can delegate the chairs to the letter and of course i'll

095work with you and sarah because i think it should come from both committees yeah all right do we have the approval of the members of the committee anybody disapprove all right so it's back to you and then you'll bring it to the chairs and we'll uh be working with dr hunter throughout thank you for your indulgence just to be clear on processing so it's clear to people listening to this is not saying that we are agreeing right now to change it it's saying that we're requesting a discussion that's correct but i would like to the select board to take the lead so it's a town just exactly discussion decision not just the schools good i just wanted to clarify that for everyone we want to see uh whether that conversation can be coordinated right exactly

096thank you thank you um i i move that the agenda uh be uh adjusted such that we take up uh item 7c at this time the cchf athletic season update recognizing that we have uh mr mastrullo and mr joncas in the room with us um might i have a second please thank you for both committees hi everybody and uh good evening and uh roll call please anders and i for both blue guy for both that i for both i think that was uh fatima yeah okay um good very good okay so check your microphones if they're on and shouldn't be and uh mr mastrullo uh if you'd introduce mr joncas and uh take it away please yeah so i'm really here just to support aaron um aaron jungus who's our athletic director and uh for

097those that don't know he was also the mecco director before becoming the athletic director for i think a decade aaron uh nine years yep nine years since so he's uh he's made a successful transition uh to the athletic department uh director position and senator uh you know a really a really good job with the support of the school committee and dr hunter of just navigating a sports uh you know the this season which has been the toughest of all so you know really excited to um to have him present we you know we did have an opportunity to talk through it and and we are just really grateful for the support that you provide we know this is it's not easy and you know we we even um when we're debate discussing and debating sometimes

098it's it's it can we recognize that um you know this this can be a challenge in the environment in this environment but but we're just grateful for the opportunity because we do recognize that kids can really benefit from from extracurriculars uh particularly during this time with social isolation so uh aaron is yours thanks very much and um forgive me everybody i've got something wrong with the camera on my screen so there's like a black spot right center um i'd echo the sentiments around uh the gratitude for support throughout the course of the year i meet with my colleagues in the league the 11 member schools in the dcl each week and we often talk about our administration and school committees and i'm always gracious that i can say that we've been really fortunate to to

099benefit from certainly coaches and student athletes who are trying to make good decisions for the most part all year long in order to have successful seasons but um you know having mike and dr hunter and the school committee behind us has really made a big difference so thank you very much i'm going to share my screen i've got a couple of slides to share to talk about what we're calling the fall two season which the mi double a developed as sort of a wedge between the traditional winter and spring season because as you will all remember back in late august as we were getting ready to start school um in the athletic year uh there was a lot of uncertainty about what uh it would look like so it feels a little bit like uh

100we're all uh veterans of it at this point but it was not that long ago we were unsure so let me just start the screen share here so hopefully you can all see you've got a dual county league slide up right now is that correct we got it excellent so the fall two season uh as i mentioned is a creation by the state association for athletics and it starts on the monday we return from uh february vacation um as with each season that we've had so far this year uh the state association has worked collaboratively with the state eea office and a subcommittee of school administrators and physicians school nurses superintendents on the sports medicine committee to develop safety guidelines that align with what the state has put out for youth and amateur sports in

101the fall 2 season the sports that are offered or approved are football uh cheerleading with very significant modifications um volleyball volleyball was actually approved for the regular fall season but we moved it like many schools to this season because many of us were unsure about what indoor space would look like in the need for social distancing in school buildings so we weren't sure about gym space and then indoor track uh which we'll talk about a little bit uh tonight as well there are no state tournaments or sectional tournaments uh everything's being done basically in a regional basis and what we've done in the league as you may recall from earlier presentations is created two different pods of schools and essentially uh you know we stay within these pods for all uh in a scholastic match-ups

102so acton-boxborough lincoln sudbury newton south westward academy and conquer carlisle make up our competition pod and in most cases there are some exceptions occasionally but in most cases these are the schools against which we compete the benefit of this obviously is that you know these are towns like ours communities like ours that have benefited from lower infection rates and their school districts i think are utilizing some of the same strategies that we are as a district to mitigate infection and spread as i mentioned the fall two season will start on february 25th it runs up through the latest date will be the saturday after april vacation uh april 24th my expectation is that it will likely end the weekend prior there may be a couple of varsity competitions during the week of april break which

103is a traditional time that sports continue to run especially at the varsity level we have about 250 students signed up for our fall two offerings right now so in these four sports there's definitely a significant amount of interest from our students the protocols will be similar to what they've been in the past we're required to follow all of the guidelines and support modifications we will not have any spectators right now for any of our indoor competitions which will be volleyball only right now outdoor gatherings are limited to 25 people right now so for a sport like football for example um we've basically put it on hold for a few weeks um the season's not expected to start with any games until mid-march um so you know we've tabled the decision about what we're going to

104do with spectators but in the fall you may recall that we were able to initially have one parent from each family attend games and we used a lanyard system for admission eventually that extended to two families uh two parents rather or guests per athlete so we'll we'll be abiding by all of the rules for gatherings in terms of spectators our students have done a pretty good job overall you know i i mentioned to dr hunter a couple of weeks ago there was a photo in the concord journal of action during a basketball game and one of the students masks was down below his nose and i said you know we can do 99 for 99 times out of 100 you know they'll take that picture and we'll get it right and the one time we

105don't it ends up in the newspaper of course but um i think the important factor for the winter is that um we had uh we had five basketball teams and three hockey teams uh in the high risk sport category and um in those cases in those teams rather when there was a positive covet case there were not any uh issues with team spread so there were two times during the season where there were more than one there was more than one student athlete on a team who tested positive in one of those cases there were some students that were carpooling together um without masks and uh in another one of the cases it was over the winter vacation and uh it affected kids on two different teams but it turned out that they were gathering

106together there were three of them all together who are friends who are getting together socially to play video games in somebody's basement so i think those two uh were the examples where there were more than one um but other than that our protocols uh are working um we did have to quarantine teams for uh two weeks uh during the season a few times but um you know those two week quarantines are a precaution designed to keep everybody safe it really results in just um you know five days of of uh extra remote learning so uh you know there is a little bit of risk involved of course but um several of our teams made it completely through the season without a quarantine and our teams that were moderate risk sports which is what our volleyball

107program will be and what we've designed for our track program those include nordic ski alpine ski both had over 50 student athletes on each team they made it through through the winter season and our fencing team our swim team which had virtual meets uh had no positive cases so i think we've really we've really benefited from diligence vigilance on the part of the coaches and i think uh you know overwhelmingly our student athletes recognize how important it is for them to be able to participate and they do a good job with with um with following the rules so um just a couple of of uh details um to highlight here let me just start sharing the screen there again i think the two big questions for this season we'll focus on football understandably as a

108high risk sport and then there are a lot of questions around indoor track so i'll start with football and certainly we'll take any questions about either one afterwards but um the modifications for football on the field are are not significant um they you know they didn't change the way that the game will be played uh very much what they've modified our uh the roster sizes will be decreased a little bit we will have three distinct levels of teams where traditionally your junior varsity and varsity kids practice together they'll be two separate distinct teams um huddling will be different um sidelines will look different um so you know all of these sort of dead time so to speak that is involved in a football game uh similar to what's uh occurred this winter with basketball and

109hockey you know it's sort of this interesting mix where you watch a basketball game in our gym and the kids are competing on the floor playing the game much as it's designed to be played and then you look over on the sideline and i've got chairs six feet apart for them and they all have an assigned seat and huddles look different and things like that so i think the same is planned for football we are going to continue to treat football as a high risk activity and so that if there is a positive case on a team we are going to quarantine uh the team for the two-week period that's again as i said worked well during the winter um i think the advantage is that it's outdoors um we have also ordered uh special

110masks that we're going to require for all students during practice and games it's a it's a full shirt that's attached to a mask with hooks around the ears so that'll allow students to keep those on and secure underneath their helmets still have their mouth guards in which is a you know sort of a logistical challenge for football players um we'll play a limited schedule it's five weeks and um you know we're gonna we're gonna try to replicate you know a couple of friday nights if it's warm enough and give the kids that experience and recognizing that you know the seasons are all a little bit different this year questions about football before i go into track yeah a quick question aaron hey there um i remember in the fall with field hockey there is an

111example of a game where we found out two days later a day later that someone on the opposing team was diagnosed with covet um in now in field hockey they're not quite as close and in football given the way they work and hit each other and they're on top of each other is that more a case like that is that more likely to put our whole team into quarantine or some of them or is that are we figuring that out as we go that's a really good question um we were fortunate this winter to not have that experience but there were some schools in the league that did one of the benefits uh of uh not having spectators is that we figured out how to videotape every game so this happened between two communities in

112a basketball game at the boys varsity level and what the school districts did was consulted with the board of health they actually watched the video and tried to determine okay what were the you know who was in close contact and for how long so i think i think it's really a case-by-case basis that if something like that comes up um you know a football roster might be 45 students right and there could be some kids that just play you know special teams so they're just in on kickoffs for example right you know there's a difference between somebody who's in that role maybe and who's playing you know offensive and defensive line and colliding with someone on the other team you know every play so i think we'll look at it on a case-by-case basis you

113know we've uh i think we've all developed good working relationships with our boards of health um i know that's the case for us in town so we'll lean on them and and um you know their advice and guidance if a situation like that comes up makes sense thanks so we have a robust indoor track program every year um as you know we don't have an indoor track facility so in the winter our indoor track program has some students who practice in our gymnasium at the high school some who are outside distance runners will will you know do a run on campus or off depending on the weather and the snow and so forth um this year uh the facilities where we usually compete are not available so the reggie lewis center is being used as

114a vaccination site it's not open boston university is another site that we use as a league they are not allowing any outside rentals and even if they were the idea of having multiple teams some of whom like us have over 100 student athletes participating on the team coming together indoors to compete seems pretty daunting so the mia's sports medicine committee did release indoor track modifications but the sense was sort of that they were they were not going to make a decision about whether or not to allow the sport they felt like their role as a committee was to present modifications and that it was up to us as a league to determine whether or not we could run events safely so as a league we also do not have a facility there are some schools

115with field houses that can have some modified practices um we're not comfortable with running a practice indoors the way that a track team would need to practice so what we've developed is what we're calling fall to track which will basically be four days per week um we'll structure it as a team we want kids to benefit from having the opportunity to be part of a team to to have the benefits of that camaraderie and um the opportunities for our seniors and captains to lead um for our students who are uh new to new to track to really have an opportunity to to meet their peers but also learn about the different events and so forth but we're going to run the program outdoors um we're going to start on march 1st so we'll wait a

116week after february vacation to begin the program we will run it through the fall to season and then as the weather improves in april um we'll we're sort of leaving it on the table that there may be an opportunity to run some uh outdoor uh indoor track events i know that sounds sort of contradictory but indoor track for example this the sprint distance is different than outdoor track in the spring so they're not perfect matches the track markings for example are very different indoors than they are outdoors the number of turns on the longer run are different so there are a lot of variables there but we're going to start our program as sort of an intramural program we're going to decrease the user fee by 50 because we're not going to have meat fees

117and transportation costs and officials and things of that nature but we are going to have students register like they would for for us uh interscholastic sport um and you know we have so many kids that are interested and really committed that we want to provide an opportunity for them to participate and at the very least this will be a chance for them to be ready to go for spring track which will start uh in april so i expect that we'll have probably around 100 students that will participate in that program and uh there should be a run on hats and mittens and earmuffs for the for the next couple of weeks because they're going to be outside braving the elements questions about jack true new englanders right i love the creativity of outdoor indoor track

118that's terrifying this is how we do things this year right i think it's an excellent um approach um having had uh kids run track um especially for freshmen um just getting this introduction to how this all works i think it's gonna be great and will really give outdoor track a a nice um start won't be so abrupt and requires such a steep climb for the coaches and students so great great work thank you any other questions comments thank you for all your work this happened i mean i don't think we thought we would be here so i know it takes uh it takes time told me we were going to talk about running football i would have taken another bet honestly been really great for the kids and i have a question about overall about

119the winter sports yes and i i'm i'm uh i think dr hunter might be talking to us about testing later so i'm not sure yeah but um just to try to avoid these um 14-day quarantines i think whatever we can do to test students on monday and perhaps delay this start especially for the football team um until we get those test results i think that would make everybody's life a lot easier because it would be really unfortunate to have like a one day practice and then come back and we find a couple of kids are positive in our testing um you know i just i think it would be so helpful to try to figure out how to test the students the first week back and maybe delay a little bit the start of football

120since you're not starting track what are you starting volleyball on the first day of two so the cheerleading volleyball and football are scheduled to start on that on that monday we return and track would be the following monday right a week a week break so i would just ask you mr massoule and dr hunter to consider you know if if we could do it i just think it would really provide benefit overall to to keeping things on track i know the track doesn't starting but um yeah just a thought before we come back to that uh aaron did your slide say feb 25 uh yes did i miss type i might i thought i heard it or saw it but you did but now that you're saying it i'm i'm thinking that i it's february

12122nd excuse me the season ends april 25th and so that's what was in my head okay yeah monday is the 20th or maybe the smudge on your screen was was maybe that's what i remember maybe so so given the importance of this let's let's take a few minutes on it uh uh does the does the the added assurance that you're going to get a season uh warrant a really close look at the practicality of pulling off test re-entry testing after vacation yes we've had i've and i'll i'll grab this one because i've had this conversation across aaron and mike and with the nurses um you know we're we're prepping to do the structured schedule testing over the course of that week back um the nurses felt pretty strongly that to try to ramp up to

122do a larger scale testing on that monday would be a lot between now and then because i only have a couple working days this week uh the other concern they had was just access to it depending on how we offered it if we're you know driving through or you know doing it off school hours or not with school transportation could everyone come in if we needed them to um whether it be you know students of working parents or the kids coming from boston or etcetera so we've we've been discussing this we i don't know that we're going to be quite up and running to do it um but we certainly understand why it's been brought up as a discussion point we'll talk more on it over the rest of the week just to see if

123there's an option we would characterize these teams as being students at uh statistically higher risk because of the physical contact and the additional hours correct uh certainly certainly the football's a high risk the other's a little less but certainly so would that mean that in your planning conversations you would include uh potential prioritization i don't know uh part of the scale up here is you know how many kids we're gonna test on a day and getting schedules set and and some of that so i i don't know if this would throw such a curveball to that that in the next couple of days we could make this make this an option um the nurses were fairly overwhelmed with the process in and of itself so we can talk more on that we've actually had a

124conversation over whether we should mandate any testing for any of the athletes we don't feel that's totally in our purview um and i again had some of that same response the nurses just haven't done this yet with the kids so i think there's a bit of unknown that they're reacting to and as they get ramped up for hundreds and hundreds of kids a week to try to try to be sure that they're going to be able to manage that and what we need if we have to add help or anything like that so at the very least i take cynthia rainey's uh comments to mean that this school committee is very concerned but i think you already knew that mr jongus yes i mean if i may say one quick thing too and i i

125will readily admit that my position evolves and fluctuates and ebbs and flows so it's it's not an ironclad position it might even change tomorrow i i too worry about 50 plus kids being quarantined i mean that was that's it's not an ideal situation you know the players do know the risk going in i think that's important that everyone understands what the risks are um you know if it was possible to test everyone at the start to avoid that i think that would you know in one point make sense you know i do think answering the question about equity is a tough one though too and you know there might be a lot of parents that would would request that their child be tested on that monday and so i do think that might be a

126tough one to answer when someone asks that question so yeah there's one question oh go ahead sorry um for context i think that we as a school and certainly in the league were concerned about the winter break and students returning to play that first week we held on to the schedule because the season started in mid-december and uh games started that first week in january we we held on to the schedule um and we were i think pleasantly surprised uh relieved maybe is a better word that coming back from winter break with our student athletes we did not see an uptick in the number of cases throughout the league um i don't have the exact numbers it's a little bit anecdotal but you know certainly whenever there's a team that's quarantined in the league it

127affects all of us because there's a domino effect with scheduling and there was not a rush to adjust games and matchups and so forth in those first two weeks back so um you know i think there could be in addition to coaches uh as a as a leadership team for myself and and mike and from doctor hunter to just continue with the message around the importance of during vacation staying home keeping masks on not doing anything to jeopardize you know participation i think for our students in the football and volleyball programs in particular they had their seasons postponed in august and remember that disappointment and i think that they have a real stake in them in in their own ability to get the seasons off the ground successfully good well we will uh we we

128will second those uh those hopes that it repeats itself from uh december to to uh the february break and that you'll you'll amplify those messages as i'm sure you will we'll do certainly and dr hunter this is still a ongoing conversation on your end oh this conversation never stops once we kick these seasons open um and i don't want to say that you know any of this comes easily we're so committed to the opportunity that unfortunately it comes with these hard hard factors of quarantine and and other dominoes that allow us to have the opportunity i don't want to diminish it's really hard to quarantine a whole group of kids we don't take that lightly and i'm going to say that again too in a minute when i do the covet update we know and

129i don't think we saw it initially before school opened what what weight that would be for us and it definitely and certainly is we we carry that um we and we're gonna get through it hopefully the way the families do that the choices are to not offer things because they come at the risk of the quarantines and i'll talk more on a little bit on why we're doing what we're doing but you know the success so far has made it worth it um and seeing kids being able to engage at least to whatever opportunity we can give them has mattered greatly to us and i think mattered greatly to the kids and ultimately that's the bottom line so um [Music] yeah i really don't think that point dr hunter can be understated i mean there's

130really not i mean we there's definitely kids that are that are that are struggling in this environment and um whatever their outlet is whether it's sports or theater is is really crucial thank you for your support this is a this is an endeavor some districts have not taken on at all and um you know your support's absolutely critical to it because it comes with all of these variables and factors and we're we're grateful for that we're we're grateful for you enabling kids to have these opportunities and recognizing that uh we don't want to add to the jeopardy so thank you i was gonna say as a parent of some kids one in particular whose sanity you are saving thank you for running athletics thank you for saying that all right good luck thanks very much

131thank you we won't count on luck but we'll take it all right it never hurts right good night everybody thank you nice thank you thank you it is eight o'clock um and we still have quite a bit of work ahead of ourselves could i propose that we have a slight break right now yes please it's 802. back at 8 10 what time do we want to come back 8 10 sharp we're rolling 8 minutes for dinner go um so this is why we start at five so we can go till 11 and it won't feel like a long night right i just want to apologize over here i had a glitch my screen went blank i had to switch computers and it was really yeah you were on twice i could use like your shirt

132was in one screen your head is in another i wouldn't turn off the computer and it wouldn't so i apologize it's fine today all of my emails all of them except for 16 are just gone i'm having like a kind of not panic attack but that's like weird sometimes they can recover i'm hoping it's bizarre be confident that you can cover them don't don't give up don't trash your account or anything i know it's making me nervous someone asked me for a document for this board that i'm on that meets now and i'm like i i can't give it to you but it's gone like oh it's wild anyway good luck with that that's nerve-wracking it is it's weird it's never happened to me i guess i've made it to my mid-40s all is not

133lost yet the reason i say that is it's happened to me i you know completely vanished to me i called i called i think i called microsoft and they really watched to walk me through how to recover it all yeah okay i'm a gmail person we'll see so we've got almost everybody back uh we never formally adjourned anything so we can pick things up at now it's 8 11. um if that's okay with you sarah yep and are we ready for cynthia is that uh oh yeah she's here yeah and uh i don't see have uh necessarily but we're moving to concord on business anyway correct well i think we're doing yeah all right we're doing the capital uh conquer capital planning task force update with cynthia yeah i mean i could just give you

134a brief update um uh the select board um charged a committee called the capital planning test excuse me the concord select board called the capital planning task force to look at how we might adjust perhaps the capital planning process in concord um and i would say essentially you come down to two options one of which is i would call we were calling it the enhanced process and the other is having a standing committee to reveal to review capital planning um and uh so pretty soon we're probably going to take a vote on one or the other as far as either standing committee or an enhanced process we haven't exactly defined the enhanced process but would be something like a joint meeting of this the concord select board and the concord and coca-cola regional school committees

135to look at um we're talking large capital projects five million dollars or greater um uh so the effort would be to look out and sequence them over a 10-year period so and have it reviewed every year honestly most of the other large capital projects are conquered town of concord and not the concord public schools um obviously we have a large capital project that we're in the midst of right now in concord so um [Music] that's really i just wanted to bring you up today because uh dr hunter and myself and jared do invest we meet twice a month um do invest some time so um i don't know if laurie had anything else to add that i might have missed and i think that's a great summary again i don't think we see that this

136will pertain to school related needs because the middle school's already got got its momentum um but we certainly want to be part of the conversation a lot of this has been about collaboration with the town between the town and schools and taking what's grown a long way in three and a half my three and a half years for sure um and trying to really memorialize that and structure that more formally i think yes um so i think we're happy to be part of that discussion and figure how everyone talks big picture and syncs up together and prioritizes collaboratively and if anybody on the committee or in the community has strong opinions or any opinions uh be be sure to attend our meetings um and i i don't know if we have another forum planned i

137don't know we said we won't do another form but um so and we are due to complete our work right in june when everything else is due so hopefully we can be proactive and get our work done sooner rather than later cynthia remind us this is a select board committee uh in its creation is it a select board committee for its appointments or a manager selectboard thank you good great thank you sure do you have a standing in the usual time that you guys meet i yes we usually meet i think is the first and third wednesdays i'm pretty sure that's it yeah okay so we do meet next week during vacation week so if you have right don't have anything three o'clock in the afternoon three three on wednesdays all right great thank you

138yep um i think then we can move on to old business covet updates yeah that's me so i did prepare a few slides just for talking points um and really i think i want to cover different pieces of what's been referenced at different points already tonight i think it's important to give you a high-level view of where we are with our coveted cases the data that's come reminders of the protocols that we're following but i also then want to be sure we reference testing and you know what our goals and visions are here for next steps short and long term and i think that'll address some of the questions you've had come to you tonight um so i think what's important is to to give you some data to start with and i didn't bring

139you all the data i could have i wanted to stay at a high level this is data as of today we've had 124 school related cases uh 27 staff or adults 97 kids and those are broken out across the schools it's actually fairly proportionate to the populations of the schools um the elementaries aren't quite equal but overall it's generally proportional to the to the school demographic i think it's really important to say out loud to you that on november 23rd thanksgiving week we had 15 cases so i just want to state that you know over a hundred cases since the end of november um is a pace and a a structure and a process that has required an awful lot of work by an awful lot of people to both support kids and families support

140the adults who might get positive support those who are exposed manage the structures and the quarantines and the close contact tracing manage the communication i mean it is an all hands on deck effort across the administrators the nurses um and beyond uh and just really important to state that i think um we're doing this really successfully and the goal has been to breed confidence and we're really really glad that we have that's been so important but it doesn't come without an awful lot of commitment and a lot of effort and energy by a lot of people and a lot of time and i know you know we're pretty communicating very transparently so you can all see the days and times that you know we're getting cases across uh holidays weekends it truly is 24 7.

141um it's a labor of love and every time i get someone who thanks us or is appreciative it is a labor of love we are that committed to keeping school open to giving kids opportunities like sports but i just feel like i need to say all of that because the precur this is the backdrop and precursor to why some of the requests tonight aren't different um and are going to take time to to morph and change into what people are hoping for so um i guess i'll then transition to you know the even higher level of work and monitoring that's had to happen over the last two weeks was our first experience in school transmission at alcott we've had eight total cases related to one another um seven of those transmission within the classroom one

142is a familial case that resulted after the one sibling was diagnosed positive the level of communication and support from the town and state officials was critical and crucial and their responsiveness mattered greatly but i don't want to understate i've spent the last two weeks wondering if i need to close alcott on a day-to-day basis so it's just really important that um the frame be made for where we are the goal has been maintaining and sustaining since we opened and that's why we're slow and stable and steady because that alone has had a lot of energy put to it it would be really easy to slide backwards here um i'm pretty sure other superintendents would have closed out in the last two weeks i took the confidence i got from the state and local officials to

143say it feels contained within those two classrooms and that's our process is working um that unless you get a random case you can't explain in another part of alcott we think you can stay the course um but it's just critical to frame where we're at because it's the backdrop for everything else we're going to talk about so knock on wood here we're coming out of the timeline where alcott's you know school student and staff transmission shouldn't be expanding and it has stayed within those two classrooms so the good news is and i didn't put the state level data up or the the community level data we're seeing you you all know this the search seems to be you know in a decline the state numbers have been under 1500 two days in a row i

144couldn't i'm not sure who could be more excited by that me or trish mcgeehan um the community numbers are dropping in suit with that carlisle's gone all the way to gray concord's held um held steady which is great because at one point there was escalation there those are pretty big drivers and obviously they have impact on the school community and the population you know to talk about you know referencing sports and i'll get into the quarantines on a minute that we got through that sturge playing high-risk sports in the months of december and january um it came at the cost of some quarantines it absolutely did but we got through it without transmission among those teams and um we we sustained a season um so just some other reminders and i hate to talk at

145you but it just feels like it's time to sort of put it all back out there in a big picture way um we are maintaining the 14-day quarantine and i'm i'll give you my explanation for that the the state and federal governments have given other options of 7 and 10-day quarantines in consultation with the the health leadership at the school level and at the town level um we have stuck with the 14 days and it is conservative and it is longer than some other places have gone to i know plenty of other districts that are staying with 14 some have gone started to go to the 10. um some of this right now is is because we've watched cases happen and sometimes it's a matter of testing timing and there's so many variables that play

146out into when when a positive can happen we've watched and been been actively engaged with cases getting diagnosed on day 10. i absolutely think there will be room to reduce this as we get towards the better weather the case counts are are slower um and we're able to feel like we've got a little more breathing room there um so the hope is to go to 10 days i don't want to say there's a timeline i think we're going in the right direction toward that i think it's important to realize that during the surge of december january we really felt like any time anything happened it switched from the beginning of the year where we felt like it was very likely whatever was going on wasn't coveted and then as that surge exploded it felt like

147we had to treat everything like it could be covered and those are very different mindsets to be operating under which is also why you'll see later on we added you know the siblings to become part of the discussion as of that same november stretch we asked siblings of anyone ill to stay home until we knew if that ill person had coveted or not that that is extraordinarily conservative just like the quarantine that is not cdc protocol that is not dph protocol those are contacts of maybe contacts like we're just you know really stretching and it mattered we reduced the number of quarantines because the siblings who could have exposed someone else weren't actually in the school setting that is why so many of the emails go out saying they were not in school there was

148no exposure um it it is all working um so i know it's hard and i know it's restrictive but i do think there's been positive benefit to the larger scale community alexa i think you're i have a yeah i have a quick question just because god i'm willing no one's been sick in my house now i feel like that's jinxing it um so let's pretend my i have a kid that is not feeling well so they have a stomachache whatever so do you guys recommend then that so on day one my kid has stays home say it's monday do you recommend then that like they don't get tested for several days is that why these kids have been isolated for so long so there's no more oh my kid feels sick we're gonna run and

149get a test the next day do you guys have changed that protocol i'm just yeah so the the real guidance has been to you know four to six days is the best time to test we don't insist on it has to be a certain day there are i know private school in town that says it has to be day five we have not gotten to that level um so yes a combination of the fact that if you wait those four to five days and then it takes you two days to get a test back you're at seven days already from being in school um and the other way that it really plays out is if someone in the family at home has covid um you know or then you're quarantined and by the time perhaps

150the student ends up positive they've been home for at least a week under the quarantine so the processes are working um they're really hard i totally appreciate that um we're all putting in a lot to try to make this work and it it's really hard um we are at a 10-day isolation for the positive covid case so that we have we are we are aligned with the gener general guidance we talked a lot about the high-risk sports and quarantining the whole teams that has been a lot but it's also allowed us to to keep playing um we are still continuing to quarantine the entire elementary classroom um that was critical last week at alcott the those kids were already home and as they became positive they hadn't been in other places so i don't expect

151that will change that's come up a number of times with the asymptomatic testing we will be testing asymptomatically in pools according to classrooms so if you get a positive pool this came up on the webinar yesterday you automatically are quarantining the classroom because someone in there is positive so it it could be that we have more quarantine but we also want to remember the asymptomatic is about containing spread and we don't want to it's good to know that and to to slow it down because some of the alcott story is asymptomatic cases in those in those classrooms um we do uh very much contact trace for the middle and high school students we are you know tracking their day talking with staff talking with the kids talking with who's actually been within six feet for

152more than 15 minutes so that's a more literal contact tracing i'm just referencing our current protocol for travel we are not again following state guidance we are asking that people test after they return to massachusetts it's not within the 72 hours before and now this was as of last week because there's enough folks out there positive who've had covid on that they will now need to provide us a positive covid test if they've been positive in the last 90 days in lieu of a test when they return and that's because they will continue to test positive for a period of time we actually expect that 90 days to go to 180 fairly soon and just a reminder the goal here has been preserving preserving health and safety and maintaining opportunities um we've been open since

153september 9th and short of a day here or there for remote weather or early on with a remote case we haven't had to stop that and we're proud of that and we're glad and excited by what that's offered to kids and the goal has been to stay stay open just a reminder of testing and how much we've grown in this regard symptomatic testing there are now we are offering paid options for families and there's obviously free options uh the cambridge option where families can drive into the site in cambridge and get a test we are regularly testing out of cchs's nurse's office symptomatic staff who the district is paying for and symptomatic students at it on a needed basis as best we can manage and they are covering those costs if families need free options

154the good news is as the surge has declined these options have become easier to access stop the thread sites back on track with free options there and of course a doctor's order will also help insurance to cover it asymptomatically we've gotten up and started two weeks in a row so far with the staff so they tested the week of january 26th and february 1st in both cases all of the pools were negative so we're glad for that we're preparing as we've referenced earlier to add students to the process the week we get back from break the deadline is tomorrow we had a webinar yesterday it was well attended and continue to answer questions um and i will actually you know feedback we're getting is the quarantine is part of the decision for families and for

155now it is what it is um the i i hear the the more pertinent timeline of quarantine that immediately worries people it seems as if they're in a positive pool and they need to wait for the individual tests to come back and um because you know you've got to then access one of these other sites to do it it might be 24 or 48 hours before you know if you're in the positive school so we're hopeful many districts have seen growth as the process has rolled out and people see how few positive pools there are and start to engage more but we're we're grateful for how engaged people are already and looking forward to getting everything up and running the state program is running through march 26th so we are funded fully for staff and

156student testing through the end of march we are going to have to have some conversations over the next few weeks and months here as to what the options are after that i did hear actually while we were on the meeting from one of the nurses that the state's saying they might be able to extend it a week so we'll take every week the state will give us um so that we aren't on our own for fiscal responsibility quite yet and then i just want to start really honing in on this because i know it's a big question for everybody i know we mentioned it during the budget process but i want to be explicit we absolutely have a goal of full return in september i don't see all the factors and i'll go through those

157just quickly in a minute coming together before that and this is the short list there's probably more that i need to add to it but these are the glaringly front loaded topics that need to be part of that discussion of full return um the local and state virus rates are obviously really important it's great they're starting to go in a better direction in school transmission is absolutely a driver um it certainly has made us step back and realize how fragile this can be we knew that already but to live quite how fragile it can be and we can't take it for granted and look at what what happened and what might have caused what and really learn from that um i guess the other piece to name is when you see the six feet are

158there it certainly hasn't increased our comfort to go to less than six feet right at this moment in time so we're gonna maintain the six feet for the time being and we'll need to talk on how we get to less than six feet uh because that's a big driver in being able to bring everybody back especially at the middle of high school asymptomatic testing i think was a critical component of this so we're excited that's happening there will be more funding discussions to have as we go forward and especially assuming we will need some of that in place in the fall and then i probably should put it in big capital letters i do believe the vaccination of the staff is a really big driver here it's very disappointing that that hasn't happened in february

159as we had thought it's now undefined in terms of timeline we're all hoping march is the first dose administration with follow-up in april but we're we're lacking any details right now so um that's been very disappointing across the commonwealth and and you know where we are with that so this list will grow but i wanted to at least start with what i see as the the biggest components we want everybody back in the fall very much so no question about that and we want to sustain what we have and i think probably the growth i see for the spring just given where all these variables are in february we would love to be able to do you know more of the the special things and make sure we're offering some of those spring traditions and

160even tweaked and adjusted making kids feel like they've got a community so could we get can we get creative you know i think is what we're going to be hoping for can we get creative with how we're managing our space and time and day and all of that um probably post mcas which i'm not going to get into my very big frustrations on that discussion right now that can be an update later but you know the state's about to force us it looks like to use parts of the spring to run these tests ask remote families to come in and take tests and offer hybrid kids a on one day beyond you know it's looking like a very big distraction and um challenge so we're we're gonna have to navigate all of these other requirements

161that come along but um we're we're here because of this community's collaboration and support of one another and i know we're all fatigued there's no question right we're all fatigued and wish this were different um i think staying the course though is how we've been successful and i think how we're going to start to come come to greater success and eventually make our way back full time with whatever that means in the fall and um spend spend the spring enjoying the fact that we've made it through this school year so so productively and successfully um so that that's where i'm at i'm happy to hear feedback and questions laurie in regard to that last slide september 2021 um last week we spoke about summer uh and you reference all the the creativity necessary to do

162as much as we want to do as much as we can do is there a thought to how summer services might not happen in early july but might happen in august this year do we have that kind of flexibility or are we talking about it oh we're talking a lot about it so just quick updates on what we we've been sketching out for this summer um we are actually alcott's going to be offline because of the capital projects you're going to get reminded of in a few minutes thoreau is going to house the case collaborative special education summer program which we're excited about that was supposed to happen last year and willard will be our home base for both special education and elementary summer programs both regular ed and special education all assuming we need

163covered protocols and distance and all of that um i'll remind my colleagues summer school started in the willard because there was one air conditioner in the schools and that was in the willard library so our buildings are going to be busy i'm also in early conversations with concord rec and what um they're going to run an afternoon portion to the willard piece but you know they were very successful at high school last year so they're interested in hearing what space we might have available some of the camps and programs for the older kids that have traditionally used some of our facilities have started reaching out so it feels like the energy this summer will be very active and i think we're to the level of comfort we know what a safety plan needs to look

164like and i think can navigate that um to your question a lot of that will happen in july as it normally does we expect some might go into the early part of august okay can follow up on with the question there um i know this is going to be a an indulgence certainly i i wonder if you've been hearing from families in terms of registering for summer camp those families that are going to be part of the summer school um how soon can they know when summer school is running so that they can choose the sections where they are putting their kids in summer camp so what i know is that we're in the you know development process right now both uh ruth gruby and special ed and kristin and regular ed are actively pulling

165those plans together they've been meeting over the last few weeks i also know conquered rec who's been in touch with us is in the same stages of discussion of what they're going to be able to offer so i don't think we're going to be running a whole lot later than normal actually given given where we are it's off frequent for us to put put information out usually sometimes in march um concord rec i think they're trying to solidify it so they can get the information out to families too so i guess the answer is it's coming as quickly as we can pull it all together but we're we're fairly on track for timeline at this point so dr hunter um i know there's a pretty big shoe that's going to potentially drop in the next

166couple of days from the bite administration regarding a very aggressive stance on school reopening and i just read that they are specifically saying that they do not say think vaccine is a necessary component to this the other thing is is the big bill which is going to be a considerable amount of money even for districts like ours i do see that it's going to have a very strong ear mark for summer very aggressive summer work so i think that's another you know i don't think we should have very specific plans for a little while until we really see what this is all about um because we we might have the ability to have a more robust summer program for those people who need it um so i still think there's a lot that's going to

167happen over the next couple of weeks so no question yeah the good news is i think we've learned how to build the seed to something and then grow it or morph it along the way so the any changes to that um we're all anxious to hear the biden plan uh there's a lot of discussion among my colleagues in other districts of what you know without having seen it you know aggressive return is that targeting those of us who have kids in school and have been in school since september is it targeting districts who have not even opened yet or both we don't know this is of course saying of actual resources required and living living the comfort of not you know the reality of still not having it is different um but we're anxious to

168hear their thinking and expect it to feel at least like there's a guiding ship there whether it's a timeline we all are tweaking locally and trying to you know match or not it's it feels like direction which will be good and i think in terms of budget and um a lot of things we just have to it's just such a big variable yeah correct i mean ideally it's going to pay for the testing that i keep referencing here that we don't know how we're paying for after the first of april um and any other costs that you know aren't totally funded at the moment so yeah i know other districts that have tried to open up more fully and you can't forget how wide of a birth covert has had here you know one of

169one of my former districts went from the hybrid elementary model and i'll just remind everybody we're not in a hybrid elementary model in that way our kids are in school five days a week which is really good um but in trying and bringing them bringing more of them back they actually assigned i mean in other times you could never do this actually assign families days you could ride the bus another day said you just can't right yeah you know so there's there's just this wide scale level of work to be done and somewhere you hit another roadblock and have to decide if you're going to be able to navigate it or not so um so i can't say enough thank you you know i i often you know the communication vehicle here but this level

170of work has had the depths of everyone involved um whether it's you know the contact tracing at all hours of the day and night or teachers who learn they're going remote like one of them did while we've been on this meeting or otherwise even you know we've actually got so proactive like if we even suspect there's a child who's symptomatic and someone in the family has it like we might just close the room for the day while we wait for the test result um you know the level of everything that's happened here since september is pretty phenomenal and i'm really grateful for everybody's commitment to that the family support's been fantastic um the communication from families when things are covered wise happening for them or otherwise has been fantastic and it's just this you know

171path we want to stay on here and we've i think showed we're pretty resilient so we're going to stay the course for sure thank you lori thank you and to everybody who's making this work i think that back in september when we were among i don't know what was it 30 of schools that had any kind of in-person uh plan and we would have thought that we'd have sports that we'd keep going still it's a it's a tremendous effort on everybody's part on the community's part on the students parts and especially on all of the administration and health services and teachers that i i i don't know how to express the gratitude for this i really don't um so thank you agreed and let me just comment also i know there were a few different

172questions during the public comments wait was that hours ago or days ago all public comments um and i i just wanted to address that i know that you guys know that sarah and court and laura you'll be talking about uh whether you expand on those more next time but i actually appreciate that a lot of what you talked about just did address those questions in many ways so thank you yeah and we know it's really hard on individual families when there's things playing out there we don't at all deny that and i think people have heard our respect for that um even if we're not able to change things okay thank you dr hunter thank you so with that uh sarah could we turn it over to heather yeah for attendance evaluation updates absolutely i

173can probably do this in two minutes um it is basically an update that we've done what we said we were going to do so as we all talked about as part of the superintendent evaluation process that is a year-long process we planned in a january mid-year update um which was really um a matter of dr hunter giving us all an update which she did through some documents and each of us touching base individually with her really as a touch base to make sure that everybody's on the same page and we're not on track for any surprises in the spring so as we discussed this is not a you know public presentation of evaluation that happens at the end of the year um but everybody has had their meeting with dr hunter and made sure that

174everybody's on track for um no surprises in the spring and i think from what i hear you had some great discussions dr hunter and yeah no it was really great i really had a dedicated time with you without pre-made topics that had to be covered and i think that was really productive and valuable and just great to spend individual time with you all so appreciate your time and that felt really good yeah good i'm glad so we can check that off of our list and and there we go that was my update in two minutes as i promised and with that we can move on to new business thank you heather thank you it's all on track well i don't know about that but we're trying so we have uh the policies committee would you

175like to yeah so these are um for the three other policies we uh worked on during our um last meeting of january 20 and so the first one involving um exchange students and um the committee the subcommittee um approved to um that's not opening up here um is basically uh coming to you with a recommendation to um approve um these policies and um dr hunter i don't know um whether you wanted sorry it's not opening here um yes okay so we um decided to leave out basically give the responsibility to check the records of the foreign students or foreign exchange students to the superintendent as opposed to the school committee we can open it for discussion if school committee members have any comments on that but that was the recommendation of the subcommittee and that

176was also a recommendation from um dorothy pressure from masc as well who did not see the need for the school committee um to be involved my um the the point that i brought up i compared it with the process of um admitting uh children of staff we do the school committee does uh approve those and for me i saw a parallel and i didn't understand why this had to be different uh so that was my my my question uh but um like i said we agreed that um we would leave out the school committee from this uh we can open it for discussion before we move to the next one or if we can go over everything and then go back i'm a little confused because it says the school committee may accept blah blah

177blah but then um i mean obviously the superintendent always verifies residences etc so yeah i mean but it makes sense okay yeah it's just a little yeah we'll double check the language and be sure we're bringing you the revised version fatima's right with the intent here so um we'll double check and make sure for the second reading you've got both versions so you can compare yeah all right um yeah there's there's one other change um and that is the the the current one references uh the records have to be in the hands of the principal you're dropping that out as well in this change and we moved it to the superintendent because we're doing all central registration now through my office good okay thank you okay so uh searches and interrogation of uh students um

178dr hunter i'm gonna refer back to you how what changes were made to this one compared to the the previous version very little um if anything so this one's a highly regulated policy and obviously a a legislated one so i do not have any recollection of any changes and i apologize with the snow day i don't have my notes here at home with me so we will send you any changes from um from the meeting but this one has so much backup with the law yeah i know we didn't have any changes to this one as as was or as is yeah go ahead yeah i believe it was the same thing for the student complaints and grievances right okay and what we thought we'd do is bring you ones even if we're not going

179to change them so we can put the date on that and so it gets documented that it was reviewed and it's agreed there's no references on this interrogations one is that so i'm sorry is so right now we'll double check to see if masc recommends any references there okay right is that what gorgeous ass general law i don't see any references there yeah well we'll well i'm sure the mac one probably has them and uh the only uh other thing that we have discussed uh during the uh this particular policy searches and interrogation was the idea that the student once it's in school is in the custody of um of this school um and and that was um that was the clarification of um of the procedures that are usually followed um based on the

180policy anyway and that was a legal determinant the the real so something that we wouldn't be able to change anyway correct um i think that is all for the policy subcommittee and just as a uh a clear a confirmation of what we think is so when it says source m-a-s-c that means it's verbatim as opposed to reference which means only that that's one of the references okay correct thank you thank you um your stamina is uh is unbelievable all good thank you all good all right so this this would be quick i promise i'm going to make up some time um so we'll start with the um the presentation on the uh cc rsd budget pull that up we got all right well thank you um this is going to be a very similar presentation

181to the one that you saw in the cps um so gonna start out it's the same timeline um so if you remember the the january 22nd uh well i'm sorry this might be the first time that uh some of the the regional members are seeing this so january 22nd all all packets for the ccrsd budget would do to me uh from the principals and the departments we did get ahead a little bit um but for the most part a lot of the high school came high school ones came in that that friday between the 25th and the 29th we had our first round of conversations with the principals and the departments and that is still ongoing uh we're going to be meeting with mrs mistrulo again this week uh today i'm going to be presenting

182the uh the updated um budget as well as and i don't have this in here sort of a memo uh for the ccrsd capital um suggestions um on february 23rd uh dr hunter and i will be presenting the recommended budget to the school committee and on saturday the 27th we have concord's preview budget meeting between the 23rd and the 19th the school committee will have that's the timeline for them to vote on this budget um in between that those times will be presenting a number of times to defend comms in both towns we have a placeholder right now for march 9th for for the public hearing and the so the reason why the 19th is an important date that is the deadline for concord to get it in that but the warrant does not close

183until that following friday april 30th we're going to have the ccrxd budget books those will be available again it will be later than most years but we hope by april 30th that we'll have the most accurate information in there by then may 25th the warrants article motions are doing conquered and carlisle i'm just getting those dates and then um june 13th is the concord meeting and to be determined is carlisle laura do you want to take this side definitely thank you um specific to the high school uh we obviously like i said i want to be sure we're able to bring kids back full time that is the goal um the biggest driver that won't pertain in the fall uh is the student supervisor piece we do expect given the availability of a vaccine teachers

184will not be working remotely the way they are right now um same as with cps the carers act should be able to help support us with any covet related needs specifically ppe outdoor tents as the software which we've built a lot of it in because some of its things some of it includes things we're going to need to sustain and long-term substitutes which again we're going to hope diminishes down to more of a normal um level for typical reasons rather than covet reasons we are fully um replenishing the substitute lines you'll remember um that we had not been using per not been and still aren't using per diem substitutes and covering internally instead so we need those funds back in the budget we do want to plan for not the athletic version you heard earlier

185tonight but a full program of all athletics and co-curricular much more typical than what we've had this year professional development lines um were tweaked last august in june of july because we wanted to bring you a budget more reflective of covid um opportunities because so many of the pd wasn't offered are only offered virtually the costs were much lower but we need to build those back up and um software like i said we've been managing that back up at the district level um so we're able to know what's redundant and what's overlapping and really start to hone in on some efficiencies although at the same time we've expanded our our tool kit here um you know basically you know basics like zoom are now embedded in our our learning environments and that i expect needs

186to stay in at least through next year you know potentially longer depending on how we see the positives post coven so the assumption for this budget is we are coming back full time with whatever modifications and any specific coveted related items will come out of cares act so it's important to know that going in because that's i think at fincon we were sort of asked about the risk management strategy of that there is some risk there but we feel we've got the contingency funds to be able to manage any unknowns covet related so again we are doing the complete zero based process um looking at every single line at the high school we have over 465 lines going through all salaries class sizes obviously the software and hardware of the ppe including um everything in

187stock we're asking for quantity everything um again memberships professional development all supplies materials legal textbooks etc it's all xero based it's all built from scratch and this bat is back up behind every single line so here is our first draft um at uh at a number right now so this report is as of as of today and it's by destiny 1000 function uh the increase is 900 696. that does include a decrease in debt of 159 7791 so the percentage is higher than the 2.58 it's around 3.46 but we are expecting increased revenue so that 3.46 is actually closer to around 3.28 this at this time which is a really great start um for where and we still have another two weeks before we're presenting um the next round of budget steel so what i'll

188do is i'll go over some of the drivers as well as some of the cost savings yeah just before you do that uh because we're kind of coming at this a little differently than we have in the past this is the set of numbers once we land on final recommendations for you in two weeks that will drive the assessment calculations so we didn't do that math for you today we want to be sure it's not thought of as an operational change one way or the other to either community but these will be the numbers that drive those assessment calculations um so if you want to talk on that more we can but that's that's the reference and i will go and and i can answer questions tonight but i will go in uh much more

189detail obviously on the 23rd so right now we've identified just over 1.5 million dollars in budget drivers starting with the teachers teachers salaries we are in contract negotiations right now the overall increase right now we're seeing is about 4.6 that does include an additional 0.8 special ed coordinator for approximately eighty thousand dollars so that is driving up that cost quite a bit and wanted to point that out the cares that the cares act often just talk more on what that position is yeah so what we've deemed and i i know i mentioned this at some point covid um timeline here with all the in-district programs we're actually proposing and this was in the cps budget and we neglected to highlight it to you because the percentage and dollar amount was lower um but we're proposing

190a full-time um in-district special ed coordinator to parallel the out-of-district special ed coordinator that both work would work with ruth um given the number of programs we're building we really need a middle layer of support this would be a teacher equivalent in the union type of position as is the out-of-district coordinator um really to support the transition of kids in and out the cohesion among programs the vertical alignment um there's just a growing need to that so that's that's a proposed position that's in both budgets actually lori is is there one coordinator the the average district coordinator is the same one from yeah all the way through so it's the same so it's always yeah so it'll be a parallel structure right yeah is it possible to have um uh in the future down the

191road a little more um uh in-depth conversation about this specific position and how it differs for instance from the the chairs of the spa department and who does what absolutely great questions thank you great um so another driver this year is last year in the fy 21 budget we carried an offset for cares act of 185 116 that is not included in this budget so that is considered an increase of 185 000 therefore it's identified as an offset the retirement pension assessment uh that the town gives us every single year and we work with carrie lafleur on that that right now is up 13 or 91 795 nurses salaries the reason for that increase is because we are putting in the budgeting 1.0 nurse for the high school next year an additional nurse so that

192would be three nurses that they have in addition we did budget for a nurse leader stipend so that's why that is a driver can i back that up a little bit too for years we've been looking at the enrollment at the high school versus the recommended ratio of nurses to students and it's two nurses is as under what you would normally see the professional organizations recommend for 300 students so this has been sitting on the discussion table for a while um in addition what we're proposing is that lisa koski serve as nurse leader in an ongoing way k-12 so the cps those of you who are here for that heard us reference the stipend for her to do that so this this additional nurse would allow us to both get the ratio to where it

193should be and also allow lisa to take on the leadership piece and ensure enough coverage at the high school this has been a long time discussion and kobud sort of accelerated it and gave us a trial run at a model that we're proposing continuum and we've heard public schools take on part of that stipend yes okay does this mean that lisa koski will be working exclusively with um concord carlisle or wishes to still be continuing her work with other districts so she'll still continue with the k-8 population so just the way she has been pre-k aid actually um she'll get a stipend from the concord concord side of the world so that she's on being funded from both so her leadership's typing split between the two great so next is the salaries for maintenance and

194custodial if you remember two years ago we brought to you an increase in maintenance staff we ended up not filling that position when we did the fy21 budget i reduced that fte right now we in a number many years ago we had a we had a larger maintenance staff since then we've really tried to well we've relied on contract services and now we're trying to wean off that contract services are probably double the amount of a maintenance staff member so in this budget includes a an additional body in addition to the 0.5 of the the position that was budgeted in uh fy20 um so that is that is the main reason why that this is up uh you will see that contract services um in custod for maintenance are down based on the fy 20

195the old fy 21 budget the one that was not voted because we significantly decreased that as well as the actuals from 1918 etc so we're trying again to really wean off the contracted services on things such as uh maintenance of the grounds uh mulching etc that we know that our guys can take care of and just i think it that highlights all the new positions and i think it's just important to note that the coordinator for special education and the maintenance position are both about better service and cost efficiency so we're not just adding positions there's actually some fiscal piece to those as well the nurse leader is just you know more thorough service for kids and um covered follow-up and any other needs that we expect long-term will continue um jared and dr hunter

196do you know whether the when the maintenance and custodial staff take over um the services of the the contractors um will this result in overtime and um is that cost included in that figure yeah so believe it or not the maintenance staff have limited overtime their budget is not is not very big most of their overtime really is on uh snow um so while i did not reduce i did level fund um i did level fun the the overtime it's it might help it uh and i think maybe in fy 23 i could drop it a little bit but it's not a huge budget to get yeah i actually think you'll see a little less over time from maintenance especially in a snowstorm like this because we'll have a whole other person plowing and between

197overtime and reduction in contracted services i think you'll see some savings there so equipment the equipment line uh is up um almost 50 the reason for that is is um one music uh we're budgeting music appropriately and one of their ass this year was an increase in their equipment line for replacement and new new instruments in addition the radio station which is really runs 365 days a year it was really reliant on donations um the donations coming in is not as large as they used to be and there are some things that they do need so this budget includes some equipment uh for the radio station and that's pretty much the main driver for the equipment uh vehicles uh which is the buses two new bus leases are in this con in this budget just

198like they are in the cps budget case transportation so case transportation we're actually seeing an increase in case even though we saw a huge decrease at the cps level the reason for that is the percentage share is actually increasing 0.81 in concord carlisle there was a decrease of 1.79 of the assessment in concord we did receive a credit this year of 86 dollars so the original assessment would have been about seven hundred and fifty seven thousand and instead the uh the credited assessment is six hundred and seventy thousand four hundred and forty nine dollars um so it would have been a lot worse without that without that credit the case formula is very complicated it actually um is based on usage of case two years back for ridership i could do a whole um high

199level view of the formula it actually saves us money over time and levels it out some but so don't don't take that as suddenly there was this explosion on case it's all it's all two years back jared can you go back one take a minute more on uh software hardware i wouldn't have predicted that what so yeah and i i think i skipped right over didn't i um so the reason for that is is right now i still have a placeholder in for the most part it's going to be an increase i think that could go down a little bit but a lot of the and you're going to see it in the budget savings a lot of the software's are we're in the curriculum textbook lines so those lines are now the software is

200parted out in there it's online so in the past again it was combined so it's just the way that i'm showing it this year i have about 50 expense categories software hardware is one of them but it's all of uh again we separated everything out so while it's probably a little bit of an increase due to you know do all the covert um software that we're now using including zoom zoom is budgeted at the high school um [Music] that that's the reason for that that big increase and what we can do is like i said i have everything backed up we can show you sort of what what is new and what is not and that number would come down after what you if you're comparing it to the curriculum textbook lines good let's make

201the time to do that thank you yep and jared on that note you just mentioned zoom are there other things that jampa i think you've mentioned a couple but other things that fell under this year special expenses you know um cef funded zoom for us this year we need to budget for it next year other things that were kind of out of special monies this year whether it's charis act or some other funding that then we have to budget for for next year so those things are entering the budget for the first time even if we did them this year right why don't i instead of and laurie may know instead of guessing i do have a list and i'll make sure i bring that on the 23rd what is new for this year i

202don't think it's it's a lot of smaller ticket items that nothing as wide scale as zoom at least at the high school i mean at the elementary yes but at the high school zoom um what we did see and this is why we're centralizing it now is the departments all really dug in and got creative and found all sorts of tools and options and that's been great but we also know we have redundancies and we could get cost efficiencies of scale in some cases and that's why we're pulling it all up to the central office level so that we can maximize any efficiencies of scale and and really do do right by the cost so more to come but nothing nothing as broad scale as zoom but other other platforms across different departments and again

203a lot of these things might be covered by federal money yeah we just don't know um the one other thing is like court i or like heather excuse me um i'd like to see like a full review of the cares act versus the budget and fy21 as much as we can just yeah that will be in and i can it probably would be part of the budget conversation but again we have to there's so much detail that we have to provide oh yeah not only you know you know itemize everything we have to show them you know why it's covered related uh po numbers etc so yeah we can certainly get that a lot of it is um obviously ppe but a lot of it is you know the long term subs that that that's

204a big big part of it got it yeah [Music] the salary support staff the ftes are the same i know that that number jumps out but it's a 3.32 percent increase for some reason for the past two years there's been a particular staff member that i've under budgeted and once again it happened me again and it's a mistake on my end and i own that not a huge amount but that's why it's becoming a uh because we have most of our support staff members that work district-wide are split sometimes um i mess up and that this one's it's not it's not an astronomical amount but it's enough to uh be a be a budget driver and i wanted to show that um did i list case twice i did sorry about that um supplies and

205materials uh we decreased quite a bit last year so this is just getting some of that back and then contract services again just increasing it not all maintenance it's many different things make up the contract services so overall i know that even though i listed case transportation twice i do know that this number is correct we had about 1.5 million in budget drivers and just a reminder that we're still working this is your preliminary view and we'll be bringing a tight recommendation in two weeks so we've identified right now just over 656 000 in cost savings once again special education tuitions are coming in under um the net decrease is um 223 000 um of that especially tuitions are down 210 and then there's a circuit breaker so circuit breaker um we're expecting about twelve

206thousand four hundred and fifty dollars less than we budgeted for an fy 22 in 21 debt is going down 3.67 percent um insurance um so not just health insurance but insurance is going down the health insurance line is going down about a hundred thousand we're still working with that number but we expect a very modest increase uh based on what was budgeted last year looking at around three to five percent which is excellent school choice and charter those those are going down based on what we're assessed right now so that's a nice little budget savings of 81 000 plus salaries assistant tutors that lines going down 62 000 the ftes are about 3.67 less than what was budgeted in fy21 so all the staff that are there currently now are budgeted appropriately we just had

207some some savings through through that uh and then the curriculum textbook clients is going down 33 000. i have a question to dr hunter about charter and school choice i know you mentioned previously some efforts to try and um get some of our students who have gone to private schools uh back into the district are we um are we seeing the same efforts to these families that are um going to school choice and charter um i would say probably not a and i wouldn't say and in any way do we go out recruiting them we just if we have relationships with families we like to encourage you know them to use use what we can offer um knowing a little bit about some of who those families are i think they often make the choice

208for very specific reasons um and some of which just is are things that you know are structurally not things we can offer or a family situation etc um so we're always looking we do get access to the names through the state so that we have them but we try to be respectful that there's often a reason for that choice so it's a little bit of both um depending on what the history is there and if what we know for rationale our numbers are actually very very low for charter and school choice most you know other districts have a bigger issue where kids are looking for those other settings um our numbers are very very low thank you a quick question on the curriculum in textbooks if that's going down 41 percent um is that just

209a timing thing that's a big drop i well it's it's because a lot of that um with software that is now moved to the software line oh god i got it okay that number might keep shifting a little bit too as we work through the software piece which is still still happening okay that makes sense wait does that mean then that we're not is it just removing the funds or does it represent also like a decrease in the purchasing of traditional textbooks and curriculum yeah so we've been carrying i'll try it the you know textbooks are going on to software platforms obviously anything that is available kristin made a really great rule for us to be able to budget this across the board consistently anything that's available in a hard copy textbook but we buy

210it in electronic form we still put in the textbook line so we've been tracking textbooks whether we buy them digitally or otherwise through this line those are remaining for the most part in the textbook line it's the curriculum instructional software and if we bring you a list of names of titles of platforms you'll see what the difference is i think um those are more tools for kids to use versus the content that's in the textbooks and that's what we're moving around trying to get back up to a centralized level is that so like yeah i've talked like i've talked with kristen about some of that stuff so like i um but are we still buying like are our kids still like reading books like i get a book that i touch with paper or like

211are you reading catcher in the rye digitally where you're like we buy a lot of paperback text the english teachers feel really strongly about hard copy experience for kids so in fact you're gonna see there are some increases along the way in the line items if you go into the english sections we're replacing you know novels and things like that um closing on a dime last year you know meant some we didn't get all our books back so we're replacing some we're buying new titles yeah all of that but yeah that's a passion passion of theirs for sure cool great so right now just showing the offsets and i'll go into grants and other things at the 20 on the 23rd uh the idea we get about 380 000 that we offset just tuitions for

212and then the circuit breaker again if it's going down that's a good thing that means there's less tuitions you're building programs you're doing uh bringing kids back it's it's better for better for the kids um so we're expecting at this time uh based on uh about 906 000 for eligible costs about a 588 821 to be precise reimbursement so here's the breakdown of the fy 22 special education um we most of our tuitions are in the non-public some out of state ones and then collaborative by rule we can prepay up to three months worth of tuition but you can pay the full amount of collaboratives which we've done in the past and then you see here is the offsets circuit breaker offset last year was 601 271. so as of today uh here's what we're

213projecting for revenues to offset the budget uh a significant increase uh well three point i think was three point five percent but it's it's a nice number right there in chapter 70. uh can you just mention where we're getting these numbers from the state level so this is the chapter 70 was from the governor's budget the chapter 71 number that they showed is actually i'm not using that number i actually think we're going to be getting more than the first one the reason for that is it's based on our end of year report and they're still going through that so i i took a little bit of a risk and put 000 instead of the approximately i think it's around the 617 that they had in the governor's budget i do anticipate that to to

214go up um so yeah we this is pretty much straight from the governor's budget that came on the 27th uh except for that chapter 71 number charter school reimbursements um the interest so that was a big hit um but so we're expecting about 80 000 less than budgeted in fy 21 so you have to make that revenue up back up and then there's some miscellaneous revenue that we get donations etc that can offset the offset the budget and then um optimists here thinking that maybe we'll get some rental facilities uh next year and you know 20 000 isn't potentially something that we can't get so um so our total um right now revenue projections that these are the ones that specifically offset the assessments is about 3.6 million which is you know 180 000 higher

215than fy21s jared yes the the rental is that uh net or gross heavy net okay good thank you you know it assumes we eventually let the public back in the building so it might be a half half a year you know that sort of thing um jared can you remind us just of e d and circuit breaker and all of those because that all feeds into this discussion um so right now um we have uh so as you know circuit breaker is uh offset in the general fund budget i am anticipating uh as of 2 9 to be able to carry over uh what we received in chapter 71 i mean chapter in circuit breaker for fy um to have it as a contingency next year uh e and d excess and deficiency um we're

216going to be right at that 4.99 give or take percent in the budget we do have an offset of 000 uh so it's it's a um they call it a um reserve to reduce amount so uh that money actually does not mean that it's coming out of the 4.99 when you budget this we can essentially go over the end amount by 300 000 that is reserved to reduce the next year's budget and we can carry you know up to five percent when i started here the end amount was more than double um you know it's it's not good practice to have that much in there but in a situation like as a revenue source as a revenue source but in a situation like ours right now when we have any healthy end and we have

217healthy other reserves it's not something i'm sweating so just a couple of follow-ups to that one is that um it allows us because our reserves are healthy it allows us to take some risks in the budget knowing we have contingencies so you'll hear us keep kind of referencing risk and i guess that's the theme is you know some risk management strategy but even fy21 we're running really strong right now because things are um going as budgeted or better and we came into the quote from the closure with some reserves so just i think it's time for us to say out loud that you're going to be at five percent in end and we're going to bring you a list of ways to manage that including um i want to say returning money to each town

218but it isn't actually that simple um if we have excess left at the end of fy 21. um so there's a whole whole big discussion to have there if there's one or two hundred thousand dollars left beyond what we can use in d e and d it's not like both communities just get their cash back it's gotta become part of the build for 22. it's a whole lesson in regional finance um and then we have a couple other options we can put on the table for you to consider that would be viable um and want to give you choice if we if we land there we're we're thinking we could so i'd rather have that conversation earlier and then keep you posted as the spring goes on jared reserve to reduce uh anticipates expenditure of

219that 300 is that correct okay so this current fiscal year fy21 when you voted the budget this summer you had a you budgeted 300 000 so that was reserved out of our e d so when we went to certify it that was already taken off the top uh and then you can still have five percent under than that if we did not use emd as a revenue source um when you voted the budget then that that technically would have gone back to the towns uh or most likely the dor would have had us uh reduce the budget with that amount in its you do not want to land with unless you're planned surplus uh auditors and dor do not look favorably on that um you always want to somehow reduce next year's budget if it's

220a region with that um with that money and then the town on the cps budget that will go right to this free cash so that's easier that goes right back not as simple with the region right thank you uh dr hunter and you will be with the congress income thursday at eight i'm sure they'll be looking for that number for concord do you have that handy or projected number for the end of year what we might have or no no no i'm sorry for conquered based on yeah we we do have and actually we're debating presentation of it because some of the slides we've had in the past make me worry that sometimes it gets confused as an operational increase so we'll bring the total obviously these are rough numbers at this point not solid

221and finished but we'll show what you know uh concord's portion of that will be based on the population right because their guideline does take that into it does and i i hope and i know they're here so i'm not talking around them i'm talking to them too um you know i think we want to just be sure we're not considering the assessment change and enrollment factor as part of the operational increase so yes we will have the numbers but we do want to have that conversation do any other school committee members have any questions or comments um i do know we have a couple of members from concord and carlisle finn combs um and while everyone's getting their own presentations through this process um if if anyone christine reynolds if you have something yeah thank

222you now i just i just wanted to um make sure that the committee was aware so we had voted a preliminary guideline on um the high school of just about 800 000 and um that includes that's meant to include the the shift the costs associated with the shift in the enrollment so that's the number that our preliminary guideline was do i compare that to the 900 000 dr hunter or are those two not apples to apples let jared answer them yeah not apples to apples okay that's i was trying to figure out that includes the debt but then on the assessment side you also need to when we calculate the assessments we'll also calculating the increased additional revenue that we're getting you know from the state right okay and that's not is that net that's

223not yet netted into the numbers that you're that you're showing i only showed the general fund okay okay that's it for me thank you okay thank you thank you jared thank you more to come in two weeks i look forward to seeing the continuing iterations and um keeping up this conversation um i think then we can proceed to the capital conversation [Music] how would you like me to present this uh i can show the memo or have a conversation oh you all right um so i'm gonna show you the screen again okay so we've been thinking um about you know capital needs at the high school the you know the building isn't getting any younger um so a couple of things that we uh we thought about um in no particular order um the amenities

224building this is a conversation a little bigger so we can all see it how's that better thank you great um so here's just a brief list of possibly anticipated capital uh projects uh one is the amenities building so if you remember back in 2019 gail did complete a study and a conceptual layout for that facility but we will need to have a detailed design in order to go before the board to get a a 50 capacity waiver um so that's something that's still still out there that jared i'm going to rewind a little just because we have so many new committee members um the the high school campus has had a pun a list of outstanding projects not many in nature but they're outstanding and continue to be um one of the one of the

225few remaining projects that were originally was originally talked about when the building opened and cece at play in the town collaborated to do the fields and all of that was this amenities building which really is about restrooms at um memorial field and the challenge here is that the state requires that you build restrooms to the maximum capacity of the stadium despite how often it's used so with the code actually when you play it out would require 44 bathroom facilities down there our understanding is that they they can waive that to half half um if we get a design submitted um we have yet to hear of anyone with success at getting less than half and obviously there's the reason this is set fairly dormant is because it feels excessive for what it is and um

226we use portable restrooms to make do when the you know activities are going on down there or the sports seasons are happening but it still sits out there as an un unresolved issue so we're just putting it back on the radar for discussion um and as jared mentioned possibly it would be worth considering getting the design done so we can submit it to the state for the waiver and at least know what we're building to um so that's that story gloria we've discussed this before but thank you for giving us the history one one thing i'm not sure we've discussed is if we did put in the uh the plan seeking the uh the variance does that start a clock to run on actually uh executing not that i'm aware of but we would want

227to be sure of that that'd be i i i doubt it but it'd be a worthy question yeah i doubt it too that has yeah but we would certainly want to confirm that so and maybe gail knows if they've brought others before uh state code authorities yeah thank you dr hunter i would like to try to tackle this for my legislative uh approach and i think we should contact tammy gavaya and discuss with her about filing a bill to amend this because it's an incredible hardship on high schools nobody needs that size um uh restroom facility um that's a great idea cynthia and i i just you know i cannot even think of spending eight hundred thousand dollars when we can spend probably under a hundred if not under 50 perhaps so um i dug

228around and maybe somebody filed legislation pre-coded and it probably just fell on the ground um and i i don't off the top i had no the legislative schedule and i'd also again reach out to the select board with assistance on this to save both of our towns you know and the carlos leftboard um assistance with um lobbying our state rep and state senator great idea all right jared on to the next thing so another thing that is going to have to be done at some point is repaving of the access road back in 2018 gail did a canvas feasibility study in that at the current at the at that time um they estimated the cost to be about 790 000. so that's something that we did identify because it's going to need to be done

229at some point again leftover that didn't get finished in the building project so other possible needs um is a is a campus tractor believe it or not or a kubota um this would actually pay for itself um with you know the amount of you know work that we can do with this with plowing and and mowing etc so we put that on there i also put on tennis court re-surfering uh resurfacing i do think this would be under 25 000 i'm thinking around 20. we did um we did plan to pay this out of the athletic revolving account there's no timetable on this not even that this summer but i just i didn't mention this at one point i even think last summer um and i just wanted to just keep that on your radar

230i also wanted to talk about a little bit of about the stabilization fund and how that works so back in 1991 the tao did establish a regional uh capital project stabilization account their so basically the way that that would work is during the budget process the school committee can vote an amount to be put in the this account for future capital costs another way that this can happen we actually emailed the dor today just to confirm is that if we have a surplus at the end of the year and it's before june 30th can the school committee vote to transfer in a particular surplus amount into this account to be used for capital purposes i believe that that is the case we wanted to confirm that um so basically what they would do is if

231you had a e and d balance of say 1.7 million and i told you in june that we were having a surplus and you wanted to vote to increase our budget using e d that would then be moved over to this stabilization account to be used on capital purchases then the excess would then go into the end um sort of offsetting it so you can't so to back up i you can't vote general fund money after the fact to go into the stabilization account but you can use e and d money and so you would increase the budget and move that over that's how and we'll get some wording from dor just to clarify that but it's a really good tool to have not a lot of districts some do so a lot don't um

232but if if you know right now that we're in a situation that we're in and we're tracking well um it's it's a good way to help offset future costs to the community by putting monies in to this account uh and not having to to go back to them for capital costs right darren i like the idea of these especially with a couple big things that for those who watch the committee for a while at least these big ones we've been looking at for years every year let's do this so we can't yet um anyway a stabilization fund how specific does it have to be am i right that it has to be named for a specific purpose but how specific does that have to be yeah i so i want to say not as not

233as specific as say a town meeting vote for capital such as the one for cps right i think that you can transfer money over for it to sit there to be used on capital purchases and the definition of a capital purchase is usually something over twenty five thousand that has a shelf life of over five years that's sort of the definition so you know um a kubota um you know paving etc obviously you couldn't use that on salaries or something like that or even computers that that wouldn't even be a great use of that um so and i'll get i'll get language on that i don't think it's as specific as the capital budget under the under the um the taliban budget okay so we wouldn't likely at least we wouldn't necessarily have to have

234either an amenities building stabilization fund or a repaving fund we could have a campus you know capital improvements stabilization fund that could cover in any be used towards any of these that is my understanding and i'll again clarify that okay great thanks and jared what is the status of the project to repair the baseball softball and yeah good question so we got i actually got notified on monday or might have been even friday that they are ready to um they have all the bid documents ready so they're going to send those over for us to to review and then it should be out on the street hopefully by the end of vacation week if not sooner so we can see what sort of we anticipated to use athletic revolving accounts for that because we didn't

235expect the cost to be something that we couldn't afford out of that with the surplus in there um so getting the bids out will allow us to make that decision and what's the approach what was the expected cost we thought under well under 50 000 okay um we're also expecting some financial support from youth softball correct jiren so we got 35 000 from them uh let me stop sharing my screen um and that is specifically for this hab guy i want to say this for the infields yeah we've got a lot of hard compacted soil there on some of those infields and they're just not friendly to to players um plus the some drainage issues so so what is that's kind of next question what is the status of the drainage issues so that's the

236work that's been getting looked at correct jiren yes so it's part of this package okay yeah yeah yeah because i i think from what i heard the drainage issues did uh cause some of the issues with the tennis courts degrading that could be then we should have had them yeah yeah because i and i do know uh russ was russ was plowing all night so we sent him home he he he would have been here him and tim sciutto uh the assistant facilities manager especially tim um know these feelings like the back of their hand um so if you have specific questions i apologize i i don't know all of them i can certainly get those answered um maybe we could get a little report on what the overall plan is for that area and

237what we expect the we expect these repairs well i would hope that the baseball softball infield repairs would be a long term we wouldn't have to do that again but how long we would expect the tennis court to last is it 10 years you know um kind of i don't know um and then maybe a little more information on the drainage sure yeah that would be great and just to point out too so that the youth baseball and softball they're making a donation of about 45 000 for general improvements in the baseball and sophomore year softball areas of the lower fields these include turf on the batting cages and bullpen areas fencing backstop padding um and dug out upgrades uh they also donating a gator to replace it the one that they have which is

238over years old what's that it's it's their golf cart okay um have we exportedly accepted that gift yet has not come in yet okay yeah because i was like it's a very generous offer that we're grateful for so that's the high level view of where we are with see cchs capital and the campus um for more discussion we thought we'd just get it all queued up tonight with what the list looks like and what the options are and i so the um the concord town meeting preview meeting what what do they expect us to have ready whatever we have ready [Laughter] so it's not a formal you have to have all your award articles no we almost never do actually we'll we'll talk about what we're working on uh and sometimes we're farther along than

239others but it's always at the beginning of december and we often don't have a voted budget so i think the same will kind of play out here especially with the december 5th last year 27 yep saturday morning via zoom which is a nice saturday morning treat i guess um so one more thing not to continue to be so for gale what they're doing too is um so obviously we hired gail to perform updates on the infield surfaces that includes the field draining uh and replacement of the infield mix um so there's a there's a it's it's the wide range of um things that they're working on working on god it's late i can't talk sorry we all feel it sorry i say that out loud [Music] um no more questions on capital and if you

240have more fail free please email me um and i apologize i wasn't able to answer everything no it's a good start yeah that's why we that's why we have many meetings sarah i'll uh move on with this motion if you wish yep to the action item yeah uh so item nine uh i moved the concord and concord carlos school committee's vote to approve the following staff request to enroll her daughter in concord public schools concha carla regional school district for the 2021-2022 school year and the tuition be waived kelly pierce teacher at thorough uh daughter to enroll in kindergarten at willard uh that's the end of the motion is there a second second for both i would note that uh we are uh making a continuing commitment to this family uh with this um sarah

241if you want to ask for the role oh call please anderson i for both booth for both i for both please stand up for both mustafi for region radio for both wilson for region thank you note that kelly pierce has been a a long time wonderful performer in the schools i'm pleased to please to support her daughter um i move that the regional uh school committee meeting uh be adjourned and that the concord school committee will remain in session thank you good night good night good night good night say stay safe good night we're jealous of you good holiday thank you vacation yep uh concord i want to ask us to press on without a break for a few minutes uh this is not the first conversation we will have excuse me not the last

242conversation we'll have on the matter of cps capital but rather the first one where we're going to introduce recommendations that might fall within the town manager's side of his capital budget allocated to the concord schools jared thank you can you all see that should i um a little bit more that's good how's that thank you great okay so uh this current request again falls under the um the town manager's budget i did reach out to kerry uh last week and um tried to confirm the 900 000 they're still hopeful we're hoping that that's going to be the case she could not 100 confirm that yet but we're going to use that number right now um to back up a little bit the fy 21 capital is ongoing um so we are uh we have the

243biggest thing in the fy 21 capital is the er u's at the alcott school those would be done uh this summer and um so that's that's the the main capital piece for fy21 uh we'll be putting out those bids uh any day now we have them pretty much ready can i ask an embarrassing question what energy recovery unit great thanks don't be embarrassed we shouldn't yeah um so as you can see our biggest ask for for fy22 is the continued plan of the erus at thoreau that would be done in the summer of 2022 um so that would be 665 000. we are starting a carpet and tile replacement in all the schools but we're we're taking a look right now and doing some patchwork and we're prioritizing and um we don't necessarily know which

244we don't have priorities yet so we have some patching to do to get us through next year and that's what the 25 000 and then a full sort of um redo on some of the schools uh for the future years jared i assume tile lasts longer than carpet correct so that's why we were looking into maybe doing tile only and then i assume maintenance wise it's better or easier right yeah and i think some of the justification for a carpet in the past has been it's uh acoustically it's a much better environment but i think the tile has come a long way to match it or my this is yeah and i think there's other options to work with sound that didn't exist before so we're gonna we'll do all that work because you're right

245it's it's rare to put uh carpet in a new school and every time anybody ever replaces carpet they always have this discussion so i'm in agreement thanks does this replacement happen every certain number of years or um how is it determined usually the rugs last anywhere from five on a very low end to 10 plus but some of the threads are starting to get loose and then you know at elementary school and a kiddo start seeing those i would stop pulling it and that's what we're seeing in some of the some of the elementary schools um alcott we've had tile issues since i've been there i i just don't think that they were installed correctly um we've contained it we had a big project there two summers ago uh but that's something that we we

246need to continue to take a look at um but it's you're always gonna have some some patchwork to do um i don't think these are lasting any less time than we thought we just it's it's time to start doing some work on them great so now at the alcott school um so looking ahead uh new condensing boiler and controls a big project for fy23 and some sidewalk repairs at thoreau so we um we put aside 25 000 in this budget to get the conversation going again for the integrated playground at the thoros at the row um i know that the um the the it's the cef uh are going to be helping with with these costs um we don't i we're going to get a design to figure out how much this will cost i

247don't think it's going to be in the um even close to the ballpark that we have at our preschool right now but we wanted to at least get something in there to get the conversation going again we do have summer school at thoreau this summer and that might we need to have a conversation with with uh miss charles so the ptg has about 70 000 that they have for the ptg has a lot of money for this they still have it alexa um and we're excited because the needs needs now really are driving towards making sure that whatever playground gets installed will um really allow access for the integrated programs that are over there now so the delay actually proved to be a positive but um yeah there's some money to work with we're going

248to need right now we just need some manpower to get going on it but we're excited it's going to be a fun project great um so when you say so the 25 000 would mean that between the two amounts of money you would be able to go ahead and execute or just vote we need to figure if there's that's a good question it depends on the design that we come up with and the big picture vision it could mean we could phase in something to get started and we don't have any of those answers yet but we also wanted to be sure we had adequate money to at least have some conversation about what to do next so more to come because the only other thing i'll offer is that uh the cpc funded that

249playground at the ripley school or at the whatever you want to call it uh kind of your children's center formerly conquered children's center but um or part of it i'm sorry it was a piece of equipment yeah um and that could be an option down the road especially if we're doing a phasing in and get a design put together um you know a lot of cost is i've actually built playgrounds in my past and um built one you know a lot of cost is about the materials you choose and with the accessibility you can do the poured rubber like we have at ripley which is very very expensive um and a lot of it is how much of that you do and what other options you have and i think we got a lot of

250discussion to have about what we what we want this and need this playground to be so and it seems like it's far off but you know the august is the start for cpc and it's not really that far away actually okay yeah you know it'll be the rate time goes right now it'll be here before we know it might be something to consider good point great um willard so nothing in fy 22 uh an rtu um insulation replacement or rooftop unit that's rtu um so and then some walkway repairs in some lighting exterior lighting that's been on the list for a while that i would like to get to in fy23 at the peabody in sanborn the standard 50 000 reserved for life and safety that we've had in there no one jinxed that no

251one's saying anything um okay so next is ripley um so we've been in more rus has been in contact with kate hanley regarding the green communities grant uh to replace four um rooftop unit pods that's 75 000 we have to spend so the green communities would pay for pretty much the entire project except for the design so this 75 000 would be for the design costs and we after a meeting we had with her last week we feel we feel confident that you know um that we could we could potentially get this grant so the question sounded like it was still about um the town obviously has to decide its priority and it is considering you know coming back to help support the schools because it's been a couple years but she had not firmed

252up exactly whether it would be a fy 22 or 23 project so we need more feedback from her but it did timing was great because it allowed us to rework this a little to allocate funds in case it is an fy22 project um so we should hear more from her shortly i think it was an exciting we've been kind of waiting for a partnership on ripley with the green community so it was good conversation and what would be the cost of the project that the grant would fund approximately about a hundred thousand i think jared is what i recall okay i thought it was a little more but yeah that sounds yeah ballpark and and it's a big energy yield so kate loves her data of energy usage and getting some progress on ripley would

253help her overall town building numbers pretty quickly yes 8 or something it would you would get her to or something like that i remember um yeah so the next is pushing out to fy24 is a boiler replacement um one of the things we did have conversations about would be potentially moving um the boiler keeping the sanborn boiler and moving that over but so that's a discussion that we we're going to continue to have it's the nicest room in sanborn and we'll bring it over to ripley um next is uh so a big project we're putting out fy 25 would be the domestic water and heating pipe replacement most of this cost truthfully would be the asbestos abatement uh it would be a astronomical cost so we put a figure in 850 000 right now for

254that it's sort of a ballpark of what we think right now uh then some little things uh exterior door replacement at the ripply um is is definitely needed we need some some paving and and parking lot um in the sidewalk work at ripley um we need and we're going to be working with the town on this and a big shout out to them they have been amazing um they said that they would work with us on this so the 10 000 would be to fix some potholes and then um the 175 000 would be to repave the existing parking lot in that sidewalk that runs to the side of the building all the way to that access road of that street and then replacements replacement of flooring is needed at the ripley and then some

255exterior repairs um in painting uh at knox trail this is actually kind of cool i don't know if i can click on this oh i can so one of the things that we are requesting i'd love to get sooner would be a a bus roof snow sweep so the bus drivers would drive through this when there's snow on the roof um you know they they wouldn't have to get a shovel and and what they've been doing now is pushing the snow off with a shovel or a broom uh they just drive right through this um it's it's it's a pretty cool thing i'd love to get it beforehand but we have that on the capital um capital and then uh last but not least an fy24 um uh sewer system install connection a very aging

2561957 septic system jared and main in general regarding the knox trail facility it's brand new so we don't really anticipate any cost to do any repairs to it but going forward that be the school's responsibility or the tax i think while it is it is a town or building used by the schools um i think it's sort of like ripply i think that would be the schools and correct me from wrong lorry i think it probably would i i would say at least the depot maybe not necessarily the building but the depot i would think it would be and i don't see any huge projects that would need to be done there to that building um just because it's a garage pretty much right it's just the probably the two things the electric electrification of

257the fleet and making those adjustments and then the water issue right actually both of those are being actively worked on um partly because the warren article brian folds sponsored at town meeting for to build up the infrastructure for the electric buses um and yes we still have no viable water source out at the depot despite different efforts of different kinds so actually the town is working very much with us on that so i think that partly answers your question when they heard we were starting to think we wanted to get going on it we immediately got connected with alan and we're told that he would be the big driver to the project so i think that's a good hint of what the answer is um and so there's actually there's money already available for both

258because the article that initially funded was it the initial article or a follow-up it was the initial article for the depot still has 300 dollars in it waiting to be used to fix the water problem um i will not ever share with you my act and water meeting experience of last spring it wasn't very pleasant it was a good college try on our part but yeah so some memories don't go away quickly and then uh he's helping us also work on the the money now we have for infrastructure build up and when the second vw grant comes up we can apply for more buses so so that's been exciting that that's all getting some momentum with town very much town involvement and even leadership yep so i think what we can do is you know

259after talking to alan is we can go ahead with the at least a design um so we have been you know we're going to be working with niche and maybe weston and sampson um and we're going to have another follow-up conversation with alan before that he's got some connections at both places so um that is something that will be happening probably we'll be getting this started right after vacation and they can't forget about it because they've all moved into that building over there while town townhouses and renovations it's right there reminding them so we certainly are going to spend more time on this um i don't know if i speak for everybody uh jared and laurie uh uh would you send uh copies of your documents to us that were not linked in the agenda

260yeah we got again the remote work today aaron couldn't get to the agenda no problem no problem at all be helpful uh other questions or comments on this we know we're going to come back to it uh lori thanks for uh hanging in so long and jared long long night um for those of us who uh took in the meeting uh as attendees thank you for sticking with us um most of all to my colleagues uh this is uh not not easy and not not quick stuff by any means uh but we're well on our way now uh with both budgets uh and um delighted fincom's were here tonight as well um do we have a motion to adjourn and do we have a second enthusiastic enthusiastic second enthusiastic second okay with energy remaining yes

261okay and a roll call please anderson aye luther out i i said i rania thank you all take care and people who will be off on a february break for a few days well deserved take care be safe we'll see you soon good night all right [Music] everybody [Music] you