School Committee 12.16.21

001punctual woman she wants to stop at seven you start at seven people learn to start a set thank you okay mr tracy are we ready on the zoom we are on okay um and so i would like to call to the uh meeting to order on uh this thursday september thursday december 16th 2021 at seven o'clock p.m i'll call the school committee hamilton one regional school committee meeting to order um and our first item is i'd like to invite you to join us in the pledge of allegiance foreign okay um so first on our agenda is our citizens comments i would like to ask that any citizen who wishes to make a comment if you're here in the room you could approach the podium to let us know that you want to speak i asked

002you to speak keep your limit your comments to three minutes i also have realized that i have been lax in asking our citizens to do this please state your name your address and please spell your name so that we can get it accurately on the minutes um there's also an opportunity for citizens to make a comment um on zoom for those people that are on zoom oh which reminds me i'm sorry excuse me to remind all that this meeting is being recorded and it's also being live streamed on hw cam um okay so i'm going to open up citizen's comments and remind you all that we are here to listen and we are very grateful for your thoughts um and so i'm going to start with in the room if there's anyone who would like

003to offer a comment you can please approach the podium okay um i'm gonna ask um i don't think there's a microphone on the podium which we're gonna need at some point oh it's for zoom oh got it i understand thank you um okay uh mr tracy do we have any members who uh members of the public who are on zoom who would like to offer a comment this evening zoom and would like to offer a comment please raise your hand okay no nobody okay um right next on our agenda is our review of the committee protocols the committee has um over the past uh several meetings reviewed the protocols and at our most recent meeting we actually reaffirmed um or renewed our commitment to these protocols um i'm not going to read all the whole

004uh document what i'm going to like to do my intent by having this at the top of our agenda is really to just bring it forward in our minds so that these protocols are you know always present as we enter into these meetings so i'm going to just read the very first opening opening line so these are from our this is the opening of the 2021-2022 school committee superintendent protocols as elected members of the hamilton wenham regional school committee we including the superintendent accept the high honor and trust that has been placed in us to ensure that the students of the district receive the best education possible so that is just a way of starting focus our intention for the meeting if you will um next uh i would ask um i guess i can

005make a motion i guess i would like to just make an adjustment to the order of the agenda um craig can i ask you does it feel like we're ready to do the yes okay because i want to move you guys up okay so i'm going to ask i'm going to move that we adjust the order of the agenda to move forward as our next item of business item 6a which is the athletic recommendations um do you have a second a second second by michelle horgan is there any discussion all right all those in favor all right and the motion passes unanimously and now i would like to invite craig genualdo to come up and provide us with some uh athletic recognitions thank you very much for having us very honored to be here so

006at the end of each athletic season we like to honor the individuals and teams and groups that have kind of gone above and beyond and have some success that is very very noteworthy we cherish all of our athletes and cherish all of our of teams individual accomplishment we're about the experience and not about the accolades but it is important i think because the young people that you'll see here tonight and their coaches represent all of us and any success that happens um is a result of their team success and so i say that just kind of off the top the other thing is we like to do this after each season last spring and last school year was such an anomaly that the spring ended so late uh a lot of our teams ended the

007very very very end of june and then the accolades came after in july and it wasn't really a chance to properly harm them there was some incredible accomplishments last year some of whom are in college right now we're going to mention their name obviously they're obviously bigger and better things and i wanted to join the school community i'm not sure of freshmen so we're going to honor them and we're going to acknowledge them we have some of them here tonight and then we'll also go through the importance of all successes that we had this past year so in the spring we're just going to go in alphabetical order by team the baseball team won the cape ann league and they had two players that were named league co-mvp they're now in college ryan hutchinson and

008luke mcclintock captains of that team in addition to those two gentlemen were uh token clark coffee and carter coffee the boys lacrosse team had some individual accolades last year first team eastern mass was andrew lynch peter godeau grant landon eastern mass academic all-american with grant lantern and the cal sportsman video who are very proud of this max lockhart any of them are here today but we called them us who they were the next team we'd like to call up is the girls lacrosse team coach abby shibley's here who's going to introduce an award winner that she had the girls lacrosse team was the 2021 cal team sportsmanship award winner uh abbey who was going to call up here in a second was the cal coach of the year and she's going to introduce an incredible

009young athlete that we have that's coming back this year and we're very excited about that so abby can you come up real just want to quick a very special player uh haley hamilton who is senior this year she uh to my knowledge is the very first all-american for girls lacrosse is an incredible honor she earned this honor with her hard work for dedication and her performance on the field she's going to play at middlebury college which is very exciting and without haley we would not have had the success that we did last year she's been a leader on the team she's a captain this year and i'm going to lead us to many victories this spring so [Applause] thank you um before we go on i think it's you know we don't there's a lot

010of athletes that aren't here tonight because we had the deca competition today and the award ceremony is actually happening as we speak so for the current athletes a bunch of which were there uh they're behind us now it's pretty exciting that they're here so the other captains for the last year's girls lacrosse team that won that tal sportsmanship award while audrey fusco invited many more very happy for them uh next i want to just call up george shapiro here our softball coach to stand next to me the girls softball team last year um you know there's a big push in the league to not just give the sportsmanship award to the team that doesn't win stuff and so that's a huge priority and these girls went above and beyond all year whether it was in

011our own community or other communities we had a player we caught up with manchester last year we the player get hurt early in the year it was a pretty tough injury to see and they supported her even well after that happened and george is an incredible example of that georgia's captains last year were kaley kelly moore kaley hills and abby hogue and i just want to thank you george it's not you know we're going to talk later in about your presentation about how we're about educational athletics it's nice when we win it's nice and kids get to college and all that stuff and these individual activities but we love when our teams are you know doing the right thing in terms of sportsmanship the last spring team that we don't there are no representatives here

012because again the coach has to work the young the captains in college the boys tennis team won the cow championship last year their captain was clinton wilkins so if you're watching congratulations to them um you know it's the first time we've had a new voice tennis coach in a while and he did a great job so we're psyched about that um on to the fall as many of you know we had an incredible incredible run this year of all of our teams in the fall as the miaa had a statewide tournament a true statewide tournament for the first time where um you know in the first round you can play somebody you know in western mass and they rank you and this whole stuff and it was kind of it was the culmination of a

013two-year project by the state athletic association that they looked at it they did this thing called the blue ribbon commission and they looked at all terms of equity whether it was gender based whether it was socially based whether it was size of school or type of school or urban suburban and stuff like that they really tried to place people in divisions which made sense and as soon as they did that our teams went nuts basically all of our teams qualified all of our teams advanced some of which haven't been qualified for a state tournament in a while so i think it's important to recognize them golf qualified for the state regionals boys cross country qualified for the all-state championships boys soccer field hockey advanced to the sweet 16 round in their tournaments volleyball and football

014advanced to the elite eighth round of the state tournament incredible stuff volleyball captains were i said when are there any volleyball accounts [Applause] class of 89 i believe has been our coach for 11 years and was the first ballot hall of famer in our induction class of 2016 she was named the cow coach of the year this team won the cow sportsmanship award in addition to advancing to the elite eight um they played you know it's a tough cow competition in the cape and league there were three teams that were in the top four of the state so you know might not have the cal title but definitely represented our league well um and one of the reasons they won the league sportsmanship award which again we loved the nature of the winning and they

015won the sportsmanship thing they had unbelievable but i just wanted to mention um coach flynn who's stepping down this year she's been with us for 11 years incredible incredible coach but one of the best humans you could ever possibly hope to me and the lead on her with coach of the year which was great in addition to team success so like i said and hannah thank you for being here um you know if anyone was at that game was a pack gym there's probably more people than i've ever seen in the gym in a long long time and you all played great and so i just wanted to thank [Applause] they're off to do incredible things certainly um uh i don't uh i think ava's here that i see david cody back there um our

016girls cross country team you know never stops doing well i think it was like the 18th right here or whatever i don't know how many straight years it's unbelievable coach steve sawyer who i once asked how many coaches of the year do you think he won i don't know where do you think you have all the plaques i don't know i said do you think it's over 30 it's a higher um coach of the year again i want to recognize him the captains in addition to ava were alexis donovan uh sadie connor and claire kirkland but ava cody i think for the second year in a row am i right about that cape and league cross country runner of the year the girls side you're incredible and i've watched you run and if i had

017to drive as fast as you run i'd get exhausted so i don't know how to do that you're absolutely amazing and i know you're going to do a critical thing so congratulations on your cook on your player of the year but more importantly your team's success and all that good stuff [Applause] uh some other teams uh the football team this year had the cal player of the year christian meraki i think he's in basketball practice right now incredibly good uh sings in the choir he's just a super super talented kid i'm proud to say he's in my advisory and we have some good discussions about uh what else golf won the cal sportsmanship award i think that's like four cal sportsmanship awards which again we take very very seriously the captains of that period who's

018playing hockey right now morgan golovski and jack bile i won't think of any of those um you know incredible kids all right so finally we've had you know you know we had some pretty good success here i'm going to invite coach waddell up um the girls soccer team this year had an incredible run as we know you know we know they were state champs we know that there it is and one of the things i love about coach you know nancy is um she's all about the experience whether you're winning or whether you're an okay team or whatever i think every kid is has a turn with the trophy and it gets a journal about it if your home gets passed around everything with coach who is again is the coach of the year second

019year in a row probably the 87th millionth time i'm sure at some point she's it's going to be out that i don't know coach of the year but she's our coach of the year no matter what we have so i'll let you introduce the players that are here and your captains and all the other stuff because it's your favorite i think i just have two players here tonight we've got a lot of basketball players i have one of my um jackie chaplin who's here and we're very fortunate that not only does haley hamilton excel on the lacrosse field but also in the soccer field [Applause] three other captains uh libby collins claire mistle and cara o'shea who are either deca or studying for basketball so thank everybody all around town for all of the support

020amazing experience [Applause] all right i know that was a lot to go over in a short amount of time um it really means a lot to us if you invite us up here again we think it's important for all of our individuals and state championships and leadership interests but we want to recognize things like sportsmanship rewards and for the kids that are here i think you know again just to read the fact they represent their teams and the fact that you know they're here but they're here on behalf of them so we're very very grateful so thank you very much thank you so much um craig i want to say to you and more importantly to all the athletes who are here and and also the athletes who are not um thank you for the

021opportunity for us to get to hear um a little bit about the season and to see some of the athletes in person it um it's really special and it means a lot and i appreciate all of you for coming this evening and being willing to come out and give us the opportunity to honor you in person it means a lot thank you um thank you very much just oh i look i think i've got other members that want to say things i always want to just say thank you but also if you guys want to leave you can go now we are very very interesting but we understand nice to exit exit left thank you did you know how did you know they wanted to go okay thank you all right next up um proceeding

022with the regular order next would be the consent agenda i know i have some things that i'm going to hold from the consent agenda and so i'm going to let you know and if other people have things they want to hold so i'm going to hold i would like to hold the institution for savings donations the minutes from november 14th i'm sorry the minutes from november 4th and the minutes from november 18th do i have any other holds on the consent agenda like to hold the field trips uh i hear you're wanting to hold the field trip yep yep okay and when you talk you're gonna need to get closer to the mic for me thank you anything else okay jen can we have a motion on the rest of the consent agenda i move

023that we approve the consent agenda as written except for the holds previously mentioned second second by anna seedzick all those in favor okay and that is unanimous of the six members who are present um i'm going to go ahead and just do the holds in the order that they're presented on the agenda so i held the institution for savings donation because i know i i wanted to make sure that everyone understood what this was um i know i asked eric and maybe some of you did as well my understanding eric is that this is a donation that was not really a donation to the schools it's actually a donation to the toys uh is it the toy drive but it flowed through the schools and so it will show up on our budget and that's

024why it is here um i don't know if i just want to make sure that people understood that or if people had other questions about it check just happened to be written out to the school department okay all right looks like we're ready for a motion to vote on that i move that we approve the institution for savings donation in the amount of fifteen hundred dollars second second by michelle bailey is there any further discussion okay all those in favor okay and it is the motion passes it's unanimous of the six members present um the november fourth minutes um i held and you heard me make um allude to it at the beginning of the meeting um the comment the concern i have has made me um aware that i have not been asking members

025of the public to spell their name when they make a comment and it is really important that people who take the time to make a public comment be properly you know when you choose to make a public comment you're doing it publicly and you want to be recognized in the properly in the minutes and so that is on me that i noticed that in the minutes um on page two of the minutes um there is an error in a name the name is listed as willis gutter but my belief is that is it is willa scudder w-i-l-l-a last name scudder s-c-u-t-t-e-r no oh i'm sorry dd you're correct correct d-d-s-c-u-d-d-e-r i was looking down at my wrong paper um and in that following paragraph it refers to mrs gutter but it should be referring to

026mrs scudder and then on page 7 our new attorney mark terry um under school committee attorney is spelled m-a-r-c um so that is just a scrivener's error um does anyone else have any other questions or concerns regarding these minutes okay motion or do we feel like we have the scrivener's errors um do you want me to just give me the november 18th errors and we'll put both of them under the same motion absolutely that's a great idea okay um all right did i ask already anybody else have anything on the november 4th no okay um on uh november 18th it's really a very similar thing um on page two very top ella schenker is spelled last name is spelled s-c-h-e-n-k-e-r and that's it okay anybody else have anything else on the november 18th minutes okay

027go ahead jen i move that we accept the minutes from november 4th and november 18 2021 with the changes suggested second second by michelle bailey is there any further discussion okay all those in favor all right and the motion passes it's unanimous of the members six members who are present um next i think we had the ski club field trip which was held by michelle bailey michelle um so originally when i saw night i thought it was an overnight but it's not it's that they're going to go up and ski at night and come home at night but they're going to be traveling on a bus for a significant amount of time wearing a mask and i would suggest that we make it a requirement that if you're going to attend an event such as

028this that you would be vaccinated okay and i have checked around and that is being done in several other communities in massachusetts okay uh so i guess my question is um you're uh are you wanting are you offering a reason why you would like to i guess what i'm asking is are you asking to amend this or are you are you just discussing why you're choosing not to vote for it is that i am suggesting that the school committee recommend that out-of-state field trips require vaccination okay then that would be also the case of overnight field trips so i would i would suggest that we'd not vote on this and we put together a policy on what we do for those but i don't recall if one of the dates is before our next meeting

029i think the first date is in january right so it's immediately after yeah um so i think if i don't even i don't even know if someone could get fully vaccinated if they're not vaccinated between now and then anyway so that point is mute but okay um i do think when you're putting people on a bus together for a couple of hours whether the whether there's you know central air masking or not there should be an expectation that i shouldn't have to put my child at risk because someone else is child is not vaccinated and it's not it's an extracurricular it's not a curricular event um excuse me would you limit it to out of state or also in state because potentially they could go from here to springfield yeah so it would include in-state

030as well as um i would say for extracurricular field trips if there were to be a school field trip for whatever reason um those usually happen during the day during the school day so you're not traveling so far so maybe it would be something to do with the amount of time traveled or maybe you know and the kids are going on coaches so the windows aren't going to be open because you know they have their own sort of like airplane air circulating system but on school buses during the day the windows are all open so it's a little different situation so it's mostly because of the extracurricular nature of it okay anna would you also want to require um a negative cova test even if you were vaccinated so i don't think that's necessary for

031a day trip like these but um i was mentioning to superintendent tracy that some schools have done that for like nature's classroom where it's a week long and so there's quite a bit of risk of putting kids in a situation where they're sleeping in the same you know sort of area and stuff so you know if we had something like that we could talk about it but that's not what we have here and originally when i when i read oh night i meant thought it meant overnight but now i would say you know for this particular situation not necessary i just asked because i know that a lot of other groups that are doing longer trips and thinking about scouts in particular that is vaccination and um negative tests but the logistics of that might

032be difficult so yeah jen can we incorporate this into our mass policy since we haven't approved it can you tell me what you mean well we have right the 80 threshold when we're going to allow the high school and middle school to no longer a mask can we just add a paragraph in that policy addressing i see you're talking about the yeah i think and michelle i just want to make sure i know what michelle was asking for i think what michelle was asking for was two things one her her input is to vote no on this or your and then or to table it or to table and then to create a separate policy i think the ma if i'm hearing you correctly the mask um the unmasking procedures is that what you're talking

033about i don't that's actually not going to be a policy that's really going to be procedures that the operational procedure so um but isn't this also a procedure well and then we could also we could approve it tonight a conditioning on that all whatever people going are on the list that we already know who is and who is not vaccinated it would be like uh when you play a sport you know you have to have a physical okay if you're going to go on this over if you're going to go on this longer trip that's extracurricular you need to have this information um anna and then i'm going to ask the superintendent a couple of questions go ahead um i just wanted to say i think it's important to note that this is still referring

034to the old policy which is still in effect because the newly updated filter policy is still in form but i think i think that we might be able to fulfill what jen is talking about and what michelle is talking about because under the approval documentation step 0.2 says a description of the process that will be used to determine student eligibility so from a policy perspective i feel like the process to determine student eligibility could very easily include in order to be eligible all students must have proof of vaccination so i actually think the existing policy provides a pathway to incorporate that in without having to add it to the mass policy or refer to the in-form policy if we simply follow point number two therefore we could approve this subject to vaccination requirement being part

035of point two description of the process to determine eligibility that's on page two if anyone's wondering what i'm talking thank you um i'm gonna ask um so i have a concern about trying to create this evening where we you know to create and what michelle is just discussing is absolutely something that is happening at other districts that is we've certainly all read about that um and uh i'm a little hesitant to create a policy this evening um having not had it on the agenda i think it's an important conversation but i'm a little hesitant to do that um i uh i'm going to ask the superintendent what are you what's your input regarding this specific field trip and the conversation regarding vaccines has that i think one of the one of the pretenses we're operating

036under now is i guess i would use athletics as an example extracurricular activity no requirement for vaccination they have protocols they follow all the same protocols on buses and if they're in the yellow buses the windows are open all those same types of protocols are in action but i just worry that we're going to create something for one thing and not like like today uh deca went out there was no requirement for vaccination so just probably tread lightly on that it's either all or none i think that's the thing we need to decide thank you i i think that's kind of what i was trying to say is that i think if if we do go down the this and again it is certainly something that is happening it is not you know not a

037completely new idea and it would be important to create a really thoughtful policy that um you know not just for this one event i guess that's my yes so it's not about the event it's about the time deca went to danvers right so that wasn't any further than they might have been on the bus to go to school really from some of their kids house by the time the bus makes the route but you know to me it's about the time you know and the viral load we know happens over time and these kids will be on the bus for a significant amount of time and it would be a different kind of a bus right coach yeah i mean the bus could be better situation i don't know what the ventilation is on a

038coach i know that i like writing on a coach better than i like riding on a school bus i know that so but i don't want to prevent these kids from going but i do think that they should be a requirement that they're vaccinated and and if we make that requirement now they might be able to go to on the second trip if we wait until january 6 they're going to be out because you know if they haven't had one shot it's going to take a while so i i guess i mean maybe i'll ask you to make a motion maybe we really need to just take a vote because i um you know i'm not a hundred i mean we could we could vote up or down i agree with what you're saying but

039i don't i don't i think we need to we do need to make a policy around it i don't i don't want to penalize these kids because they don't like i don't want to make a ruling right now and then have it be something that they didn't know that they had to do and then have them be penalized from going on the trip i guess i don't know i just but i i completely 100 agree with what you're saying michelle yeah so i'm just not so sure about well and obviously that's going to be kind of retro right and i and i was i i thank you for that and i um and i know this is difficult i it's part of the reason i mean that i'm sort of wondering what the motion is

040because um i i feel like i hope i've expressed pretty clearly that i i i think a policy needs to be i think i think this is sort of what eric was saying like i i feel like if we were going to create a vaccination policy for extracurriculars we should create a vaccination policy for extracurriculars not a policy just for something that i understand you're not saying just for the field trip but i um do you want me to make a motion yeah if you have one i move that we approve the field trips for this ski club i guess it's called for the upcoming months and that we require that students on these trips are vaccinated students and chaperones are vaccinated second okay that was seconded by anna siezik um all right we'll entertain

041discussion on that michelle horgan um eric how would this be managed the nursing i mean the nurse thinks the homes but they're already tapped out trying to keep the kids in school correct yeah we can still we could still so if you revert back to what uh dr carr was talking about the policy the procedure if you will we could create the same procedure that we would use in the 80 where we would say you need to turn in a form and a copy of your card and then that allows us to make a compliance list without violating well without nurses violating hipaa okay thank you uh anna um i think i just want to affirm that i think from a policy perspective especially knowing what the um the new policy looks like there is

042a little bit of of i don't say variability but every field trip has certain criteria that might vary from time to time and i think that it's okay for us to recognize that i mean i so this is my opinion i think personally from a policy perspective because of that bullet point number two that says there's a process to determine student eligibility and that will vary from trip to trip activity to activity and i think i think michelle has raised a point that this is a unique activity that's a little bit different so i think i disagree with the superintendent respectfully that it's okay for us to have sort of a different policy depending on the activity and i actually would argue that the probe the provision of 0.2 here supports that we don't have

043a blanket policy around all extracurricular trips the policy here and also the new one that we approved in form last year talks about instead of getting didactic with every single trip is going to have this this this it simply says there will be criteria set forth to determine who is eligible and then the minutia is borne out trip by trip so i'm okay with that policy i don't feel like we're making policy i think we're following policy uh just so you know we're looking at three to three and a half hours on a bus okay thank you julia did you have extra other comments okay so yep sorry just so you're worried kevin santo and i had a conversation about this only because there's a bigger trip coming up in our near future that we'll

044discuss but she has no issue either way whatever the committee decides she would she would follow so if there was an expectation for vaccinations she would put that out there it's not holding her up so okay are we ready to vote all right so understanding that just for clarification that a yes vote would indicate that we would approve this field trick request um in an amended form saying that students needed to and and chaperones needed to provide wait can we can we repeat the motion i'm sorry yeah so not word for word but the gist of it is that we will approve these um field trips with the requirement that participants and chaperones are vaccinated okay so that we allow it to happen with that one contingency okay okay right or whatever and what did

045you call those eligibility eligibility all right are we ready all right all those in favor and those opposed and the motion passes five to one of the members present okay um next uh did we yes we did the whole concentrate correct okay all right next new business we are going to talk here about the 2022-2023 course catalog i believe ryan mannigoni is going to present brian's going to come up and present for very us just so you know the curriculum leaders were responsible for making changes to their particular departments and then dr lasro who was the director of counseling took care of the foreign so because you've had time to maybe look through program studies and generate some of your own thoughts and questions thank you and i would like to say brian i think

046this was um really clearly presented and it really allowed um it allowed an ease to figure out what had been changed and you know it was it was easy to get through i felt like um all right let's open it up to questions let's start with just really specific clarifying questions things that you're uncertain about start with that michelle bailey so it seems to me that in the health and wellness you talk about each class for this class for this and by meaning graduating class is there a reason for that is there like different requirements for different classes yeah are you asking about the specific courses and their descriptions i'm talking about their descriptions in the health and wellness and it's like for each category it says for the class of 2022 for the class

047of 2023 is that because there's different requirements for those classes or i mean everybody has to take a physical education course each school year right what i would say is that you know and i don't know i'm answering the question correctly so i apologize but ninth graders for example take adventure leadership education one that's their required course 10th grade students take the health and wellness course that's their rewired course juniors and seniors are able to choose from the elected courses that are there as their required physical education course so maybe that is getting at uh their questions that's not how i can i have one can i ask are you talking are you referring to the bottom of page 67 in the top probably yeah it's way down there yeah so i think it's at

048the bottom of the page at page 67 and the top of page 68 and i i guess and forgive me if i get it wrong michelle but i think maybe your question is have the requirements in the wellness department change so that that is why the class of 2025 is listed sep like each class class of 2023 24 25 are listed separately with different requirements so you're asking whether the requirements is changed that is exactly what i'm asking yes i think that's what i was referring to uh the reason why for example where it says class of 2025 and that's crossed out it says the class of 2026 that's because they'll be the ninth grade next year so there's a reason not to put 9th grade 10th grade 11th grade so you don't have to

049change that every year um that just seemed like a good idea right i think so i think that that i think that was a clarifying question is that if it it that it's not that it's not that like some chain some requirement has changed and now the people that are in the class of 2024 are different somehow it's just that these these represent just change year after year 9th grade 10th grade 11th grade 12th grade yes it seems that would be better that way you don't have to edit it every year yeah all right um when was the last time somebody got a global competency certificate uh i would say it's probably been it happened last year the year before so the class of 2019 i believe a single one same yes that year it's

050a lot of fun it's a lot of extra work for a student to do that it's a pretty significant number of steps that they have to take in addition to doing the community service abroad uh course work here there's a lot of reflective work that has to be done so it's it's a pretty significant accomplishment as such uh it hasn't happened since 2019 we've always had somebody here every year get that uh until the end started i think it really is kind of blocked into doing that traveling certainly but just it's been more difficult to do with the community service work even in the country here so we'll have to re-emphasize that with the kids as he starts choosing courses for next year because that's really when they have to start thinking about global health

051certificate it's part of the whole planning for their next school year i don't know the answer this is it true that if you take an honors course you get an additional whatever point or something in your gpa correct there's a there is a i think yeah okay i guess advantage in terms of gpa yeah get an a in honors class that's a 4.3 whereas the college prep class is a 4.0 that's really the college prep class that sets the scale of any honors or ap classes so is there a chance that you might offer mandarin honors level at the earl the younger grades because i didn't see honors listed for nine and ten yeah so it's right now it's for next year that that's not in the works it has been moved into mandarin vibe

052and performs not yet is it as you know when you're getting down to calculating the gpa for who the victorian is going to be it can come down to the difference between whether or not they were able to take an honors foreign language class and so kids who are taking mandarin are at a disadvantage of becoming the vale victorian or salutatorian perhaps perhaps but that's one class of 28 that may take classes yeah but i think you know when you come down to the end it can be the difference of one tenth or of a point and that could be the difference is that one class all right anna um just to as a reminder to you i have a clarifying question or two and then i have some comments so i'm just asking start

053let's get everyone let's do the exact question thank you um mr matagoni why do ap history why does apu's history and its related courses why do they not count toward the required social studies classes whereas all the other ap's ap english ap spanish do appear so they count towards the requirement maybe i misread in the chart but i see two stars next to ap us history which would indicate that it's not it says these are elective courses and do not fulfill any part of the three year history social studies so does that to say if a student takes apu is history as instead of u.s history in the world that they that wouldn't account for them correct that's because the ap us history curriculum which comes from the college board is not aligned with massachusetts

054history frameworks is that the only ap class that's like that um that that class in particular is i think just because frameworks are laid out whereas ap english i think there's perhaps more flexibility within that so it's better aligned to massachusetts so if a student wanted to take aps us history they would be having to take it in addition to our u.s history in the world typically kids take ap us history as seniors and historically only seniors took it it's just within the past couple of years that we've started opening in two juniors which i think is more consistent with the rest of the country usually u.s history is a junior year requirement depends on how they structure their history courses we happen to have a two-year u.s world history program i think that's um

055that's done to i think better look at how the united states history has been integrated with some of the happenings around the world it may make us not so much the focus all at so this this i guess anomaly is the word that comes to mind this is not unique to hamilton one of this is true of every high school in massachusetts no one can count apos history as a graduation requirement it's always an elective um it could mean perhaps but you know the way it has worked here the way our curriculum is written and again i would say that the ap us history course does not align with the state frameworks has that ever been raised as an issue with the state i'm just saying objectively as someone who's taken a lot of ap

056classes it's odd that we have a state framework that doesn't align to a pretty core ap class so i mean that's you know it's up to the conference what they're looking for in the syllabus so we'll pass on and they have to approve that and ultimately we have to keep an eye on here are we attending to what the state expects us to teach okay thank you okay jen if that's the case do students take the u.s and world history at the same time as they take ap so they're essentially taking two social studies courses at the same time we do have a public kids who are doing that we also have a couple kids who are more than a couple of kids who are taking world in one year-long science class so you know

057that that kind of stuff does happen you know the conversation that i try to have with the students is you know you gotta remember when you're taking double the amount of a year-long class you're missing a chance to take two electives so you know that's something that they have to do with they take a lot of thought and a lot of care it's gonna really change what their school year looks like in terms of workflow but also you know how much they're devoting in terms of one subject area what happens maybe a little bit more it's like it's a lot of math if you really like it that's great but you know you are going to sacrifice a couple of other things hi uh i'm sorry eric did jessica will help clarify something in the

058in the frameworks itself on the actual actually on quite a ways through 118 pages in it actually says high schools may include other electives such as advanced placement or ib courses or locally developed courses in world religion sociology psychology international issues constitutional law human rights in areas of studies of specific regions or countries social studies department's following the curriculum frameworks as they're laid out for massachusetts and as you may know they've changed several times in the past six years or so and poor kristen borges and her team continues to rewrite and write so just for clarity that is saying that those they can certainly districts can create those but they don't necessarily fulfill the requirement they don't works considers ap and elective correct okay it considers it to be what an elective right in the

059same way that you could create your own you know your local course courses uh julia um will the program of studies be part of the equity audit the dei audit yes i gave them program studies from i believe not this year was not approved yet but last year all the way back through i think um okay um i'm just going to make sure michelle horgan did you have any questions all set um all right before we go around again so um if if people have well we can go around get michelle so i am curious as to where sex education happens in the high school curriculum because i'm aware of where it happens in the middle school but not so much beyond that at the beginning of the school this year i was sent out

060the required letter to the ninth grade families just to make them aware of the sex education program but also their opportunity to often but that's it it doesn't happen in 10th 11th or 12th they will they will talk about some topics related to sex education but i think the you know maybe what we think of it traditionally really is done in ninth grade and certainly as kids get older things get more complex and they will be discussing those i think more complex issues especially you know as social dimension gets more and more complicated for kids and just more choices for them to make that would be the focus towards their senior year and so where would they learn that in yoga and pilates class or so what happens is you know kidney as a junior

061may be taking nota lobbies for their required course for a semester but there will be class periods built in throughout the semester where the health education component is taught it's the same thing in ninth grade even because they're doing eventual leadership education which means throughout the project adventure course but still in that semester they schedule time in the health classroom to learn about the health topics for that particular grade level i guess i would like the opportunity to see those at some point yeah what those lessons are related to sex education did you just want um perhaps what the topics are no i think i'd like to see what's being taught other people anna so i have two sort of serious concerns one of which is related to what michelle was talking about which i

062voiced last year and i don't get to use the worst this word often in public speaking so i have to say i am a gog that we continue to push abstinence plus the line in particular that just really throws me is this line that says quote to protect the needs and values of our students the curriculum will be abstinence plus based and not only i mean i raised this concern last year abstinence plus is is an outdated uh puritanical judgmental approach to sex ed and i looked it up today the senate passed in september by a vote of 38 to one a comprehensive such education bill it's senate bill 2541 it's set to go into effect if it's ratified by the house i see no reason to expect why it wouldn't and it requires medically

063accurate comprehensive sex education in the state of massachusetts so i feel like this is coming at us whether we want it to or not but i'm i'm really troubled that we as a district are not taking a proactive step to teach comprehensive sex education and this is why i voted no on the course catalog last year and i have no intention of changing my vote um i'm really bothered by that the other thing that i'm troubled by that is not so much a hard no but the other bill that's worked its way through um through the house and the senate was signed into law earlier this month and that's which is the s-2557 education law and nowhere in our course catalog does the word genocide actually appear i actually did a keyword search for it

064so i'm curious to know where exactly are we going to put genocide education in the only course where the words human rights appear is in facing ourselves in the world but as much discussed that is an elective and not a requirement so how are we going to comply with a new state law on genocide i'll start with education question about abstinence-based education again that's language that's been in the program studies for quite a while so what i did was i looked at the state frameworks for health and physical education and it's first of all they're from 1999 so perhaps these will go work but when you look at how they partition the kids out they talk about by the end of grade 8 and by the end of grade 12 like those are sort of

065the two bands that we can kind of look at for high school because you know in particular here we're talking about ninth grade students who really are closer to grade eight than they are to grade 12. so when i looked at the language with respect to sex education where kids should be by the end of grade eight um you know it talks about that students will be able to explain the benefits of abstinence uh postponing sexual behavior and or an ant setting limits on sexual behavior so that's how they describe what by the end of every day kids should be able to do [Music] by the end of grade 12 it says students should be able to describe the effectiveness and consequences of various pregnancy hiv and sti prevention methods including assets so these very

066old state frameworks they're still using the word absence um you know and so with grade 8 they kind of led to that [Music] by the end of grade 12 that was at the end so you know maybe i understand your concern around how outdated you know abstinence plus is but i think the fact that it's in grade nine given the developmental stage that grade nine students are at they still want to stress that that approach i do know that the teacher and having worked with these teachers for a number of years now what's actually happening in the classroom yes they do discuss how absence you know is sort of you know it's the fail-safe method however there are other methods um contraception although they're all discussed at length so better so i mean that i

067and i agree with you the frameworks are perhaps part of the problem but i know that other districts have taken steps to include comprehensive sex side it's not as though we're hands are tied by the state frameworks i know that worcester for example recently adopted comprehensive sex ed you know before the state law has been passed so i can appreciate that we're following them but frankly i expect us to do better than that um and i think you know all of this is fine and well and good but comprehensive sex ed as it relates to dei there are numerous studies that support the districts that have comprehensive sex ed have lower incidence rates around consent and abuse and acceptance of lgbtq relationships is all valid healthy displays of sexuality so i kind of feel like

068this to me feels really really outdated and i understand that things are in motion but i think we have an obligation to our students present day not the students of 1999 i don't really care about the students of 1999 i care about the students i care about the students today and students today this is completely outdated for them and i feel like we need to serve them particularly if we look at sex ed through a dei lens so i understand everything you're saying i'm not angry with you but i feel like this is really wrong for our district and and i think the state agrees which is why this law is making its way so very quickly through the legislature so thank you uh jen jen did you have something i agree with everything innocent

069can you speak in the mic i'm just having can i get that in writing for me yeah absolutely um not teaching comprehensive sex education in the ninth grade and putting it off until the 12th grade means you have 14 15 16 and potentially 17 year olds who aren't getting the full picture so they're making adult decisions without the educational background to make what we would hope would be the correct decision or the informed decision uh i just i think more knowledge is never a bad thing and i would rather have them learning about it in ninth grade than waiting and through the internet and whatever else they can come across because at least if they learn it early they're we know they're learning it correctly okay um is it comprehensive sex education i just think

070that the first of all language is the program studies maybe that needs to be revisited but what they're doing with the kids is providing them with information that is more aligned with comprehensive sex education which doesn't move abstinence as an option obviously we all recognize that but i think given the developmental age and stage of the grade nine students perhaps is emphasized at the forefront a little bit more than it will be or of course description for 12th grade students perhaps i uh you know i'm just gonna i'm gonna say i it sounds to me like michelle bailey at the beginning asked for sort of what the curriculum actually looks like and it sounds like that might be useful information because it might correct me if i'm wrong brian but it might be that that

071some of this is is is that the wording in the course catalog doesn't necessarily give us the full picture of the comprehensiveness or not of the actual coursework does that i mean i can tell you right now i don't think our concern is around grade nine i think our concern is that it's only a great night yeah i don't okay yeah i i i don't think i agree wholeheartedly with what you stated that abstinence should be what is taught to an eighth grader and possibly even a ninth grader but i think that the relationship thing the things that anna talked about about um you know abuse and how to negotiate you know those situations is more of a 10th 11th 12th grade developmental area so i if we have comprehensive sex education it should be

072happening developmentally progressing towards adulthood by the time they're in seniors abstinence sexual diversity and gender identification male female reproductive systems stis contraception uh finding support developing healthy relationship skills sexual assault and violence and sexually explicit images so that that's great nine what you know what that looks like for a grade nine student um will look obviously very different than the discussions you have with the 12th grade student they will touch on some of those topics in grades well probably not all of them hopefully learned about the email and female reproductive system by then i don't think it's changed for a lot but certainly they're going to be revisiting some of those topics developmentally appropriate plus what's in the course catalog this is i guess probably a more detailed description of what actually happens in the

073classroom in terms of the topics that they study i think what dana said is that we we're not in the class so it would help us to see those materials so that we can understand what's being taught um this i have a question for brian and possibly for the superintendent um this is the 2022-2023 course catalog so um and maybe it's actually for also michelle and michelle who've been here in the years past when do we need to approve this in order to get this i guess in terms of the scheduling process for next year so once this is approved it allows us to go back in and make a lot of the formatting changes so that way it can be presented to parents and students for next year which we would you know this

074is a nice project to do over the break also early in january that way when you give it to families like in january as we start looking at courses or a little bit in terms of how we're going to relay missions um and so this is typically a maybe that's michelle and michelle maybe you know from the past i don't remember last year was a blur whether this is typically approved in december i think it was january last year yeah i feel like it was later last year but you know last year was left last year my i've accepted it i've accepted my one year of experience was not a typical i don't remember and honestly there's been a superintendent here that didn't have us approve those things so okay um okay so i guess

075uh jen would it be worthwhile to change the description then on page 69 to match what we're actually teaching well what we are teaching is abstinence plus aren't we yeah i mean i guess that's a term that was placed in that course description uh 100 years ago is accurate in terms of what they actually do in the classroom with those great advances a more accurate statement it might be abstinence first as opposed to absolute loss i think that would be your worst categorization is there any way that what she's what she what we're teaching would fall under the umbrella of comprehensive sex ed in my heart it sounds like we're kind of teaching everything that you could possibly want to get a great act to know about that topic that we're certainly not excluding or

076providing them with all the evidence-based information that we taught in that so i could talk with her out there she's much more of an expert in terms of what comprehensive sex education is so we want to have that discussion before we put that in there yes absolutely um just a quick glance through the maps nine through twelve i mean we really do cover comprehensive health because it starts with the baseline if you will in ninth grade and then um starts to get gained complexity as you go through each of the years so when you're starting to talk about sexuality in ninth grade now you're in 10th grade talking about okay how does alcohol become an issue with you know issues of sex or issues of violence or issues of relationship so they start to connect

077things together all the way up into senior where they're talking about environmental factors and physical factors it just it continues to grow through the years i'm just like i said quickly glancing through the maps that are here and the standards that are here um there seems to be a connection all the way through nine through 12 for health all right um can i say can i just say something just really quick there's a question just one question please go ahead um so i i mean what i think i'm hearing is that it has a very unfortunate name of abstinence plus but it's not it's not what we would maybe think of as promoting abstinence as the only answer and that came is that accurate with dr carr november 5th meeting i asked the same question

078and it sent the map out it's not the only thing it is clearly not when you look at our map it covers all the the things that brian listed out and then some and it seems to grow i mean it's very basic in eighth grade ninth grade it's a little more expansive and all the way through 12th grade where you're seeing um much more complexity in the things that they're studying including relationships and substances and relationships problem solving socioeconomic issues related you know it just seems to grow in complexity from 9th grade all the way through to 12th grade in our in our written curriculum and abstinence plus is probably time to take it out of there realistically where we're teaching as much as we can even outlined with standards when you're looking at the

079just the mass standards our teachers use both the math math standards and the national standards to build from so there's even more dynamic relationship between the two standards so if it's just seems to be a a name issue what we're calling it who would make that decision to change the well we could just landing curriculum change we would trust our teachers to build the curriculum and then you know how we how we write the descriptions that's brian some brian could bring back to them and say hey we need to we need to update these to what we're actually doing that would be the easiest thing to do that makes the most sense so at this point i'm just going to say i do want to trust the wisdom of the committee and you know we

080need to make a decision this evening about whether we want to vote to approve this catalog or whether we want to you know table this until some changes are made we need to um but we do need to move forward we have a wrong agenda and i do want to make sure and i am willing to trust the wisdom of this group of people um as to what we feel is the best or step forward so at this point i would take a motion if anyone has one as to what active step we would like to take yes i'm sorry uh specifically genocide correct and then the bill that was recently passed so um you know the bill has adjustment uh recently in the past and a part of what is called important bill in

081addition to the explicit teaching of genocide at some point in high school and middle school yeah in middle school it calls for the creation of a fund that fund is going to help help the development of curriculum um activities and professional development specifically around genocide so what we would be you know looking for i guess in the coming months is what sort of money is going to be applied to this what programs you need to develop to help us push our brain a little bit i did ask christian gorgeous who was our leader for history and social studies where we would see genocide taught right now as a currently existing curriculum for two required courses 10th grade and 11th grade in 10th grade uss u.s and world history won they talked specifically about the media

082and louisville and morgan schools and the us government response to that in 11th grade which is u.s world history ii when they get to the world war ii unit they are talking about the rise of totalitarianism they reunite and pre-covet they did a great wide study on shepherd's west so we may look at bringing that back because the culminating event [Music] question is the framework of the holocaust taught only through the use of schindler's list as a film no i think that's that's culminating one of the culminating activities for it but there certainly is a lot more about the holocaust than just watching the movie in terms of the lack of electives that we have ap us history again you talk about the 19th century indian rule also referring to the armenian genocide as well

083and then the facing history class which really focuses a lot on human rights and genocide they talk about the ten stages of genocide armenia raphael lincoln's definition of genocide holocaust cambodia and rwanda so they go through that classes you know semester long dive really into that so you know currently we are um learning about genocide in the high school um you know so that way we can you know understand you know the impact that that's had throughout history but we're looking forward to what can be offered to the students in terms of how we can expand our definition of genocide see other examples of it but really i think more importantly what that bill is pushing for is to start integrating more human rights discussions and history courses so it sounds like it sounds like

084our current curriculum addresses a lot of what the bill is requiring which is good i'm wondering again if we're looking at revis you know revisiting the course catalog if we could include some of that specificity because it is sort of troubling to me that the word genocide is not in there and some of the great things you just talked about are great examples of curriculum that we're already doing so i think that's a change i also mentioned this to superintendent tracy a long time ago the trust fund to me is really interesting especially since we have newly created municipal human rights commissions and you know as most people no disclosure i'm the president of the human rights coalition so i think the opportunity to get funding is really interesting but i also think it's important

085for the public to know this will be required of us regardless of whether or not we get funding so i'm happy to hear that i think curriculum-wise we're a little bit closer to the mark on this um than that i also was trying to interrupt to say just in terms of vernacular abstinence plus is not like a term we made up it's a very specific curriculum that has a universally understood meaning so it's it's not something that hamilton went in is saying like we're doing this you know it's it's a technic it's a it's a proprietary term so if we're using it and it's not accurate then we should change what we're saying because it's sort of like saying we drink you know coke when in reality we drink lots of different sodas we said

086we drink coke i hope that makes sense to people okay um so as i sort of said i would trust the wisdom of the committee i um would look to those of you that have i mean in other words we are looking to adopt this i um we could have a motion for that there could be i don't know is there it doesn't sound to me it forgive me if i'm not hearing right but didn't sound to me that there was any specific course that people felt needed to be removed it was more questions around the specifics descriptions correct i'm just clarifying whether that's accurate no i would say i'm prepared to make a motion and see how it goes okay is literally just an issue with formatting a lot of well at least two

087of the sections on requirements go from one to three instead of one to two when they're listed so that could just be fixed yeah can you just give me this here's another example um if you look under the requirements for social studies it goes from one to three page number what page page 38 no it says two i don't see that i see two i don't have that cup you're looking at it as a workout you know yeah the two is nice that might be needed i'm sorry do you see the two there's a wrong one yeah it's not there's no two there but it's just okay there's no period sorry we found the two hooray okay so that sounds like that was just a computer formatting issue it's a computer formatting issue all right

088let's give it a shot because i do we have a lot still to pursue and i want to make a great decision here i move we table adoption of the high school course of studies for 2022 to 2023 to receive additional information about specific curriculum and teaching around sex education in the district second seconded by jen carr so my question to you brian is i asked already this sounds like it will be challenging i'm wondering if knowing what you've heard this evening there are still things that you can do over the break to move forward knowing that it doesn't appear you know in terms of scheduling it doesn't appear people are i don't know or do you feel like that you're without having this adopted you cannot move forward at all i'm just trying to

089understand your timeline i guess on the surface it would seem that a lot of these get done regardless of what the decision is here i just don't know for certain you know what gaining a pushback further discussion okay are we ready to vote did you want to say anything eric no um okay so the motion would be to table this um did you say specifically pending further i've pending further information about the curriculum and specific course information taught around sex education in the district um all right uh all those in favor of tabling this uh okay that is four in favor all those opposed that's two opposed and the motion passes and so the course catalog adoption is tabled and we will i anticipate that we will revisit it at our january 6th meeting i

090hope oh okay or the 13th we'll say we'll we anticipate putting it on a january meeting because we're forcing them to do this over break absolutely no i i absolutely that was not my intent at all my intent was to get it done as quickly as possible but not absolutely we can on a future agenda okay okay thank you very much um next up is craig is here to talk about craic danny weldo's here to talk about the athletics budget presentation is there is there a way that i can plug my laptop in so what's up right there yes i think it's right i actually yeah it's like right hear a while thank you everybody so i think this is an important night for athletics not because we're talking about money but just because we're

091talking about values and you know the things that we value and stuff and again i met with the subcommittee laws i completely appreciate the chance to share the dialogue the ability to to get on the same page with what we're actually doing there's a lot of high level stuff that kind of gets floated around out there but really being able to dig into that is super important and i'm incredibly grateful for your alumni and you know like discussion with you um so we're going to go through some things tonight we're going to go through these slides pretty quick because they're but they're all very important um we want to talk about some recent highlights last year we had the ability to complete all four athletic seasons usually it's three we had to divide up into

092four like everybody else in the world we had to adapt adjust and overcome we were proud that all four of our seasons finished in person the entire school year all of our marching games were completed we didn't have to postpone any seasons we did have some teams paused last year but at no point in no time for any team was there a spread within that team so to me says that all the protocols were following pretty well as best we could even in a year that was you know crazy we still had an unduplicated participation rate of 63 what that means is 63 percent of our student athletes participate excuse me 63 of our students participated in at least one sport we did so while trying to keep the focus not only on the field

093but off the field in the classroom and how we comport ourselves with our peers um between last year and this fall we've had eight teams winning college championships seemed live five teams won sportsmanships award eight players of the year six coasts of the year many of which you met tonight one of the things i didn't mention earlier because i was hoping she could make it here we actually had our first home hockey game of the year it's like the third hockey game i've missed in seven years and trish mademon the assistant in the athletic office was recently named kate bailey in district five assistant of the year that's a group of about 30 to 35 schools that she won that award from she's actually helping me cover that game so i can be here with

094you tonight but i wanted to mention that as well um this fall in the first state after the first statewide state tournament every one of our teams qualified we talked about that earlier we talked about how far they advanced and of course we had the incredible uh run of the girls soccer team and how well they did and again it was about that team and those girls for anyone that was at those games it was packed you know whether it was home or a home away from home or on the road at manning field and then there was incredible support from everybody i thought it was wonderful that all the other teams came out and supported and then the next day the girls would be in there it was just a wonderful wonderful few weeks

095it's a lot of success the last year year and a half even in some pretty tough circumstances um [Music] last year this particular slide was toward the end and i felt like it was an important issue to put it up front um whether we like it or not whether it's appropriate or not whether it's we can argue about it all day atlantis is the single most visible part of our school district we host the most events we host the biggest event on campus school event on campus every two years we're in the newspaper every day and it affects more of our students i think than any other deal so 70 of high school students in a normal year will participate in that bucks this year if i had to guess it's going to be closer

096to 75 which is the most since i've been here in 10 years and if you think about that from a district perspective these are 2019 numbers but 22 percent of our district-wide students participate in athletics i don't know how many students the elementary school has or whatever but 22 percent of the entire district students is a significant amount of students and what we're trying to do is we're trying to extend the school then for all the miaa's faults and i do support that their their mission is on point their mission is educational athletics this isn't club this is an aau this isn't anything like that we're about educational athletes between three and nine pm every day we're trying to extend the school day to our students we see our fields and our courts and our

097brinks as laboratories it's the same as going to work in a cat lab we talk about all the things that their 21st century student wants outcome beach learning collaboration accountability resilience and creativity with instructor we feel like we're trying to extend the school day and we're trying to do it the best we can shoot a bit of a shoestring um one of the things this budget does not include this is not a service budget right yeah this is not a level service budget what we're doing here is we're presenting you with options right now our district funds user fees at 25 and we keep the family capital we are presenting options to you for 30 35 and and what that looks like and our contention and what we're going to try to show you is

098as you increase those steps every five percent it's a cost of 29 000 to the district and what we're trying to extend is the value of what we're providing in our district through athletics is worth every penny of that and perhaps more um and you see that there in a 43 million dollar proposed budget if you go up five percent from 25 to 30 is 29 000 and it's 0.069 percent of the budget and then 0.069 percent each five percent as you go up 29 000 i mean the difference between um what's not included in this budget i still contend that we'll always contend that every boss esport is a paid assistant if you're in an elementary school and this is really doing uh a lot of our sports take place off-campus if you're a

099vastly coach along with 20 kids and a kid drops who takes care of the rest of the team while you're taking care of the kid who if you're on a road trip and someone has to be transported to a hospital who goes home with a team right these are some of the questions and not to mention the added coaching value or the added mentorship and all that added adult connection so i'll always contend with all of our rc teams to pay the system from the district we don't have that again we need a new pole vault okay it's 25 grand we need trap and field actually we need game goals for soccer field hockey it's a lot of money that is not in this budget we need to redo the gym floor when you blow

100away from equipment and there's no there is some money in our budget for outdoor facilities and managing that there's no additional money to that so those are just some of the things not interfering but and i say this not i'm not trying to be negative in any way i'm just trying to say we're not adding anything in this except for the user fees it's a lot of stuff we need we're trying to be reasonable with what we're asking brief history about news and feats prior to 2012 it was 100 family based there was a scholarship fund there was no family account um the district paid nothing towards fees 2013-14 the district started paying 20 percent of the family cap excuse me 20 of the user fees there was no family cap 2015 to 17 we

101stayed at 20 we included the family cap for the first time 2018 and 19. the district jumped to a 60 percent a sixty percent contribution to the fees and we kept the failing capital two years ago at this time prior to cover that sixty percent was again approved covet came we were concerned about losing chapter 70 money it dropped to 25 the 20 the amount never re-increased despite the fact that i don't maybe i was speaking around school i don't think we lost the chapter 70 money and so now going in so we're on the second year now of being back we're being back at 25 we did increase the scholarship a bit which is great and it has helped so that's a brief history of where our user should have been if we don't

102increase the user fees at all the contribution to user fees this is our numbers we need five nine we need 595 000 to cover all sports at 25 the district would pay 148. admin scholarship family cap kind of stays the same that's your number 30 again we're going to go up about 29 000 per box here and so you'll see the number of fees needed stays the same admin cost say the same stuff stays the same fill the cap stays the same but the district contribution goes up by this 29 000 for each of the columns so that's your numbers between what we are at 25 up to 40. um what we have on this slide is what the estimated user fees are per sport this is this is an estimate it's very based on

103participation we are combining genders here for example you'll no longer see girls in boys basketball we started doing this this year just as basketball and what's interesting here so if the fee structure stays the same this is the number per score at 40 percent what we did do for you down here is a rough guess is if we combine everybody it would be 525 40 we do the same thing in 35 same thing in 30 the same thing at 25 and you see how the fees obviously per sport go up i'm going to take golf for example the higher the district fee the lower the family that plays golf pays and then these are your numbers down here in the turquoise we have one universal number um hamilton if we go up to 30 1.15

104percent of our budget will go toward athletics 1.15 of our 43 million budget we're going towards athletics this is a value statement we're saying how much we value athletics and all that good stuff all the kids over here all the coaches that were here all the joy it brings to the community all togetherness it brings to the community all the 21st century learning stuff if we go up to 30 we're saying 1.15 of our budget goes toward our lives we do the same numbers at 35 up to 1.22 and hamilton when i'm at 40 percent users beat contribution we're at 1.29 of our budget what does that mean our neighbors ipswich and 1.3 4 percent of their budget goes towards athletics and manchester essex it's 1.47 we talk about this all the time i know

105it's an uncomfortable topic i know you hear it certainly i hear about it we don't like to talk about it during the years much because there's a million things going on i think this is the point where we need to make a choice about our user fees so that's that i'm happy to answer any questions or clarify any slides yourself thank you um just to clarify where there's it looked like there were some minor differences from the original that was a couple was that accurate am i looking at an old copy the data was the same um the pictures i didn't represent enough sports so i updated some pictures when i did the copy that you had the total district budget was lower than that was the only so some so some of the percentages

106were slightly different okay thank you okay yep no because yeah no i appreciate that um okay so um again this the goal of this is for the people here to really understand to really get clear on exactly what you're presenting so let's start with just clarifying questions um anna thank you thank you craig uh the family cap and i know we've talked about this before but if we eliminated the family cap am i correct in understanding that that 59 567 would flow back towards money available to the district contribution it would okay so the downside of that is you have several so it would right it totally would and it's a valid question right like do we help out a lot of people a little or maybe help out a few people a lot right

107that's important i think you and i have had that specific conversation more than once ultimately there's not there's not one perfect everything fits all given the answer what i would say is if that family cap was eliminated what i found last year somewhat anecdotally somewhat numbers wise was that if you took that away there are certain sports in the spring where participation is more the goal than being elite would be right track and field tennis those numbers those participation numbers would drop drastically and so what would happen is if you had if that's what if people paid for that sport where they already paid they probably wouldn't play again because they're not there as as like this is what i this is how i no one should define myself as an advocate some students write

108like i'm a soccer player i'm a basketball player they wouldn't participate in those sports necessarily because that's not their fundamental event so one of two things would happen either the cost of those specific sports would skyrocket making the people that are kind of in the middle less likely to pay because now tennis which was i'm making this up i don't have the slime turning but say it was 466. yeah now that might go up to 600 and so someone who's in the so now you're losing the the student athlete to do it socially and you may lose some of those middle of the rope you like i don't know if that's the value i'm looking for do you think that if we increased the district contribution to 40 for everyone so that if we eliminated

109the family cap but went up to 40 then those families who otherwise might have been benefiting from the cap they would benefit from the 40 allocation you would you know split the difference a little bit do you think that would ameliorate some of that participation drop off in the spring i think if you increase it all the way to 40 but throughout the family cap i think i think that's right where the line is of like too much this way i know what's going to happen too much this way that's probably right around where the line is that it would be it would be interesting to see what happened if that makes sense and then my only other clarifying question we've talked about i've talked about this a lot with you when you say average

110that would be under the scenario where everyone pays the same fee regardless of the sport so some you know some sports are going to get a significant decrease other sports might see a little bit of an increase but that would be the scenario by which everyone pays the same fee for suiting up for the generals regardless of your sport okay thank you thank you just so you know your screen is not showing i like your spreadsheet though it's very nice um um okay so yeah so you're exactly were ready um about a third of the sports would be bennett would benefit greatly about two-thirds of the lobster on and if spoofing would be about the same okay michelle horgan um so if we do a 40 you're looking at 85 to 100 decrease per family

111let's say if i look at your let's look at volleyball right so if you have an athlete that a student that does three sports only child in the family they would get the third sport fee free right let me follow let's see if you can if i can get this out here without confusing the whole world um so for two sports they'd save themselves two hundred dollars but then they'd have to pay four hundred dollars for the third sport where if the family cap if you didn't have the 40 percent and you kept the family cap you would still be up yeah right so so you would pay a little so if you're a three sport family you'd be paying correct so just take volleyball at forty percent well no like you know it's about

112to take the average because right so if you play three sports times five twenty five since fifteen seventy five if you played two at 35 you'd be at 13.50 but then you'd get the other one free so we would what is that so you you have to spend a little bit more you've got 150 175 bucks one total to play the third sport to take away yeah yeah did i answer your question yes thank you so in a perfect world keeping the family cap and 40 district pay would be in my ideal yeah um that that would be an approximately 90 89 90 000 increase for the district above if we funded 25 and that's including keeping the cap and that includes keeping the cap and again that's a 1.29 funding level which is still

113well below ipswich and manchester okay um michelle bailey um so i i think discussing this too much with craig is wasting time because vinnie's budget has an increase in it for tonight which is new and that is the number that you know the district feels that they can support so which was it 30 or 35 i don't remember 35. so 35 so discussing this 5 to me isn't like a good use of our time right now okay thank you thank you for that michelle because i i i agree i think our goal with craig is to really um just really understand the what you're presenting to us and and sort of the discussion and debate um can come later but so that it's essential for us to understand it but we don't necessarily need to

114debate it right in this moment um are there other clarifying questions or things that you feel like can get answered about this presentation okay thank you very much that was oh oh i'm sorry jen so if i'm reading this correct if we eliminated the family cap and went from 35 which is in vinnie's budget to 40 we would actually decrease the amount we're paying because the family cap is 60 but the 5 increase is what 29.7 so it would actually decrease our budget not increase our budget if you were to remove the family cap entirely yes if you were to remove it and reallocate it to the percentage match no it's one for one but if you're removing it completely yet yes okay okay other questions okay thank you very much thank you very much

115thank you okay all right um next up we have our i.t budget presentation allen is going to present for us thank you so while alan gets set up i'm just going to point out to you that the i.t budget changed so much from the budget we've been talking about to the budget i'm about to update you on tonight that we asked alan to do his presentation based on the updated numbers that i'm going to tell you after their presentations uh just so you have the most accurate information because his did his does have a lot of changes in it okay so is the exhibit accurate anymore uh the exhibit one that's linked to my section is what he's presenting on tonight if you're trying to compare his presentation now to our prior two meetings they

116do not match okay but it does match my exhibit one i believe or it's exhibit two let me check well thank you for having me um happy here to be here to talk to the big hops again all right so um just a little background and just this year last year it's something i've been i kind of see that department as what we do with our user experience at the center of it and i think that we provide services around the user user experience so it's like risk management around security preservation business continuity data integrity identity confidentiality network mitigation for protecting our children in the information side there is making available quality data that acknowledge tools that can be leveraged for from with collaboration and usability current technology that can be accessed with easy easily

117transferable skills so it's kind of doesn't talk we talk about technology as much but it's mostly about me trying to center how i think about what we do as a technology partner so in the coming year our budget has has some changes in it we've been really busy this year a lot of different uh initiatives a lot of rollouts rolling out 9th grade 8th grade 7th grade 6th grade devices rolling out new laptops to the that those changes keep in place it's been an effort and it's been continually busy um so though in hardware we have a big change coming up and the costs are going up significantly but this is mostly around the seventh grade ipad initiative where we're now paying for the seventh graders to have new ipads every year each ipad they'll

118keep for the rest of their their their time as students there's also a chromebook refresh at the middle school the chromebooks we have there are quite old um not quite though but they're they're growing old and we're playing we're playing by 120 new ones to utilize with sixth graders next year we have again next this coming year will be our lifecycle replacement of our high school teachers laptops there's about 55 of them and then we'll also have replacing the parts of the ipad that is the element school which is the 90 ipads there professional developments which keeps our staff up to date there's no change there uh contracted services which are xerox as our it's our print management services our contracts with our isps our contracts with our external services around security around firewalls around

119other internet services we think dns archiving a number of things that are staying the same we also have our software is changing so our software is going down a little bit but there's been a lot of changes from again being remote we have to buy a lot of software or at least engage in in uh licensing and services around ingenuity and um advance another one outside for kids or a fluid involved we also engaged a lot a lot more persons you know websites and software that comes through websites that were we're using externally and uh so that was those things are not being purchased again next year we also we're reducing our costs around zoom it's not going away but we're reducing our costs around it and uh but those are kind of being offset

120with some other things we learned this year and that was that we need to do better job from our communications so we're engaging in some software that enhances our website multi-language translation on our website a messaging from a web website there'll also be additional um software purchases around our student information system to help our parents manage the emergency cards and information performs we have we have them fill up every year that's probably enrollment process so there's a little bit of balance in there we pull back some stuff and we also engage in some new initiatives so the changes are remote services we're reducing our costs around both remote services and fees and that's the accelerated education and ingenuity zoom reducing those also includes educational software subscriptions we're increasing there's one piece then talk about we're

121increasing our cyber security we've been working on a number of what i call business continuity services uh making sure that we have backups and ability to recover from the disaster and planning on having a disaster and then the the security platform or our footprint that we engaged in were like seven or eight years seems to have not in my mind has not met no longer meets our needs so um although we're keeping all this stuff both pieces we're actually adding another layer to that and that's what we call networking heuristics allows us to not only um understand what's happening in our computers but also understand what kind of traffic is actually happening around our computer activities and you know flag that information that's not right or that we really can't look forward into the future

122without having this type of vision into what's happening on our network i think we've done a very good job at this point but it's we can't sit in our laurels we have to keep moving so there's an increase of about 11 000 around um this aspect of our our network security from a glass back answer read this and then the last piece is actually increasing the devices for the seventh grade ipads we're also going to have an increase around beginning a multi-year initiative around replacing our access points um here at the ceiling that one came out of the box about 10 years ago i like to tell people a favorite story about when i arrived there are boxes laying around the surf room and i open them up with all these brand new asset points

123in there that they apparently the head fund had um granted us and there's no plan actually put in place so we got them up and running and since then we've gone from those 50x points to 170 or so we use now but that technology is not does not no our meets our needs and will not keep up with our needs over the next 10 years so thinking about how i think about the networks i think you've been seven to ten years phasing saying what do we need to go get over the next seven to ten years and we can't do that with what we have in place here um so we're gonna be investigating and entering trying to find the right solution to get us into you know the next generation high performance high density

124or wireless access points i think that we've gone from our classroom where we have we're handing out kids ipads and laptops you know during the classroom where now every kid has at least three devices on them and the density for that device up there the ceiling is really about 35 to 40 but we're having any classroom 90 devices sometimes so there's not enough room in that device to actually handle the amount of traffic that can be generated in busy times we push more than 15 terabytes of data across our our firewall every month it's like you stop tired of the paper it gets halfway to the moon you know it's like a lot of information um and i think that's that's that's good right we've been growing into this we've had a lot of success

125in our classrooms with our well that's pretty much all i have to say so uh sure um let's would can you back up one slide just so that we have that to look at thank you that's going to help me um okay questions jen i have two questions since the seventh graders are getting their ipads at that point in time and i assume they'll follow them into the high school we're not planning on collecting those back when they graduate because they'll essentially be absolutely correct to either get a dollar back or something yeah but they have no real value at that point yeah exactly so i don't think in my mind we have disciplines objections here water yeah and we have been observing and talking about what the students devices should be and how the

126student develops their own sorry do you mind speaking to the mic so hcw cam can get it other students might develop their own uh learning um i don't know if it's like their own learning style right with the devices so i um i've been in classrooms watching the teacher give an assignment out you know to do in the classroom and kids pick up different devices they kept tackling the same the same the same uh project if you will simon and in do by using a stylus by typing by taking photos like drawing on paper and i think that that we don't want to spy for that right so we find that by the time the kids are there our students who are lucky about this but by the time the junior senior they've migrated to

127their own learning style around their digital device and that often involves them moving from the ipad to personalize that to another personal device like the laptop so we're going to have we're going to have some some stress when the kids devices get to be that old and we're going to have to deal with that as we come across one at a time but it would be it would be interesting to see how that works out but there's no plan to replace that right now as they get together yeah so that charge for seventh grade ipads it's basically going to be recurring every year we have to buy 120 to 100 plus 120 125 new ipads every year and my second question is with the large website revamp that you were discussing we're going to make

128sure that's ada compliant correct appropriately okay other questions okay um what michelle yeah so when we talk about equipment replacement and things like that are we talking where do we see the smart board replacement in there we haven't developed a smartwork plan yet we're just beginning starting to identify what that would look like the survey and start to gauge what that should look like so the every room in the district has some kind of audio visual system in it so there's 147 or so of those and they mostly all engage some kind of projector like this and a smart board this is not a smart board this is just a production platform and uh those smart boards i think i've only bought one of those 10 years i've been here and so we need to

129look at that carefully and think about what that's going to look like if we start replacing them next to the next budget cycle exactly a three or four year what program is that how long will that last another 10 year cycle but at this time right now to walk into the classroom and just replace exactly we have there it's about five or six thousand dollars so i'm anticipating we're gonna have to look at that carefully because it adds up and it can't be just done at one time there'll be something to learn so there is no there's no nothing in there for replacement at this point oh there is a replacement for in the park where we have a small line that i put in for broken projectors light bulbs bulbs any repairs may happen

130right now we're having we're replacing some speakers because the speakers that come with most of them are 15 years old and right now but you're working on a life cycle replacement yes okay thank you [Music] okay other questions thank you alan thank you very much thank you okay next we have facilities maintenance and operation budget presentation and tom geary is going to present two very tough jobs ladies yep okay again presenting the facilities and maintenance budget for employee 23 to start off quickly for those who haven't seen the fast facts in prior years we've maintained six schools plus six buildings across 93 acres which covers 365 000 gross interior square feet and we do that with a snapping level of 16.25 excuse me so first i'd like to start off and explain to you how

13121 22's funding has been spent to date first celebration our facility has been fully occupied since the first day of school and that was a theme i know across the elementary middle for high school budget presentations and i couldn't be any more excited to walk through and see our facilities oftentimes that's the magical it makes me excited to walk through our buildings there's a difference between working for a public school district and working in any other area of facilities so what our budget allows us to do this year is to perform those code requirements those safety inspections that are mandated by law and also best practice to keep our occupants safe so everything from boiler systems to life safety playgrounds we have these inspections covered in the budget this year something this year that was

132very exciting to do was moving most of our contracts and services to the massachusetts state contract vendors under the operational services division they basically put out public goods and allow us to take advantage of economies of scale of being a small school district we're able to take advantage of statewide discounts on contractors which is also helpful because i'm not sure if anybody on the committee has tried to secure a contractor for their house is very challenging however built into these state contracts are required response times which has been helpful that's not to say that we can always get the parts needed but at least you know we have a leg up when it comes to getting qualified contractors excuse me um something that we really transitioned to this year was i would say estimated 90

133utilization of the fac 85 contract through osd that is a really in-depth detail contract where we're able to order our consumables for custodial supplies and anything from ice melt to paper towels to cleaning chemicals and the contract is such a gold standard that the state of new york the state of connecticut the state of vermont uses as well you have to all vendors have to go through a third-party certification process for their products whether it be green seal or epa stamps that not only provide us safe chemicals and safe products for our occupants but also you know reducing i guess the world's carbon footprint at the same time so a big all around it's a good contract most of the items are the same price as normal products if not cheaper so that's been really

134a no-brainer and happy to celebrate that another thing this contract we were able to i guess maintain our playing fields to a higher standard using targeted cultivation and fertilization i put an asterisk there because we started out really good i was doing my touchdown dance the fields were looking really good however with the success of our teams going later on into the season it's just not sustainable for us to maintain the natural grass fields with the amount of use that we have on our data which is why we're investigating making a major investment into our athletic fields so the fy 23 the budget allows us to the first point is pending action with the funds that have been discussed using env and that is we would use those funds to improve the safety functionality life

135cycle and aesthetics of our learning environments my first inclination with this money is to target many deferred maintenance projects at the middle school high school with some of the uncertainty going on with the elementary schools builds a safe investment to make smaller project investments at the middle of high school everything from asbestos flooring removal to restroom partitions to upgrades to some of the science lab equipment we've had some issues with gas alliance so some of those initial thoughts to dedicate those money to deferred maintenance projects that are smaller they're not necessarily capital investments but they're still on the to do this budget also allows us to basically keep the doors open for business as we're operating today you know by continuing to use these osd contracts and continuing to use the cleaning products at the

136staffing levels we have it's no secret to anybody on the committee or to the community that our infrastructure across the district is aging middle school even being our newest a lot of the major hvac devices are coming upon the end of their useful level that doesn't mean that things are just normally stop and shut down just means that we have to be mindful of what we put in the budget for repairs athletic facility upgrades desperately needed as i alluded to before no matter how hard you know or how much money you put into the natural turf fields you simply do not have enough athletic space for properly maintained and the custodial maintenance stopping levels uh continue to be an unmet need as you recall during the reductions during the fy20 budget process um two out

137of three maintenance technicians were reduced thus uh and our custodial staffing levels is very difficult to find substitute custodians only time there's an absence it's definitely a fellow i'm happy to answer any questions you may have on facilities and operations thank you all right questions oh jen um so i love the fact that we're fully occupied um but if we get another huge kindergarten class and we're already fully occupied do we have a plan to deal with that because if we're fully occupied and we add an additional sorry so when i are fully occupied in my side presentation means that we opened up school much different than we did in last fall okay so not all it doesn't mean all the classrooms are fully that's not to say that we're not in a space crunch

138and i think that we have to look at defer to the superintendent tracy but i think that there's going to be some in-depth conversations of where classrooms are located please yeah the three principles actually four principles at the elementary level have already had started that discussion trying to figure out where things would go so we do have an idea what to do we just have to um again it's it we're tight everywhere we're we're pretty tight all over so it's really reallocating and trying to figure out best locations it may you know kindergarten may jump from say the buker over to the winthrop or the cutler depending on how they restructure programs other questions yeah i have a question um so i cannot recall there were some upgrades to make bucher specifically um more ada

139compliant and is that did that or is that going to happen or is that in this capital budget list not mistaken that was character was we were looking at targeting that as a project if we had taken that program seek evon this year on capitol no so i guess my my my question is so this budget also doesn't meet the needs of making our schools ada compliant okay and there had been a lot of talk about those at the doors making there be like an enter room in order for security purposes so this would this also does not address those security needs that's correct the physical security needs you know as far as the double airlock vestibule without getting too much detail on on security in public right that would have been characters two security

140upgrades okay but without us pushing capital forward a lot of those major contexts right at the same time we are seeking you know assistance from msba where we have three project applications in the elementary schools i know the board of directors met yesterday i believe 12 15 they looked in their agenda packet didn't appear that they took action on invitations to the program so my understanding is our guess is that we will find out um after march for director's meetings thank you anna and um thank you for all this just so i understand the the idea around the 325 000 capital allocation from the end if we move forward part of your motivation is focusing on the middle and high schools because we're hopeful that the msba will come through on the elementary level do

141you have um i suppose it's going to be after the budget timeline but if you know we're not going to hear from the msba until march or april it's going to be after this budget has run its course so is there any notion that if we're not put into that program do we need to have some sort of contingency or idea to do some of the the upgrades that michelle has been talking about and other things is i mean i completely support the high level idea that we're not going to put money into a car that we're going to replace you know like i get that but at the same time this is still these are still the buildings we have with students in them still so is there a way that we can have

142it so there's a plan in case it doesn't come through and how do we build that into the budget if at all the 325 000 i believe would not address all of our accessibility issues for all the disparities across all three elementary schools so you'll see over the years over the coming months a state of the school's report to pretend tracy is we'll be publishing you know the current conditions of the schools and one of our goals is that long-range facilities plan which you'll see you know we'll have more information from msba by the time that report is you'll see some possibilities of how to live with the structures we have and we're in a similar spot with the high school roof i mean there's a few things that ideally we would address right away

143but are a significant financial ask without state support so i feel like that to me is you know i wish that the district had addressed that you know 10 or 15 years ago but we can't really lament that but for me looking at it now i i'm struggling with sort of saying we're waiting on the state we're waiting on the state i mean a certain point i want to say well we can't wait on the state any further like we have to figure out a different plan so i guess that's the bug i would put in your ears you know what is the what is the plan look like if we didn't have that option and i don't even know if that's a realistic ask but my mind is thinking on it because i think

144we do have to do something about the facilities um as soon as we can okay other questions okay thank you very much okay um next uh vinnie i believe is going to get up and update us on the budget process look at that victory nope i think yep we're here go ahead so tonight we're going to update you on some changes uh to the budget but just to back pedal for a second on november 18th we gave you the first peak on the superintendent's uh fy23 initial budget recommendation at that meeting we showed you the changes to level service we should show you any addition or changes due to the grants and we also incorporated any new investments we had at the time two weeks later at the december 2nd meeting we layered in one-time

145use of expenses to offset emd on december 18th week on december 8th i'm sorry we held our quintuplet board meeting where we discussed both presentations prior to that both but simultaneously during that whole roughly three week period eric and i were meeting behind the scenes with department heads with principals and the leadership team we conducted many of our one-on-one meetings at the same time we were waiting for the deadline for salary advancement and step advancement and waiting for the deadline for retirement applications to come in so during that time we didn't update the budget for you guys we kept the same numbers to not confuse you how to layer into e d and what effect it had on the budget but now we're going to update you on the changes to the budget and what

146this effect has had over time so now i'm going to go through and break down each deci category and what the genes were right here we're looking at the difference between the budget we presented in december uh sorry the budget we presented in november which is located in this column and then the budget we're going to talk about tonight which is in uh so overall the changes from the original budget we presented till now we're showing an increase of approximately 2.1 ftes but at the same time we're showing a reduction to the budget of approximately 482 000. so now i'm just going to go through each individual deci account and highlight the major changes it's not all the changes in total i think there was almost 105 accounts that changed between our original budget and

147now i'm literally just highlighting the big ones so just to start in order for the administration doc we're seeing an overall change from our first budget to today of approximately seventeen thousand 000 and an increase of roughly 0.1 fte this is due to two major things the first one is the increase of a 0.1 payroll position so originally we asked for a 0.5 payroll position to be added for many of you who know each point two equals one day at work when you have a 0.5 you kind of come into a scheduling conflict and as i discuss this with the business office we were trying to figure out you know what their schedule would be and then we looked back at the past and we used to have a part-time position it created a lot

148of conflict with staff members coming to the business office because they always had to coordinate what day were they actually here and then if they were here that day what time were they here because the 0.5 means you'd have some sort of part-time day so we're asking just to increase that by 0.1 to make them three even days per week so we can tell people to hear monday tuesday wednesday during the birthday you don't have to now schedule a certain time to come with that increase brings approximately 500 5 100 uh increase to the administration dac uh in addition to that you heard alan talk about upgrading our security posture and putting in another layer of technology security that costs roughly eleven thousand five hundred dollars so combined we're looking at an increase to administration

149for seventeen thousand and again this is just from the budget we showed you before to tonight not the overall budget from fy 22 to 23. the next section is capital operations and maintenance we're seeing a change from the november budget to the december above budget of approximately 364 000 obviously the bulk of this is extraordinary maintenance when i originally presented the budget to you this was in a different desi category our last presentation i had mentioned that this might change depending on conversations i have with the auditors it has changed you'll see an offsetting amount in the next slide but here we're seeing an increase of the 325 000 for extraordinary maintenance in addition is again technology infrastructure upgrades with you know the coven 19 pandemic we've added a lot of devices into the network

150and we need to upgrade our wi-fi across the district this is estimated to cost approximately 35 000. uh but this is netted against a 5 000 reduction into the overall overtime related to the maintenance as well as the summertime student support the next desi category is the capital fixed assets improvements this is the other side of the 325 the next is guidance counseling and testing we're seeing a change of roughly one ft fte or roughly 105 000 this is not a new position you'll see later on in a different deci category the exact opposite of this since i think about 2008 there was a rise program in the budget it was categorized as a special ed classroom instructional teacher they are not special ed and they are not a classroom teacher they are considered a

151counselor this was brought up during eric and i went on meetings with the high so to properly categorize that teacher we are moving them into the guidance counseling and testing back and again you'll see the exact opposite in the teacher's data so it's not a new position but it is an increase to this deci category in addition to that we're seeing an increase of around five thousand dollars in the guidance department this is due to the enhancement of their naviance platform as well as their x2 next is instructional materials we're seeing an increase of approximately 78 again you heard alan talk about it and i did mention my last program my last presentation sorry earlier in the year mary beth did eliminate the paid ipad program at the high school and we initiated the seventh

152grade ipads at the middle school uh you guys heard it again and i'll just repeat it this will be a reoccurring cost every year going forward there won't be an additional 63 000 but this baseline of 63 000 will have to stay in the budget as long as this program uh exists in addition to that we're adding roughly uh sixty thousand dollars for our curriculum materials uh this is related to the math common core in the lexia materials across the elementary schools this is being offset by reduction in remote teaching software just like alan said we're no longer running ingenuity and we have reduced our consumption of zoom so we're lowering our software by approximately 32 000. next is instructional leadership where we're seeing a change from budget to budget of about 0.6 ftes in

153addition 39 000 uh the biggest contributor here is the is the additional ask at 8.6 out of district chair to assist uh stacey music our director of student services and the managing of our audition students many of you were here two years ago this position was cut as part of the coca-19 reductions in the beginning of 2021 in addition to that the north shore education collaborative has told us that their membership is going up six thousand dollars for fy23 some of this is being offset by the elimination of the curriculum coordinator coordinator stipends across the elementary school so with the addition of the instructional coaches at three elementary schools we don't need that stipend anymore so we are eliminating it there is one at each elementary school in addition to that we are offsetting it

154offsetting it by a reduction in maintenance contracts now this isn't a reduction year over year if you remember when i originally built the budget that we presented we had not had that one-on-one meeting with alan and i set a baseline at a seven percent increase on every one of his house he didn't need an increase at all so i withdrew the 7 which equates to seven thousand so there's not a reduction in services it's just a reduction of the placeholder i put in from the previous presentation uh in addition to that we're reducing it by approximately ten thousand dollars there is a there was or there still is a vacant position in the technology department uh at the time allen was not finished with his structure he has finished that we posted the position and

155we have posted the salary board which resulted in a ten thousand dollar decrease to what we have in the budget for the prior year the next section is uh insurance retirement and other where we're seeing an overall reduction of approximately 53 000 uh the first item here is the reduction in sick day buyback when i originally presented the budget to you all i did was roll over the budget from one year to the next without knowing actually how many retirees we have we have that information now there's three of them therefore i removed roughly three additional retirements from that line which resulted in savings of approximately fourteen thousand dollars the next item is a reduction in our health insurance enrollment so as i might explain before right now for every vacant position in the budget

156we've budgeted either a family plan for them or an individual plan since the creation or since the introduction of the first budget two of those positions we've hired for they came in filled up the paperwork and they are not taking health insurance so we have reduced that live item to reflect what has actually occurred uh over the past three weeks the next one is other teaching services where we're seeing a reduction of approximately seven thousand dollars these are just two minor changes one of them is the submission of a column advancement for a teacher that falls in this deci category and the other one is reduction in our distant learning and online coursework this again has to do with coping 19 we upped that account this year and last year to cover additional online coursework

157that will not be carried through into uh the next section is professional development where we're seeing a decrease of approximately nine thousand dollars this has to do with the reduction in summer curriculum work when i originally built the budget i noticed that in fy 21 and the beginning of fy22 we overspent our summer curriculum lines so i was anticipating that this was going to carry through from one budget here to the next after eric and i met with jen our director of teaching and learning the elementary teaching and learning we do not anticipate that carrying through the next year so i have taken back that additional 12 000 dollars i added in to cover the expenses that looked like were going to be reoccurring from the prior years in addition to offset that we are

158asking to increase all tas in the district a half hour on one wednesday every month to include them on early release early release wednesdays to help provide professional development to them and pay did you say a them hour half hour yes there's already you're going to do one half hour there's already a half hour this year for 22 we had already built in a little bit so in total it's about an hour the next one is people services where we're seeing an increase of about 18 000 this is due to the athletic user fee so just a level set on this one in fy 22 we currently have a 25 match on athletic user fees when we originally presented our initial budget recommendation we upped that by 5 for for a total of a 30

159match we are now upping that an additional 5 for a total of 35 you saw craig's presentation earlier he was hoping for anywhere between you know the 35 40 right now it's set at 40. i'm sorry 35 we'll get back to 40 in a moment but right now instead of 35. in addition to that we're increasing uh this the people services line for additional social and emotional support up at the high school and some of this is being offset by a reduction in our special ed transportation that also flows to this destination the next item and the biggest one is teachers where we're seeing an overall increase of approximately 0.4 ftes while seeing a reduction of approximately 162 000 so to break this one down i'm just going to start from the top instead of

160instead of the positives the column change placeholders when i originally presented the budget to you on the 18th again it was still two weeks before the deadline was due i incorporated every single um column advancement i had at the time and incorporated an additional placeholder for future ones that i would get i based my number on the past two year average the past two year average included the new edition of the m15 column which upped that number we saw a steady decrease this year and the actual number of people that applied the theory behind that is most of them got it over the past two years and finally moved to that m15 so ultimately we didn't use up the entire placeholder that i put in so we're pulling that back and reducing this line item

161by approximately 123 000 the next item is that offset in the rise teacher that you saw in the guidance counseling and testing deci category again the december first deadline has passed for retirements three of them were submitted and we're realizing a savings of approximately 25 000 per teacher retiring for an ultimate savings of 75 000 the next item is almost the complete reverse of that we had a recent vacancy occur in the special ed department this the teacher that vacated that position was extremely low on the pay scale we do not anticipate being able to get somebody that low next year so we are actually asking to increase that lie item for that individual because we do not feel we'll be able to be lucky enough and fortunate enough to get something out the next

162two items are addition additional ftes the first one is the one is a 1.0 middle school or language teacher this kind of has two factors playing into it the first one is we're trying to maintain sixth grade for a language that we've been discussing over the past year this will help us accomplish that in addition one of those retirements is a department head in the world language they are currently a middle school teacher and they are currently teaching spanish but eric and i played out a bunch of different scenarios depending on who takes their place whether it's a high school teacher whether it's a middle school teacher whether it's a mandarin teacher or whether it's a spanish teacher it could leave a point for vacancy in that department so that 1.0 fte will help us

163maintain the world language throughout the high school and the middle school depending on which scenario plays out the next one is a 0.4 uh middle school math teacher this is on top of the 0.2 math teacher that you've already seen built into the prior budget and the same 0.2 math position that you guys voted in for this fiscal year so overall combining all these items it's a 0.4 uh increase and roughly 162 000 degrees uh for the last item is tuitions through the hard work of the student services office we are projecting a decrease in our auto district placement i think probably for the first time in four years i believe approximately 548 000 which obviously is what is helping uh cover a lot of the conditions you've seen tonight so what does this all

164mean when you wrap it all up so we're combining all the electrical service all the addition to the grants the new investments the addition to the opeb and extraordinary maintenance we're seeing an overall budget of approximately 43 million dollars a roughly 4.3 million dollar increase just to remind you that includes the additional 2.3 million dollars for the offset for an overall gross increase of roughly eleven percent this is it in that form and this is it in our desi category so i'll try to bump through it because i know i've ran through this with you guys plenty of times you can see that same number carries off to the top we are seeing a little difference in our school choice enrollment from what i projected before uh i rolled over the same number we had

165last year which incorporated almost a hundred school choice students we're only at 77. so 77 times 5 000 per student is the 385 000 now so even though i showed you before that we reduced our budget by approximately 480 thousand dollars the net assessment to the town is a reduction of i believe roughly 420 000 the difference is the decrease in the revenue for schools so ultimately it brings our gross operating budget after offsets to roughly just under 4 million from there you take away all of our revenue sources just to point it out again you have the ed of approximately 3.1 million the end result is an overall net budget increase of 2.6 now before it was i believe it was roughly 3.6 i think um so we're dropping it down roughly one percent

166so what does that mean when you roll out the new assessment uh the new shift for hailings and when 65.4 percent hamilton and uh it means an overall increase to hamilton of roughly 675 000 or roughly four percent but look what it's doing to that it's actually decreasing their uh broke their net operating budget by approximately 17 000 or roughly a reduction of 0.1 so that kind of does it for updating you on the budget now i'm kind of asking for direction you've seen what we've presented you've seen what level service was you've seen our new investments and you've kind of seen what we want to do with end there is still a question that was raised tonight about athletic user fees this is kind of a moment to ask us whatever you want to

167ask us even if it's questions about prior presentations if there's questions about tonight because the next time we meet is january 6th at that meeting we're supposed to vote in a tentative budget i would love to incorporate any changes you guys want into that budget for the sixth obviously that's not the final budget we won't be voting that until february so there's still time to change it if there's if there's no um direction you have tonight but it's kind of looking for how you like it okay um so i know that vinnie thank you very much for that vinnie and eric um i know that you said you want us to talk about direction i think just before i think we've seen this several times but so we may not but if before we do

168direction if anyone just had a question about something that has been changed tonight um julia i just have a quick question about the reduction of the od placements um what led to it is it coveted or is it something that you think will be replicated in future years or is it just sort of an anomaly this year through covet the department of education changed or gave an opportunity to the kids who otherwise wouldn't have met competency determination so they wouldn't have passed that past basically uh kids who were you know out of this replacement the number of kids in artificial placements were given the option by department along with actually anything in the state um to go back and say you didn't pass your mouth but you're in a school and you took algebra two

169and you passed it the state swapped that out for the requirement uh for those kids so we have a number of kids qualified for that change in conference determination which basically that thank you anybody else with questions before we move on to sort of okay um all right well i guess i'll open it up to give feedback direction anna um so first of all thank you i think this is i mean i high level i like it um i am intrigued by everything that craig had to say tonight um and you know i don't know how it's and i'm it's unfortunate he left because i know that he's has such a good brain around this but i especially given how we compare fee wise to other districts i personally would be comfortable and open going

170to that 40 to doing a little bit more but i am intrigued by eliminating the family cap because i feel like that's the 60 000 if we're going to increase our contribution i like the idea of of um i like the idea of doing things that help the most number of students and i think that i actually really like the way michelle kind of laid it out you know if you were an average family that played three sports and you looked at that average fee what what would the real delta be so i personally in terms of my direction like i would i would encourage us to go to the 40 but eliminate the family cap and i have always loved having one fee average the fees out and if there's any difference instead of

171having these individualized booster clubs encourage people to have a generals booster club where everyone pools resources like friends of the arts like the ed fund like other groups do to help offset that but i i to me the one spot i would tweak it is in the athletic department budget and i would i would that would those would be the changes i would personally support i don't know if anyone else likes any of those at all but that would be my point of direction the only other thing i really want is a dei director but i know that that might be something forthcoming but i would love to see us um you know make that a priority for the district but i know the audit is still running and i think that you know that's

172my gut feeling on that is we could improve there but i think it might be premature to put that into the budget before the audit itself is done but i do in my mind i i think that's something we need to keep making a priority in this district so that dei initiatives are not a one and done like this is the first year and i i'd like to see that reflected in the budget year after year okay thank you anybody else michelle um i the capital plan um i know tom talked about you know the balance we have to do between msba and and the schools but you know we did two years ago we did have a a 10-year plan and i think there's a little can you just explain i think there's a

173little bit of a halt on that right now a little bit right or again because of the msba or it's kind that of is the lining up of our capital projects with towns capital projects they're having their master plan go so each they finish along with uh eric's state of facilities we kind of want to see all these things to see kind of what the future holds because if we know we're gonna have to have a five million dollar high school roof project next year it might be wise not to issue a million project now when you know that big ones come in three to four years so that's kind of the idea of not pushing your capital forward right now trying to line up everyone we still have a 958 000 that was approved

174in the last capital round to spend because we just can't get people to do the work and get materials and things like that but we're still i think this is under six hundred thousand dollars and work still to be done and then the ten year plan that you're you're looking at we referenced in uh in the capital planning subcommittee meeting and you know you look at something like just the ada requirement changes you're looking at 2.6 2.7 million dollars for the three elementary schools only you know so there's a lot of these kind of odd projects that are there are a million dollars two million dollars that we're going to have to figure out and it's one of the reasons we meet tom and i are trying to build a state of the school district

175because i think it's important to work with our communities given the fact that we're looking at the possibility of building a new school possibly an elementary school that could run in the 30 40 million dollar range with a 47 percent reimbursement there's a lot of money still pressed on with a project for our fields that it's no reversal from the state that could range if this is my guesstimate between 12 15 million dollars by the time we get there um another 3.5 plus million dollars depending on how the scope of the project works out and then on and on so we're sitting on we looked at that capital improvement planning grid of 10 years i believe it was this year we looked at it two meetings ago i think it's like 26 million dollars and

176that's just in fix-ups things that we need i mean the middle school already has that window over the place they're failing after you know 10 years their seals are breaking but those stuff run into the millions of dollars when you're looking at an entire building over time so you know we have some uh fancy book work to do but also i think it's important for us to keep working with the communities communities uh we've met with both town managers we put kind of all the cards on the table to say we're looking at 75 million over the next 10 years if we were to hit all the buttons the right way that includes their project as well like the town hall project is a 10 million project with i think three and a half to

177four million dollars coming out of the pockets of the people and then i don't know about when i'm yet learning about any bigger projects they have but i'm assuming they also have aspirations for greater products as well so it is it's really trying to get all the information out there this the state of the facilities report that the month of january we'll lay it out for everybody but i don't think anybody's seen everything in one place at one time if you go back ten years and go my office tonight there are 10 years worth of studies that we've paid for over time have never actually came to any fruition so my my hope is to change that start to make something out of what we're putting our money into you know studies checking and building

178and growing to actually making something happen okay thank you jen my question is more edification so are you just assuming that for school choice students that the number will be the same next year as it is this year or when do we get the final number for school choice for 2023 uh what we receive this year is what we spend next year okay receiving 77 dollars worth of kids it's five thousand per student for 77 students so what we get this year is exactly what goes in our budget okay thank you julia oh i just wanted to say um just from all of my listening and all the presentations i i fully support this budget i think it's i think it's going in the right direction i think it expresses our values and i also

179think it's palatable to the towns which is hugely important um but i i would absolutely support what anna said with the 40 percent increase um and the money i know we talked to the capital finance meeting a little bit about more specifically how we might structure the fees and then present something to the committee but i i i just wanted to lend my support to the budget and thank you for your your hard work around it so ultimately i'm going to work in whatever you guys want to work in but i just want to remind you that next year we have to backfill that 770k so whatever we're adding in now is going to amplify the picture so michelle did you have anything no oh no oh no okay i'm ready to vote on this

180bad boy i think i i think this is a great budget as it is i think it's palatable i think it addresses um you know a couple of needs you know and it's it's incrementally always trying to improve and i think that's what this budget does so yeah i'm i'm ready to vote on this and i'm ready to start telling people come to town meeting vote on it thank you um i i am also enthusiastic about the budget i did have a question which i guess is the flip side maybe about of what michelle was talking about about the big capital project i guess i don't really know how exactly to ask this but i'm thinking about the people that are going to be sitting in these seats 15 years from now what and and

181this is to michelle's point to about what incremental things can we be are we mindful of like let's make sure i mean you asked the question about the very specific question michelle about the smart boards like like do we feel like in this budget there's sufficient attention to just regular preventative maintenance so that we aren't differing yeah well that's a great example of i mean and i've used that same example for the opeb about serving the people that are going to be sitting here 10 15 20 years from now so i guess i just want to make sure because open i think is a huge part of that and i want to think about it in terms of maybe the middle school is what you were talking about as sort of the wisest place that

182that building is whatever it is 20 22 years old or whatever it we don't want it to you know fall apart before it's time right in in the way that we've heard that some other things maybe it's not before the time they're old but anyway it's just that's just my only feedback is that i just want to make sure that we're continually mindful of things that are long in the distance and i did hear eric you mentioning the middle school specifically because i think that might be really a wise place to be thinking about because that building is certainly not looking to be replaced in the near future so we're also mindful of emergency projects as well like for instance we had a massive gas life issue at the high school under the floor that

183would have been chopped out to get to the pipes that were identified by firebombers leaking um tom and the plumber and the gas department came up with a better solution for us to go walking over the ceiling and just reconnect everything but that's those things we can manage those things it's just when you're looking at the bigger structure of all the science labs every one of those science labs that has gas in them could have the same issue again and again we fix one set so we just we're just trying to balance that as well to really be careful i think tom probably has the most difficult budget demands in some ways because all of a sudden something goes we have to try to figure out how to mitigate the issue thank you i just

184wanted to make the comment that the increase of that 2.6 percent that's a third of what implement inflation is right now so you guys really are doing more with less funds yeah no i i agree with michelle i vote on it tonight and can i ask a clarifying question about something you just said about the the seven hundred no but and i this has always been on my mind you know and we know this to be true that 773 000 that's not the one time exceptional use that really is a you know an overage that next year we're not going to have so when you say be mindful of what we do now we'll be qui use the word amplified in the future do you mean to say that we just need to be mindful

185that next year we're going to have to come up with 773 000 to keep level services for next year i just want because we'll have to come up so even though the relative delta which i think craig said was something like 29 000 per you know per 5 and then the the family cap was 60 grand right so i mean it's small dollars in the big scheme of things but you're just saying every time we do that we're gonna have to come up with that money again somewhere and we already know for a fact that we have to come up with 773 000 next year just to keep level services so are you sort of forewarning that next year we're going to have to cut 773 out just to keep levels depending on how this

186year ends it could be next year so to play that out if we do this lovely well-intentioned idea of going to 40 and making it generous et cetera et cetera two years so now we might be in a position where we have to go back to the days of 100 user fees and we offer nothing just as hypothetical is that sort of are those are those the scenarios that you're talking about that's possible yeah i mean it depends on what we decide to go after to reduce even play we could all say you know we really think that's important but we want to reduce somewhere else and it's going to hurt at some point because there's there's that it was last meeting many showed the effects of of you know just you moving that hope

187that number okay okay thank you very much yeah everybody else what it okay say that again it's a good amount keep what it is bring it back and whatever is it two weeks or three weeks the second it's the sixth be back on the six yeah we'll vote on it yeah yeah a little um um so i do want to be um aware of our policy that it is 10 o'clock um i do have a few more things i would like to do so i'm going to make a motion i move that we allow the meeting to continue for up to up until 10 30. second second bye anna michelle actually michelle said goodbye michelle um all those in favor it's unanimous of the six members president and we'll continue until 10 30. thank you

188um all right uh eric do you want to uh give us the review of the face coverings and masks truly yes first a little review of the numbers hopefully everybody's seen them as you can tell our numbers have skyrocketed in cases in both communities and through a discussion today with the hamilton town nurse rachel lee she actually even sent out an email to several of us that those numbers aren't accurate because there's quite a bit of non-reporting going on just because people are doing a home test and they say oh i have covered and they're staying home they're not necessarily going to a facility being tested and being entered into the maven system so they feel like the in in hamilton anyway she's speaking for hamilton that the cases are even higher than what they

189actually are pulling off of the maven system so right now this is this is where our cases are at we had a big bump um in the district i did show a change in one of the numbers i mistyped the number that was that was entered in and it should have been an eight so i updated that from a couple from two weeks ago and then um this week it doesn't even show on here we had for the first time ever six pools come up with cases which yielded 14 different cases across the district and then we were running in the past two weeks over a hundred testing stays which is putting a huge burden on our nursing staff i mean they again above above and beyond um monday morning i came into this cafeteria

190and there were 40 chairs set up at six feet apart and the nurses that were here were getting ready to do tests and say for 40 of our kids at this school we did 50-something at the middle school so 20 at another school these are all um places where nurses are spending their time first thing in the morning they're coming in earlier than they're you know then than they usually would they're setting things up with the custodians some teachers are volunteering to help out administrators are involved helping out so it's been it's been a pretty big burden and cases are continuing to to rise um i don't have final numbers on this week but i do uh i i do anticipate it's still a continuing rise we get our we get our buker numbers tomorrow

191usually mid afternoon or so so that's the only one i i'm not aware of but so far this week and it doesn't show on this chart because this is from my friday submission but um there's a huge rise right now across the the district itself again the nurses saying they're not seeing uh spread in school so they're saying oh we picked up a student in the pool testing but around there's there's no spread um and that's being proven by the intestines day as well we've only had one student come up positive through the test and stay over well over 100 students being tested so um just before you take that slide down um the vaccination percentages um do we have an update that's from the data the date on that is from our end of

192our course that's the last time they pulled from the system yesterday the nurses and i well the nurses shared with me the comparative vaccinations that we did with our you know who were paying system i can display those numbers if you want i didn't know because if they were on they're not on the agenda if you wanted to what do you mean who were they've changed okay so you do have them yeah i just finished them yesterday okay you want to see them yeah i asked yeah i think then i'd like to ask a question about that too so i added central office into this chart because they all work for this magnification into that chart thank you perfect sorry um so you see that the numbers have changed we have one school in central

193office at 100 um across the district we're looking at 11 people that have accommodations so that's where you're seeing the not and then student vaccinations continue to rise slowly including um the the younger ones at the the middle school you can see that the average is is bumped up at the middle school now to 79.68 for staff and students and this is so they're this represents fully vaccinated which is why there are no elementary school students represented yet on this we assume when we get back from vacation that second week in january we'll start to hit the double vaxxed uh elementary kids and they're we're anticipating a large number i'm sorry michelle did you have another question eric asked it because i know that we had made a policy that our employees would be vaccinated

194by the monday after thanksgiving and so i hadn't seen the numbers change either so now we've seen the numbers change and he answered that right and just for clarification all of the people all of the staff who are currently unvaccinated have received an exemption for that correct correct okay well one resigned okay and the rest have received a legitimate exemption with a letter that says this is the expectations you're expected to be involved in pool testing and so we've given that list to the nurses to manage as well okay um other questions all right thank you um uh we next is the discussion again the this is regarding the plan for unmasking while it feels bleak right at this moment after that last update the idea is to be planful so that we have some

195that we're providing awareness of our the district's thinking so that when it becomes possible we have some thoughts on how the district will be enacting that um do you want to update us on that what you're sure this memo that i originally put out on december 10th uh with the first kind of this is the first volley of the process we would follow i've added and read some of the changes that came about in discussions with all of you at the last meeting but also with union reps and principals the first edition in red not this this means that you cannot choose to go remote so you can't close your building down and choose to go remote without going through the process that's that the department of education has outlined they've been very they've underlined

196it again yesterday we were in a superintendent's meeting with the commissioner yesterday um they gave us a number to call if cases go crazy and and um they will walk us through things including you know support personnel or different testing regimens or quarantining certain classrooms so we just i just wanted to note that we we're not able to close schools if we choose to close schools without the commission at the department of education it's like a snow day we have to make it up and then continuing that uh with the understanding that if students it's unvaccinated and a close contact they're required to wear a mask outside for 14 days that was an addition from our nursing staff they wanted to be sure something like that was in there and we believe there's a meeting

197tomorrow on testing through the state and the commissioner has pushed off their any update of their masking stuff until we come back from vacation in january so we believe these things may change again so let's have to kind of keep our eyes on them can i ask you a question about it yeah absolutely so at my school if you are unvaccinated and you are a close contact whether it's in school or out of school you're out for 10 days that was going to be my question as well you're not in school you cannot participate in test and stay if you're not vaccinated where where i'm right but you would you would come back on day 10 you still have to wear a mask even outside for four more days four more days okay yeah the

198rule is 14 days so it extends beyond the 10-day window all right yeah i think i learned that from leah leah had found it from some of the information they were getting from the state um this is the same uh just where to turn it in it was it was not clear about where to turn it in the form at the request of uh somebody at this meeting i added in these are the steps that we currently have agreed upon with the the uh hwa and um have been using all along for probably a year now yeah nurses requested that we pulled out the snap self-check they don't really believe they could keep up to it because of all they're doing now i mean i don't even know how they're keeping up to what they're

199doing now but again they're going well above and beyond so my conversation with them would be if they were to give up anything that would be something to give up because it would be just constantly compliance compliance you know trying to figure out what to do with kids that didn't check in or families who forgot or you know so it's a it's at least i i think at least i can push back and give to them um this one maybe uh needs some explaining returning to masking if the number of cases originated out of school reaches five in any seven day period so what that means is that we test we do pool testing so if we get five tests five positive cases in i'll just use as an example the bucher school and they

200were unmasked we would return to masking so within a within a week-long period if we got five tests so it would really be at one point because we test each school once each a week on a particular day so say we test the bucher on thursday friday we find out there's seven cases monday morning we go back to masks go ahead but only among the kids who are participating in pool testing or is it any five cases as reported in any any any form so it would be i put originated purposefully because what we're seeing is parents are home testing their kids and then calling the nurse and saying i'm keeping my kid home they just came up positive so they don't actually come to school but we count them in our numbers so that

201we know how many cases there really are related to school-age children that we that come under our school district so in this case these would be cases that we find at school in a school building during you know a weekly testing period really is really how it works out each building gets one day of pool testing so meaning my just meaning that or the implication would be that because it was discovered at school we would know that those five students were positive while they were in school as opposed to a child that is at home and kept at home that child may never have walked in the school building while they were but but i also think that we might not know that i mean they might do the test at home at the end

202of the day when the child was in school and was contagious correct but all i'm saying is that if a child tests positive at school we are certain that they were in school while they were positive we also have a fairly strong if a child tests positive at home we don't know right but i mean that particular threshold is entirely dependent on the number of kids participating in pool testing which we know is lower than it has been and we also know the state is not advising that fully vaccinated kids participate in pool testing so to me that actually seems like sort of an irrelevant stop measure because if all of a sudden parents who have fully vaccinated students are not participating in pool testing then the likelihood of us being able to catch those

203cases is down significantly so i i understand what you're saying and i agree you know i understand what you're saying about the testing at school but i feel like um sorry i'm so excited to be close to the mic i get a little too close um i feel like that's a really i i understand the idea but i think in light of increased vaccination and decreasing pool testing and state recommendations against pool testing i don't think that that metric is helpful like i'd like to see some other way of of phrasing it and i guess in my mind it would be if any school-age students test positive through any means and the reason i say that is that even though the kids are not transmitting at school which i think is great they're still congregating

204outside of school in the same pods of students so you know kids at bucher tend to hang out after school with kids from bucher without their masks on another thing so even though it i don't think it's transmitting at school it's transmitting within the school population outside of school i don't know if that makes any sense and in shocking form i agree with anna that is not but it should be if there are whatever 10 cases identified with children from the same school no matter how they were identified because they are the social norm is you know i hang out it almost normal with the same people and i i guess i don't i and i don't i i would trust you know maybe our school nurses to sort of determine what is that i

205who knows what the right number is that yeah i was guessing honestly i'm guessing talking to nurses and looking at averages and yeah and i like 10 because it's round number but it might not be the right number you know that's where it started actually but but again i just want to say i i think actually michelle and i agree more not more often not but it's not not it's not it's not like a comet flying over we do sometimes agree but that is funny i'm glad you noticed that um i feel like whatever that number is has to be within the same school population or yep i mean i think either by school or potentially by by grades across school but i think school is really the only place that's meaningful and that's how

206we're tracking it um because we know that the parents are congregating and i i mean we can't tell people what to do after school but they're recreating you know the buke or third grade here to there to there it might not be in this building but that's the same kids are together right but keeping in mind too that this policy is or this i'm sorry it's not a policy this procedure is talking about a school that is unmasked right just school right the idea is that the environment that you're talking about that currently is occurring outside of school would now be inside inside of the school so yeah does it include teachers and stuff contesting so the likelihood that teachers and staff at school is that's just you're not yeah we could we could put

207everybody in it all right i'm i am still quite mindful of our time and i am going to give us a couple more minutes and then i'm going to stop okay go ahead jen my concern is on the new variant the omicron variant we know at least preliminary results are showing us that it's spreading among vaccinated people that the vaccines aren't providing the safety that they are from the other variants that it's more transmissible so we're taking away a mitigation strategy but we're not adding anything in except a new variant that's more transmissible and hits people who are vaccinated as well as unvaccinated i just don't think we know enough about that variant other than we know that it's increasing in pretty much every state they measured yeah i mean i i read an article

208today it's it replicates in human airways 70 times faster than the original covert virus i mean that that you can see that you can see that in the charts that they're publishing from south africa and and europe right now in the in the infection rates and and that was also you know they're they're pushing that johnson johnson is not a vaccine that will protect you they that just came out just before that just this meeting right just i i i i it sounds like my line of grammar i just have a clarifying clarification this is really just and i said that at the beginning of this section that this this is the point is that we want to just be aware that the district is making plans for when this happens eventually and we'll get

209to see this again um i just have a one click i have a clarifying question because i didn't see it before but number seven um we're talking just about students but i think we should talk about all cases at a school staff and um yeah that's a good point yeah good again this is something that's being worked on so um i am going to because i have about seven more minutes i am going to if you guys are okay with it i am going to skip to a essential element on my chairs report um okay i did send out some information to all of you today i'm going to just quickly go through this i want to just make you aware regarding posting information regarding the elections to the school committee i sent this information

210to all of you but i want to say it publicly and also get if anyone has a concern the our regional agreement states that the district secretary shall that's an important word annually post the notice and it's very specific about what needs to be in the notice it's basically the dates of when the nomination papers will be filed may be filed and the number of vacancies to be filled election day is on april 7th therefore counting backwards the first day the nomination papers will be available is on january 10th therefore the posting needs to happen by january 3rd i apologize for not um realizing in time that that timeline really meant that i should have put the warrant on tonight's meeting i just was informed about that and i'm grateful to have been alerted to

211my error because it means that we aren't going to miss this posting date but it does mean that it wasn't done properly i wasn't able to put that warrant onto the agenda the warrant on the agenda um is a way for the approval of the warrant directs it gives a directive that the committee directs the secretary to do this i spoke at length with our legal representative mark terry he said to me that we certainly the secretary certainly can post this based on our regional agreement he did also advise me that best practice would be to hold to vote on the warrant ahead of time i've stated that given the time of year and the challenges of scheduling another meeting my intent is to move forward and have the posting done with that information however

212i'm also ready to schedule another meeting next week to vote on the warrant if anyone has any concerns or objections i'm happy to do that okay hearing none i'm going to move forward um all right we're good good um okay we skipped ahead it is 10 26 um eric do you have any highlights on the district goals um yep go quickly through them here uh portrait of the graduate third meeting we reviewed hopes and dreams and aspirations that we were determined in meeting two we reviewed the results of individual submissions of rankings of our competencies our core competencies that we're looking at we've rounded it down to seven we're now examining those competencies to see if some can be combined into um you know together to make maybe five or six you know we we

213may stay with seven we're not sure we have a fourth meeting scheduled in early january uh we're waiting on graphic design work also that the company gave us some some design work we didn't care for it so we've asked our students to jump in and take the ball and run with it so i met with uh courtney cooney our graphic design teacher and she's going to put her level 2 kids on it to make some much-needed improvements on the designs or come up with their own um the designs from the professionally paid consultants that were the designs that came from the paid consultants we were dissatisfied with yeah okay and i'll i will i liked them well i liked two of the three yeah yeah there was it was a different percentage of of liking

214or not twenty percent are we going to get a refund on the bill then since they haven't liked that we have a conversation going for a number of reasons with them so okay good um the dei work continues as there is uh now a mighty network established for our staff so our staff works with regis and her team in a mighty network online where they can go in and read articles that are posted and then respond to articles and regenerate conversations across the in the entire staff articles videos and and prompted discussions by regis and her team or prompted discussions from people on our our own staff you can go in and say i want to you know i just learned about this boom and and present it um we're doing our walkthroughs at all

215levels of high school i have scheduled walk-throughs for the next all the way almost all the way through april we started doing instructional look for us with the leadership team to really hone in on what we want to focus on in our walkthroughs it's part of my goal to help them to become better instructional leaders over the next couple of years so that's uh we're building on that and then mtss middle school start work on that on this tonight today they had it 16th they met with our consultants and they'll start laying out their process early january high school will pick it up from there working with with them athletic facilities improvement group met on 12 6 new member was welcomed we're building a comprehensive faq document to release in january to help communicate the

216project details to the public invitation sent to hamilton and wenham spincoms to join the working group this allowed us to be strategic in discussions about funding through the through the communities and then gale associates just recently wrapped up site property and wetland surveying this week so they'll come back to us with their findings adjustments changes and presented at i think our next meeting that's it thank you oh actually two quick shout outs sorry two quick shout outs um i want to shout out to the the middle school and high school uh band and music personnel they crushed it in the past couple weeks bringing concerts back for you know been two years i was at a standing room only event at a double mast at the middle school concert the other night it was it

217was fantastic great job and it was fun to be back in and then deca you know they competed today they're actually almost probably done with the award ceremony we had 175 kids in the deca program and and uh not all of them competed but a large number of those kids did compete today so we'll be looking forward to find out tomorrow how they did thank you thank you um okay i will take a motion to adjourn it's 10 30 if someone would like to make that motion i make a motion that we adjourn at 10 30. second all right i was seconded by anna anyone have a discussion all those in favor those opposed i am so curious about that and the motion pass