001welcome everyone to the montevoyne regional school district for our meeting september 24th at 6 30. this meeting is being done this meeting is being held partially remotely in accordance with the governor of massachusetts march 12 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law glc30a section 20. and because we're partially remote we do need to do a roll call order so we'll start in the zoom room and just say your name and present joe we'll start with you joe osiello present thank you siren present all right thank you go around the room oh can you say your name and present present meredith henderson present thank you nancy scott present terry russell present tina games present and before we move into the first order of business i want to wish terry a happy birthday [Music]
002happy birthday terry thank you tina and also to share with everybody um and our public joanne sheehan will be returning on next week she'll be joining us for our school committee workshop which is next thursday uh the first at six o'clock so we'll be happy to have her back moving into approval of minutes from september 10th may i have a motion to approve so move all right nancy motioned uh second i think jackie's seconded and any discussion any corrections all right we're going to have to do a roll call again we'll start in the zoom room with joe joe oscillo yes for minutes thank you sharon and just if you turn off your turn on your mic and i or nay all right so just put your mouse on the bottom remember you see your
003little microphone on the bottom of the screen okay so sharon just give us a thumbs up or thumbs down okay good uh jackie aye meredith aye nancy aye terry aye and i'm an eye so that's unanimous and now we move into the next order of business which is our student representative welcome amy heinsley you can come up to the mic good evening my my school committee my name is amy heinsley and i will be your student mrhs student representative for the year i'm so excited to get to know you all and keep you updated on our students busy lives due to covid there have been a lot of changes and adjustments for the school year but we are taking them in stride it has been going extremely smoothly we always wear masks we have one-way
004hallways socially distant classrooms and hallways sanitizing stations and other similar measures to ensure the safety of our students and staff everyone has been doing an amazing job keeping everybody safe by following the regulations and we have seen the product of it and our ability to remain open during these unprecedented times about 20 percent of our students are doing fully online instruction which consists of a live class being streamed to their homes this has been successful so far in helping students have the feel of a classic school day while being in the safety of their homes the students that are doing hybrid are broken up into three cohorts two out of the three being in the building every day and it rotates this transition into the building has also been very successful though some technological issues
005are expected teachers and students have been managing and working everything out arrival and departure processes have also been very different this year compared to previous years and despite the new protocols every day has been efficient students are able to be dropped off and get classes on time in the morning and make it out to the buses in a manner that is swift yet safe for everyone speaking of which one of the largest changes we faced this year has been our new schedule we previously had a seven day rotating schedule seven five blocks per day beginning 8 45 this year however with the effort of our administrative staff the schedule has been morphed to make covet adjustments easier for all involved we now begin the school day at 10 35 in the morning and have three
006blocks per day on an 8 day b day schedule the students have been doing a fantastic job adjusting to this fall one sports are in full swing and heading to heading into their second week of practicing the current sports girls soccer boys soccer cross country and field hockey just got their game schedules and are excited to begin playing under the circumstances we are playing with a lot of modifications in order to ensure the safety that all the teams are making the best of it a new sharky friend you may see around our school is our new canine frederick von fritz of the harwich police department our school resource officer officer clark is working with fritz as a vape and marijuana detection dogs in our school to keep our students safe and healthy there are a
007few new faculty members joining us this year in several departments across the school for example our new ap government teacher mr sumner came from teaching at the middle school and has already proven to be an outstanding teacher for our classes i have not had the personal chance to personally meet all the other new staff around the building but i've heard only good things along with this we have had staff changes such as our new principal miss police and our new vice principal mr alexander both of them have stepped into these roles with ease and are already creating fantastic opportunities under the circumstances another new element of this school year is a seminar for all students that explores the systemic racism which plagues our country and the racial disparity in our school system was specifically focusing
008on being anti-racist this as a part of the board's resolution to eliminate racial economic and linguistic disparity in our schools has been successful so far the monomer equity task force has already also been launched in order to create an equitable district where everyone feels safe and supported we as students are looking forward to helping monawi create equality and continue to support the black lives matter movement this august one of our eighth grade civics classes received a designation of exceptional at the project citizen national showcase where their presentation titled plastic water bottle band was presented these students were able to complete the project during quarantine and hope to advocate for real change in our communities when they consider plastic waste issues thank you so much for your time and attention and i look forward to meeting
009with you all again soon thank you very much amy any questions comments for amy before she leaves the podium anyone anybody in the zoom room questions comments for amy amy thank you very much knowing you personally i'm delighted to have you here and look forward to your reports thank you thank you so much all right moving on to the next item of business which is public comment anyone from the public would like to speak anybody in the zoom room all right seeing none we're going to move on to recognitions doctor can you hear me can i be here yes okay charles is here yes we'll back up i'm sorry joe you had a question uh no no i was just pointing out i saw a hand raised okay thank you thank you for that all
010right so charles go ahead you have the mic can you hear me all right i can okay um i want to uh just express some comments regarding uh the draft policy on school committee meetings it's up for another first reading on the agenda this evening i believe that many of my concerns about the initial draft policy that i expressed in my recent email to the committee members have been addressed in the revised draft that will be reviewed tonight if i'm understanding the revised draft in tonight's packet correctly the second public hearing public comment period of the meeting will remain in effect as per rule one of the general rules for the committee's comment public comment period under the policy section guidelines for public comment i note that the draft calls for limiting the speaker to
011three minutes maximum instead of the current practice of five probably to rein in folks like myself who suffer from verbal diarrhea to learn how to structure our comments with verbal efficiency but it continues to allow the chair to permit the extension of this time limit quote in extenuating circumstances i prefer the latter wording to be changed to at the discretion of the chair extenuating circumstances is a debatable uh clause and and term and it wouldn't want someone to be talking about unfair treatment of people and trying to justify what makes an extenuating circumstance versus not it would be easier for the committee in my opinion to use the wording at the discretion of the chair in that comment i respectfully request your consideration of that under uh rule five in the same section i'm wondering
012what action the chair will take with any comments longer than three minutes that are presented to him or her before or after the meeting as rule 5 calls for in the draft tonight i think if there are comments that a member of the public believes are important for the entire committee to hear i feel strongly that it should be guaranteed that every member of the committee will receive them so i would respectfully suggest considering changing the wording in rule five to quote written comments longer than three minutes may be presented to the committee through the presiding chair before or after the meeting in other words putting a responsibility on the chair that those comments are shared with all guaranteed to be shared with all committee members the only area of my concerns that i expressed
013in my letter about the draft policy remaining unaddressed is regarding the committee's ability to take and respond to questions from the public requesting clarification or correct uh correct understanding regarding something that was presented stated or decided at a meeting or similarly regarding the nature of an agenda item or something in one of the attachments for the meeting that will be reviewed during the course of that meeting i think it's good a good thing to allow a member of the public to ask a question to be certain that they understand something related to the agenda for that meeting accurately and important for the committee to clarify if there is any misunderstanding at recent meetings i've asked such questions on two occasions and at the last meeting another member of the public asked a question related to
014this specific draft policy in fact and in each care the chair has stated that the committee does not take questions as a matter of practice but then the chair did proceed to get the question answered i think there should be something written into the policy which provide guidelines for the kind of questions that are allowed to be asked of the committee and enables the chair to respond to appropriate questions without feeling that the chair is violating the rules and guidelines of the committee in some way in other words i think if the public is taking time to follow the business of the school committee attending meetings trying to understand what's going on through the agenda the school commission want to make sure that they are clear in their understanding as a public because they go
015out and explain things to other people out in the community so i think the committee should be allowed to take specific questions and certainly not in any question but something that's clarifying in nature and feel comfortable the chair should feel comfortable to be able to get the clarification so that the person goes away with a full and clear understanding of what the committee has decided or you know what the matter was at hand that was discussed and debated and with that i thank you again as always for consideration my respectful uh requests and comments uh during public hearing period thank you thank you very much charles anybody else by the way i'm charles gruska 6t very ad harwich yes get ready for that meeting saturday thank you thank you um anybody else for public comment
016anybody in the zoom room i don't see anybody in our physical room okay yes terry just a clarification that charles i commend you on the letter you sent us very thorough speaks to a lot of the same feelings i had regarding a year ago i don't know if it's appropriate for me to comment now or when we're discussing the first reading but in my uh reading of the draft from the subcommittee earlier this afternoon i couldn't and thank you charles i couldn't find where it says uh the restoration of a second comment at the end of our public meetings so will um and thank you terry um it is we're going to discuss this because it is on the agenda and we'll go in more detail in our discussion at that time so fine would
017that be okay all right um so anybody who and charles i wrote down a couple things which i'm going to address when we get to that part of our agenda um thank you and and i would further comment that i i hope i was correct in in what i stated as a follow-up to what terry presented that was the way i read the draft that you'll be looking at tonight that there would be a at the beginning and end of the meeting a public comment period so um if not i'll have more to say about that in the second public commentary thank you very much keep us on our toes thank you all right and anybody else public comment all right scene nine we're going to move into recognitions with dr carpenter i have a
018few tonight first we would like to thank the following for their grants donations and support of our district the harwich quilt blank and bayberry quilters for their donation of cloth masks for our students and staff the artisans made 90 masks in sizes ranging from preschool through adult and have offered to make more when those are given out to jim and mary miser for their generous donation of two 200 to the chatham lighthouse fund to help support the needs of elementary middle school aged children in need of warm clothing to ginny drink water for her donation of camera kits including a nikon 80 or d80 and other camera equipment to our high school visual and performing arts program chatham elementary school received a generous donation of masks from maui gold approximately a thousand of them for
019our students staff and community moderate community services chatham children's fund and local vendors donate an assortment of new and gently used clothing for distribution via the food pantry clothing and masks will be available for families on thursday and friday after school outside of the front of the building the pto donated 800 for the chatham elementary school to purchase shade tents the laptop for kids donated three laptops for distribution to students to help access homework resources from home the cape cod and islands chef association for their donation in the amount of five hundred dollars to support carolyn freitas as uh carolyn freitas's garden history or garden kitchen classroom and culinary arts program at the high school and finally we'd like to thank the friends of chatham waterways for their grant to the middle school in the
020amount of 700 to purchase two dissolved oxygen meters two ph kits two tape measures to allow more students to participate in water quality testing thank you any comments questions for dr carpenter thank you any questions comments for dr carpenter regarding recognitions all right seeing them we're going to move on to our first item under section f reports and discussions the district handbook for monomoy regional high school principal police welcome and vice president mr alexander thank you good evening good evening everyone john police principal at monomoy regional high school um one piece of advice that i was given when i took this role was to make sure that i delegate to my assistant principal so david is actually taking this over as the position that janey filled which he was the handbook guru so david is
021going to go through the changes to our handbook for 20 20 21. perfect thank you pleasure to be here see everybody in person too so in addition to the routine yearly updates of names dates page numbers etc uh the following student and parent handbook revisions are proposed for 2020 2021. uh the 2019-2020 handbook would likely need to need a overhaul in light of all the current changes related to the pandemic and like our other schools in the district we chose to keep last year's version of the handbook intact because when this is over which will be sooner rather than later um the handbook would revert back to its original form so uh the addendum takes each affected topic covered in the handbook and includes the changes in effect this year to accommodate all these adjustments
022that were made we did this by doing three things we provided you a link to the covet addendum we also provided a link to the district back to school plan and then the third item was a link to the health services department's web page on the mrsd website topics covered obviously in the covet addendum would supersede what is written in the handbook and a copy of the addendum was sent along and in addition we provided hyperlinks wherever appropriate to make that convenient for folks to find it in one click thank you oh thank you thank you very much any questions or comments for vice principal mr alexander anybody anybody in the zoom room everybody good i think we're good thank you thank you very much have a good evening thank you thank you congratulations david
023yes congratulations i appreciate that just hold on mr carpenter go ahead jen and david i just want to remind you that we're not used to presentations from the high school less than an hour [Laughter] every minute matters yes thank you very much thank you all right moving on to item the next item under reports and discussions is the fy budget revision and there is a vote required um and i think michael is doing something else so superintendent you'll take this one so jim's just going to cue up a presentation that we gave this past monday at the harwich selectmen's meeting and i'll just go give some context i'm not going to give the whole presentation i'll sort of summarize the slides and we'll we'll move through it because most of them you've seen before the
024i think the challenge that you know that both of our towns have had as we deal with covid as a school district and covet as as two municipalities is clearly you know revenues are down in both of our towns to you know to some extent and at the same point we have some grants that have come in for covet relief that's helping offset some of the budget challenges that we are happening so jim if we could go to that slide two that's fine all right so so so if if you kind of step back and say okay where did we start when we when it came to developing the fy 20 budget we started you know we started doing budget presentations in january of this calendar year january this calendar year covid was something that
025was happening overseas in china um but wasn't here and uh yeah so we were we're actually you know doing budget presentations both on the town side and the school side that that were not you know taking into account what was about to happen uh between between january and the uh you know and currently here in in september so we had at the time a budget for the high school that was initially presented of 41 billion 946 623 dollars and we were using 670 000 dollars of excess and deficiency to offset those budgets over the intervening few months when we saw the initial impact of covid on our towns and and our ability to move forward initiatives we decided to the school district that we needed to go and carry our share of the impact on
026budgets uh you know and ultimately the assessment on the two towns and we lowered our budget by reducing some staffing and not funding the ela curriculum at the elementary level for this year in part because without the ability to bring teachers together because of all the social distancing it it would really wouldn't make sense to launch a curriculum if you can't put in place the necessary pd to have the curriculum effectively launch so uh we went and took a vote as as the school committee to on on april 30th that reduced our our budget yet again from what it was before to the uh what's up there the 41 million nine hundred twenty four thousand four hundred and thirty two dollars and increase the amount of excess and deficiency that we were going to use
027uh then as we were getting closer to chatham's town meeting we lowered the budget ultimately yet again that that had the full the full reduction of the ela curriculum and and you know so we were at 41 million four hundred forty nine thousand four hundred and thirty two dollars with eight hundred fifty thousand four hundred and forty in excess and deficiency that we're using so that's what chatham as a town voted at their town meeting in june but harwich's town meeting isn't happening until this coming saturday there's still on the harwich side a a budget golf out there that needs to get closed and in conversations between myself the chair and our chair and the chair of the board which board of harwich selectmen the selectmen felt that they could go and support us reducing
028our budget by a hundred and forty thousand dollars which then has us reducing some on the chatham side and we'll we'll get to what those numbers actually actually mean so jeff we just go to the next slide so you know this just summarizes what the assessments were so so based on the chatham town meeting vote harwich's assessment was going to be going up by 1.19 which is still i think the lowest percentage increase of any budget since i've been here in the last eight years chatham's because of enrollment shifts was going down by just slightly over two percent so the next slide jim one of the things i wanted to clarify when we went to talk with the selectmen that there are challenges costly challenges in running a school during a pandemic you know one
029of the one of the most challenging ones is that we are really running two parallel school systems we have monomoy distance learning school system that a quarter of our families have opted and minimally in-person learning happening in four schools at uh which 75 percent of our families have opted for so there's you know there's staffing of both of those there's added staffing that's needed to have students six feet apart with generally no more than 15 students in a classroom we've had to double our nursing staffing in the buildings we've had to make sure that the hvac system in all of the buildings including the three built-in the three non-high school buildings which are 50 plus years old that we were had those hvac systems ready to go and then there's technology purchases there's pp e
030that we needed so there's a lot of things that we've had to purchase so the next slide we've made those purchases out of those grants those government grants that have come in to help support the coveted costs that districts have had so there's a coronavirus relief fund that the district has that's 389 000 uh this sr fund of 169 thousand dollars and a remote learning tech grant of just about sixteen thousand dollars that have helped buffer some of these costs next slide so to date we have spent over 340 thousand dollars of those funds just on tangible things like protective gear cleaning supplies hvac maintenance plexiglas that you've seen in the library and and throughout our classrooms additional student chromebooks um you know just you know just a lot of different things that we need
031just to run a school with these added layers that you know that you need you know to protect staff and students during a pandemic so the next slide jen one of the one of the misconceptions that i wanted to straighten out too for the board is that there was a belief that that since our schools have been closed and i you know using air quotes around closed since march that we don't need to fund our capital line in our budget so there was a suggestion by some to just reduce that capital line i i just wanted to clarify what was in that capital line and that capital lines main things are our maintenance of our facilities and technology purchases so next slide jim so when it comes to technology it's those technology purchases that the
032district has been doing that has positioned us to lead the way when it comes to distance learning this past spring but also in providing the instruction that we're doing now for the for both for those students that are in the one quarter monomoy distance learning in a program uh one quarter of our students and also this two-way streaming that's happening that's happening at the high school so you know as it as it stands now you know the district is providing the most in-person learning of any school district out there in this region and that's something we can be proud of the other thing that's different is that we've invested in maintaining proactively our hvac systems so we're not like the two adjacent school districts that have buildings the same in the same era so yeah
033i think people initially looked at the picture in the bottom left and it's like oh that's harwich elementary school um no that's not that's uh you know that's wixon and dennis but again built in that same era but it's the difference between proactive maintenance versus you know versus not maintaining and then you have these hvac issues that create situations where you're not open during a pandemic the other thing that we wanted to clarify is that we are our own municipality and and as our municipality we need to go and develop reserves for the long-term fiscal stability of the municipality of monterey regional school district at present we only have about seven percent of our of our annual budget in these yeah in these uh we'll call them you know so long-term stability accounts you know
034like uh in our case excess and deficiency stabilization you know opeb if you look at those similar accounts for the town of chatham or harwich which would be their free cash stabilization in opec you know they have 26 23 of their annual budget in those reserves because i think often times when you know when it comes to how do we balance out our budget on the school or on the town side it's like oh well the school has two million dollars in excess and deficiency we could just use that and the important thing to understand is we need that too and we need that to help offset budgets and we are using 850 000 of that 2 million dollar excess and deficiency reserve to help support both of our towns during this fiscal crisis so
035uh we met with the finance subcommittee and michael and i made a recommendation to them to meet harwich where they were recommending which is this hundred and forty thousand dollars to cut our assessment towards them if we're cutting a hundred forty thousand in harwich we need to cut our assessment that chatham has already approved by forty eight thousand dollars so the total reduction that uh that i'm recommending and that the finance subcommittee has supported is a hundred and eighty eight thousand dollar two hundred eighty eight thousand two hundred ninety eight dollar reduction in our budget which would then revise the assessments or and lower the assessments for the two towns um it becomes a total assessment increase for harwich of only 0.66 and it becomes a total assessment decrease in chatham again because of the
036enrollment differentials of a negative uh 2.62 percent increase the overall budget increase this year over last is a 1.25 budget increase and we are significantly increasing our amount of excess and deficiency to support the two towns going from three hundred thousand four hundred forty dollars last year to the eight hundred fifty four hundred forty dollars this year so that's the uh presentation in a nutshell and i know that michael was with the uh finance committee while this meeting was started in harwich we gave this presentation to the harvard selectmen they unanimously unanimously supported uh our budget uh with these uh with these revisions and do you have an update from the tom michael yeah so i just spoke with the well i just attended the finca the finance committee meeting and they voted to support
037this budget unanimously all but one member was there and they all voted in favor of this budget okay thank you so much so our recommendation to the board is to support this budget too and vote for it and that it would have the school committee finance committee and selectmen all supporting the budget on at this saturday's town meeting on our football field okay great thank you so i'm going to open it up for discussion and questions before we actually move into a vote does anybody have questions regarding the presentation the comments the proposal anyone i'm seeing nothing uh joe go ahead i first wanted to see if i could unmute being able to do that successfully i can raise a question uh dr carpenter and the excess and deficiency where do you see the future
038of that of that use in the next in the next year or two i think the idea that the excess and deficiency of the district is really for the use of the district i think that idea is in the rear view mirror by now what do you see as the financial impact if the current trend continues good question john joe so first of all just to you know to give everybody like my uh my sort of quick primer on excess and deficiency so at the end of any fiscal year you're going to have some unexpended funds and and there are you know you when you budget you need to budget certain lines conservatively you need to budget your staffing conservatively just slightly conservatively you need to budget your insurance line slightly conservatively so that you
039know so that you have you you have some you know some wiggle room if you have staff that get married and move from an individual plan to a family plan during during a year or you need to budget for staff to take to take college courses that's in the contract and if they don't use that money then it can go it's it's left at the end of the year and that unexpended money rolls each year into this excess and deficiency reserve that gets certified and once certified can be used in the future fiscal year so my you know over my losing track now i think i've been in a regional school district for about 20 years and and you know it with budgets relatively you know as large of our as ours and almost about
040three hundred thousand dollars in any given year tends to roll into excess and efficiency so so when we were using 330 000 in the past year last like last year that's sort of almost a stable amount that you can use budget cycle after budget cycle if excess and deficiency grows you can look for things that you might spend out of it but you ideally want to think about things that are one-time purchases because because once the money spent it's it's gone from your reserve until it slowly builds over time so uh you know so when we started the regional school district seven years ago we had or actually now eight years ago we had zero it's a new school district no reserves and katie isernio and i over those years had slowly grown this during
041the budgeting process and when had when we would have monies that would come in either unexpended monies and in some cases in the recent years there have been state monies that have come in after the budgeting process that that's rolled into the excess and efficiency so it has gotten to the point in the last couple years where it has reached just over five percent and one of the things that has to happen with excess and deficiency in a regional school district is anything above five percent automatically has to go back to the towns in the once you when you're calculating the assessment so so there's some money if if it's over five percent that has to go back but typically you know our goal has not been to have it at five percent but we
042have i think we were when we were launching into the school district and i think for for sharon and terry and um and nancy um who were you know who were here back then i think our goal was to get up to about four percent you know seven years out and we got to five percent seven years out so we're yes we're right around where we want to be and getting to joe's ultimate question uh so we'll we'll see this we'll see this naturally increase each year and will see us offsetting the town's budgets each year with it but there are some purchases that we know we want to make and one of the things that we had talked about this past budget cycle is using excess and deficiency to purchase either a piece or
043a whole ela curriculum which would be again a one-time purchase i think if we're looking out into the near future when we're developing this next year's budget i think after we understand what the financial realities are of covid you know for us i i would love to see us again when we're developing the fy 22 budget look towards excess and deficiency to purchase that ela curriculum or at least to heavily offset the purchase of an ela curriculum that again is a one-time purchase it makes sense out of an excess and deficiency type account sorry to a lot longer answer than what you might have needed that's a joe kind of answer any other questions comments anything before we move into a vote terry thank you madam just an add-on for all of us as a
044member of the baltimore regional subcommittee on finance i find it first of all i think it's a critical stage in both both municipal governments as well as a school department that being said and partially a major because of the pandemic i see this as a rainy day or deluge account that number 140 which doesn't represent the surplus beyond that to satisfy the needs fairly around chatham that 140 000 and change that we are assisting the municipal side of howards because of their shortfall represents about the same percentage of what are how much donation towards the region is about a third so to me when and it was dramatically lower than the the initial number that was being requested i find that to be under the circumstances to be a very fair way to create this
045fiscal partnership plus it's my birthday so i say that yes anything else yes go ahead if i could just add one quick clarity on why we can be in a position to reduce our budget by 188 000 and not impact programmer staffing because we have to keep in mind we are partly into the fiscal year one of the things that we are doing this year that is a we'll call it a temporary thing and can do it because of the unique nature of this year at the moment at the high school we have a third of the student body is remote on any given day and a quarter of the student body above and beyond that is remote on any given day so that so that instead of having the 680 high school students that
046are on paper supposed to be in this building we only have about 330 students in the building at any given time because of that we we looked at it that we don't have a need at the present to replace the retirement of janie girolimo who was one of the two assistant principals so we have one assistant principal salary that we're not using this year that gets us part of the way there and if the board remembers we offered to our staff a transitional incentive like an early retirement incentive we didn't have a huge number of takers of it but the staff that did take it we hired on large part less expensive staff that came in on the other side because we had more senior people leaving less expensive staff coming in the combination of
047those two really have allowed us you know to you know to do this without impacting other things in the in terms of staffing and program for this year okay thank you all right anything else all right seeing none could i have a motion to accept the fy 21 budget as being re-reproposed nancy sterol i moved to approve the updated fy 21 budget in the amount of 41 million 261 134 which breaks down to a harwich uh harwich assessment of 26 million 820 dollar excuse me 26 million 820 046 dollars a chatham assessment of eight million eight hundred ninety nine thousand one hundred ninety five dollars for a total assessment to the towns of thirty five million seven hundred nineteen dollars no holy criminy total assessment of thirty five million seven hundred nineteen thousand two hundred
048forty one dollars thank you could i have a second please second all right terry seconded so we're gonna do a roll call vote and we'll start in our zoom room uh joe yes thank you sharon and if you're having difficulties still with your mic just do a thumbs up or thumbs down if you can't um if you can't unmute just give us a there you go yeah okay all right thank you uh jackie hi meredith hi nancy aye terry hi and i'm and i and that's unanimous all right thank you very much do we need madam chair yes do we need to revoke the one line item that's updated uh that's a very good question i do not know i'm going to ask you nancy or do it michael for the the breakdown of the
049budget by function code mm-hmm do they not do you normally voted by function when we when we vote the budget initially we do it by if you could do that okay do i need to do them all or can i just update the one good answer good answer madam chair yes i move to approve the updated line item for category 2000 instruction and salaries to a new number of 19 million 100 8 000 286 dollars all of the other categories line items are the same okay thank you so nancy's made the motion could i have a second second all right jackie seconds and we'll need to go around and do roll call again um joe we'll start with you yes thank you sharon yeah thank you jackie uh yes uh meredith hi nancy aye terry
050hi and i'm and i so that's unanimous thank you nancy all right moving on to opening day report superintendent yes so i'll uh i'll preface this i'm just going to talk about the first five days not what happened after the first five days so we can keep it upbeat and positive so um i i i this could this could be um you know participatory um you know we could have mary chime in on this one so you'll want to unmute mary so um i i think mary can you share um sheryl hoffman's assessment of how we opened this year i first speak a school ever with or without kobe and cheryl is our one of our administrative assistants who's been at harwich elementary um not quite for how many years but probably close to ten
051and i have to agree with her um it was just beautiful the the children came off the buses and now their parents cars with their mouths on acting you know like it was this second nature and um we the staff was so prepared after having had those 10 days our distance learning classrooms are up and running and everything has been calm peaceful the class of the school is just bright and shining and so clean and um you know it's it's really just been remarkable i guess it's the only way to say it it's just been thrilling to watch everything all of our efforts in preparation by the staff that went in over the summer to have paid off so um nicely for the children you know so i i think cheryl hoffman's assessment you know
052best school best part of the school year ever with or without covid i think really if if you sort of go to each one of the buildings i i think there's that similar thread out there and even if you go into my office area typically this time of every school year the phone is ringing off the hook on bus challenges bus challenges bus challenges bus challenges and i have to publicly thank every parent who stepped up to go and support us getting the density off of the buses to go and have the spacing that we needed you know so you know there's just all the partners the community partners that have stepped up to to have drop-offs happen differently it has been very smooth from that's you know from that standpoint um if you were
053if you're a fly on the wall in our little administrative retreat this summer my uh you know my reminder to all of the principals is i i don't want us to become that georgia school with the the students his students swarming down the hallway no masks and you walk through any one of these buildings and the kids are wearing their masks they're kids but they're they're they're spacing themselves out really nicely and it's it's been it's just been amazing it's it's it yeah i had all these nightmares on what it could look like and you know from you know from my office yeah i looked down you know behind the middle school and after fifth graders go out to recess and watching them sort of on their own orderly walking back into the building wearing
054masks and and it's you know it's it's it's going really well so i want to give some special praise to four people who i think pulled off a minor miracle and and those are the team of adam o'shea and abby dudley at the middle school and jen police and david alexander here at the high school you have to keep in mind that all four of them are brand new to their roles we had a deadline for families of august 12th to let us know what form of learning would you like distance learning and person learning so it was august 13th that that they all got the green light to schedule your buildings put kids in classes and and it happened and it happened smoothly uh and you know you know we see yeah in the
055newspaper other school districts still struggling to figure out how to schedule kids into their classes given the challenges we have you know so yeah i just can't say enough about the challenge that that four new administrators at our middle school and our high school had and how well they stepped up in uh to meet this challenge and make it happen so um again a very smooth start to the year um it's it's never perfect there's a couple bus glitches that we've been fixing and there's a couple class scheduling issues but but they're you know but it's it's you know it has gone it has gone really well and then under the superintendent's report we'll talk about the evening of day five thank you any uh questions comments anybody um nope all right see now we're
056going to move on to the next item which is subcommittee chairs in your packet you have a pay it's actually page 10 from our school committee handbook and if any anybody needs to find the handbook it's actually on our website if you go under school committee but under subcommittees liaisons and representatives i think it's number two number two the committee chairperson subject to approval by the committee will appoint the subcommittee uh chairperson and its members so a couple of things that uh just in attending some of our subcommittee meetings and i guess a couple of questions that came my way was us wonder kind of wondering out loud should we be having either a subcommittee chair or a point person just to kind of make sure that the committee is meeting as it should is
057there somebody taking notes for the minutes um maybe facilitating the meeting and so i think it might be helpful and i would like to recommend just for our four standing subcommittees which would be uh budget finance superintendent evaluation negotiations and policy i'd like to recommend that we have a chairperson or or a point person whatever you want to call it just for each of these committees and their role is to basically just make sure that you're meeting as you should um the meetings are getting posted which leah does a great job with but just making sure taking the notes because we are we do need to be getting leah the minutes for these subcommittee meetings and facilitating the meeting so um just wanted to put that on the table so discussion or questions any comments
058in the zoom room yeah sharon so i think that's an excellent point i think once we i'm on the superintendent evaluation and policy committee i can't speak about the others but when we get going you know it's so easy to forget to have the structure to take minutes and all of that i think this is um a really good point okay thank you sharon joe did you have a comment i saw something flash up in the zoom chat no comment and you've got a very nice haircut joe anybody else yes meredith i just want to say that i support this because i think it would be nice to just know who's going to present when we come to our combined meetings thank you that's another point too thank you so with that being said any
059any other discussion jackie um i just had a question and a comment okay one is this something we can talk about at our workshop because i feel like um we are also going to talk about the committee handbook um and also my comment would be i feel like we've talked about this before like a while ago structuring our subcommittees and i don't know if anybody else recollects anything but it definitely has been a topic before and i couldn't tell you why we never proceeded with it okay thank you for that i'm not aware i mean meredith and i'm being the newest one yeah i'm not aware of that but i it's yeah absolutely nancy yeah i think that it was a conversation at some point and it's probably a good idea i should say probably
060it is a good idea to make it more structured i think that over the years what i have noticed is that somebody kind of just takes on that role at the meeting without at the subcommittee meetings without it being formal um so it kind of evolved but in putting it into a more structured format and and dedicate a dedicated person is probably the right way to go okay thank you terry i agree with everybody i think it's probably a lot more to do i do think in reflecting back on the financial subcommittee and the uh staying without it usually the subcommittee's the superintendent is with us and it seems uh appropriate that on occasion primarily the finance subcommittee that the superintendent carries the day and highlights any references to what had happened the previous few
061days and then that generates the conversation in some direction how often that being said i too would agree to have uh volunteers or whatever however it works out that there would be a designated person to uh to conduct a meeting okay thank you anybody else uh we'll go to joe and then sharon uh just a technical point uh at the last meeting it was very difficult to hear from mr russell uh i'm very appreciative that terry you're coming through loud and clear today and just quickly for the others it may be uh moving the microphone a little closer to you but because the mask is interrupting the audio and it's it's at least for me in my advancing years it's a little harder to hear you so if the mics maybe were a little closer
062that might help us or help me in any event thank you okay thank you joe sharon and you're on unmute and unfortunately i don't think we can meet her so if you're on your zoom looking at your zoom screen sharing down at the bottom left corner is a mute button the very left bottom corner and if you just click on that it should open your mic and unfortunately you can't do it on our end okay so leah is going to send you a note that says asking you to unmute so i think if you click on that it will help okay so here's what i'm going to ask you to do sharon if you would like to put a comment in the chat box joe could i ask you to read it to me if
063that would be okay or yeah thank you joe the same functionality okay it looks like she's typing um so for those of you watching at home a lot on my feet we've just taken care of some technical issues thank you for your patience while we're doing that i'll just all right so while we're doing that um let me just ask this and then we'll hopefully get sharon's question here so do you and i can't remember who said it i think it was someone do we want to take this up next now my understanding of our workshop is that i don't know we can if we can take an official vote at our workshop because it's not a public meeting so i think we'll have to do it here tonight um we could talk about it
064next week and pick our people which might have been your suggestion or not yours okay so go ahead it was my suggestion i i think that well i think that in each subcommittee that subcommittee would pick there would pick their their chair or whatever you want to call it um but i was thinking at the workshop is where you would talk about and develop the roles of them and what the you know what i mean and the structure of what what that subcommittee is going to look like then you would bring it back here with this is what we as the school committee put together and now as a group we're going to vote on this is what we want okay how does everybody feel about that is everybody okay so if we take this
065dialogue into our workshop next week getting a bit more clarity then we bring it back and we'll add this to our next agenda in a couple of weeks for more discussion and a vote everybody good with that looks like what about in the zoom room would you be okay with that joe uh yes just be just be careful and clear that we do not deliberate in uh in a retreat meeting well we can't do that um i'd also mention quickly voting has to be audible uh not uh just a thumbs up and if i think she's going to the phone which has been very helpful in the past because we can she can sometimes connect with us by phone okay thank you and sharon it looks like your mic is now open can you say
066something yes first of all i just got this new device at five so so it's gonna take a little bit but the only reason i had was trying to speak is because when jackie spoke before i couldn't understand it was very muffled and i didn't want to mess what was being said everyone else i thought that's all okay thank you so what i think on i'll just put i'll just make this recommendation because i hear what joe is saying that we can't deliberate but what we can do is make this part of our goal setting i believe and we can just def better define these roles and then we can bring it back does that sound good all right so all right so we're going to move this over leah we'll move this over to
067our next agenda and bring it back for a vote all right thank you very much moving on to item five substitute rates would this be michael i can i can manage this one okay yes so um yeah i am a biology major by training but back in the 80s on snl there was a uh actor comedian donald novello who had a character called father guido sarducci and one of his skits was a five-minute university and it was everything that that a undergraduate remembers i think a year after they've graduated and one of the pieces of that skit was economics 101 and he said it's all about supply and demand so this next thing uh on substitute pay rates is all about supply and demand and uh and and i will be sharing everything i learned
068from from father guido sarducci uh back in the 80s so at the moment we we have most of our subs that that were working for us last year we actually still have subs the challenge that we're finding with operating schools in an era of covid is we actually need more subs so if we just take the high school alone with one student positive and the quarantining that has happened around that student we have eight subs that we need above and beyond the subs that we've had and we you know we have one other teacher at harwich elementary school who is quarantining so there's you know so technically we have a need for nine subs above and beyond what would be typical in any given year and knock on wood we don't need more subs than
069that until those teachers are back so you know so we need to retain the subs we have attract more subs and and we have had a thoughtful plan that katie and i walked the school committee through wanting to have our substitutes get up to that fifteen dollars an hour by 2022 and talking with michael and mark and i uh we feel that the district urgently needs to jump start that and get to 15 an hour now and then what we have recommended is that we we offer a bonus for subs that that continue you know they continue to sub for us so you know so to have a bonus for this for just this year that if you've subbed for us for 30 days there'll be a 500 bonus and if you or if it's
070for an instructional assistant if you've subbed for us for 30 days there'll be an additional bonus to have people have some consent some consistency there so our recommendation is that we increase our sub rates for instructional assistance to 14.25 an hour and for our teachers uh subs to 15 an hour and to have those bonuses for just this year to again support this notion of supply and demand that the demand is high out there not just here but it's going to be high in every school district and i think we have to recognize the economic realities and uh michael's done a little uh assessment at the bottom of what will this actually cost us uh in the end and has gone back in and looked at you know subs that have worked for us in
071the past what percentage of them actually do do 30 day chunks at a time so yes we have a feel for how much the bonus would cost us above and beyond so if you have any questions on the numbers i'll defer to mike michael if you have any questions on supply and demand economics 101 i will share with you everything that father widow sarducci has taught me all right thank you questions comments uh sharon yes so and my question is if we move it to an hour do you feel like we will have that will be competitive enough with other districts i'm sure every district in the same situation you think that that will be competitive enough to get the session you need i i i would say yes and in fact uh i think
072if we if we explain to people at the moment uh at the moment people are getting what is it 90 a day yes so so for a substitute teacher it's ninety dollars a day uh and i i think that that's uh i think that that's probably the going rate around you know what we're saying is if you come in we'll pay 15 an hour if you come in routinely and uh and earn this bonus that that the 15 an hour plus the bonus would actually translate into folks that want to kind of commit to us uh at a daily rate of of about a hundred and twenty dollars an hour i mean a day which is you know which is i think very competitive and i think we i think we what what we're trying
073to also think about is i think there are some people who who are doing certain jobs in the area that that might look at a a solid 15 an hour with the chance to have this bonus and and be up more like 17 and a half plus an hour that that that might be enough to actually pull in additional talent any other questions comments oh nancy i must have just assumed and that is never a good idea and i won't say why um the 30-day incentive that's not 30 days in a row that's 30 days over the course of the year exactly okay that makes more sense because normally once they get if it was 30 days in a row it would be long that'd be a long time right and that's that's a whole
074different pay scale yeah okay thank you so this is an incentive for yeah just for the rest of this year to be along a regular season come on excellent people that are here for but you know but taking over a class for 30 days the the policy as we go for the bachelor's step one right which is more than this thank you any other questions comments i i have a comment i think it's well worth it absolutely under the circumstances okay jackie did you have something i was gonna make a motion okay so let's go move into emotion joe can you hear me okay i'm gonna take that as a no [Laughter] joe can you hear jackie [Laughter] all right i moved to approve an increase to the rate of pay for substitutes as follows
075for teacher assistance substitutes six and a half hours a day new proposed rate effective immediately of 14.25 cents an hour with a coveted incentive of four hundred dollars after 30 days teacher substitutes seven hours a day the new proposed rate effective immediately of fifteen dollars per hour with a coveted incentive of five hundred dollars after 30 days second all right so nancy seconded jackie yep okay um so the second came from nancy so we're going to do a roll call vote and we'll start in the zoom room share we'll start with you all right thank you joe joe in favor of the motion thank you jackie aye nance um meredith aye nancy aye terry aye and i'm and i so that's unanimous thank you very much now we're going to move into section g subcommittee
076reports first reading so this is our school committee meeting policy that is coming back as a first reading because there were major revisions done to it um could i jackie do you mind if i ask you to kind of kick start us to just highlight some of the changes well i can try [Laughter] [Applause] um where do we want to start actually you know what i've got a yellow coffee from do you want yeah i don't have the yellow copy so i just have i made notes of what charles was talking about okay but that was it so do you want let me let me start with the yellow curtain and the yellow version that i'm referring to this was my version as i was taking notes last time so let me just kind of
077bring you up to from based on our last meeting some of the things that were suggested and i don't know if it exactly matches up to the printed copy here unfortunately tina if you want to lead me off and then i can talk about it that's going to agenda format um under agenda format there was a paragraph three any school committee number uh and i think what we did was break that down if i'm remembering gosh yeah i have a note reward this for clarity so i think we took paragraph three we decided that we would bullet because i think it was too confusing and so we ended up bulleting which you now see one through eight and then we added a new paragraph from page four so if you can remember the swapping of
078the paragraphs we were talking about and then during public comment period uh it was the paragraph that says the agenda will also provide for time i think what we did is just bulleted all of this stuff does that help jackie yeah so yeah i didn't have to say anything all we did was break up the paragraph and bullet them because um sharon had suggested that there'd be more clarification and kind of subtitles to each section so instead of titling something because we felt that that might limit us or be too difficult to actually frame what was in that section we would number it so that each number pertains to a specific item in that paragraph so basically it's for ease of reading and for to locate you know to address something one of the other
079big changes is that we changed per joe's request anywhere where it said citizen to person or persons because we felt that that encompassed everyone best [Music] and let's see what else do we have under public comment at school committee meetings we did there was a reference that there was in the original version we were talking about a sign up and we decided we didn't need to sign up so i think we removed that we omitted sign ups and we did i can address the part about and this is where we did add the second public comment yeah and that and actually that's on page five um and i know tay i think it was you that was looking for that so if you look on page five paragraph are number one public comments shall be
080for a period of 15 minutes and shall generally follow the opening of the meeting and the closing of the meeting so that's where the two public comment sections are addressed yes um we had a lot you know we went back and forth on the amount of time and i think the general consensus was that even though we're bringing it back to three minutes that it truly is at the discretion of the chair um and that we just have never felt the necessity to ask someone to stop talking um i think that we've always been pretty forthright with allowing someone to to talk and share their comments so we didn't really feel that it was too constraining to just state the that timing in there um and we were very careful to most things so that
081they didn't look as definitive made them at the discretion of the chair so in my mind that makes things more flexible in this policy and then let's see charles you had a question and i agree with you page four number two speakers will be allowed up to three minutes to present their material and must begin their comments by stating their name in city town the presiding chair may permit extension of this time limit i think it should just be of this time limit period yes while we're on that line i think using the words at their discretion because that seems to be the theme at their discretion instead of so the presiding chair may permit the extension of this time limit at their discretion perfect jackie you're making notes of these sure okay thank you
082yep yeah and i would agree that the wording at the chair's discretion i i do think i agree with that wording so i wasn't quite catching exactly where there was something else written but we'll look for that i also was going to comment that i almost i think that on that same page number five where it says written comments longer than three minutes maybe presented to the presiding chair before after the meeting i kind of feel like we don't need that like we should just omit that section because when you're telling someone that they have three minutes to talk and they may be able to talk longer at the discretion of the chair then i don't really think that we need to bother a public speaker to present their comments before or after because i
083often think that sometimes the comments aren't prepared um so i just you know just like we're not having them sign in i just don't find that necessary and i mean anything longer than 10 minutes should be a presentation anyway and that's a whole other topic yeah so i would almost omit number five um all right so amen how does everybody feel about omitting number five uh sharon i i can't hear anything jackie's saying but my suggestion is that all of these comments just get sent in writing to one of us you're on this on that committee so maybe that could be sent to you though and then at our next subcommittee yeah we look at that because uh it sounds like some good ideas i can't hear all of them um and we could just
084take it back up in our policy and come back with that's what we're doing right now sharon okay thank you and yeah so and it sounds like we just might have a an audio issue too um joe you had your hand up and then i'll come to terry it's just a request that as we are moving now from summary of changes and we're initiating discussion uh it it might be a little formal but i think ultimately it could be useful if we just organize the discussion section by section uh you know is there discussion on the general overview then is there a discussion on executive session just move move that way rather than bounce around between the different sections that makes sense we could even vote that way if that's as well okay that makes
085sense i vote joe chair of the policy subcommittee um but it makes sense uh joe but we're since we're almost at the end let me just say um the other big change that we made i think uh was under guidelines for public comment there was a huge paragraph it was another paragraph move basically it was meredith's suggestion that we took um it was a big paragraph that we ended up moving out of guidelines for public comment and moving it over to agenda format um as paragraph number four we just moved it because it didn't make any sense exactly so we just ended up swapping spots so that that's pretty much the changes that from the last meeting that we took to this terry uh i thank everybody in the subcommittee for for the revisions and
086i didn't catch thanks jackie i didn't catch on that item four i guess adding the second comment because i think that's valuable as i looked at the past year i didn't even know we were on trial anyways as far as was that a good idea and absent the fact that the rationale for eliminating it to me didn't make any sense especially in the light of the fact that for the last six months we've been under house quarantine and the public has not been able to make a move in coming not that they probably would anyways however i think it's our idea to uh i think it's our goal someone once said you know well it is our meeting that's true but all of us have been elected to represent the kids and the parents and
087the taxpayers so it's it's their meeting too that's my feeling so the only thing one all the suggestions i think charles made as well as i was echoing that i think to go back to the original idea along with all of this math school committee recommendation i think is a good thing the only thing i'd add is because we have never had to worry about coming someone coming and speaking to the point where uh it's it's over time i would recommend that we keep the five minutes uh to me three minutes is an awfully quick thought in your head especially for the public who maybe they're not used to coming to speak their mind so i would suggest the subcommittee take a look and just revert back to where it says speakers will be allowed
088five minutes on the discretion of the uh the chair uh other than that i agree with everything that's been said as far as revisions so let me make one comment and i'll go to jackie so i think it's important for everybody to know that in researching this the massachusetts association of school committees their statement is school committee it's a school committee meeting in public so technically we don't even have to have public comment that is a choice that each school committee can make but according to mask it's a school committee meeting in public it's not a public hearing with that being said mask had recommended the 15 minute in the three minute in the policy subcommittee we had a good debate about this and we felt that the 15 minutes and the three minutes was
089sufficient at the discretion of the chair so i don't think it's our intention to ever cut anybody off but we also wanted to just have people really think about what are the key points i need to make in three minutes and so and then if you need extra time at the discretion of the chair you know i think we're willing to do that but that was our thought we were going with the recommendation from the massachusetts association of school committees 15 minute and three minute really with the intention of having people to come with their thoughts and terry's right sometimes people pop up and they have an idea right then and there but we really did want to for people to come in and boom boom boom have their points made and the dis uh
090the chair can always extend it jackie um yeah just on that same topic we did we talked about it a lot and one of the points that i had actually offered up was that you can always give more time but you can't take time away and if you have a lot of speakers that you want to hear it's more advantageous for us to have a smaller limit that we can extend rather than fewer people and then yeah yes you could look at and go we'll give them 30 minutes or give them 20 minutes you know as an overall but we're just trying to give it some guidelines and with this we feel like we can always give it more i mean charles always gets whatever he let's pick any child i don't think we've ever
091cut charles charles never gets cut off because he's usually one of the only public speakers that we have but we've had meetings where there's been quite a few public speeder speakers about something that's really pertinent in our community and that's when having three concise minutes of your points is important so that everyone can be heard and i think that's kind of where we were coming from not to limit the opportunity but to know we have the flexibility and to give it some structure yes thank you i think jackie at least you proved my point i agree that you folks in looking this over probably spent a lot of minutes talking about it well that same logic lies to once or twice or three times a year when the public comes to a meeting and wants
092to express either positive or negative concern they may have in their mind i don't see any reason why you'd want to say it's you've got three minutes now what i want to be the chair to say excuse me you now but i'm going to give you another couple i think it's worth at least an open transparent thing to leave it at five because five minutes is a reasonable time to to me and none of us are going to burn the midnight oil saying five three to me just seems to be a little bit tight with with the very people that we want to be able to come and share what their issue is so i would recommend that it stay at the five okay thank you terry sharon i totally agree with harry because i
093think that there are a lot of us that sometimes have difficulties being succinct we're trying to get our idea out if you know if we've come prepared with it all written down like it was being turned into an english teacher sure that could easily be done in three minutes but um i think that the top the comment that charles made a while back was if we want to hear from the public which we hardly ever do we need to look like that that my the horror would be is if we start if we did cut people off at a three-minute time and we started doing that because it was in our policy i think would be so detrimental all right thank you sharon joe did you have a comment go ahead well we've definitely slid
094into discussion on the policy as a whole so i'll make a comment or two i personally have very little interest in what the massachusetts association of school committees says or recommends on anything but they do recommend three minutes in in speaking and in that point i think they're right i think they're correct to do it and i say this to someone who doesn't typically feel the need to follow any of their guidelines uh also i i did also a little investigation on this as someone else said um i i just looked around at about a dozen school committees at different parts of the state and 11 of the 12 used the masc guidelines now these were you know it's only a dozen that chosen at random but most every towns that i came across seems
095to follow the masc guideline and i think it's a good one i'm imagining a future meeting where there's some controversy we have 50 60 people in the room different people will want to speak the shorter time allows for more voices to be heard i i think you can say what you need to say in three minutes and i am well aware that i'm someone who has been guilty of not always following that guideline but it is a good one for the public at least thank you thank you very much uh superintendent i i don't know if it would make sense to have a clause in there that i've seen even at our own school committee meetings or select board meetings that we've gone to where you have a lot of the public coming to talk
096about one topic uh that uh you know that at at some point if the if if the points that are being made start to become redundant redundant redundant at times the chair chimes in to say you say yeah are there are there members of the public who have sort of new things you know just to make sure that you know that the committee is hearing all the the breadth of perspective out there within what you know within the time frame that you that you want to have and and sometimes i think it's helped chairs that i've seen um uh limit limit the length you know so that you're not hearing 20 people come up and saying the exact same thing over and over again but uh and and that that's you know you know that's
097going for either three minutes at a time or five minutes of time but i i think to have some little clause that that allows the leeway for the chair to to steer it a little bit too okay thank you nancy um i don't really have that big of a feeling of a three minute to five minute time frame um because i again being at the discretion of the chair we i honestly can't remember a time where we've ever said i'm sorry you've been speaking for five minutes you need to stop now um what i would recommend is removing the line from our agenda and just leave the agenda to say public comment instead of saying speakers are limited to five minutes additional time at the discretion of the chair i feel like that line kind
098of makes it more i don't say negative by saying you're limited to how you speak and then if a situation arises we can say you know thank you very much we appreciate your comments you know our school committee policy is to limit our speakers to approximately three minutes something along that lines um just a thought terry i guess a good school community member can argue both sides so i'll i'll take uh jay public comment and i recall being a chair at the time when we were had some feeling major issues around budget seven or eight years ago and barbara executive secretary of the time i think she borrowed this from sandwich to me without any public comment to those who are going to get up that'll that allowed us without any heat to point to
099that and say uh gee we're giving five minutes rather than to surprise them because it it's not there and you say i'm sorry but look at our policy it's back at the central office so whatever we decide i think that statement kind of clarifies it for those members who arrive as a citizen where you hand them this and they they see that i would agree yeah i would agree with that the other um comment that i wanted to address because it did come up in um our speaker today as well as an email that we all received is the q a during um public comment the second public comment i know it's been raised a couple of times actually three four times that i can recall where somebody comes up to the public comment and
100they have a question a clarifying question and we did talk about this in subcommittee uh but i do believe it because it keeps coming up in the in the public comment about this so i think we have to have a discussion how do you feel about the second public comment being open to somebody who wants to get up at the mic and ask a clarifying question through the chair now we talked about it at policy and i think we kind of had it was kind of you know we didn't have a unanimous thought on that but i wanted to open that up now jackie i feel like without the i feel without the guideline it's i'm cautious to open a what could possibly be a discussion or debate when and if something is not on
101the agenda or if there's already been a vote taken i think there's just too many gray areas in there and i think that it's traditional in my mind that because this is our business meeting and now we're also adding a second public comment segment that there's an opportunity at the beginning to speak and then there's an opportunity at the end to speak where you and i think our purpose was so that if there was something from the last meeting you could address it in public comment and if there was something during the middle of a meeting you could address it during public comment but we're moving away from the purpose of public comment and if you go to if you look at the definition of what we have for public comment that doesn't really correspond
102to a question and answer filling public comment so we would have to change i think what the definition of public comment public comment is to make a comment it's not public conversation so i'm just saying we gotta look at the whole document okay um nancy and then terry um i was just gonna say that it's very difficult because i i agree with what jackie's saying 100 that it's a public comment period it's not a public hearing a public hearing is where when we have our budget and it's a conversation between the public and us and them asking questions and us responding to them that's a public hearing which is a specific meeting type these are our business meetings in which we want the public to attend and we want the public to be a part
103of the meeting and make a comment at the beginning and i agree i wasn't exactly a huge fan of the public comment at the end of the meeting to begin with and i've come to think it is advantageous um it and it's very tricky because it can't be a question and answer period for the public to ask questions and yet as we've seen a couple times there was misunderstandings from the public of what we did during our meetings and that it's good for it to be clarified so i don't really know how that's handled i would actually be very interested to hear what other committees do during that in that situation if they want a clarifying question i know that over the years different chairs have handled conversations differently there have been occasions where a
104during the middle of a presentation in the middle of a discussion before or even shortly after a vote on the committee a member of the public had a question and the chair allowed the person to ask the question during the middle of the meeting which i find that that could be more advantageous i don't know what if it would be at the discretion of the chair if that's allowed versus not allowed i know the town of chatham has kind of altered their selectmen's meetings around public comment because they allowed comments and conversations during every discussion item and that was becoming very difficult to maintain a reasonable length of a meeting so i don't know if maybe that i think that might be actually something we could discuss at our workshop as how we could handle
105it and then bring it back as almost a net another policy or even an addendum to this policy just to kind of or even you know the policy subcommittee could do some research in terms of how it's handled in other districts because we don't want the public to have a misinterpretation of what happened and the the rule of being a student or role of being a teacher is if one student has the question chances are there's going to be a lot more and so if one of our members of the public is speaking up and asking a question chances are there's other people who heard the same discussion and have the same question and don't understand what happened and we don't want that misinterpretation out there so basically i just rambled on and said i
106have no idea okay thank you terry i'd just like to respond answering most of what you said i agree with and i i think there's maybe a simple answer first of all with the discretion of the chair number one number two i think it's very valid that during our meetings i might say something that someone from the audience needs to have me clarify because they didn't understand what i meant i see that as very valid as a matter of fact i see it as very defensive for the chair to say we don't have to answer any any questions this evening we'll put so and that's so obvious so there is some discretion i think it rests with the chair as that person rotates every year to make a judgment and i think it's worth a
107while to make certain that the three or the 10 other 40 people sitting with us that night if a hand is raised about not so much why did you vote that but terry um i didn't understand that last quest that comment you made about bussing or could you clarify i think that's a valuable moment to try to clarify and and after all we have these packets that most of us have done a little bit homework more than the mom and the dad who might be here so i would be all in favor of making certain we have the freedom to answer questions of those who are here okay um jackie in the meredith um nancy i was thinking about your clarification comment and i was wondering if under public comment just as terry had mentioned
108that that it's kind of nice for the speaker to know they have three minutes five minutes whatever it is that it also states you know for further if further clarification is needed please somewhere on here please contact the the chair or the superintendent like i'm just thinking like let's not forget that yeah we're running our business meeting but there are other ways for people to ask questions and it doesn't always have to be in that moment or or at that meeting like it can be a follow-up question you know charles comes back all the time or sends us emails sorry charles again he sends us emails with follow-up questions and clarification and they're all very good and valid but i don't know that it's something that we need to i just don't know i just
109feel like you got to have a little bit more structure and i'm really not a structured person but i just think for this at the discretion of the chairs terry said i think that definitely gives you the flexibility um to use it and i know when i was a chair i used it a couple times and then i know there i knew there were nights that there were lots of speakers and there was just you know it wasn't a good night to be you know there was just too much going on so it wasn't a night where you let someone talk longer you know or a night where you're going to take questions in the middle of your meeting because you're trying to run your meeting so it's really tough um i just i just
110feel like we've got two spots for public comment right now and i almost feel like one of them is your opportunity for clarification and the other one is your opportunity to for public comment that's kind of the way i look at it it's in a perfect world it's not gonna work that way but we're now giving the public two opportunities plus like i said making contact we're all public all of our information is public our phone numbers are public our emails are public you know the superintendent you can reach the chair you can reach there's definitely other avenues as well besides our meeting and certainly the conversations with the community is ideal and i think that we've all learned that with the zoom meetings it's been incredible how much more attendance we've gotten because i
111think it's just more reasonable for a parent to be able to sit at their house and attend these meetings but i don't want to get away from our business as an elected official and making sure that we're running efficiently and i don't know it's just it's okay i threw my pen no that's okay thank you uh meredith so i i don't know if you can hear me i'll talk loud um so i mean i think that i think we definitely need more structure but i wonder if there's just language that can be put together um that you know just clarifies if it clarifies if we're clarifying something [Laughter] it's been a long day clarity um that it's something only that's been mentioned at our meeting the current meeting or that is on the agenda that
112has been already addressed um but that it would be done during the public comment so i guess that would be the one at the end of the meeting is what in my head just makes sense okay um before i move to the zoom room so on page four at the top it says right now it says public comment is not a discussion debate or dialogue between individuals and the school committee it is an individual's opportunity to express an opinion on issues within the school committee's authority so um something i guess we we will have to continue to debate this i know we did have a nice robust conversation in the policy subcommittee about it um something i just jotted down we could put another sentence that says however a clarifying question may be asked during
113the second public comment but only through the chair but that is something we have to discuss we had a mixed thought about it in the policy subcommittee um but that is something we could certainly consider the question that jackie raises is i think it's does it get too wild you know does it kind of get too so we have to clarify the clarifying yeah i would also say that uh i think we addressed the border selectmen that i think it was last year the border selectmen were here and we were actually complimented on how our meeting was run and how our agenda was was structured and that they loved the way our public comment sections and we had two at the time um ran so smoothly because i think the chad and stuckman do allow
114they don't anymore but they were allowing conversation and clarification and it just became i think too disruptive for them but we got high praises for what ours did look like and um run like so yeah i mean we're doing something right i guess thank you um nancy and then anybody in the zoo nancy go well i'm just we have a lot of words in here saying at the discretion of the chair so i think bottom line our chair has a lot of discretion whether it's written in our policy or not and i think that the times that it has come up in years past and most recently um in in these meetings even the zoom meetings where if a member of the public has a question during the second public comment it's at your discretion
115if you want to answer it if you would say you know what meredith can you please clarify whatever x y and z you're right there sorry um so i i think i don't i don't think it's necessarily something that needs to be addressed i think the members of the public that come to our meetings regularly know that we are more or less pretty darn flexible on what happens and i also think that if we all of a sudden have an influx of members of the public that come to our meetings and they want to ask clarifying questions i think it's completely up to you without without putting it in a policy and is up to future chairs to say you know what she has a question she didn't understand they say it at public comment
116it's at your discretion to say you know what i really appreciate your question now is not a time for us to ask questions i'm happy to discuss it with you after a meeting or please reach out to us via email or you could say you know what we don't normally answer questions during this time it's a public comment and i understand that you would like some clarification and i think now's a good time so i think without limiting what our what our rules are and i know structure i i am actually a big structure person and i'm saying that it might not be necessary at this because we don't have it happening all the time it's not something we need to limit so i think it's actually just leave it alone and let things come
117up and if all of a sudden we have an influx of people showing up at our meetings and asking a ton of questions during the second public comment i will be the first one to say policy subcommittee go back and put something in there please but i think at this point it's it's unnecessary to to kind of belabor it okay thank you um jackie hold one second anybody in the zoom room did you have your hands up joe joe go ahead um uh i i'd like to move to a another point kind of inspired by what has been said today uh is that okay to do oh yes unless jackie were you did you have something to say off of nancy's club i'm good okay all right so go ahead joe uh if i could
118ask everyone to turn to page five it's under guidelines for public comment item number three you'll notice it talks about the authority of the chair the chair ruling people out of order and and so forth i would just like to point out to the committee that this this rule is is typical of different public committees throughout the town throughout different towns throughout the commonwealth actually it has recently been a very controversial point here on the cape at a meeting on september 2nd in barnstable i think the county commission was looking at an issue of recall there were people in the public who wanted to speak on that and the chair ruled some people out of order for violating uh or failing to honor guidelines this this led to a pretty serious amount of controversy and
119two women of color condemned the chair for procedural racism based on the utilization of this this rule that that we will consider adopting at our our next meeting so what i would suggest is that we don't take this too lightly and and don't say oh well if it didn't happen here yet it can't happen here at all we do have an incident in barnstable within this month that did make front page news of the cape cod times so my suggestion is that the not only the policy subcommittee members but the school committee members as a whole take some time to look at the cape cod times of september 3rd look at the comments by anti-racist activists who were criticizing the rules and policies of a white space environment and the procedural racism that was visited
120upon women of color take a few minutes to look into that situation and consider the policies uh that we're adopting so that we can if we do choose to discuss this at our next meeting we can discuss it fruitfully based on factual accounts and have perhaps a better uh conversation and discussion about it okay thank you joe and i am familiar with that incident sharon did you have a comment i hate this policy oh i don't think so now no okay sorry anybody else nancy just that just kind of a kind of more of a masc question i guess but why is there two sections about public comment why is there a public comment at school committee meeting section so starting on page three the bottom of page three continues on to page four and
121then there's a guidelines for public comment starting on page four going to page five but there's a lot of redundancy like for example it talks about the speakers being allowed to speak for three minutes twice once on each section i guess is there a need for having both of those or can those two sections be condensed to say public comment at school committee meetings including our guidelines or something and and put those two together versus keeping them separate whatever you want yeah we can consider that it's just it's one of those things where i keep looking back and forth oh which section am i looking at oh they're both i don't maybe there is a distinct reason i have no idea i think guidelines was before public comment at school committee meetings yeah we switched
122it because somebody suggested so that's what our focus was like oh this doesn't make sense right needs to be in order and then you know public comment at school committee meetings is framing in the policy what public comment at school commutings is and then for further detail are the guidelines which is why i think you see repetitiveness but if if we rewrite it and get rid of the two sections and put it into one section i guess we could do that and bullet it maybe and then maybe you would you would never remember that there actually was a public comment section and just refer to the guidelines of public comment and i guess i'd have to look before so agenda format and then it talks about public comment it's almost like public comment and then
123it should be a sub category of public comment maybe it's more i'm sorry about it it's just more the the redundancy of there's a lot of the same information between the two and i don't if there's a reason for it by all means um but we were pulling from not only mass but the open meeting wall we were kind of looking at two two things and trying to incorporate they both have good stuff yeah and they're not identical obviously there's there's different pieces it's just maybe combine them okay so oh sharon go ahead uh so on on this i've had the difficulty in the subcommittee meeting of differentiating between someone asking to speak for the whatever it's three or five minutes and making a presentation so um i'll just ask for the only thing that
124i can think of in recent time were there were three people that came and spoke and they had prepared statements um of what they wanted to say regarding the um their support for that anti-racism thing and so would that that would be called just a comment wouldn't it a presentation would be about a whole different topic that we're not talking about right now could i take could i take this opportunity to clarify um so the presentation what we mean by this so a public comment if somebody just has something they want to say uh based on an agenda like if they're coming in at the beginning and there was something for whatever reason they wanted to speak about and then at the end people typically get up and talk about something along the lines of
125an agenda but if it involves a person or a group wanting to make a presentation so it goes beyond just getting up and making comments and as an example there was the anti-racism group that went to nauset public schools and asked for time on their agenda and they got up and made a presentation now that didn't come to us in that manner they decided to just come you know they didn't ask us to do a presentation that they just came in and just spoke during public comment so that's the difference does that make sense okay thank you yes and nancy we did have a group come to us to request a presentation it was the group that wanted to put the senior center on oh yes sorry i thought i thought i had it on
126the group that came to us to talk about the senior center on the stepping stones property they requested a spot on our agenda through the chair and the superintendent they came and during the middle of our meeting made a presentation so that's what right this is an example that happened here yeah that's a good example yep does that make sense sharon yes yes thank you that's clear okay so what i'm hearing i i don't think we're ready yet um so i think we're safe to say this probably does need to go back again to the policy subcommittee for some more discussion possibly some more revisions and what i will say is next week when we meet for a workshop if we decide because we're getting together to talk about goals so we might decide that
127one of our goals is to really look at public comment that might be one of our goals but we don't know we'll we can bring that up so but i think for tonight um this is going to go back to policy again and i guess it'll appear back once more as a first read is that kind of what what everybody's feeling tonight all right do i need to clarify that yes terry just as my final comment it's amazing for those of us who've been here five years six seven ten years that we've gotten a public policy document regarding school committee meetings that amounts to almost nine pages and for some good fortune those of us who have been sitting here for all these hundreds of hours have been able to make it through an evening
128meeting because a lot of this is good good stuff it's amazing how much we've missed yes how did you miss it and just for a little bit of history for anybody that's just now tuning in i mean this really came about because of what we're dealing with right now i mean we've got people on zoom we've got people in the room it became clear to us that this isn't what we typically do and we needed to put some structure and then once we started looking at the structure these other questions came up so that's um kind of the history behind that all right any other comment all right so we're going to move on and that will go back to policy again and we're still under subcommittee reports so the superintendent goals could i have
129somebody from the committee report anybody from our superintendent evaluation committee make a report please we did not meet this week oh okay well it's on the calendar all right so no report all right so we will cross that out moving on to the superintendent's report okay um so my first little thing i want to talk about is enrollment and to put this one into context a few weeks ago i get a phone call from one of the boston tv stations that wants to send a reporter and film crew down to report and do a story on the spike of enrollment that we're happening here that we're having and then i get tim wood from the chronicle emailing me to talk about the spike of enrollment and i've had citizens emailing me to asking questions about
130the spike of enrollment and you know and i keep going to my faithful assistant leah to uh to to give me the data about our spike of enrollment so um i am here to report to you that this is the first time ever that that an enrollment for the school district of being down according to his numbers today being down a hundred and two students is considered by some a spike so there's clearly a misconception out there on what's happening so i will try to explain why people think that there's a spike despite a decline so here's the math of it and i'm going to need some group participation because the superintendent left his glasses on his desk in chatham and some of these numbers are too small for me to read so so first
131of all if we go back to when we started our current seventh graders were kindergarteners so nancy how many chatham seventh graders do we see uh on this on this list which one the left so if you go to middle school 39 nope chatham resident seventh graders 22. that's this year okay so yeah so yeah 21. no so 20 so we have 22 so we have 22 seventh graders you pointed to the wrong card that's fine so so we had 22 seventh graders eight years ago now if we look at today's nancy chatham elementary school seventh kindergartners nine nine okay so 22 has has slowly over time dropped down to drop down to nine and and it's it's gone up and down a little bit but but there's a trend there and meredith is the
132harwich person this is where you have math um so if we go to seventh grade in harwich uh and uh how many we have this year yep 90. okay so 90 and then if we look at our kindergartners and harwich this year we have to go and add the chatham elementary and the harwich elementary harwich kids this is tough we have to add who 12. so there's there's how many at harwich elementary 84. 84 plus how many at chatham elementary nine so 93 no harwichy so four right there's four in horowitz yes so 88 so we have eight is we have 88 harwich kindergartners this year so so so we've seen a slight drop off in enrollment in in harwich and it and it's it's it's been slow it's been slow and steady and and
133some years it's gone up a little some years down but but we're seeing a decline in chatham a decline in heart which in in the reality of the cape is across all towns on the cape we're seeing a gradual reduction it's just in chatham it's happening faster than it's happened than it's happening in in in the harwich and that's that has been the trend so we were expecting that we were going to see somewhat of a decline in enrollment because every year we're graduating out more kids as seniors that are coming in as kindergartners so that that attributes to a piece of the decline but it doesn't account for 102 students the other thing that the biggest uh factor in the decline is that there are some families who have chosen to write out the
134pandemic doing homeschooling so families that choose to home school they email us i forward the emails to mark smith and mark smith works with the family and they submit a homeschool learning plan that that that if it gets approved they're doing homeschooling i believe we have an additional well as of today we have an additional 68 home about six so it's that's total so it's so it's 55. so 50 so additional 55 homeschoolers this year over the previous year so you take a slight enrollment decrease and then you add to that 55 additional kids that have gone out to home school um that's that's where that's where some of those that that drop in uh in enrollment is coming from question superintendent excuse me through the chair yes go ahead those 55 youngsters are scattered
135they're right they're scattered i would say disproportionately at the lower grade levels um but but they but they are scattered across the grades so then we have we take uh and and you have some offsets to those losses and this is where the perceived spike is so there are 17 students unless leah holds up some signs saying that there's more of this but there are 17 students that we that we are seeing in our school district that are that are new to us but new to us because they're electing to stay in their summer home you know so it's families that have a summer home and an off cape home they're electing to stay in their summer home and attend monomoy or they are electing to stay with their grandparents in the grandparents home and
136attend monomoy and and i think that 17 a lot of them are sort of uh i would say this is the 17 that it's a compliment that they're they're looking at what we've been doing and what we have been putting in place and what we are currently putting in place and say okay this is better than what we've seen happen in terms of distance learning or that as i mentioned we have some of the highest amounts of the in-person learning you can you can pre-k through seven grade seven have have full-day uh in school learning uh where in their district it might be all distance learning or it may be two days you know two days a week so so there's a number of families that have opted to stay because of what were what
137we're offering there and are those throughout where is that concentration they are they are again throughout you know throughout the grade levels um and then we have uh because at least one of our neighboring school districts is fully remote uh at particularly at the high school level and we have in-person learning there are five students who previously school choiced out who have returned home so they were harwich and chatham president children but are now back in our numbers and they're predominantly at the at the upper grade levels so yeah so we're so it's it's a it's a little crazy in terms of what this you know what covid has done the big question is is you know will you know the though the five that have come home stay if the uh another the other
138district goes back to uh you know back to in-person learning will the 17 students that are here in their summer homes will the families realize hey we can yeah make a living and and and do do our jobs remotely postcovid you know will they set you know stay and will we see a you know i call that that's one of those silver linings well we see a silver lining of covid that that families can start to look at the cape as a place that they can stay um and raise a family so will those 17 stay post covered or will they return to their off cape to their off cape homes and uh and then on the other side it's you know will the 51 or 55 sorry 55 that are that are electing to
139home school you know will any of them continue to homeschool or will those 55 return so so lots of you know lots of unknowns out there but uh but it's definitely a very odd year for enrollments and typically we we well not typically every year we submit our october 1 numbers this is sort of a preview of where we see the numbers a week away from you know from october 1. could um i have a question but jackie first and then i've got a question the 17 students that presumably are summer home or grandparents or whatever those are remote learning or in school learning that they're mixed and also to address the no new families of chatham elementary that's none of those 17 are at chatham elementary either remote or in person right so i
140i believe that the bulk of the 17 uh really are there there have opted to stay because of in-person learning options that we have so they're possibly physically in school right okay um the uh then one of the things that you that you brought up and this is you know this is a concern a concern i have um just again about chatham elementary and chatham elementary enrollment is you know these little you know the little increases there of those 17 you know we're seeing them in harwich elementary we're seeing at the middle school we're seeing them at high school we're not seeing them at chatham elementary and my yeah my worry again it's it's it's what what does chatham need to do as a town to retain young families i think at the moment i
141believe there's only one home on the market in chatham under 500 000 and you know it's just the you know the real estate market has started to skyrocket and i think it's it's made a town that was difficult for young families to to find that starter house in even more difficult to find that starter house in so i i understand what you're saying and i know that we don't need one two or three students we need like 15 to make a classroom each at them i get that but my question was of those 17 none of them are in person or remote at chatham elementary that is correct thank you and then just to to foreshadow some interesting challenges as we look forward you'll notice that preschool which feeds kindergarten at chatham elementary is only
142is it four or five it's only five um you know so you know so again it's you know we're and and we you know we typically run it just and this i don't know if the committee knows what we've had to do to make the in-person learning happen but we typically run run a morning preschool at chatham elementary in an afternoon preschool at chatham elementary because of kovid we we are only running our preschools that the school is doing for the students with the intensive needs because we need to maintain those distances we only have one chatham preschooler so we are transporting that chatham preschool so we we actually don't aren't running preschool at chatham elementary currently you know so we've gone from a morning and afternoon session to what would have been one session
143at chatham elementary of preschool and you know so i'm you know we're going to be struggling to you know we will you know encourage harwich families to come over to kindergarten but but our kindergarten numbers are you know continuing to go down into the sort of unprecedented places at chatham elementary but that will be dealing with at the end of this year when we look at staffing and and what the program starts to look like but i just wanted that on you know people's long-range radar screens can i ask so i have a question because this has come up and i know i did shoot this over to you but i think maybe for the listening audience so when somebody chooses to home school how does that affect our budget i mean can you just
144walk us through that so at least in terms of our two towns it doesn't impact the the assessment um you know so you know so we you know the assessment will continue to be the assessment for you know for this year each child brings some state aid with them but if you think about that state aid is supporting you know supporting that that student so so technically the the the the students that aren't here it's it's not the they're we're not seeing state aid come for them but we're also not having some of the expenses of them so i would call it more of a budgetary wash um you know so there's you know i do think that there'll be somewhat of a of a hit to the budget in that we would anticipate of
145the chapter 70 aid for 55 students and that's going to be gone but some of the resources that those 55 would have it's it's not you know so so so they it's they aren't like the uh a school choice student that's bringing in five thousand dollars at a time it's it's less with that uh you know with the with the state aid that's coming are they considered foundation enrollment once they're homeschooled they're removed from foundation they're out of our foundation enrollment so you know so our enrollment this year is is like oddly artificially off there there is one other category of student that's not anywhere on this and and that is there are kids i presume in both of our towns that are living in that second house and still going to school wherever their
146school is because just as we're offering distance learning uh you know i you know a student could uh you know could go to grandmother's in you know some uh you know some distance place and still be doing distance learning you know electronically with us and i suspect that there are some families that you know that may be here from boston or new york that are continuing to do school from here from afar but again they would not show up in our foundation or enrollment or in these numbers here but i do imagine that we have some of those students in our community and i think that that's where i think it's the combination of those individuals and the 17 that we're seeing here that you know that you know that have kind of gone through
147the the rumor mill in both of our towns and and and it's inflated to be a number that seems to be so big that it's a spike but there's all this other stuff that's going on so you know so 17 new kids at monomoy might be a slight spike in in a particular year but it's offset by you know by some of these other negating factors okay any questions uh sharon or joe none from either of you okay as complex as the math was on that uh the next topic was just uh just a skosh more complex and um and that gets to what friday evening and saturday look like for the school superintendent the high school principal and uh thank goodness we have joy jordan as well who uh who it was so so
148friday evening i get a text message that we have our first positive student case in one of our school buildings and we we had been planning for this we were hoping that it was going to happen far into the future but realistically you know we knew that you know that it was a matter of when not if um so so we uh it was late enough that we knew that we couldn't start communicating out at that point and one of the one of the most important things that has to happen when this comes when this comes in we had the report of the positive wasn't from a board of health or a doctor it was from uh from a parent and and we needed to understand you know what type of test was it and
149and the details so we needed sort of this official confirmation because you could imagine that you wouldn't want to see the school superintendent you know sort of quarantining and closing things only to find out that it was there was a miscommunication so so i would uh just like to extend an appreciation to megan eldridge who is the director of the board of health health director for the town of harwich uh who has been amazing to work with through this and uh megan eldridge was able to reach out to you know to the public health sources and confirm the positive with with this case and also to on a saturday mobilize the contact tracers in the area so our both of our towns are using the visiting nurse association as contact tracer so they mobilized on
150saturday with us to kind of walk you through the the order of play that happened is uh a combination of joy gen police myself and sheryl default were in in contact we we agreed we'd start at eight o'clock or nine o'clock in the morning but joy and i were already modifying the uh the emails that would be going out to all the different parties uh much earlier than that one of the one of the important things that we wanted to do is to make sure that we got our arms around who were close contacts and advice that i have had for mike my other superintendent colleagues is if you have the capacity to contact trace on your own even though the visit the visiting nurse association does wonderful contact tracing you you want to you
151want to do it as quickly as you can so you know so jen went and had a google meet session with the student and parents to talk about what are the immediate close contacts that we should think about because we wanted to you know to reach out to those families and make sure that sleepovers weren't going to happen on saturday night and you know kids weren't heading off to you know to games and this that and the other so we were trying to get the students that we were most concerned that might be exposed to somebody that was positive and to ensure that they were getting quarantined and their families communicated with about the need to get a covid test ideally with the pcr swab that that will dict that will tell you if you
152are currently infected and and positive you know so it's it's it's sort of the gold standard for testing um so we we had all of that communication as we did the contact tracing and had the students identified by noon and we had three of our nurses that donate time this uh this weekend so uh jamie staniels who is a brand new nurse at chatham elementary school uh carol fiocco uh the nurse a nurse at uh at the the middle school and also amy sullivan who's at the middle school this year went and got on the phone and called each one of the close contacts to make sure that the family understood knew joy and i had a email that went out to each of them just clarifying and sort of confirming that conversation that the
153nurses had had and then we communicated out to the entire class and and i i think i i i think that uh this was this was sort of a a realization to me is that uh that there are there's communicating to close contacts and then there's the way i in my position want to make sure that we are dealing with close contacts and and that the the v a and the state would say that we should only be quarantining the student who's positive and the students who are immediately adjacent to them because in a classroom because we have six foot spacing so it should be just those i think that's fine and dandy unless you're in my shoes and you have to try to explain why this child who's six foot away is a close
154contact and that the person that's 12 foot away isn't because because the definition of a close contact is uh to be within six feet for 15 minutes or more well you know it's like i don't want to freak meredith out but if i was positive you know we have been 12 feet away but it's been a lot longer than 15 minutes so so i have have opted to be far more conservative than what the state's saying so we are quarantining classrooms of students the challenge at a high school compared to an elementary school at an elementary school you have one classroom one teacher maybe one teaching assistant at a high school a high school student has has six in person classes so there's six classrooms six teachers and maybe somebody who is there at lunch
155guidance counselor they worked with and it it gets a little more complicated which is where we got to this supply and demand need for additional subs so so we communicate it out to to the you know to the families that had a child in the classroom lesson learned i'll own this one um we did not do a phone blast to that group and i think uh should this happen again and my lord i hope it doesn't happen again or not for many more months until i've recovered from this one a a phone blast to those families would would be helpful it's it's more than the nurses could yeah could easily get to was it was an additional 77 students beyond the close contact list but we got two but but they all got emails and
156and then we communicated out to the school to the district to the media so it was sort of layer on top of layer on top of layer but but the nice thing is um by being apparently the first in the state to have the positive student in their building because we were one of the first in the state to open up we have a really great communications package all set to share with any other school district out there so way to blaze the trail yes so monomoy leads the way um so uh i'll i'll answer any questions people have on that but that but but all of those communications happened i think before 4 p.m that day so you know so um you know so it was a lot you know particularly when i think
157it was maybe almost 10 30 that we got the confirmation of the positive to have it all sort of flow from there was was relatively quick given everything that had to happen great thank you so questions meredith let me just have um as far as the re-entry goes for those kids that were quarantined is if they weren't that immediate close contact are is it just an option to get tested and then if they don't get tested they just get to come back in 14 days so fantastic question um so again jen's dealing dealing with this at the high school and the high school because of this rotating group of students there there are tiers of students who have different re-entry dates that they're communicating out because it's 14 days from last contact with the person
158who's positive and that so we you know i think some of our hindsight challenges are we initially communicated out that anybody in these six specific classes and you know so is this this teachers this block class this teachers this so six specific teachers and one of their blocks and the initial communication out was that you could return into school on october 2nd which is next friday because the students last day was in school was a thursday and then it turns out that some of the students by virtue of the way the schedule was rotating were with the student last on let's say a monday and some on a wednesday and some on that thursday so there's so there's sort of a tear on you know they've communicated back out to families on here's the date
159that you were last in but the but to kind of get back to the question is so it's 14 days from the time that you were last in in the classroom with the student and then a common question that we have gotten is well can't i just get a nasal swab and if i'm negative come in because i've because i tested negative and the answer is no so the so this so the standard on this is if you've had the swap you are still quarantining for 10 days after that swab and it takes a few days for that swab to come back so you're still out for 14 days and there's a reason for that one of my colleagues who reached out this past week has a situation you know that we was just wanting
160some advice on where the individual got swabbed and it was negative and a couple days later the student is starting to get sick presenting symptoms they swab again and it's it's positive and it's sort of like they were asking how does this happen i was kind of explaining all but you know so you know so if you get that nasal swab too early in the infection you might not be expressing the virus and it might not get picked up so you can have you can have a person who will become positive so that's why you have that sort of safety window that if you've been swabbed and it's negative and 10 days after that they still aren't developing symptoms then that was a good swap so so that's where and i know there's some angst
161with some parents because this also was the time when tryouts for sports was happening and and it was sort of like can i get my kids swabs they can get you know be at tryouts so karen kamel was doing a subsequent round of communication out to families on how we will handle that you know the sports tryouts and kids can still try out for sports it'll just you know we'll just have an extended window for them so okay thank you um any other questions sharon or joe nothing anybody else all right um well thank you for that and i really appreciate all the quick fast work over the weekend in less than 24 hours i think it was so thank you oh other stuff go ahead so just uh we we uh do have students
162that that are in quarantine related to the latest thing that that people have seen in in the in the media report so there were you know there were a couple positive cases with with chatham fire that have us quarantining you know cornington some individuals and waiting to see the results of those tests and based on those tests we'll you know if they're positives then we'll have to respond and i'm keeping my fingers crossed that that everybody's negative and okay um you know and it's you know so i mean there's this i i had a superintendent a friend to text me earlier today saying i'm feeling like my job this year is just communicating out about one covid situation after the other covent situation and the answer is that's what it seems like so it's it's
163challenging in terms of that um just uh two last very quick things next tuesday 6 p.m i'll have my first virtual conversation with parents and just touching base with them on how the beginning of the school year is going and and i'll you know hopefully you know help reduce some anxieties and answer some questions one of the things i'm clearly going to be communicating out to parents more and i'll probably do this in a little email blast tomorrow too i think one of my concerns that i have for us globally is uh i i've been communicating out about the the need for masking and need for social distancing and hand washing and i think i really need to in my position reinforce the need for us to make our social bubbles smaller for now because
164i i do think that as this pandemic has gone on i think that that we've let those social bubbles grow a little too large and i think some of what we're seeing and some of the quarantining that's going on now is is partly because of some social bubbles that have gotten pretty big and you can imagine that you know a staff member or a student who has a really large social bubble should somebody in that social bubble you know become positive we end up quarantining a whole lot of people and if we want to keep the schools going it's i think we're going to have to you know maybe take you know take a deep breath and take a step backwards and and say okay you know how big is has my social bubble been
165in the last two weeks and and i think the smaller we can make them and i'm i'm not militant saying it's like you know don't leave your house don't interact with anybody else but but i do think we have to as as a school community kind of bring those back in a little bit if we want to keep our schools open this year um you know my my daughter called me up last night and she's like you know she's she's concerned that you know that we're just going to keep quarantine and quarantine and quarantine and we get to this point that you know that nobody's you know nobody's in school and like yeah but but we can control that uh and that's and you know and we can you know we can do this uh
166very last thing just a reminder we've already mentioned it but harwich town meeting this uh this saturday 10 uh 10 a.m on our high school football field there are three warrant articles that have implications for our program the first one being the budget which comes early on in the the articles that are that are out there middle of the pack we have enhancements to our our television studio here and our ability to broadcast out school committee meetings and the daily news uh for uh to you know to our community um that's that's a warrant article that is different than our budget in that the taxpayers have already paid for those cable upgrades um yeah so the taxpayers have a a subsidy a surcharge that happens on all of their cable and internet bills there's a
167surcharge that goes into a revolving fund in the town of chatham in the town of harwich both towns are paying 50 50 for the enhancements to the av equipment here but it's already been paid for it's sitting in the revolving fund chatham's already voted at their town meeting the request would be to have the harwich taxpayers pay for that then late in the day almost one of the last warrant articles is the harwich community playground project at harwich elementary school which is a half million dollar project again already paid for out of cpc um money that that is part of the tax bills so it's already there an account for community preservation projects like this one at the harwich elementary school so we could really use the support of folks at town meeting and uh
168and please keep in mind that we actually have things at the beginning middle and end of town meeting so we could use you there for the full morning for the duration anybody any other comments or questions okay so let's move on um action items we have taken care of everything the presentation of the warrants they've made their way around the room so they've been signed and now we're down to our final public comment um speakers are limited to five minutes additional time at the discretion of the chair for public comment go ahead charles thank you i i just want to express as a member of the public and perhaps on behalf of the public the deepest appreciation to the committee for all the time and effort and good thinking they're putting in to the policy
169on school committee meetings and and the role of the public in in those meetings i had a very wise group of mentors through my career who used to emphasize with me that process is often more more important or at least as important as product and i know conducting your business is a process matter and can be more boring the exciting stuff for the the final decisions the big outcomes that you make whether it's a curriculum program budget or whatever but unless you have the support and understanding of the public that's really at the heart of of the success of any any committee or any project so um i hope hope you don't feel discouraged about the the lengthy time that you're putting in on that because i think it's going to be very worthwhile in
170the long run unfortunately i i wasn't able to understand most of what jackie had to say during the discussion or technical issues i kept my mouth closed because i wasn't in public comments i didn't want to make that known i have a situation similar to joe's where i really right now i have to be attending these meetings virtually um i wish i could be there more in person um but just as a point of information i don't know how a member of the public can deal with it when they're not hearing the broadcast of of important discussions that's going on jackie always has so much uh of importance to lend to the discussions from my perspective as to each of you and finally a couple of observations on on your discussion tonight i i support
171the at one point it was mentioned eliminating rule number five under the section public commented school communities i had to deal with written comments for anything longer than three minutes i i don't think that section is necessary if somebody has that much to say they can can always send an email as i would do to to the committee that they want the committee to hear charles i think we lost you the sound has gone out oh he's frozen all right he he knew he was approaching two minutes yeah the timer was going off um charles we'll we'll kind of hang tight um and wait for you to come back in just a sec anybody else from the public in the room all right there you go charles go ahead i i thought i had exceeded
172my time limit looking for the yellow light in the red light that they have congressional hearings for the speakers um i just that that section rule number two where it's uses the wording extenuating circumstances uh to extend the uh uh speaker's time i i think that's another place says you were looking for places where at the discretion of the chair could be the wording for consistency for those two points but again uh thank you so very much for taking the deliberations on this particular matter so seriously means a lot to me as a member of the public and don't lose sleep over too much sleep about that clarifying questions for someone that will have a clarifying question they've got to be paying darn close detailed attention to what's going on at meetings and really determined
173to follow and want to know this stuff as much as the members of the school committee that doesn't take in too big a population of the public if at some meeting there's a huge crowd over one issue um well you know the you you can deal with that and all the more important that everyone who has mis understandings goes out of that meeting with clear understandings because you always want full public support as much as possible to to what you're doing so again thank you so very much thank you charles for clarifying that all right uh yeah i think we are now at the end just a reminder to school committee members we have our workshop next week um at six o'clock and then we'll be back here in a couple of weeks for our
174next meeting so motion to adjourn all right second that motion all right nancy made the motion joe has seconded roll calls starting with sharon hi joe joe aciello yes jackie yeah uh meredith aye nancy aye terry hi and i'm and i so we are officially adjourned at 9 10. thank you everybody we'll see you in a couple of weeks you