001good okay we are recording awesome thanks you're welcome so curtis is going to be late i don't know if you saw that jake yep is he a is he a coach for uh oh man yeah yeah he has been for quite a few years i think even when kiva tried back when she was a first grader he was coaching that's awesome yeah have you ever seen a dancer play soccer nope it's quite it's quite adorable graceful yeah and very um non-confrontational well i like that yeah no no contact soccer yes hi nolan hello hello i hope you're having a great day absolutely i am trying my standing desk so it's entirely possible at some point during this meeting you will hear it cranking down but i'm gonna try you're good this this could be a
002long one to experiment with uh i know i know i have a yoga mat underneath me so hopefully that'll help mark nolan i like the color of that room you're in you're mute your meter it's very nice yeah well i thought you know it doesn't matter who picked it it's just it's it's very pleasant uh very pleasant up yes very happy in this room yeah hi cindy hey how are you good how are you i'm well thank you good cindy does your laptop have a thing to cover the camera like a sliding thing yes because it's like you're you're like almost letter by it's interesting there you go that's completely none of my business so just bothering me you know though we were having um some wi-fi issues so oh i should have thought of
003that i thought thank goodness ann is still here definitely yeah it's you know if you need something at like five in the morning rina's here and if you need something 7 30 at night anne is usually still here so we're lucky in that regard everyone's cutting it close tonight [Applause] thank you julia i have to admit i was reading an article it was like two in the morning last night or this morning and it was about it was about the importance of rugs you know what what the movie the big lebowski taught us about rugs and i'm looking at that rug behind you and it's very uh i don't remember what the big lebowski i don't know if i ever saw the big lebowski you never should someday if you see it you'll see the
004rug tie in and you know i don't know if you should or not nolan says no there there are people who are worshipful i don't quite i don't know it's an occult classic it's not worth your time i feel like maybe i'm a lacking because i haven't watched it so hi jose i wouldn't spend much energy feeling that way so hi christina this is steve just calling in on my cell phone until i get to a place with better wi-fi hi steve so we are just waiting for carrie there she is curtis is going to be a few minutes late he thought he would get here around 6 15 just so everybody knows but yes carrie christina i'm gonna warn you my uh network has been incredibly reliable lately so i may just pop in
005and out and in and out okay thank you okay um i everyone is here that's going to be so let's get started i'd like to call the mount graylock regional school district school committee to order it's thursday september 9th 2021 and it is 6 00 pm we are meeting remotely via zoom this meeting will take place virtually pursuant to the law signed by governor baker on june 16 2021 an act extending certain coven 19 measures adopted during the state of emergency which includes an extension until april 1 2022 of the remote meeting provisions of his march 12 2020 executive order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law this meeting will be broadcast on willy net tv channel 1302 in williamstown and will be posted on the mount greatlock regional school district youtube page within
00624 hours of the meeting at mount greylock regional school district our mission is to create a community of learners working together in a safe and challenging learning environment that encourages restorative based processes respect inclusive diversity courtesy integrity and responsibility through high expectations and cooperation resulting in lifelong learning and personal growth next up on our agenda is public comment and i just wanted to share my screen for a minute um just to remind everyone who's participating of you know some quick general um public comment rules um [Music] anyone out there who would like to make public comment we don't currently have anyone signed up but if you could raise your hand with the zoom raise hand button which is in the reactions i will call on you and i can't share my screen i see stephanie
007boyd has raised her hand and i'm gonna stop the screen share because i can't really see stephanie unless i do so hopefully everyone um just caught the basic rules of public comment okay and stephanie you are the only person who's raised your hand so you can go first okay great sorry i'm not overly prepared but i just um listened to the finance committee meeting and i just wanted to address a few comments that i heard at that meeting i thought carrie green's comments about um this is about artificial turf about how you know that project should fit into the values of the school and the values that we spoke about when we designed and built that school um around you know the environment and the natural beauty and so i think we really need to
008consider that when we're thinking about this artificial turf field people often also spoke about artificial terps being state of the art and i just wanted to make you aware that the us women's national soccer team is up in arms that they have to play on artificial turf when the men's teams don't so i'm you know i'm not sure under you know what criteria we define things of state-of-the-art but certainly a well-designed grass field is considered state in the art by by many sports people and athletes i also want to address the issue of cost because i think that's really important when we're thinking about this field i've done a financial analysis and i think joe bergeron talked tonight about how pj c organics mentioned that a good organic field may cost in the hundreds of
009thousands of dollars um doing a financial analysis looking at a five hundred thousand dollar cost for a natural grass field would save the school about a half a million dollars over the life of that field so you in fact could have two grass fields for the price of one artificial turf field that may increase your playability more because one thing to think about in terms of playability for a field it doesn't really matter if you have 15 teams that want to play only one team can play on the field at one time so having a field that's available 24 hours a day when the kids are only available three or four hours a day whatever it is isn't really helpful you may get more playable hours useful playable hours for the students by having two
010grass fields rather than one artificial turf field and the other thing about playa playability it is quantifiable how many hours might be available on a grass field because there are tons of schools that have um done are using fields and they're available 700 to 900 hours a year which is certainly less than what an artificial turf field is but may be sufficient for the needs of the students and the last point i want to make is you know we often say we're doing this for the kids and i think there are so many ways that we can do things for the kids and some of it is directly supporting their sports but also it's teaching them about our values and um last night many uh people in williamstown participated in a webinar about the negative
011impacts of artificial fields and if there's something that we can do i think it's teach our students how to be responsible for this beautiful world that we have the opportunity to live in thank you good luck with your decision thank you stephanie okay i do not see any other hands so we can move on to the next agenda item which is student spotlight hi hi this is jake so um joining us tonight i'm pleased to have mira boyer with us here is a 10th grade student athlete she is joining us as a representative from the student council moving forward we had charlie last year and actually molly sullivan is going to be our typical student rep but she is busy tonight so mira is filling in and she's ready to talk about um the student
012perspective at the at the start of the year great thank you thank hi everyone um so it's been um uh sorry um so uh we've been it's been a really good start of the year so far um i know a lot of people are really grateful not to unzoom it's been a little weird to like we'll see everyone in person but it's been it's been nice um i think uh okay sorry i'm thinking um we're uh i know a lot of people i've talked to are really excited about like the athletics that are up and coming um a lot of my friends do cross country or soccer and they're um really excited to meet tonight and um yeah so i think moving forward um we're student council we've only had we had one meeting a
013couple days ago so we're still unsure about what the exact schedule and our concerns are but i think we definitely wanted to discuss or like look farther further into um a uh or having a later start time which i know charlie brought up somewhat last year so we were um thinking about or kind of seeing pursuing that option um but yeah as mr said um i'm just filling in for molly so i'm sure she can tell you more about that and um especially once we've had some more meetings but overall it's been it's been uh pretty pretty great uneventful start of school year thank you any questions from the committee uh yes steve miller one quick question so first off uh welcome and thank you for the update i was wondering if the uh council
014has reached out to councils at other school districts to see about their thoughts on a later school start time um i'm actually not sure about that but we do um i know there is a we're meeting with mount i think it's mount anthony to have a further um to like have a joint meeting sometime soon um so we definitely are going to talk to or meet up with some other student councils and there is a um whole western massachusetts conference i'm not totally sure about whether or not anyone's going to that one but we're definitely meeting with matt anthony um so yeah but we can we'll keep you i'll let molly know and we can definitely keep you posted on that thank you okay thank you so much okay next up on the agenda is
015approval of minutes um hold on one second uh do i have a motion to approve the august 12 2021 regular session minutes steve miller so move moves do i have a second i'll second julia's seconds any discussion uh yes oh this is steve steve and then julia for the for the record i actually left the meeting i believe at 7 48 and i did not abstain on any votes after that i i wasn't present at the uh at the rest of the meeting because that was the day i had surgery okay thank you julia um i had a a few edits to um recommendations for changes to these minutes but i also just wanted to raise across all the minutes that we passed in july a new policy or an updated policy on minutes with
016a form that was to be used the form was used in this case but also that they are to say what was done not wolf said and so um and i i raised that in particular because some of my edits are ways in which i was misquoted um and so i want to i want to i went back and listened to the video to make sure that i was correct um in that thinking i was misquoted and i was so my edits would be as follows um first of all i actually arrived at the meeting at seven um it i it was noted that i arrived at 7 15 because that's when curtis recognized me but i had actually been there for 15 minutes before so for whatever that's worth i'd love for that to
017be um corrected um there was a a vote in the section um on the face covering policy this is on page 12. of the minutes i believe it was not noted in the minutes but there was actually a vote um it was at an hour and 49 into the meeting so i think that vote needs to be reflected in the minutes um on page 16 i think it quotes me and sorry i don't have the minutes now in front of me that um saying that now people would know how to raise questions or concerns or new information i actually specifically said that there were not many people listening and people would not know to raise questions um and so that's a very different meaning than was in the minutes um should i stop and i
018don't know if i should like maybe i'll just give like i don't the last one um mentions i was naming tension among members and i was not naming tension among members i was trying to name the unnamed question which was the tension between getting this done for the next summer and whether or not that was a priority getting the fields done so i was naming the tension between a streamlined process to move quickly with potentially undermining the integrity of a process so um and i think um that if we resorted to using the minutes policy that we passed i would not be as worried about each of my words getting pursed um and so i guess i just encourage us to not keep a running record where people can be misquoted but to summarize the
019discussions thank you any further discussion on august 12th minutes jose yeah i really appreciated that julia you know having gone into this with detail and also having acknowledged how um the addition that we had before us is uh different than i think what we had expected upon approval of of the most recent policy on minutes if we choose not to approve these minutes as presented to us would there be an opportunity for them to be edited and reformatted in a way that would um be in accordance with with the most recent policy thereby you know making hopefully know all of the the substantive issues that julia raised regarding being misquoted uh that's a good question i don't know if i have the answer to that jake yeah and i don't know if carrie wants to
020weigh in on that question i don't want to jump in um i i do think that that is a definite yes jose um that um like by not passing these minutes that does give the opportunity to go back and re-examine them from not only for content but for form thanks jake so my my question was about whether um there was somebody else doing the minutes um i think we had hired someone who had done the previous set is that same person doing them or is it a new person is it just a matter of a new person learning how to do them as we had voted i believe that all of these minutes i believe these these minutes were done by the new individual and so this is a good learning opportunity for for the
021individual we've we've asked to come in and do this okay yeah i mean my point was that these are this it's the same person who did them the previous time though so it's not like it's two different people so just getting some consistency and i agree let's just um i mean i'm gonna vote not to accept these so um it is an opportunity to just um try to align them and make sure that they're in keeping with the you know the votes that we've taken about how you know how we want the how we want it to be done thanks okay any further discussion yes steve one quick question yes i i want to make sure that the following would not be an open meeting law violation but is it possible if draft minutes are
022distributed for people to send you know small comments like this to the note taker to be adjusted before the full committee sees them or is that not possible i would need to ask about i would need to ask our attorney about that steve and get some guidance on that it's a it's a really great question but i wouldn't want to answer it that i can pass the question on thank you because that would resolve a lot of issues not all but a lot yup okay all in we have a motion um from steve seconded by julia all in favor owen no conrino constantine no green no uh miller i'm abstaining because i was not at the full meeting and ursula i didn't hear from you you're on mute sorry i hate it when people do
023that malloy said no okay thank you okay so we have five nose one abstention so that motion does not pass okay moving on august 24th 2021 do i have a motion to approve the august 24th 2021 special session minute can i make a motion that we similar to the first set of minutes we delay the next two sets of minutes to have them re-formatted in the form that we passed and in the on the template that we [Music] i passed we can do that so we have a motion from julia do i have a second jose ursula are you second can't hear you guys okay second okay jose seconded any discussion carrie so since these are minutes that steve took i'm just wondering um if we can get a sense from steve whether he can
024do the reformatting or if he needs for someone else to do that i i would say if i would need someone else to do it i think these minutes captured the discussion and i think they helped provide you know context if there are mistakes i'm happy to have the mistakes fixed so then would that be up to someone else on the committee or is that someone at the district level who could do that work well these are these are special session uh minutes so these are different than the regular session right now i'm just saying this is not a question specifically to you but you know it's a it's a clerical task that needs to be done and so i guess i'm looking to jake or christina to ask you know do you are you
025looking for a volunteer from the committee or is this something that could be considered part of the work of the committee moving forward if they're members i mean because this might apply to subcommittees as well um i know the finance subcommittee minutes are not in the proper format either so if it might be a matter of making sure that someone is reformatting these and potentially distilling them but then so it's kind of a more complicated ask than maybe appeared on the outset well i i think there's a difference between subcommittee meetings and full committee meetings you know with the full committee if you have a video you know it's very different if you want to have a tersa set of minutes with the subcommittee meetings when we don't have any video this is the only
026record and so for some things it is very useful to have the full discussions i think i think would be worthwhile for consistency to just have whoever's doing the regular meetings of the school committee to also do the special sessions and then you have one person who's doing it associated with that julia um i guess i've uh a couple things one if there's a cost associated with it i think we should discuss if we're comfortable spending the district's money that way um and i for one would be um to ensure i know how much everybody already puts into this work and if that's um if there's a cost associated with the district ensuring everything is done correctly i'm all for that um i also want to name that steve i think you you raised this
027point the difference between subcommittees and full committees but the policy that we all voted on and we had a hundred percent say yes said the same um policy covered subcommittees and full school committees um and if we want to reopen the policy i think we should do that but i i just i feel like we should be following the policy that we discussed and passed and i think the template um was not part of the policy but was maybe attached to the policy and is available to you know from the district office i know um we did include it in the policy subcommittee meetings so it's it's it's a public record jose did you want to add something no apologies christina i i uh i think carrie had just just raised the point that i
028was going to bring up okay um so i'm not really sure how to proceed um we can we could take a volunteer to high curtis to modify these current minutes if steve cannot do it but i don't know without um a formal vote because i think we would have to compensate someone to start taking notes our meetings happen um oftentimes our subcommittee meetings happen during the day and i don't know if our note taker would be available unless they could you know watch the recording later so they're just some like nuances julia sorry i also wanted to name there's something called live transcript um in zoom i see it at the bottom of my screen i don't know if you all do but that is a pretty powerful way to also capture the conversation without
029a video so we could have that way we could have both without worrying about the bandwidth of videos okay um i just want to throw it out there we have some time estimates we're getting close to our 10 minute minutes just to follow up on what julia just to follow up on what julia said uh if you put things on youtube you can also get you know full transcripts from that and if the information is available then i think the minutes can be far less detailed but for you know the subcommittee minutes if we don't have you know video records of them it's very hard and i would like to repeat the suggestion that we record subcommittee meetings especially right now since we're still in the zoom era okay so we have a motion to
030modify the remainder of the minutes that we have set to approve we need somebody to make those modifications um jake christina i i think we can handle i think we can do that for this set of minutes at the central office within within uh a work day so thank you for for this time around okay so i have emotion from julia that's seconded from jose all in favor oh and i connery i constantino eye elf and vine abstain green eye miller abstain okay that motion passes okay moving on to our next agenda item we have principal updates and first up on the agenda i have mount greylock regional school [Music] do we lose jake [Music] i think i'm i hope i'm still here am i here you're here but crackly all right well i will
031start off and then if it's not worth it i can't see my picture either and i just see carrie so okay she's shaking her head up and down so i'm gonna go so uh we had a great great um start to school um it was good to be back in a more traditional sense students are ready to learn teachers are ready to teach overall morale seems pretty pretty high everyone's cautiously optimistic i would say they're hopeful and they're happy to be there for a full staffing a minus one paraprofessional position that we're working that is that's a good place to be for staffing um just a couple comments about numbers and enrollments we had 40 uh right under 45 new students registered um this summer the last month of the of the summer so we're
032up to about 530 students um total our we have a couple class side our class sizes range as far as grades 72 to 107. we have two classes over over 100 so that's um that's the first typical first in a couple years add drops i'm not talking about specific classes add drop period is over that's the first three days of classes where counselors figure out and fix holes and address any issues with classes or plato which is our virtual component that we use for independent studies and more proper dependent studies are 70 smaller than last year and that's a good thing that means we're maximizing and maximizing enrollment in our organic classes with our with our own teachers and uh fulfilling students student requests with in-house courses that we offer one result of that is
033that we are running some classes that are smaller than usual and we have a we have about 20 classes with over 20 students and that's not atypical um and most um most of those classes are just like at 22 24 so that's in the average range um nothing extraordinary considering the amount of like electives we have and um offering i think we have about 300 classes running this year a quick covet update we do have one positive stone case and four students in quarantine um which is similar to um our numbers uh last year so i'm sure they will fluctuate and we are um i think doing an effective job at uh tracking and um uh managing the uh the covet uh mitigations as well as the follow-up concept um the follow-up efforts so pool
034testing first day was today it went great we ran about five minutes late so we have some tweaks to do just to get students into into the swab and into building a little faster but overall success and that was all staffed by relax folks um our student vaccination vaccination status is over 50 and climbing so that's that's a good thing um contact tracing just to mention contact racing uh the definition is the same as last year of what a closed contact is but how we handle that is different and so we've we pushed that out a couple times because it is um different than last year and it is it's um very complex and so um just i if i could get a message message on the families it would be if anything does happen
035the nurse will call you um and she will walk you through step by step of where you and your student are and what the next steps are and where they have to go i would like to give two shout outs to a couple student opportunities the pmp the playwright mentoring mentorship project is um is coming back to mount greylock and so that's something that we typically have some students participate in and fall shakespeare is scheduled to uh have their auditions september 22nd in our auditorium and sign up will come out from mrs von holtz but we're looking forward to those those two uh student opportunities so pending your questions that's all i have and i hope that folks are able to hear me okay thank you jake i don't know jerry has a question i
036don't know if you can see her jake you mentioned can you hear me nod your head yes okay um so you mentioned that over 50 of our students were vaccinated do you know what percentage of our students are eligible to be vaccinated in other words old enough and you know don't have medical exemptions i don't know offhand i my question is a lot most of them yeah so are we hoping to get those numbers up and is there any thought about how we might do that we we are it's it might even be um we haven't had the time to tell them so it's 50 and counting because they're coming in facts um in in um physicals so they're coming in multiple way text message scan uh text messages and so we haven't had time
037to to sit down and to go through the finals of uh i see so it's fifty percent of the the um of the proof coming in not necessarily fifty percent of our students who have been vaccinated that's just what you're seeing no no we're half of our students are vaccinated and of additional papers like this that we haven't counted yet right that we haven't processed yet so just another way to put it would be a a little bit above 50 of the total student population has already submitted proof of vaccination that does not mean that the remainder is not vaccinated it just means that they either haven't submitted it yet or they haven't been processed by the staff to catalog it thank you this is steve can i just add a quick comment uh when
038i was submitting the vaccination status for one of my kids it returned it and said was unable to deliver the message you know fortunately i noticed that so i'm just putting this out there in case anybody else had you know trouble submitting and thought that they had actually sent it and it hadn't so it is possible that the numbers could be different the second time i sent it had no trouble thanks steve any other questions for jake ursula i just wanted to add on to that that there's probably people like me that five days into school have been meaning to do that and haven't so there's probably a bunch of other people that are and just have not sent the thing in so hopefully the numbers continue to grow i just remembered okay thank you
039jake for that update okay moving on to our next principal update we turn over to lanesboro elementary school in noland pratt good evening everyone i have four things that i should get through pretty pretty quickly it says 10 minutes on the agenda i aim to cut that at least in half um so first a huge shout out to all the teachers custodians paraprofessionals and cafeteria staff getting the building ready in the two days leading up to school uh to remind everyone our classrooms were pretty bare last year um free from art and stuff like that to really make sure that rooms were clean now that we know one more we have you know things back in the classrooms to make them feel home like again and that was a lot of work so all that
040work that went into it i just want to thank everyone out there specifically miss ashley and nurse larson to make sure people got where they needed to go and all the coveted information got to where i needed to go we have four new faces this year michelle thompson who's a new pre-k teacher melissa marchetti who's a new life skills teacher uh jen renzi who is our new school adjustment counselor and david silac who is our new art teacher some new things are happening this year ela curriculum which i'm sure you have already heard tons about our community building we have 30 minutes in each classroom to build relationships between each other and their teachers and really have strong bonds within that classroom and the last thing is intervention blocks to help mitigate any of the
041academic challenges that were created by the pandemic so that's the first thing second thing is our enrollment we went from 190 students last year to 210 students this year we have six we had 16 students sign up in kindergarten which does not include the rollover from pre-k last year so i think our pre-order about 24 total we had 10 new students in grades one through six and then six students returning from homeschooling it's also important to note that we have 22 pre-kindergarten students this year which compares which is huge compared to our nine that we had last year um currently our smallest class is 18 and our largest class is 36. um so that's the second thing covid is the third thing and day one we had three positive coveted cases found in school we
042had the protocols and procedures in place to quickly identify any closed contacts and then utilize the test and stay program and the close contacts that we did identify they were cuspy like they were like six feet or five feet eleven and a half inches and i was like you know what we have this program that's utilize it to make sure that everyone is safe and that's what we did and i have to say students and staff have been fantastic at adhering to the protocols and procedures in place so that we can continue to stay in school and stay safe we did have our first round of full testing on wednesday and i'm sorry if you hear my dog in the background i'm a single dog parent this week and pork chop i did take him
043for a walk but he just loves to be with me um our first round of full testing we had 106 students signed up so i had to give a shout out again to ashley and kathy in the main office they did a social media campaign with yoda and yoda getting everyone to sign up for full testing and we had over 60 people sign up in one night just to join full testing which i think is awesome and uh we hope that number continues to decline as we have 210 students in the building so that's the third thing and lastly the handbook we updated the handbook we added a quick reference sheet on the second page because people like this call and get information if they need it the updated formatting because the formatting i just
044didn't like the formatting was global ugly for my eye and then we updated all the policies to reflect the updated policies in the district handbook and that is my information dump for this evening what questions do you have for me carrie i think steve is first he's got andres sorry steve no problem i just have a quick question so thank you for the detailed numbers do you happen to know how the numbers for students this year compared to the numbers in the year before the pandemic because one of the things we've discussed a couple of times is you know the long-term you know trends for population in the county and it's nice to see those numbers going up steve i have that in my report um excellent not going back too far but going back
045a couple of years perfect i will i will read all my questions thanks jake so so nolan you can't drop that you have 36 students in a class and not expect some questions about that is the entire in the entirety of the grade level it's split among two teachers okay so what is your highest classroom class so number of students in one classroom is 24 we have two sections of 24 in grade 4 and in grade 6. okay thanks any other questions nice job nolan five minutes 20 seconds okay next up is williamstown elementary and i will turn it over to cindy sheehy hi everyone so much very similar to what jake and nolan both said it's been an incredible start to the school year sometimes i feel like there should be some sort of
046you know reality tv show made about what it takes to open a school year and the incredible teamwork it looks like between teachers paraprofessionals building and grounds the cafeteria the nurse the office staff it is nothing short of magic and i truly am thankful for everyone for being able to bring our kids back and to bring our kids back safely and similarly i'm really thankful to our families and our students for bearing with us and looking at all the changes and trying to make sure that they're doing the things that we're trying to implement at school to keep them safe as well but it's been an incredible five days i think most importantly our students and our teachers are just so happy to have kids in the building and being able to have them there
047full time has been an incredible change from last year um and so everybody is pretty excited and still remaining positive about it the biggest update since the last time i spoke to you we ended up opening a fourth section of kindergarten we just really felt like with the distance requirements of three feet while we could you know maintain that distance in the classroom with three sections it felt like the learning environment itself would really suffer from what we wanted a typical kindergarten classroom to look like so we ended up opening a fourth section um did some reshuffling with a teacher who was really interested in teaching kindergarten and so we are now you know operating with four full sections which has been great a lot of changes at williamstown a lot of hiring at williamstown
048we've hired four different classroom teachers we've hired five paraprofessionals and i am still hiring for a full-time special education teacher and so interviews for the that position are going on within the next couple of days so we're hopeful to be able to fill that position as well and the other big thing on our end is as i spoke of before our enrollment is really booming um we have had enrolled 52 new students just in grades k just in grades one through six with an additional 10 students who we have enrollment paperwork already it's being processed by the main office and by our school nurse um so we're currently at 417 with an additional 10 within the next 72 hours so we're seeing growth at every grade level which has been great it's been incredible to
049welcome new families to our school community and we're anxious to you know continue to have our community grow with our teachers but also with new families and students um our coveted update you know our kids everyone is so worried about how our kids are doing and how the teachers are doing and i have to say our kids and our teachers are so used to wearing masks and staying separate from each other and are so used to trying to maintain safety that it's really second nature to them our kids we've had very few reminders that we've had to give students about wearing a mask they're just so used to making sure their hands are clean and their masks are on and they know that they're masking on when they're inside so it's been great to see
050the kids really just maintaining what they know and we haven't had many issues right now with pool testing we do have 250 of our students participating in the weekly pooled testing all of their results from our tuesday tests came back negative which was great i think one of the biggest things we've all been talking about is to continue to push out information to our families to allow them to sign up for testing i know at the beginning of the school year we often inundate our families with all sorts of communication and don't forget to sign up for this and don't forget to sign up for that and so you know we want to be able to make sure that this is something that is offered to all of our families and we'll continue to make
051sure that that's a priority so that we can have as many students participating as possible but overall it's been a really great start to the year i'm really proud of everything that the students and the families and the staff have been able to accomplish in just a few short days thank you cindy any questions for cindy thank you so much for that update thank you okay moving on to our next agenda item we have a report from the director of athletics and co-curricular activities and that's lindsey von holtz good evening today is a very busy day in the athletic side of things but just to give you a quick summary we have 225 students currently participating in some form of fall athletic program most of the program started about two weeks ago golf team is
052the only one that had a contest before today but with course availability and rain their second contest is until tomorrow but it's 3 30 it will be good tomorrow if you feel like going to a golf match unified basketball had their first practice on tuesday and we have 18 students signed up for the program which is really exciting um some one of my favorite practices to watch they were really excited to be out there we had soccer volleyball and cross country all out competing today i heard i ran up from the soccer field but i heard their final was four or nothing on the varsity side and varsity volleyball literally just started about three minutes ago so we have a lot going on in the building and around the building we do have 11 students
053that are traveling to jury high school each afternoon to participate in the jury high school football program which we are very thankful that that worked out as a co-op because we filed for an emergency co-op with the district one athletic committee they agreed i've spoken with a majority of those either families or the players and they've had really positive things to say about their experience so far definitely excited that they have the opportunity to play um in their first game is this weekend we've been able to transport them there using e-pod vans um so that has definitely helped because every single one of them needed some form of transportation and it wouldn't have been possible without that let's see outdoors right now we are not doing any form of limits on spectators we are encouraging
054people to remain distant and be out there that message did go out to our families as well as the families of opponents and that seems to be pretty consistent across berkshire county and the pioneer valley we are limiting fans on the indoor event so for volleyball and unified basketball we are limiting fans i stood at the door today and checked people in we're allowing two fans per away spectator and three fans per home spectator we the way we set up the gym is we have both teams on one side of the gym and they're using chairs so they're not grouped together on the bleachers and that also made that no spectators or fans are going to be behind the teams so all the spectators are on the opposite side of the gym everyone is in
055maths and nobody nobody had a concern with that when they came in today everybody put their mask on as they got to the which was really nice and let's see we do have a bunch of sanitizing stations up there as well the requirements are not as strict this year for the game itself but we thought it would still be a good idea to limit the number of people that we were bringing into the building um in the evening and stacking in bleachers um but it's still i can still hear them from here which is kind of exciting on the club side of things um mr schutz mentioned that shakespeare is starting soon but we have a club fair scheduled for the 21st of this month we're still working out logistically how that's going to happen
056it happens during our lunch periods so students have the opportunity to meet older students in each of the organizations learn a little bit about them to sign see if they want to sign up for any of the language clubs the writing clubs and things like that so i know that was much less than 15 minutes but i figured i'd give a quick summary and if you have any questions i can go further into any one of those thank you lindsay and we should probably mention that we the overnight field trip request is off the table at this point so we don't have to vote that yes thank you any questions for lindsay oh i see steve miller's hand yep and so this is essentially the same question i asked uh nolan a few minutes ago
057it might be a jake question do we know how the numbers of participations in the fall compare to the year before covered uh they're a little shy of them we normally i'd say we average in the fall closer to 260 and we're at 225 so it is a little bit smaller but at the same time some of that is uh in the past we said seventh graders were able to play volleyball our volleyball program has become so popular um that we did not have seventh graders they're going to do some clinics with some seventh graders to help out so that is one of the aspects that changed the fall none of the programs ended up making cuts this fall which is the positive side of that um but it is it is a little bit
058less than we have had in the past i we're still that the difference with this year is normally everybody's set and ready prior to school starting but with so many new people coming into the building or deciding last minute to play a sport we've probably added 15 to it in the last four days and because we didn't make any cuts we were able to add people to university level programs so if i meet you again next month that could have still gone up a little bit more thank you not a problem thank you so much lindsay i don't see any other questions for you thank you okay next up on our direct on our agenda is a report from the director of special education services and summer programming review and update and that is patrick
059priester good evening everyone um is it okay if i share my screen i don't know if you notice i'm kind of a sly let me figure out how to do that there you go okay can everybody see that no how about now yes okay um so this summer we are able to offer programs in all three schools in addition to our typical esy programming we were able to offer enrichment programming to basically anyone in the district that wanted to participate so so the 2021 summer extended year services and our enrichment programs in the district we offered academic and related services so in addition to our typical four or five week esy programs at williamstown lanes road mount greylock each hosted a multi-week enrichment program available to all students this is new not something we typically
060offer every year but in response to the uh the pandemic and the closures and remote learning we offer these programs for students that want to participate we also offered our typical extended year services program to promote academic fine motor and gross motor as well as speech and language skills throughout the summer months to prevent regression we also offered camp russell to some of our students who qualified for that and they participate in recreational therapy related services and academic skills development on-site at camp russell and one day the basically all the administration team in the district took a ride down was able to observe our kids having a great as uh dr mccandless like described a typical summer new england camp experience so it was great to see that and it was really refreshing it was
061nice to see kids out interacting with each other and having fun so in our elementary schools at williamstown elementary we offered a multi-age program that services students in the pre-k program extending your services are extensions of the previous year so these kids were in the grade level for the 2020-21 um school year so they were in pre-k last year in kindergarten that's a typical program we offer as part of our extended year services in addition to that we offered a general education program that included a k-2 cohort and a three through six cohort we offer uh we also offered an english language learner program for students that need that service and in addition to our special education tutoring program for kids k through 6 we offer academic tutoring and related services for students like that
062and we're for elementary kids we did offer camp russell for the students that went through the team process and we decided that that would be a good placement for them and in addition to uh offering the enrichment programs we also offered we provided transportation which is new we don't typically offer transportation to our students um for extended year services unless it's like a ride to camp russell so that was something different and took some coordination on our administrators across the district to get that set up um the program's offered at mount greylock again camp russell we had a cohort of students that went there from mount greylock uh mount greylock also offered enrichment program which was new mount greylock hosted a five-week summer enrichment program for all students develop academic behavioral social skills to address
063learning laws due to cloven 19 closures and remote learning the district also offered credit recovery for all students affected by the coven 19 closure and related services and academic tutoring will also offer as part of extending your service program and again we offer district provider transportation to the high school our numbers break down across the district we had 125 students participate in our summer program either special education or our enrichment programs at williamson elementary we had 55 students lanesboro 31 and the high school we had 39 students and i'd like to give a many and special thanks to our staff that worked um in setting up for this program you know it was kind of an ask after the year we had and they stepped up to the plate came out and worked some you
064know could do two weeks before they went on vacation and we had a staff fill into the other two weeks so it was a great uh teamwork and camaraderie and i would like to give a special thanks to chris hawking our summer program coordinator and pat o'connell at the high school who served as her assistant in setting up this program it's not the most easiest thing to do when you're trying to provide programming across three schools that are basically almost a half hour apart and its most extent so it's nice to have people on site just making sure the programs are running like they were supposed to and the kids were being cared for we'd also like to thank our nurses who after a year they had were willing to come in and still work
065with our students unless we have any more questions i'll stop sharing um that's just a quick review of our summer program so if there's any more questions to move on yeah kerry so um i had read that nationally speaking it was really hard for schools to get people to participate to teach to coordinate to run summer programs in school so that speaks volumes for the teachers and the staff in our district that it wasn't so much coercion coercing them it was really just inviting them and they showed up and they were there and ready to go and that's just amazing it has been great for the kids in our districts in all three schools so i share your thanks i have a question about the enrichment program i know it was new this year and
066i know we talked about maybe doing it not just this year because of covid but perhaps doing it in the future as well i'm wondering how we would assess whether there would be interest demand or need for ongoing enrichment programs i'm happy to jump in here you know i i think we will look at the students who did the enrichment and see what their outcomes are as we proceed through this year i think there's also an opportunity to you know get parent feedback get student feedback get the the staff who were involved their feedback i think there's also an opportunity to look a little broader at enrichment what enrichment means and what areas that covers i know one of the important pieces for all of the school councils uh and and for our leadership team
067is to to expand opportunities in the arts um you know not that the berkshires doesn't have lots of arts opportunities for young people in the summer however offering them at little charge or no charge through a public school system with transportation included would would certainly as we begin to think about what enrichment looked like in the summer that was and what it could look like in the summer that is to be i think we could partner with some really fantastic arts organizations you know just for instance you know as well as the academic pieces but i think there's so many opportunities in places that are really wanting to do outreach and i think we have a group of people that we serve that would welcome that thanks jake that's really exciting any other questions for
068patrick in that realm okay thank you patrick thank you okay next up on our agenda is the superintendent report so i will turn it over to jake mccandless thank you christina and thank you everybody i'm not sure i'll take up my allotted time either although 30 minutes from now i may regret saying that christina can i have a share screen or i'm struggling with getting that to work you don't have huh okay there we go all set thank you thank you thank you can i can somebody carry can you give me a head nod or christina is that can you see that yeah okay thank you um just i think eight or nine slides here tonight just to just to do a few updates and i thank the principals and uh in our our director
069of special education services and our activities and athletic director for their um excellent reports and um [Music] so i will in some ways add to those and hopefully provide some new information first of all i just really thank you to so many people as all of the principals said as pat said getting getting ready to roll for school this year was really opening school is always monumental um this year was was monumental and then some i really want to thank our our custodial care teams the folks that take care of our buildings if you think about the summer that just was i was having a conversation with a parent at the soccer game for a few minutes uh that who this parent said she wishes she could do july over again and that we could
070actually have more than six days that we didn't get rain and maybe a couple of days that we didn't get rain and it wasn't 95 degrees uh and so when you think about what july was like and consider our custodians were were essentially resetting the entire district after a year of furniture being put away and some of the nice things in classrooms being put away really want to thank our custodial and and buildings and ground staff for for the work they did simply to be ready to welcome our students and staff staff back safely and thank you to really everybody who helped us get ready for the summer do you want to thank dr joshi who was with us here at the very end of summer right before school started um she spent three really
071powerful days with us um days where we we asked ourselves and each other um challenging questions where we all learned some things that i think made us acutely uncomfortable but but she did so with with real skill and kind of with overwhelming force and i really want to thank the 45 educators teachers and paraprofessionals who took part in our in our three-day uh institute i want to thank the 12 administrators who also took part in uh in several pieces of that as as we we all learned about where we are in in terms of being advocates for uh social justice and making sure that we're welcoming all of our students and all of our families in the way we should and for helping teachers move beyond simple reflection to actually putting ideas and practices into
072place i want to thank our students you know coming back and i i think we finished up day six today so amazing to see our students whether it's our brand new pre-k uh kids or our our newly minted seniors it's just wonderful to have them back there there's at some point in the summer you just hit a point where the grown-ups are kind of tired of each other and we really need the the mass of why we're here back our students our students have been nothing but helpful this year with with trying to keep in-person school going in the midst of a pandemic our students have been nothing but but hopeful and and as they always do giving us great reason for optimism and hope and now our students have been wonderful neighbors helping each
073other older students helping younger students [Music] all students helping you know those of us that still consider ourselves new to the district get some things straight so i'm very grateful to our students um very grateful to uh the massachusetts association of school committees and to dorothy presser in particular one of their regional field reps and i'm grateful to all of you on the school committee for giving up a good part of a saturday to learn a little bit more about the planning that we need to do in order to best serve our communities and um to and i'm really grateful for the time you put into helping to consider what's a meaningful way for those plans to intersect and interact with with the superintendent evaluation and how we make all of this work together to
074to better serve the students and the families that are really our only reason for being here and then you know finally among my thank yous and i could probably go on for another five minutes with thank yous but uh it was wonderful to see our students back it was similarly wonderful to see our families who who take care of those students and love those students and support those students really wonderful to see them back fantastic to see families supporting their children uh and neighbors children and nieces and nephews and grandchildren at our athletic events wonderful to see um the smiles and the tears that the elementary schools drop off was taking place we are uh we never forget why we're here we never forget that it's an incredible honor and a real privilege to have
075the position of serving people's children and and i'm very grateful to the families that we serve for for lending us their child's energy lending us their their child's um deep deep intellect and lending us their child's wonderful individuality um especially during times that make us all a little nervous and make us all a bit uneasy um just a couple of words uh in a back to school update around enrollment i see steve hopefully this gets to at least a piece of your question um this data is really initial we will have a much more permanent permanent ish view of our enrollments after the the official october one count but um you can see we have this school year last school year uh 2019 school year which was the the march that uh that covid had
076and then we have one fully pre-covered year uh included on this data set and actually it gets really murky to go back and look at that data on a district level because the regional school district did not exist at that point although we will when we do a little further dig into enrollments we will look at each of the individual school levels uh for the 17 18 and 16 17 years just to get a five or six year look um you can see the district this year is up to 1150 students if we think back to last year i think it was in november or december when we talked about the the berkshire county regional planning groups forecast for where we would be at the beginning of this school year they had us forecast to
077be at um 1070 students so you know we're pretty pleased to see that 1157 um you know listening to ms sheehy tonight it sounds like that's going to be uh 10 students higher by by this time next week um and that's exciting you know we we're excited to serve the families that have always been with us we're excited to serve families who are seeing us as as a as a great educational option for their child and making a change we're totally grateful to have our home some of our homeschool families come back to be with us and we're really grateful for folks that are that are uh new in lanesboro new and williamstown and choosing to educate their children with us so you can see williamstown as cindy said is it 417 and uh really
078that's that's as high as williamstown's been you'd have to go back to the 1819 pre-covered school year to uh to be higher than that um lanesboro is uh nolan said 210 i had 209 but you know really looking good there looking solid there you know the highest that we have in this four year span and mount greylock which i think is is growing a little bit every day or a couple of new students each week here over the last couple of weeks um you know sitting higher than we were last year uh you know mount greylock we we certainly could have ramped that up through uh school choice and some strategic some strategic spots if we chose to but uh you know we're we're pleased with where our enrollments are we continue to keep a
079careful eye on class sizes we continue to keep a careful eye on what new housing opportunities particularly in williamstown mean for us in terms of best serving students and families this year and in terms of budget preparations and educational planning for next year just a word about home school students because it's something that we certainly discussed last year last year you can see due to the pandemic we were serving you know we had we had 62 individual students whose families made the choice to home school um this year with 30 we're we're still at kind of a four or five year historic high if you take away next year we anticipate that some of those folks may be coming back to us at some point during the school year maybe coming back to us next
080year but uh certainly you know i families that choose to homeschool have nothing but their superintendent's respect for the lifestyle choice that that is because it is a lifestyle choice it's a it's a massive commitment uh it's a good exercise for me to go through the plans and for our principals to go through the plans um and certainly we're very pleased to serve those families in any way we can and very pleased to welcome their students back into our schools uh when they when they choose to do so and if they choose to do so nolan touched on our expanded pre-k a little bit tonight we are serving 22 students at lanesboro elementary school and we are serving 24 students at williamstown elementary school and uh we're we're so excited about this this sort of
081back to the future pre-k expansion we have asked sherry monty to serve as the mentor for for both of our preschool program so as well as our teaching duties um we're we're really asking sherry and i think in some ways giving sherry an opportunity she's been looking for for some time which is to um really get these two programs tied together and uh and and make sure that programmatically we're just as strong and as powerful as we can be as we lay the foundation for the next 12 or 13 years of these students to learn and so uh you know when you when you have somebody like sherry who in a lot of ways really wrote the book for uh for public school pre-k services in massachusetts um we we want to take advantage of
082uh of of the opportunity to have a real um master in our midst so we're excited to welcome these families excited to welcome these students excited to welcome the new staff that are associated with these programs and very grateful to sherry for stepping up into this uh into this leadership role as a teacher leader health and safety of course you know this is the the just like pre-k is the foundation for all of the education that follows this year health and safety are the foundation for everything else we do uh and and you know how much energy you have put into this you know how much energy we have put into this we have had coveted 19 cases this year um you know i i am not somebody that subscribes to the fact that well
083we're just gonna have sick kids so we might as well get used to it um i think we still owe to our families and to our students to to work to be as healthy and as safe as we can be with kids in school so we have had 10 cases among our three schools at this point the state is not collecting data on covet cases that are students or staff members that official data collection will begin on monday and we will be reporting those cases so that the state can contract this and we can compare and contrast across the state and the state is also tracking this year on an individual school basis not individual student hold testing results or staff pulled testing results but they are tracking a school by school what your pool
084testing results say we continue to work with local and state officials with each and every case that we have or a case of a close contact at home or in school and we're continually working on refining and defining close contacts in our local setting and what taking the big definition and working to make sure we have a full understanding of what that means for us in lanesboro and williamstown we do really urge all of our families to sign up for pool testing um a few of us have had i found it to be a real privilege and a fun time to get to participate in helping kids take the pool testing i will probably make a few fifth and sixth graders at williamstown elementary i'm really happy by saying out loud on television that they
085added a new phrase to my um my vocabulary which is booger side down and yes i said the b word in an open session and on tv that's how the swabs go into the test tube as about 80 different fifth and sixth graders reminded me um so you know but we really do encourage families please think about uh signing your child up for pool testing if it's just a matter of you've been too busy to do the paperwork the online form which your principals have sent and are sending again here in the next couple of days it honestly takes about 30 seconds to complete um and it's it's really just a good reassurance for us to know there's one more layer of protectiveness and if you have questions or concerns about pool testing you can
086certainly reach out to me or you can reach out to your school principals or your school nurses we likewise continue to urge all individuals who can be vaccinated to please get vaccinated um i suspect not everybody in our in our community and among the families that we serve would agree with uh you know the school taking such a strong stance on this but i firmly believe as a leader as a dad it's the right thing to do so please get vaccinated if you are able to be vaccinated friday september 10th tomorrow is our deadline for our staff to get their vaccination status into our hr office so we will be sharing out to the school committee the the data of where we are with our staff vaccination rate our student vaccination rate at the middle
087and high school as uh mr schutz talked about um we're right now we're sitting at 54 uh and as and as carrie asked and jake responded appropriately that's that's as of today when i put this slide together earlier in the week we were like at 49 and then we were at 51 um nurse nikki got me some some data late in this afternoon and and we're up to 54 so again um if if your child is vaccinated and if you have not got that information into the school please do so uh and if your child's not been vaccinated again we're we're all at your service uh to to talk about this um you know it's it's not a high pressure sales job but we really do believe that um the more of our students get
088vaccinated the more of a full school experience we can offer to our students and to their families having said that very very appreciative of the seriousness with which the staff our students and our families and caretakers have taken our pandemic preparedness with so pleased that first day of school people not wearing masks or wearing them incorrectly simply not an issue our students really get this their families clearly really get this our staff really gets this and um just reminding everybody that what it's really all about this year is making absolutely certain that we don't have to have a class let alone a whole school not be in session in person because we know that that is is just not ideal for kids and so so we want to keep kids safe we want to keep
089staff safe we want to keep the community safe and that's why we're doing this because we want to stay in person and we want to have kids here creating learning for themselves and creating really good memories of being with people that they'll carry with them for the rest of their lives just a couple of bullets on looking ahead of things that we're working on uh courtney tunis uh the cons the diversity equity and inclusion consultant that we've been working with on surveys has a draft report that she's gotten uh back to me we're gonna be working on an october special school committing date for courtney to uh to present and discuss with the communities that we serve not just not just our staff not just our students not just the parents and caretakers of our
090of our students but with the entire community invited to to a meeting to discuss what we learned from our mount greylock regional school district listening and learning project and i can assure you we i think everyone will agree that we learned a great deal we're also working thanks to the school committee bringing concerns from the community we are working with the massachusetts department of transportation on possible options for improving the safety of the mount greylock regional school entrance entrance thank you for bringing those concerns to us thanks to andrew graf from the community development office in williamstown for for helping me understand a little bit of the history and we're actually working on a meeting with uh the massdot folks from lennox next week an initial time to chat about you know what our concerns
091are and what we might be looking for and then of course we're going to be working this whole year on on working with everybody who comes to or cares about the mount greylock regional school district to ensure that we're that we're operating smoothly and safely uh in person including the activities that are so meaningful to students things like athletics things like the arts and so that will be work that we're undertaking for the full year and uh with that christina i am finished and i wasn't keeping track of time but hopefully i was in the ballpark 21 minutes jake oh any question jose i see a hand and then steve thanks jake and thanks as always for uh you're very thoughtful and uh informative presentations thank you uh the question i have jake is a
092it's a bit of a follow-up from the question that carrie asked patrick earlier and uh and it's i know it's one that i'm sure you and your team have thought a lot about but um myself as a parent and many parents in our district have been worried about learning loss as a result of a year and a half of remote to hybrid education i don't think we have heard yet about a plan to assess and address uh learning loss that might have arisen i know mcas the abbreviated mcas results are going to be released later in the fall but um could you report back to us about whether there are plans to to assess and address uh learning laws yeah there are jose and i i you know i i think the the school folks
093feel like we're taking it on but it but it's tough to quantify and report out we and we talked about it several times last year but clearly not in enough detail um we we've had the mcas results now for um several weeks and so the principals and teachers have been digging into those and they're they're actually uh almost across the board uh better than we were expecting them to be quite honest given what is out there in the realm of concern uh all of our all of our our teachers and and schools and their planning for the summer there's always a time at the beginning of the year where you're assessing where people are relative to where you know they need to be at the end of the year i'm trying to answer this eloquently
094i think to some degree we agree that it's a big concern and we share the concern there's also a piece of this that this is what educators do this is what educators do when times are great this is what educators do when times are difficult so we we don't we do have the acceleration roadmap that the state has provided us as a as one pathway to get here um our initial data thus far whether it's grades whether it's student self-reporting work with families or even now throwing mcas into the mix is that um and i think even on the academic research side the the learning loss for some demographics of students was a very real very significant thing the learning loss for students that were in mostly stable home environments where there where the connection
095to school stayed relatively constant in spite of all the zigs and zags from last year the learning loss simply is not proving out to be as drastic as i think i worried about as a dad my wife worried about as a mom um so you know i i know it's an unsatisfactory answer and it has been it was when i gave it last year but i think we're we're trusting our educators to do what educators do which is to take the data including um and at the elementary school there's some there's some very formal i was as i was helping pull test kids the other day the the dibble stuff was going on in the hallway and i felt awfully because i was interrupting it with um booger side down um but you know so
096so there's much more formal ways at the elementary school but really across the board kindergarten through grade 12 it's teachers doing what they do which is which is finding where their kids are meeting them there and then bringing them along and and using response that you know response to intervention figuring out who needs a little bit more and a little bit more of what just just jake thank you so much for that answer just uh follow up with uh a summary just to make sure i i understood it um given what you have available um to you and your team has available to you in terms of data it seems that most of our children are have done done okay and that we have in place a system to address you know when needed um
097any any learning losses that might be might be present within within a child and our teachers have the support they need um and the flexibility they need to to do just that um if i i think that that's what i i understood from from what you said and i'm going to just follow on with uh follow up with just a brief question for about um the the children that you highlighted um that may have suffered uh serious significant learning losses are are we planning as a district to [Music] run our summer programs this upcoming summer just like we ran them for for for those children who may need a bit more assistant assistance outside the normal academic year first of all your summary of what i said was much better said with about a quarter
098of the words than i did so thank you for that um i hope the minutes reflect your words not my words but uh so so thank you for that summary and yeah you know um again and this this is true for k through 12. our summer programming was it was an open enrollment but it was open after it was targeted um and and there were great efforts at outreach and recruiting i think is the right word to make sure we had the students who most needed to be there this summer to be there and i'm pretty confident that you know whether it's through our budget preparations for the upcoming year and i and i'm where my pretty confident statement comes in is i think the state saw the merit in supporting summer programming um this
099summer on a wide scale basis and and i would suspect that some of the state level esser money is going to be going into supporting that again uh and so i i would anticipate our folks that actually helped develop and and run the summer program this year um they had a proposal on my desk by like august 1st about here's here's what we'd like to do next summer so uh and and i think that that's well matched by feedback we had from families that that this was a good thing and uh and so yes i would anticipate that we will be offering um perhaps more targeted in terms of of remediation and catch-up next summer but i also think uh maybe somewhat expanded in terms of of exploration and acceleration as well thanks jake thank
100you steve i think your hand was up and then julia yes and so i just wanted to go back to the numbers on uh preliminary enrollments yes and i don't know if you want to punch them up for the screen while i ask the question or comment or if you want me to no let me just skip the right slides i took a screenshot so i don't know what slide it was there we go that's the one so hopefully you can put this in good perspective for me long term i think looking at the elementary school numbers is the more important part than looking at the total district enrollment as this gives us a sense of the pipeline is that a reasonable way to view things uh yes i would agree steve and so if
101you know we do that the lanes boat numbers are you know essentially where we were in 2018 2019 and if the williamstown numbers are going up by another 10 that's comparable to a high and again the 409 from 2019 2020 that actually includes the numbers from before covid started so those are the numbers that do not affect any you know changes in moments from people going to home school so these numbers are extremely positive yeah i i think it's a uh i'm very heartened at these numbers um i i think tomorrow we have a countywide superintendent's meeting i'm really interested i'm interested selfishly just to do some comparison of notes because we have been feeding the round table the superintendent's round table our enrollment numbers so i'm interested to see if this is um if
102this is something that's true across the county if this is something that's true uh more true here um but you know i i think we're going to and whether it's coveted related and people wanting to get away from from more urban places and be in a place like this whether it's it's just um confidence in in kind of or or being pleased with what we're trying to do here in combination with with new housing opportunities opening up i am heartened by these numbers and and look forward to seeing where they are in october looking forward to seeing where they are in march when we do our our second uh run through of a real formal count in the year and um and like you i'm i'm really optimistic about these elementary numbers that speaks of
103good things to come thanks yeah you're welcome thank you uh julia and then carrie yeah uh thank you um also thank you for such a thorough update i i you you talked about learning loss and how your the different types of information you have to assess as much as you can the learning loss but obviously we know another big impact of covet is the social emotional well-being and the mental health of our students um and it was wonderful to hear from from cindy and from nolan and from jake how happy kids were to be back i know my own we're thrilled to be back in school um but i wonder if you do have some form of an assessment to and i don't maybe you didn't have a baseline like you might have academically but
104if you have um some sort of assessment to be seeing where kids are and then the supports in place to help them in that domain not just academics yeah julia and i you know to to just backtrack a little bit and talk about academics you did hear nolan talk about creating additional intervention time in his schedule cindy has done the same thing and so so there are some some there were good efforts just in how the day is structured to make sure that students that need extra support have time to get that extra one-on-one support or small group support quite honestly i'm much more comfortable in the supports that we have to offer kids on a social and emotional um side of the ledger than i am in our our our formal preparedness to measure
105that does that make sense i mean we've we've added an additional uh social worker of mount greylock an additional social worker at um at lanesboro elementary uh cindy again felt like she was well staffed in that regard so i i think we have the ability to have supports or we have the supports in place but like i said i'm in terms of formally inventorying that i am i think we're really depending on on families in schools communication among one another and then students openness to expressing here's where i'm struggling what can you do to support me i i don't know if it's it feels like it would be useful data to somehow um capture the difference in you know hands being raised for support now um versus you know there i imagine uh counselors have
106some sort of log of how many students they've seen in different years but like just to understand that shift that we may be seeing and and sometimes when you have more counselors you see more students um which actually just means the need was there um so i feel like that's a that's information that could be valuable as we think about what our school's needs are thank you julia carrie i think your hand was up uh i'm okay jake okay yes oh thank you everybody thanks for your attention and questions and ideas thank you jake okay next up on our agenda is the finance subcommittee report so i will turn it over to kerry green great thanks christina so there's quite a bit of information in your packets from the finance subcommittee i'm hoping that you've
107had a chance to look through it we have the document that we've been working on for several weeks now that have outstanding questions that we started in the finance subcommittee i incorporated some feedback from julie bowen some feedback from the finance subcommittee and that is in your packet along with the initial the original document from julia that she sent for our consideration you also have the status of the williams gift what we've spent what we and expect to spend you don't have the status of the gift in terms of what we expect to see available we don't have that information and we won't have it until october we hope to have it at the october meeting but um we can keep you posted on that um and then um let me just go back and
108see if i'm missing anything the payment history uh what is this document yeah and then the payment summary so the detail of what we've spent the gift on and then the summary of um how we've expended it and thank you to joe and joe's team for putting all of that documentation together very much appreciated so we had another finance subcommittee meeting this afternoon and we talked about the um status of the votes on the agenda um we also talked about the alternative to the um to the artificial turf so i'm going to try to frame this and i'm going to try to do it kind of quickly so um basically the um project that has been on the table for the school committee for a few years is one that supports um an installation of
109artificial turf and potentially also a track which is also an artificial surface um that project has been supported a couple of times by previous iterations of the school committee it initially came out of a phase two subcommittee there's a lot of documentation about why that project was supported why that project was proposed and then all the various discussions that have happened in public forums in school committee meetings in finance committee meetings and various meetings and this has gone on for a couple of years our goal tonight is not to rush anything but to encourage the committee essentially take a position on whether to continue to move forward with the project that has been on the table for an artificial turf and hopefully also a track should the funds be available come october the reason that
110vote is first on the agenda um there are a couple of reasons one is that we have the documentation to move forward with that project it's gone out to bid a couple of times both times that the school committee voted to send it out to bid the bids came in higher than were hoped for the second time that happened was last fall and as a result the committee voted to take care of um ada compliance and safety issues so that work is being done it's currently being done i know um some folks think that we're actually installing an artificial turf field right now because of all the work that's being done on the fields i can assure you that's actually not happening we are taking care of the ada title ix and other safety issues
111for our existing fields we are not currently building a new field having said that um we have the documents that were previously put out to bid we know those need to be revised um that's not going to take a lot of work but it is money that needs to be spent which means the school committee would need to vote to approve it that's the first vote that's on the agenda the thinking around this is that if the school committee decides to move forward with um revising these documents that is the decision to support the project um the artificial turf project and the track all right it's not actually in the sense that we're not building an artificial turf field or a track with this vote we're simply moving forward in that process toward that project
112the first step of that process is to revise these documents and we need to spend money in order to do it so the motion that we're recommending is to direct the district to continue down the path of estimating and bidding an artificial turf and track as previously designed and bid or not meaning if the vote doesn't pass that's the or not so with that in mind we did at the previous finance subcommittee meeting and i think we might have discussed this at the school committee school committee as well we looked at what that might look like if the committee decides not to go down that path um joe was able to touch base with some folks in the area that we've worked with on grass fields and to get a better sense and a little
113more information for the committee of what it means to do natural grass fields what our options are not necessarily what that might cost but at least what we might be able to consider if we wanted to go a different direction so i'm going to turn it over to joe to share some of that information sure in terms of natural grass options the what what was discussed was the spectrum that natural grass can exist on for athletic fields um on one end of the spectrum would be the fields that we have right now where were there fields that are put on top of soil that was already there on site minimal grading and effort to try to try to turn those into something that is perfectly playable on the other end of the spectrum is an
114engineered grass field which is what the community saw within forum discussions two summers ago now that type of engineered grass field is what you see at colleges and and professional teams that choose to have kind of the ultimate playable natural grass field it's actually built in a way that's similar to a synthetic turf field and that you have extensive drainage underneath a layer of what is most commonly sand actually and grass is coaxed to grow in sand um through amendments and and fertilizer and very carefully taken care of to ensure survival so that's you know the other end of the spectrum and then in the middle would be a natural grass field where you you don't put in a significant drainage under layer but you instead replace the top soil you carefully grate it you
115add drainage around the field to encourage water running off the field into the drainage and then away um and and that's that's the middle ground pjc organics the company that carry a reference at the start is the company that we've used for trying to amend and improve our current fields um and that type of field is that that middle ground is where they tend to advise people to go which is the type of field where the least expensive fields you're paying fifty thousand dollars to do all of your various things to get a field ready on the high end you're paying a million or a couple million dollars to get a field ready and then in the middle you're paying in on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars somewhere to um to get
116a field ready um and so that kerry was that what you were looking for as far as the spectrum of options great thank you joe um so so we have these two different directions that we can go in and we have an opportunity tonight to discuss some pros and cons um if that's what the committee would like to do um what i'm what i'm not sure we've done recently is to ask ourselves the question of what is the problem that we're trying to solve and for me that's a pretty important question right so the problem that we're trying to solve um the question that the phase two subcommittee ended up the question they ended up focusing on what the problem was playability right we have fields that aren't playable and they're not playable for enough
117of the year that our teams can use them and we end up having to bust them to other fields if we're solving for playability is it possible to get 75 percent of the way there or even 70 percent of the way there with really well designed and maintained organic fields i don't think you'll get a hundred percent of the way there because we live in new england but we could get a good ways further than we are now because we know that we have the other end of the spectrum if we were to design fields that are in the middle that have good soil and good drainage and are very well maintained we're going to get a lot closer to having playable time than what we have now um if the question is that we're
118trying to solve is what is most in line with the values of the mount greylock regional school district as an educational community i'm not sure the synthetic field is the answer although we did discuss this in the finance subcommittee today and you can really look at it from different perspectives and this was what stephanie was referencing in her comments earlier that um one way of looking at it and i'm just going to relay the conversation is looking back to the building project and the visioning exercises that we did in terms of sustainability the green charettes that we did as a community there was a lot of community outreach talking about how the new building [Music] could and would potentially interact with the natural environment it was very high up on the priority list of the
119school building committee to make the greatest use of the natural environment in a way that the old building for those of you who are familiar with it looked inward we wanted to look outward we wanted to have access to the views access to the light the natural light coming in we wanted the art studio to be able to open the doors and look out into the vista so there was a lot of attention paid and there was a lot of community input we also focused on the financial impact to the communities obviously and that's something that we've already talked a lot about so we don't really need to labor that i don't think tonight unless unless folks on the committee want to talk about that again um we talked about what is the educational vision
120right so there was an educational visioning group they wrote the educational plan how do these fields fit into the educational vision those are questions julia has raised so i guess that's another way of looking at it is how how does this question of fields fit in to the visioning of the district um as expressed through all of the community input and feedback and um discussions during the building project that's the last time we really did a lot of community um you know thinking as a as as a you know outreach um one of the comments that that ursula made was that you know another focus actually of the the building project was technology and um synthetic fields are considered technology they are considered to be if not state of the art and that was one
121of the things that stephanie was was saying um maybe was perhaps not the best term um to use but if not state of the art then then at least something where the technology is thought by many to improve the um state of the natural field right improve on it depending on how you assess improvement right so all of these things are subject to discussion they're subject they're i'll just say there a lot of them are subjective right um but there are some things that are quantitative and or qualified by by numbers and i think we all have to just realize that if we don't go the turf the synthetic turf direction we will not be maximizing playability but i will again just say is that what we really want to be maximizing so we've been
122handed this question and it it didn't generate from the school committee it was given to the school committee and i don't think the school committee has ever owned it fully um so i'm just gonna ask tonight that we as a group or all suggest that we're agreeing that the question is playability if we go the synthetic turf direction um [Music] maximum playability i think there is um at the risk of repeating myself i think one of these other grass field options we could achieve far greater playability than what we have now um i just want to end with one story um which i also shared in the finance subcommittee so when we were nearing the end of the building project i was approached by a parent in the community who was a parent is a
123parent of athletes and was asked the question um so now that we're nearing the end of this building project what about the fields and i just said what about the fields um the fact at the time the fact of the matter was that the massachusetts school building authority does not reimburse districts for playing fields um they don't reimburse beyond a very low percentage for any kind of landscape work and playing fields are never part of that equation um so that was always going to be like the next phase but what about the fields right is that still the question like what about the fields how do the fields fit in with the vision of the district so that's where i'm kind of running full circle back to you know whatever year that was it's quite
124a long time ago now um what is our vision as a school committee so i'll leave it there jose and then julia thanks carrie um and thank you for for leading all this work and uh and with your your colleagues our colleagues on the on the finance subcommittee i'm into joe for for uh doing the research that we have before us um you know i have uh have i think been pretty consistent in voicing skepticism about um moving towards the use of artificial turf on our campus we have heard i think from a wide range of voices in our communities about um pros and cons about you know of turf versus uh organic grass organically managed grass um they all seem to reflect what i think we all i think know to be at least
125a current truth about the importance of of athletics to uh our district and and to our students and and to our parents and you know we've heard that uh you know from lindsay today that all the numbers are down there's still a substantial number of our kids who who do play sports who do you know utilize that the facilities that the the fields that we have at our disposal we also heard i think from our community from folks who are orthopedics about the number of injuries kids have suffered playing on the surfaces the poor surfaces as they stand right now and we also heard from our community about the difficulty of managing grass and ensuring or guaranteeing a playable surface principally during those spring months right when the frost is melting the soils are wet
126the roots are not well set um one member of our community who helps manage uh the services at the taconic golf club didn't believe that we could have a playable surface in the spring no matter how hard we try if we went with um grass the college our you know our our track and field team utilizes artificial surface at williams college and the tracker on williams college so there's a precedent at least for our community and our kids for um you know playing on these surfaces um speaking to the resource the potential resource that a turf could provide our community from you know you potentially year-round playability but also being a community resource for you know you can imagine a whole wide range of events um and then i'm going on and on and on
127here but it seems to me there uh there's a lot of momentum i have been very skeptical of going the route of turf for a number of different reasons principally around the potential environmental costs of turf but i respect you know my colleagues on on this committee and members of our community who i think have thought long and hard about um you know we have to believe that proponents or parents who who have argued for turf don't want to see their kids exposed to harmful toxins or to you know the injuries we have to give folks you know a genuine benefit of the doubt um so i i think i'm speaking for as long as i am because i do hope we take advantage of some momentum that the most recent committee vote on this
128matter seemed to give us um i know parents are eager to see the district take advantage of the very generous gift that the college gave us to improve you know the educational experiences of our students thanks karen thanks jose julia um thank you both carrie and jose for framing this in the ways that you have carrie your comments about what problem we're trying to solve uh really resonates for me in the question i was asking last fall about where does this fit in with our strategic plan and so going back to the point of saying the building project was fitting into a vision for the district was super helpful and grounding in the kind of values that our district has expressed um and so when i think about all that jose just shared and all
129the um complexity of the issues that we've been um hearing for you know many years and certainly with this committee at least since last fall um i think about uh how do we optimize across all of the variables or if we only choose one such as playability the negative impact on the other variables that we had committed to or the district had committed to back in are optimized at a much lower level um so maybe playability drops to 70 or 80 percent maybe we do more than one field so we get better playability across multiple fields but maybe we get playability up to 80 percent but we keep our commitment to the other values that were set and so my concern about only responding to the need for playability means we are not responding to
130the expressed desire to demonstrate values around um financial you know responsibility or the environment um and then i i add to that um trying to look at the more current data um where it's possible so joe thank you for collecting that information you got from um the company you did i think about the report we received from thomas bartels about greater incidences of injuries on turf fields for high school students especially playing soccer and football um i think about the un climate report that came out the week we talked about this um back in august and i think um and this is i think where i was coming from when i said if we're going to move down this path i want to know we've done it with as much information and i know that
131sounds like i'm just looking to drag things out i'm not i actually have tried to remain open to turf fields all along funny i actually voted for them for it in december um but now i'm really saying no i'm not i'm not ready to move forward right now um because i am getting that picture of the multiple values and in places competing values that we're trying to achieve as a district and i and i want a name that i think um by saying competing i'm not say i agree with jose i think everybody involved in this conversation from the get-go shares those values it's just this is a point where we have to individually think about the priority of those values or how much we need to meet each value um but that collectively i
132i know that those who are the biggest synthetic turf um advocates do care about our environment um but i but i look at this and i say how do we optimize across all of those um and not just focus it all in one thanks julia steve ah remember to unmute i guess i'll just say very briefly that you know these are issues that we've been looking at with community input for years and i agree completely that depending on how you put your priorities you are going to end up with different decisions on what you think is right and your best for the district we're in a very fortunate position that most you know districts would be envious of that we actually have money that was given to us explicitly by the college for something like
133this we we do have the funds to explore something like this we haven't asked the towns to pay for the new administrative building which is you know several million dollars we haven't had the town paying for the you know trailers and stuff like that i am concerned about doing more and more studies and spending more and more of the funds on study after study i understand that it needs to be done at some point but at another level at some point we have to decide you know do we have enough information to make the call and for me i think things have changed a lot since we started the building project i think the pandemic has really shown us how important it is to have access to outdoor options you know as i said in
134a previous meeting we started the last school year with the students remote but able to do athletics outdoors and for me you know the playability is you know such an important part of this conversation in terms of the environmental impact there have been changes made in the plans based on you know input from members of the community and so i i do think there has been you know work around those lines but this is why i you know strongly support both the artificial turf as well as the track it's just you know we we are fortunate that we have this gift we have the funds to do it we've waited more time to let the endowment grow and you know the longer we wait you know the less opportunity the children are going to have
135to actually take benefit of this thanks thanks steve curtis i had a quick clarifying question just because so many things going through my head at this time um if if we do the ad alternate or the the inclusion of the track uh is the is the track an artificial substance track it is and the reason i ask that is that if if the playing field is going to be ringed by an artificial substance track they're two different locations so remember where the old track was curtis over by the cross country entry area right that's where the the the idea was to build a new track on top of where the old track was gotcha the field itself would be behind the new administrative building right right there was a very there was an earlier drawing
136that had the track ringing the field but that's not the latest yeah i couldn't remember which one that's okay yeah julia um so i think curtis raises for me an important question um my understanding and here is where i'm open to and want to learn more is that while an artificial or sorry while a track would be an artificial material it's not one that has to be replaced every eight ten twelve years um and therefore you're not left with a giant piece of plastic that you have to somehow recycle and it's not one that um has infill that leeches into potentially the groundwater or nearby streams so while it's an artificial and so i'm just i offer this because to me that that um my initial reaction might be oh well if we're going to
137talk about something artificial we're going to talk about something artificial um i don't know if they're actually the same um they i don't know if they have the same environmental impact negative environmental impact joe the difference would probably be framed as there there really isn't a ton of variation in your options with the track whereas there there is a lot of variation with your options in an athletic playing field um but certainly it's it's a it's a rubber surface on top of an asphalt and or concrete subsurface so it's you know it's it is what it is um but i don't think you've got as much of a range of options in in terms of implementing a track as you do with an athletic build another difference of course is that you're not using the
138plastic grass which has a tendency i guess to um you know to break or shed the carpet sheds so that's a and the carpet itself i mean is what you're recycling so um in terms of adding to the landfill i think you're right julia that a track doesn't have a huge piece of carpet that you're essentially rolling up after eight or ten years and and putting in a landfill although you'd really rather recycle it if you could kind of thing yes uh christina um thank you i i just i really appreciate what everyone is saying i i truly feel like i am i have been and continue to be more in a plate i would echo more of julia's sentiments i think it's i think we cannot say we can recycle the grass turf at
139its end of its life it's probably going to get rolled up and put some place on our campus because it costs money to get rid of it and that's that is my my biggest concern it's like if we we have wonderful water filling stations so we don't have to bring plastic bottles into the school if we had to throw all of our plastic material into our backyards would we do it probably not and and i struggle with with that because we do look at that sustainability piece of our of our vision as a district um and i do also echo what jose's saying and and i have been on this committee now and i've had these discussions and they're exhausting um and i want to give the kids everything they want um i'm just not
140sure that i've ever been comfortable with the artificial grass piece of it thanks christina ursula did you want to say something sorry no i was looking at the agenda if i raise my hand i apologize we are encroaching on we're here at 33 minutes with this discussion so i don't know if we want to try to move it forward sure so um would someone like to make this motion or a different motion carrie can i just ask a question sorry i i think you said before um if we did not vote to move forward with the current you know artificial turf that we'd have to go and do more studies um or we'd have to go and do a study can you just elaborate on that sure right and this is um what steve was
141speaking to as well so um we do have to spend money if we move forward with the artificial turf because we need to revise those plans if we decide not to move forward with the artificial turf then i think we open the door to okay what do we want to do and then at that point i think we need to um decide do we want to install a new field in this place where we've been talking about artificial turf and if so we need to get an estimate you know we need to you know or do we want to hire someone to evaluate the entire campus and say you know within five years we want to bring the entire campus up to a grade of play that is 50 higher than it is now right
142that's our dream or 80 percent higher i don't know right so we need to make it we're not going to vote sorry mosquito we're not going to vote tonight i don't think on the alternative use of the capital gift but we may want to discuss what that could look like if we decide we don't want to go forward with the grass or with the our uh synthetic turf so it kind of sounds like if we if we vote no then we're back to square one right then what do we do as far as the fields go we're back to square one but without the synthetic turf i think i think this is this is the time to take it off the table if we want to take it off the table because that way we
143really can focus our energies on alternatives we wouldn't necessarily be taking the track off the table i think the track would need to be a different discussion i think if we could focus i mean that's my own opinion that if we're but it has been raised by others here if we move forward with the synthetic turf i think we're also wanting to include the track with that but if we don't move forward with this synthetic turf if we say we're taking synthetic turf off the table we want to consider other options we just don't want it i don't think we're excluding the track and nor do we have to julia how does this vote fit into our discussion last time about the list of questions that we would still be looking into sorry a vote
144last time no no we had our discussion in um august about wanting to get responses to a list of questions before we think about moving forward and i know we heard from joe on the some on the potentially on the organic natural grass but there were other questions as well and and now it feels like we're taking this vote that i thought might have been an october vote without all those answers right i think that well i'm not going to speak for the rest of the subcommittee i think the document that has all of the questions that brings together your questions and the finance subcommittee questions is a way to um [Music] the committee a sense of what may be left unanswered but still ask the committee to take a vote if there are too
145many questions left unanswered i think you're going to vote against the synthetic turf if you're okay with the questions maybe either you feel that you do have the answers that you're looking for or you're okay with the fact that we'll figure that out as we move forward in this process then you're gonna vote in favor of the synthetic turf we don't have to vote tonight but um i think that the purpose and jose sorry i'll get to you in just a second the purpose of scheduling the vote for tonight was so that when the balance on the williams gift was made available to us next month we could hit the ground running if you would like to postpone the vote in for another month i don't i don't know what information we would need to
146know very specifically what information you would need as a committee member to be able to take a vote one month from now as opposed to tonight jose yeah thanks carrie i just wanted to clarify that uh a a vote this committee chooses to pass the motion to you know um to seek bids on an artificial turf and track that still doesn't commit the district to paying for it and building it right and in the process of um requesting bids could we in addition requests from bidders uh information and um about the the materials that they're proposing to use in terms of what the artificial turf will contain whether it will have pfoas in them or not the things that that are genuine concern to to parents whose kids are going to be playing on this
147surface is that could we could we ask of potential bidders to um clarify the you know the the quality of the products that they plan to to install as well as and this is probably a pipe dream some clarification about um means of disposal or or ideally we're you know the possibilities of recycling the materials that they plan to use in the future joe so two answers to that uh by the time you go out to bid you need to specify something in enough detail that everybody's bidding on the same thing so it can't be a choose your own adventure type bidding process so that's the role of a designer or an architect as opposed to a company bidding on a project and then the the second thing is that in terms of understanding the
148recyclability of various products that would again be something that either a design team or we ourselves would need to conduct so just to quickly follow up then joe the um in the revision that if we if this committee does approve this motion the revision that would take place um would that be led by us or do we have a design team or an architect that we can consult with who can you know help draft you know uh who can help draft um an appropriate uh you know call for for proposals the possible emotion that was put into the agenda is is really just to try to limit the scope of what the district administration would be putting effort into and and a part of that is trying to understand over time there have been a
149lot of changes and you know even over the course of a two hour one single one meetings two hour conversation the perspectives that an employee of the district might think are being prioritized um and and i think understanding the priorities that's the that's the most valuable thing that we could receive so that we can we can do something with it and so this here is i think this motion is more geared towards twice the the school committee had said synthetic turf field and hopefully track let's go do it um and the question is is is that still the impression of the committee or does the committee have a separate kind of path that it wants to be on because i think that when you talk to the employees of the district within um the coaching
150co-curricular realm they'd be saying we we just want facilities we we want fields that we can play on that we can be confident and we want to track um please do something um and and what it is is in some ways secondary um but perhaps that's because they're not in the in the position to make decisions themselves um for the district with this gift and so i think that's just that's reality of where we are and so just trying to come up with the pinpoint things that we can do or limiting the track that we're that we're barreling down is i think that's the hope right now um to get let's say the committee wanted to put an artificial turf and track out to bit the process would be we would need uh the design
151team to modify its design to fit the current the current campus and the current you know potential um we would need to to have them instruct them to get updated estimates on what that would cost so that then coupled with the value of the of the gift as of right now and those costs the committee could say okay i'm prepared to put something out to bid because i think that we can get what we want or look at it and say no we shouldn't put this out to bid we need to value engineer it or we need to wait until the gift is large enough um so there there are a number of tedious steps between here and even putting it out to bid hopefully that answers your your question yeah thanks joe yeah julia
152uh thank you uh and apologies christina i know i was the one who said can we make sure we stay on time we're just eating up all the time that everybody else gave up right um so i recognize uh that the committee has voted a couple times before this committee aside from ursula voted um but i do want to name that the conditions under which we voted were different um in that i felt great pressure important pressure to respond to the need for title ix and ada compliance and i at the time was thought we've got to vote for this in order to make sure we meet those two requirements i i was new and i wasn't i didn't realize we could have done it without it um i also want to deeply respect the
153work of the um school personnel um to joe's point who have said we just want you know the facilities um and when i i just want to make sure i'm clear on the questions that haven't been answered so that um i think about this in my own risk profile um for my own vote so we don't know um we won't know the full cost but we don't know um how it will be like what will happen when we need to turn over the field in eight ten twelve years um i.e we don't know how we recycled or how we what we would have to pay for it to be just taken away and put into a landfill um in the in the um session that carrie and i sat in and that um we didn't
154share with everybody but there was a session we sat in on tuesday night where they've said these have never been recycled there's no there is no place right now to recycle them um so that's that's a risk out there that we don't know about that we're not going to know about but we don't know how this fits into the school's long-term capital plan we don't know who would pay for a replacement down the line so by taking a vote tonight we would be taking those risks of not of letting things unfold as they as they come and i just want to make sure i'm clear on those things that we don't know those things or if i want to make sure i don't miss any information anywhere well i think you're right that we don't
155know if there will ever be a way to recycle these things although it seems like an awfully good business opportunity to me so why someone hasn't figured this out i don't know um we we know that the district could potentially agree to absorb the replacement cost with long-range planning either through the capital gift or through um you know the district's own funds so we know that the district could take that on but we cannot commit future committees necessarily to that decision um so yes it's always a risk but we could we could make clear that that is our intention is to have the district pay for the cost of any kind of um renewal um yeah uh jose and then steve yeah thanks carrie um a little red hat i i think it's gonna be
156difficult to find two more deliberative people than julia and myself we probably can do laps right around one another so we examine every every corner of this uh of this debate um you know in in following on from how julia put it now that the number of unknowns that um we still haven't sorted out for ourselves remain the unknowns that you know the the committee had before itself when it made a vote to continue on this path and i only bring that up because you know i fell on the short end of of that vote but i respect my colleagues now as i did then and respect you know the the fact that you considered the many unknowns regarding this this um this this possibility this opportunity for out of artificial turf so and and
157i think it's important for us to um to have a vote on this motion because i presume if we don't pass it as a committee that will be used we'll speak very clearly and very publicly about um our interests to pursue artificial turf or not and certainly would remove it it seems like it would take it off the table quite um i think importantly in a very public and uh uh a public way so what i i'd like to do if it's not too early carrick i think the discussion can still continue is i i'd like to make a motion to direct the district to continue down the path of estimating and bidding and artificial turf and track as previously designed and bid if i'm reading that correctly great thanks jose is there a second
158i'll second all right then we can continue discussion um steve i i just had um you know one brief point in terms of when you were discussing about committing future committees we've actually had some discussions like this i believe on the capital gift when we were putting aside a million dollars for future projects and repairs and whatnot and so we you plan accordingly um christina there's a hand raised from a member of the public and this isn't public comment so i don't know do you want to just dismiss that or yes let people know yep it is we no longer have a public comment open so we don't take public comments with our apologies yes uh julia hi two quick points um one i recognize and appreciate the concept that we can't um we can't
159define what future committees need to do um but i guess in that same regard past committees votes then how do those how should they influence this committee so i i don't i mean i don't think we have to be beholden to those passing day votes by the same by the same logic um the second point i just want to make is um as the person who actually voted for this in december i think there's more information now um and i think to change one's vote because you've collected more information is is a reasonable thing to do so the injury rates the climate you know what we're learning about climate even in the last six months um i just want to name that so i i had the information before and i had the pressure of
160title ix and ada that are now gone and more information i just want to name that thank you julia is there any more discussion all right uh let's vote did you want to hear it again ursula yes okay jose can you read it again yeah the motion uh that i made is the motion that's in the agenda which is to direct the district to continue down the path of estimating and bidding an artificial turf and track as previously designed and bid okay sorry julia bowen no conrino constantine eye elephant by an eye green eye all right that vote passes um thanks everyone and thanks christina for giving us a little extra time there so again this doesn't commit the district to installing any kind of artificial turf it simply puts us into the next step
161which is to update the design or modify the design update the estimates those would then come back to the committee and we would make a decision that's the next vote that we would be looking at a decision to put it out to bid this does not technically prevent us from looking into alternatives but i would caution the committee to not do that at this time i think that's the reason we took the vote right was so that we could limit the effort made by the administration so that we could choose a direction to go and [Music] be ready when the um capital gift funds were made um known to us so if it's all right with the committee i would suggest that we hold off on further explanation sorry exploration of natural grass options right
162now and do what we what the vote implies which is to take this direction and see where it takes us that however is not a decision that i would be comfortable making for the committee is that a does that make sense i mean i think we were clear on that but i just want to make sure that everyone is in agreement that that's what that's the vote that we just took is that for now we're going to pursue this path it gets pretty clear that's what that motion indicates all right so we did have some discussion of alternative use of the capital gift um um but i again you know that's i guess what i just said is that let's not continue that discussion now um since we just had a positive motion going in
163that direction the renewal fund vote is here because there are some question i think i'm actually not sure about this so someone might need to remind me i think it's here because there's a question about whether when we voted to set aside a million dollars for a renewal fund whether number one that meant a million dollars from the time of the vote or a million dollars from the time of construction of a you know the time that we voted on a a project a capital project number two whether we wanted to name in our thinking about this renewal fund whether it could be or should be used for renewal of said capital project right so those are that's what i'm thinking it's on the agenda right now i'm not sure we want to or need
164to spend a lot of time talking about or we need to take the vote but it's on the agenda to give us the ability to further define the renewal fund if we'd like to do that tonight jose thanks carrie just a question um for for i guess in terms of what what's possible the the million dollar reserve that the committee voted to um to create is there any precedent or is it possible for us to commit to holding that as an endowment of spirits and the the the money that can be earned from that endowment can then go into you know this with this renewal fund is that something that in which there's any precedent or something that we could do right so the the one million remains in the college endowment yeah so i
165guess i'm sorry my question was if we keep it in the endowment and we um imagine it being an endowment of sorts for the district meaning as that as the the money that is earned from that sitting in the college endowment creates a uh a um you know a growing pot of funds hopefully that we can call upon for you know capital improvement and renewal that is the plan that is the vote that was previously taken by the committee and i'm i apologize we actually should have brought the vote up i don't have it in front of me but that is the vote that was taken i think there was perhaps some conversation at various times that that fund should not be used to renew you know a synthetic turf field that was not a
166vote by the committee but it could be um there were other times when um folks thought that it should be used for anything but athletic facilities since this funding was going toward toward athletic facilities potentially but i'm not sure that was ever really so there there has been discussion about whether we could should try to constrain the renewal fund which will grow i mean that's the whole that's the beauty of having it in the williams endowment it will continue to be a capital fund so it won't be used for um educational like curricular purposes but it can be used for capital improvements repairs restoration joe and his team have been working on the three to five to ten year capital improvement what are the needs going to be at mount greylock it is a relatively
167new building that's not to say that there won't be things that need to be replaced um so we have that information we've talked about it in finance um what we know about is not um substantial right now in terms of dollar figures so so this conversation carry i think i i misunderstood is it about whether that fund can or should be used uh in um in a potential replacement of of the turf at some point in the future is that what is that where yeah i think it's an opportunity for the committee to say we are prepared to use the renewal fund to replace this synthetic turf field when and if needed or all when needed right um presumably a million dollars now is not a million dollars eight years from now so it won't
168be going solely for that use but it's also an opportunity for the committee to say that's enough of this capital gift being spent on a synthetic turf field um we don't want to see more money from this capital gift being used to replace it you're going to have to find money somehow somewhere else or you should so it's not it's an attempt to define perhaps constrain or ashore this is while knowing that this committee can't um behold in any future committees to to whatever if we were to vote on on on this tonight i i think that's right um it's always been very vague i mean i know we can't constrain future committees we could write up language and we could ask the district to look into you know whether there is an agreement that
169we can you know put it make create a legal agreement i don't know we haven't really talked about it um for instance there is a legal i mean there's an agreement between williams college and the williamstown elementary school that's that's a renewal fund can only be used for capital expenses i believe there are some constraints on that i'm not positive i haven't read it recently enough um we could perhaps ask the college to i mean i don't know there are all sorts of options of what we could do if tonight i think it's more about taking the temperature of the committee and seeing if there are assurances or constraints that we want to make clear to the community julia so is it um i felt last time we had this conversation that it was effectively
170there was a a sum of money we knew we'd get a report on or we at that time we knew but now we know we'll get a report on that and the question is are we going to agree on how much we set aside and then the cost of the project has to come under that like i'm trying to understand what the purpose is of of defining this tonight um and and if we could delay to maybe have a longer-term understanding um i would i would be advocating for that um a long-term view of of expenses can i say something kerry yeah absolutely steve go ahead so the way i remember this from numerous conversations on several committees was that there was some concern from the town i think select board and maybe finance committee
171about how much money would be left to would be left when we were done with everything so my thought was always that we were going to set aside a fixed amount so that when we work on the fields or anything like that when we're done with all of that there will be a fixed amount left that will not be touched in this initial stage so for me i was always viewing i think we were having numbers ranging from 500 000 to 1.5 million as an amount that would be available to be set aside after the construction projects were done not being set aside at that moment but just once we finish doing the bidding we want to make sure we have at least that much set aside i may be misremembering or misinterpreting what the
172conversations were but that's how i seem to remember it the other thing is in terms of your costs and expenses we're not asking the towns for any money right now for the ada title ix stuff which is stuff that the district needs to do we didn't ask the towns for money for the administrative multi-purpose building it's important to keep all of this in context i think i've asked this question before this is the last comment we have to be very careful how we use funds like this you know in terms of are we able to take out bonds or whatnot and use that rather than touching the money which is in the endowment in in order to borrow money like that we would need the permission of our towns but again that is something that
173might be worth exploring uh in terms of them leaving the money and the endowment to grow further okay so it's not thank you steve it sounds like unless anyone else um wants to weigh in on this it might be a good idea to continue this discussion at a later date great that's a great idea all right um joe i think you're up but i'll turn it back to christina and she can turn it over to you awesome next up on our agenda is the business administration report so i turn it over to joe bergeron thank you all right i'll try to be concise current field project update um nunes our construction firm has done an incredible job of um battling the weather staying ahead of time dealing with delays and procurement of of items um
174they've been a real joy to work with um as of right now the project is at 80 to 90 type completion um the back stops for the various fields along with the dugouts are on order um and hopefully they will arrive on time but at the same time that's the kind of thing that right right now is is never arriving on time um the good news is we do not need those back stops or those dugouts in place until the spring so it's so it's not as though hitting a precise install date is of critical importance for us right now it will not impact any of our any of our students um or the district as a whole um if that is slightly delayed this fall um the the other news is that some of
175some of the the fine work around um infields and and final grading of things that is still to come but the but the team has really done a good job of getting well ahead of its early october deadline to complete the project as whole um so that's the that's the current field project update are there any questions on it all right uh grant updates um christina may i please share my screen yes i'm sorry about that no worries did it work no yes yeah i just didn't want to do anything while the recording was stopped yeah i don't know how that happened all right so hopefully you can see my screen is it large enough for everybody to see and understand the numbers we'll not understand the numbers but see the numbers okay so in
176terms of grants the the big picture is that we have um certain grants that i'm highlighting right now where it is within our ability to reserve use of those and use them in a later fiscal year so these are grants that were awarded to us in fy 21 where these that i'm now highlighting right now are the amounts that we were awarded this is the amount that we ended up using in fy21 and here is the amount for each available to us in fy 22. so all in all that picture is extremely extremely healthy and then in terms of fy 22 grants the update is um all of our standard um federal state um grants that the school committee might be accustomed to are in good shape and we are finishing up all the paperwork
177that we need in order to receive those and then we have the two esser grants sr2 and sr3 following on esser 1 that we saw last year esther's standing for elementary and secondary schools emergency relief they are covid related special funds that we do that we will not expect to receive annually going forward both are grants that are available to us for multiple years fy22 fy23 and at least a portion of fy24 for both and i think estro3 is straight through fy24 these are two funds that we will certainly be using over multiple years and so as we move towards the fy 23 budgeting process you'll see that those will be a part of our plans for next year um all of that is is good news within the grants world um we are a
178district that was accustomed to budgeting for um spending between four and five hundred thousand dollars a year in grant funding and we clearly have significant funds in excess of that available to us at the moment um which is which is good news for the work that we're trying to do to pull out of the pandemic summer programming and so on any questions on grants all right the good news in terms of fy21 closeout is that right now we are on track to submit all of our end-of-year report documents as well as certify our various fund balances so that we can be in line with the total expenditures as well as the funds in reserve that we saw um approved for the fy 21 budget and then augmented last september when we approved when the school
179committee approved additional funds from tuition and um the covert related grant expenditures so we're we're on track there we'll have another update in october as we get closer to submitting and and certifying various values but we feel like we're in good shape um we don't have any votes to put in front of you because we don't need to make any modifications right now to what the school committee would expect so that was discussed at link in the uh finance subcommittee today but we can spare the the rest of the full committee from that and that's i think that's all i had tonight thanks joe under six minutes unless people have questions for you it's fantastic okay moving on the next item on our agenda is the masc delegate selection this is something carrie where did
180she go we lost carrie um this is something we have to do yearly is that correct jake um i apologize i'm still new to all of this um yes the uh the the joint conference of the mafc which is your professional organization and the mass which is my professional organization happens in november uh it also serves as the annual meeting of the masc and um there there will be a slate of um legislative priorities and things that you will be asked to consider and support and uh and it is really important that we're represented at this meeting and it's really important that we have a uh a voting member who can weigh in on behalf of mount greylock regional uh at and this is the time of year that we have to do that because
181it it kicks off soon so do we have a volunteer to be our misc voting one time meeting i don't think i understood what is it one meeting or is it no sorry this is a this is actually a three-day event um the con there's a conference that these joint um that these two committees co-host and it happens on sorry in hyannis every year except last year because of covet it was virtual this year i believe it's a hybrid so and all members of the committee are invited to attend we are all members as representatives of the committee um i've attended a bunch of times and it's really um [Music] a great opportunity to meet colleagues across the state the vast representation is from the eastern part of the state but there are a fair
182number of people from berkshire county who attend or from even you know mid-state um i was a delegate last year it's the first time that we've done this to my knowledge and it is a great opportunity as jake said to be represented to have our voice heard i'm happy to be the delegate again but also i do plan to attend um in person but i'm also happy to have someone else be the delegate instead since i did it last year jose i was going to start by saying that is a fantastic idea and just to call out the absolute mayhem and shenanigans happening over your right shoulder christina it is just fantastic sorry about that did you know christina i can't control the foster kittens julia um i see we have a vote on the
183agenda and i wanted to make a motion that kerry be our um delegate thank you do i have a second this is steve i'll second steve's second that's great any discussion any further discussion on that i'll just ask the question i was curious when that conference takes place yeah um so it is always the beginning of november um and if you go on to the masc website um november 3rd through november 26th it's the 3rd through the 6th this year sorry carrie no that's okay looks like my internet is unstable and um the delegate meeting i forget which day it is um but there is a backup we do also have to vote a backup delegate i think so um if you're interested ursula maybe um you could do that or you could vote me
184down and you could be the delegate why don't we go ahead and vote that motion do we need to amend it to include a backup delegate or can we i think we do that a separate stand yeah right bo and i connery i constantino elephant eye green eye miller eye okay that motion passes so backup delegate do we have a volunteer i nominate ursula if she's willing to do it or if she wants to do if she wants to do it does that mean if carrie becomes unable to go is that what backup means okay sure yeah that sounds good and it's so great that it's um hybrid um i will second that motion any further discussion i would just say since it's hybrid i would encourage us to you know attend as possible absolutely
185thank you any other discussion hearing none all in favor oh and i connery eye constantine i elephant by an eye green eye and it looks like the delegate assembly is on saturday morning at 9am thank you that motion passes okay next up on our agenda is the response to the open meeting law complaint which we have in our packet um jake i wanted to ask you a question about this um just for clarification in the last paragraph of the public complaint it says either the jlmc should conduct its affairs in public unless it conducts business that falls under one of the acceptable uses of executive session or the moa should be redrafted to give either the school committee or the superintendent authority to decide when a masked mandate is lifted and my understanding is you
186already have that authority so i just think one and two i do have that authority to lift the mask mandate um however the the just for for clarity um the mou point three the masking requirement detailed an item one above will remain in effect until the jlmc for health and safety by majority vote votes to eliminate the mask requirement or at the expiration of the 21 22 school year so you know the the purpose of the jlmc is to you know revisit data and to converse about really the the the approach the the mount greylock educators association was we're happy to agree to a masked mandate and this was pre the state issuing a mask mandate but we would like to be able to have conversation about when does when is the mandate over and
187why um and so that's really that spirit but it is true that the the school committee did give the superintendent the authority to to bring masking on and to take masking away um but but i think it is true that this jlmc does does to some degree um i don't know if it trumps that or not but i believe our attorney is he's preparing the response to this um this uh alleged violation will address that and and you will of course be given copies of that that response to this effort to bring about clarification about um you know whether this is a public deliberative body or not okay thank you you're welcome does anyone else have any questions before we move on okay oops steve i can't yeah it's so confusing sorry it's it's not
188really a question it's just more of a statement that i've been on the school committee for so many years i no longer remember and just i think this joint task force is a wonderful advance for the district and i think it's great that we have a structure in place where the administration the school committee the teachers and the board of health can get together and talk and so i just want to thank everybody again for the service that they've been doing thanks steve okay um do i have a motion to move into executive session with intent to return to open session per mgl chapter 38 section 2182 to conduct contract negotiations with non-union personnel superintendent business administrator director of special education services so moved curtis moves do i have a second second julius seconds any
189discussion all in favor oh and i conrai constantine eye elephant by an eye green eye thank you it is 8 57 and we are now moving into executive session and um we will declare we are alone once we are in our breakout room which i'm hoping joe can create sure and should i put up a and do i have to pause the recording or does it automatically do we know it will remain recording the main room i believe great perfect and clearly i'm really not alone there's quite some sort of thing happening behind me the show in town and um christina you will need to add yourself to that breakout room because you're the host so it's just room one let's see did we get everybody back you get everybody back nobody one two three
190four okay if anyone's missing please raise your hand okay it is 9 14 we are back in open session um i would like to make a motion to support the contract for the director of special education services second curtis second any discussion hearing none all in favor oh and i connery i constantino hi elfin by night green eye boy thank you that motion passes i would like to make a motion to support the 1.5 um contract increase of the superintendent and the business administrator i'll second that julia ii any discussion hearing none all in favor thank you that motion passes um okay next up on the agenda upcoming meetings there is a finance subcommittee meeting on the 23rd at 4 pm and another one in october on the 7th at 4 pm we have a
191regular session school committee meeting october 14th at 6 pm and as jake mentioned there may be another special session in there somewhere for the school school committee any questions there any um agenda requests i have no other items for discussion thank you everyone do i have a motion to adjourn so moved julian moves do i have a second second curtis seconds all in favor bow and i conrie constantine eye elephant by an eye green eye eye middle eye okay that motion passes we are adjourned at 9 16 p.m thank you um especially to jake and joe who have been at the school since 6 15 looking at people's boogers yeah all good thanks everyone thank you