001call the mount greylock regional school district school committee to order it's thursday october 8th 2020 and it is sorry i can't see my watch 6 01 pm per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law mglc30a section 20 the public will not be allowed to physically access the school committee 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 the first item on our agenda is public comment and the first public comment is coming from julia bowen on item 6a and i need to call her so i will do that this is julia
002hi julia it's the mount greylock school committee we're ready for your public comments great thank you uh so uh i'm julia bowen i'm calling from williamstown and i'm speaking to the item on the agenda under superintendent's update for dei actually also really just calling in with an invitation so on behalf of the diversity equity and inclusion or dei working group of the mount greylock regional school mgrs this is a mouthful school council i'm writing to invite you the members of our school committee and anyone listening who is interested to what we are calling a dei convening to discuss current and future efforts in the areas of cei at macraela this convening will be held on tuesday october 13th from 4 30 to 6 p.m on zoom the agenda and finding instructions have been posted on
003the district calendar in addition to student groups who engage in dei efforts we have sent this invitation to the williamstown-based community groups engaged in dei work we are also interested in having participation from lanesboro community members who may be interested in advancing the cause of dei at the middle in high school the mgs school council is a committee made up of students teachers parents community members and the principal whose purpose includes developing and supporting the implementation of a school improvement plan for the middle and high school in each of the last two years the school improvement plan has included a goal to support the continued growth of the truly inclusive school culture where all school community members feel they have a voice and that they belong the dei working group was formed last spring to
004focus specifically on this goal embedded in our goal for 2021 is an effort to build strong partnerships with individuals and organizations whose perspectives and experience will enhance our work we're planning this dei convening to launch this effort and engage as many people as possible in our discussion going forward we hope that representatives of aligned school and community committees and student clubs will join our working group's regular meetings ensuring that we continue to benefit from a diverse and representative set of perspectives we anticipate our discussion on october 13th to include an overview of efforts already underway at the middle high school to support a more inclusive environment a review of our dei goal for the 2021 school year and an open conversation to hear ideas from participants on how else to achieve our ultimate goal of
005a truly inclusive school community if anyone is unable to attend but would like to attend in the future they should email me at jgb275 gmail.com and again the meeting information has been posted on the district calendar thank you thank you julia thank you okay our next public comment is on agenda number nine and it's from stephanie boyd who i believe is from williamstown but i don't have that information yes thank you dear school committee i want to start by saying thank you for your commitment to our community i know that all of you are striving to do what you think is best for our community i do not doubt your intentions on the other hand i can understand how in the thick of trying to resolve complex issues we can sometimes lose sight of where
006we are going it can take a variety of voices and viewpoints to keep us heading in the in the right direction regardless of where we come out on the decision related to turf fields the process we engage to make the decision is extremely important at the end of the day when responding to people who don't agree with whatever decision will ultimately be made being able to point to a robust inclusive thorough process will be the only defensible position the committee will have despite what i feel has been a failure to adequately adequately evaluate and express the athletic program needs incorporate environmental impact assessment into the design and conduct a reasonable financial analysis comparing various options i am mostly dismayed with what appears at this moment to me to to me to be a lack of
007integrity on behalf of the school committee several times the committee made commitments to the community and to process and then seemingly ignore them last night i went through various i berkshire articles to track down promises made by the school committee over the past year or so in response to concerns expressed by numerous community members the town's finance committees and select boards related to the expense and impact of a proposed artificial turf field the school committee committed to gather more information september 29th to hold a public forum january 2020 to form an advisory committee june 2020. currently the school committee seems to be indicating that none of these promise promised initiatives are necessary and there is a need to move forward quickly while many things have changed in our world since june it is hard to
008fathom what would compel the school committee to spend 2.5 million dollars without the due diligence they pre previously thought was important if anything financial pressures and changing priorities due to the realities of coba 19 should encourage us to pause and re-evaluate the significant decision it certainly feels like the decision is trying to be pushed through without the appropriate due diligence because in a few short weeks there will be four new people on the committee i am more than happy to discuss these issues at any time best stephanie included in her comment are excerpts from i berkshire's articles and the last comment is from q daily of williamstown on item number nine chair connery i noticed an item on the agenda for fields with a potential vote expected while i'm not able to attend tonight's meeting
009i'm hopeful the committee will be prudent and deliberate in its decision making with regards to the fields i wholeheartedly i wholeheartedly support the title ix improvements in light of recent budget issues and the budget issues to come i believe the best course of action is to do the work you have to do only this does mean that installation of a turf field should not be undertaken at this time as i'm sure you know anything that distracts from the core mission of educating our children should be avoided the limited amount of bandwidth from staff and the community should be focused on our collective core mission only please don't get distracted i will note that i'm still hopeful the committee will establish the building maintenance fund we are all expecting the board of selectmen of lanesboro williamstown
010and the finance committee of williamstown have asked you to make good on this commitment please do so thank you for your service sincerely for you bailey okay next up on the agenda is the approval of minutes do i have a motion to approve the september 10 20 20 minutes milla i will move miller moose do i have a second second taranova seconds any discussion uh yes i have discussion on all three so for the first one on page three i just wanted to expand my comment to say when uh s miller recommended making our own community statement and then add as posting a blm sign could open up the district to post to posting requests from other groups because this is what actually happened later any other discussion okay all in favor of approval of
011minutes of the september 10th minutes with that edition can we just say hi yeah yeah no do we have to do well called we don't we don't we don't that's right yes yes did you say i oh yes i'm trying okay thank you those minutes are approved do i have a motion to approve the supper september 15 20 20 minutes miller how some move miller moves do i have a second one harder seconds any discussion uh yes another addition uh given how close we came to losing in-person instruction i think it's worth putting in the minutes the discussion we had back then so when it says discussion among school committee members including concerns about state metrics and getting students into school i would like to add miller warns that if the district uses the state
012color code then five people testing positive in week one zero and week two five and week three and zero in week four will move the entire district to remote and then it should just say i think explicitly that the motion i made was not seconded okay any other discussion on those so is that wording in the video it is essentially yes so the person who does the minutes can go back to the video and look yes okay i mean this may not be word for word but this was the example i gave with you know five zero five zero and the more expensive one gets us to eleven weeks but i did not do that calculation okay all in favor of the september 15 minutes with that edition i okay that passes do i have
013a motion to approve the september 24th 2020 minutes miller i will still move miller moves do i have a second no second harder seconds further discussion and then i think there was something cut off on the top of page four i think this was from something that rob was doing i had a possible suggestion are we waiting for rob i don't think it was cut off i think it was just there are two points being made it says complications from posting of signs on school grounds raising i think i think their raising should just be deleted okay that's fine just when you have the raising there it seems like something was following right the top top right yes okay so are we okay with you either we move raising or add something afterwards so i
014think would be better to put after that you know what the complication is that it raises uh it opens up other groups who want their message displayed just to be explicit in the minutes as to why we did what we did but i'm fine either way that's i think just eliminating reasons think that works okay so all in favor with that change all right okay we're not doing an alphabetical order no we're all here so yeah you got it okay september 24th minutes are passed you do very orderly that's for sure okay next up on the agenda are chair reports um and we have a school committee member letter of resignation from regina delago she's our one of our lanesboro representatives this is dated october 3rd christina it is with mixed emotions that i am
015resigning from the mount greylock regional school committee effective immediately for 20 years i have served the children and residents of my district with strong commitment of meeting the educational needs of children in the best and most responsible manner possible i honored my commitment to see through the regionalization which i'm sorry to interrupt i just got a message that bullynet is only showing a blank youtube page technical difficulties okay okay i honored my commitment to see through regionalization work towards the blending of the district negotiating the many contracts into unified documents continuing the mount greylock building project and working to get appropriate workspace for our administration the time commitment has been phenomenal but the end results were worth the investment i now find it that it is no longer the case for me and the commitment
016is not balanced out for me it is no longer a positive experience nor is it sufficiently about children and education it is time for me to walk away i wish you all well sincerely regina delago and i would like to personally thank regina for her dedication and work for the district over her many years on the school committee regionalization and all that's cropped up over the last two years has been very challenging while the community doesn't necessarily see all the work behind the scenes that the committee performs regina's contribution contributions have been amazing and um i'd just like to thank thank regina i don't know if anyone else has other comments before i move into what we do i would second that sentiment it's been clear for years just how devoted she has been to
017the students and the families and the district as a whole and it was wonderful to have her advocacy for years okay so um i just wanted to read the next steps when we have a school committee member who leaves within their term according to our regional agreement statement on vacancy if a vacancy occurs among the committee members elected under section 5 we're appointed under section 5b1 the selectmen from both lanesboro and williamstown will meet together at the mount greylock regional school within 30 calendar days with the remaining committee members to fill such vacancy by roll call vote a majority of the votes of the elected officials entitled to vote shall be necessary to such election the newly appointed committee member will serve until the next biennial state election at which election a successor shall be
018elected to serve for the balance of the unexpired term if any this joint meeting will be chaired by the town moderator of the town of residence for the new appointee and the joint meetings chairperson will vote only resolved tied votes so the reason why i read this is it's sort of important because the timing is unusual um so central office reached out to deci regarding the vacancy because of the timing it basically happens right before our next biennial election and essentially the contact said um the deci context said they hadn't really experienced this particular chain of events in the timing and suggested that we reach out to the state so that was done in the response from that office was that any resignations after april would leave to appointment until the next biennial election which
019means this appointment appointment will be a two-year appointment through november of 2022. so at this time our central office is handling posting the position and we'll reach out to the lanesboro town moderator who is christotic and begin coordinating the joint meetings between the school committee and the two town select boards any questions what if we don't get nominated that is a good question and i don't have an answer for that can we run with six committee members what's that can we run with six committee members sure yeah but how do we promote it i mean what's the best way to promote that the position is open and we would like people to consider you know applying for it it's a good question and in the past i mean i how did you find out what
020what motivated you i feel like you and jamie were the closest to having experience there yeah they just went around quickly and people contacted me and said you know would you please consider and i've already actually done that with a couple of people would you please consider her so i do think that's the best way to do it is to just you know contact people that you talking about it now we'll get it into the newspapers uh maybe an announcement in the stuff we sent home you know the weekly newsletters dave as well right and the pope the application or the position that goes on the school committee portion of the website it's not in school spring which i think is an important distinction that it's it's under our sort of tab on the left
021side yeah or you could always email stacy and she could send me actually yeah what are you thinking in terms of timing christine well it because it's 30 days and um it's october her resignation was october 3rd so it has to happen before november 3rd so you see why the timing was really yeah yeah so you know at this point it's sort of stacey will start communicating with all of the parties involved so we can figure out when we can all get together you know the majority of us can all get together i would assume so yeah because of the not the sheer number of people i don't think we could get everyone safely into one space so is the idea probably we'll give a couple weeks for applications and then meet late october yeah
022yeah sounds good so the lanesboro pto would be right what is that the parent group at lanesboro elementary yeah should reach out to them if someone hasn't done that already yeah yeah and then the pto at mount greylock and any other groups where parents are actively involved and then words should get out it's already actually been in eight berkshire's resignations right right i found out years ago from a radio ad or radio story just talking about an opening okay anything else on that okay so the next item up is the anti-racism resolution and um if you remember in june we we or rather back in july we read the covet 19 funding resolution this resolution was provided at the same time but we admittedly were very focused on the time sensitive need for funding at
023that time so this this is particularly particularly critical now as we have moved back into in-person learning and want all our students to feel safe so i'm going to read the resolution it is the mount greylock regional school district school committee anti-racism residents want to bring it from reading if somebody else answered that fantastic thank you okay um so yes the mount greylock regional school district school committee anti-racism resolution which is also the resolution is being put forward by the massachusetts association of school committees and will be voted on as a resolution at the delegate assembly in november whereas as schools have the responsibility to equip students with their civil right of obtaining a free and appropriate public education it is the responsibility of each school to ensure we create a welcoming community for all
024students and whereas it is the responsibility that every district provide to all district staff including school committee members annual professional development on diversity equity and inclusion and whereas every district will commit to recruiting and retaining a diverse and culturally responsive teaching workforce and whereas every district will examine their policies for institutional and systemic racialized practices and implement change with sustainable policies that are evidence-based and whereas every district will incorporate into their curriculum the history of racial oppression and works by black authors and works from diverse perspectives and whereas we as school district leaders can no longer remain silent to the issues of racism and hate that continue to plague our public and private institutions resolved that mount greylock regional school district and all the school districts in the commonwealth must guarantee that racist practices are
025eradicated and diversity equity and inclusion is embedded and practiced for our students families faculty and staff we must ensure our own school culture and that of every district in the commonwealth is anti-racist that acknowledges that all lives cannot matter until black lives matter respectfully the mount greylock school committee thank you do i have a motion to support the mount greylock regional school district school committee anti-racism resolution i don't know who had that we'll say carter moves do i have a second second alright seconds any further discussion no question so is this language being used across the state or is there yes i i 100 um support um signing this i would have liked to see it include an explicit statement about developing dei skills in students not just staff it incorporates working on the curriculum
026and reading works from diverse perspectives professional development for district staff but i would really like to see us have active programs specifically for students and working on those skills as well i think roundabout is in here but i hope that that's something that we can look at going forward as well and i can bring that up at the delegate to something that'd be great thank you anyone else okay all in favor aye aye thank you that resolution passes okay next up on our agenda are superintendent updates well thank you very much i have two updates or two two uh topics the first being diversity equity inclusion and internal and community related issues there is much i don't know about the mount greylock community so i have been very grateful that community groups and individuals have
027reached out to provide me with much needed background information and invite me to community events and i wanted to make a statement to say that i am i am not uh i have not gone to these events not for any other reason than uh all the sort of the existences of reopening school which have prevented me from focusing more intensely on these important issues another issue that i have been while i've been getting information from different groups involved with dei and also of police presence in the schools what i have done is is that these require a sustained meaningful focus and the brevity of my tenure in the district prevents that type of focus but what i have done is i've reached out to dr mccandless who will be assuming the leadership of the district
028during the first week of november and i've shared the community every communications i have received in regard to these issues i have shared with them and dr mccandless was particularly thankful for the historical context of the efforts in regard to ensuring diversity in mount greylock uh regional school district and the efforts that have uh that have been made on that behalf these are efforts have been the guiding principle and passion throughout dr mccandless's career he's eager to take up and sustain the diversity equity and inclusion initiative initiative upon his arrival and he's has been in contact already with uh folks who have been uh spearheading this information in fact during this meeting i texted him about the october 13th event that was just announced by julia bowen and he already had responded to her looking
029forward to participation in that also dr mccandless in regard to the issues having to do with police presence in school has had extensive experience with please police liaisons in both pittsfield public schools and in his former position in the lee public schools and he is really best suited to provide detailed accounts of actual day-to-day interactions of police officers with students and parents in and around the schools the purposes that police liaisons best serve in his experience in schools and other kinds of resources that might be deployed to ensure the safety and mentoring of our students uh so he's looking forward to engaging in all of in both of these conversations and much much more uh his extensive experience and i believe it's 16 or 17 years as a superintendent uh and of different types of
030communities also he was the superintendent of lee which was of course a very small uh district and now pittsfield so he's looking forward to uh engaging in these uh tremendously important issues and uh he said he was actually just in talking to him he said he's particularly interested because these are the core issues that brought him into education and the things with he thinks are the most important things to engage with as we move forward so that is my what i wanted to update on that the other thing i want to update is on our reopening to date uh i did i uh had told the principals and actually all the administrators that they didn't have to attend this evening for this update didn't put their names on the agenda uh because we are going
031to have an october 22nd meeting focused entirely on education and of course the education center committee before that and so i thought that it would be best for to be to give a brief uh description of what uh what's been happening and we are currently our three days of hybrid learning that's happened so far just to give you a brief taste of what's going on with the expectation that the october 22nd meeting will be much more detailed but this is more of a snapshot to give you a sense of where we are so at the lanesborough elementary school nolan put together a couple of things in terms of successes and challenges the kind of things he thought about successes he's quickly getting students into the building that have filled out the screener that the students
032uh one of the things that you remarked on and this is everyone's remarked on the ease and expertise of mask wearing demonstrated by the students there have been i personally have walked through all of the elementary classrooms during this week and i can tell you quite frankly that they are the students kindergarten actually pre preschool all the way through sixth grade uh are actually better at wearing masks than i've seen many adults demonstrate uh they actually uh and they they do it without problem for the entire course that they're in school and he marked about that uh he also remarked upon the power of the small class sizes as i walked through all the school the classes not only in lanesboro elementary but also at um at williamstown it's remarkable to see anywhere between four
033to six to ten students in the classroom and i will tell you that they are deeply engaged in the work that they're doing uh also there are the other things that the inventive ways to teach within the parameters that uh we are faced by our social distancing that's another thing one of the challenges he said which is something that we're working on is asynchronous learning and time out of the building those are the things that are the big challenges at mount greylock jake has reported that both cohorts of hybrid students have successfully experienced a full day of in-building learning he's impressed with the students staff and families uh his man the mantra of the school the greylock way is obvious he says it's not hard to notice where everywhere he turns he sees and feels
034the after effects of people demonstrating integrity responsibility and perseverance the appropriate and most effective balance between synchronous and asynchronous liberties continues to develop this is a challenge and it's going to take a while to figure out how this happens but i believe it's we're working in that direction the flow of students into the building between classes and during lunch is getting smoother if you really think about it there we have not been at it for very long and i think it's going to improve as we go uh mount grayla continues to seek suggestions in excess assess their procedures and refine practices and make necessary adjustments the process doesn't happen overnight uh he appreciates the feedback flexibility and patience jake always likes to take an opportunity for reminders of course and he said reminders families please
035remember to complete the student self-assessment health greeter every day monday through friday for each student so out with whether you're remote or hybrid so that actually goes for all schools and also school photos october 20 and 22nd more info will follow in an email jake takes every opportunity he has uh now at wes for students the uh kristen has reported the return of students in the building's been exactly what they need seeing their faces even though masked hearing the voices and feeling some of the normal hustle and bustle in the building has reminded everybody why we do this what we're working towards uh the rival dismissal has been getting easier every day as families are adjusting to the new procedures we're having some trouble with families not filling out the screeners i told you this
036would be a theme as we go along and this is called some delays but it's getting easier i actually visited kristen has been visiting classrooms and i visited with her on tuesday we made it to all the class all of the classrooms and students students she remarked have expressed the utmost appreciation for being back in the building and the teachers of course are more than happy to have them there teachers are taking advantage of the weather and many of the classes have having real uh read-alouds and lessons outside in addition to their socially distant mass breaks uh basically successes social distancing protocols the kids are doing great mask wearing symptom screening is going better refining procedures uh lots of smiles in-person learning is wonderful when students report this is different but feels more normal than
037i expected the areas to improve of course again asynchronous learning and login hurdles these are some of the things patrick priester was reporting on special education saying that there are quite a number of successes students are reorienting themselves to the in-person learning meetings and evaluations have begun and remote sped teacher is being introduced to new caseload the challenges of course screen time balance remote learning for k2 students and students with executive functioning issues and seventh grade transition here we'll go into more detail but this is again a snapshot of what it's like the first four days of our hive of the implementation of our hybrid model now both uh joelle and ellie are also working on addressing some of these needs with the technology and professional development uh they are offering uh basically they're offering
038professional development that deals with such thing as what are you doing with your asynchronous time what is working well for you about it beyond assigning lexia ixl and like what sort of learning tasks are you offering students if you're assigning social studies or science how do you create forums for discussions among students in other words there's we everybody recognizes that we've been at remote learning for for basically there were 18 days and now we're in hybrid which includes remote and that there's going to have to be continuous improvement in the work the teachers are doing in order to reach all students and that essentially is my thumbnail of what's been going on yes can you tell us anything about how the remote academy is going yes uh the remote academy there are essentially we're still
039working i think that everybody joel has reached out and actually dropped off materials to each of the households of the folks that are doing this uh it is from my general sense of it it started on monday uh and so that the idea is that but prior to that the students had been assigned to their classrooms their the classrooms that uh they were assigned to at the very beginning of the year they have all made the transition into the remote academy and uh i basically things are moving along but it is it's a it's a transition from the rule that was happening before and the teachers are actually taking two grade levels and i i think everybody's g are getting up to speed with it but i can tell you that with our next report
040there's going to be a more in-depth report because i intend to have a survey data from parents uh that specifically asks questions about how is remote learning going uh what basically i've got to craft this thing but we've got to get to that and also what's how how apparent and student perceptions of the hybrid model see and then just talking about reopening i know one of the concerns the community had when we were considering reopening and having students back in the buildings was what would happen when the williams students returned i think it's worth just stating what those numbers are that there's been over 19 000 tests since august 17th almost 4 000 the last seven days and only five positive tests from the williams community and so i know that this was a concern
041a lot of people had and it's great to hear that the numbers are this low where actually we're at the realm where some of these might actually be false positives by the laws of statistics all right i got a question um thank you i i don't have any treatment and i'm going to put my colleagues under the bus there or anything but my children aren't coming to school here anymore okay and if you don't want to answer you don't have to how is that going from the from your point of view as a parent i mean you know i wake up from this you know what is it like getting three kids or two kids right here at 6 30 in the morning if you don't want to answer i don't think you're on the
042spot you know but i just wonder what that's like there's one thing i one enormous positive that i'm happy to say is that for our kids at mount greylock it means they can get up a little bit later and so that has been very useful for a lot of things it's it's been a challenge especially if the internet is not working well in the house and many people have to be on at the same time it's going to take a while for teachers to find out what is the right amount of work to give so that people have something meaningful to do when they go off on their own it's a process i'd share something i took to my grandson who started kindergarten in north carolina i mean he thinks that this is the way
043school is [Music] he's really excited he thinks everyone would that's the way you go to school you win this anyway i don't know if anyone else wanna say i did because i i have no contact i can speak just from my perspective with two in um elementary school um my kids are so thrilled to be back in school they're just from a social emotional perspective and really happy my my first grader told me today she was doing her their last assignment of the day was a check-in how was your day and she said this is the best day of my life are you like maybe this is the best day of your life i don't know but um but she's just every day she says i love spending time with my teacher and my friends
044the um and everything seems to be running really smoothly at last i've been really really impressed um and i think the challenges just as a parent are the asynchronous learning the other half of the day which feels more like less spring than like remote was for the first two weeks of school and that's tricky it feels more like what last spring last spring because it's the dinner of their teachers like during the remote learning even though they were on zoom the teachers were doing an incredible job engaging the students and working together um but they're with the other half of their class in that chunk of the day so then the little ones come home and they need help working through all their things um and so that's how it it feels kind of like
045it was it was before are they engaged with specialists in when they're home are they in classes they are but it's a brief part i mean they like for the morning session the pickup is at 11 10 and they have an hour break and then the whole you know the specialist is 20 minutes or something um so there are a lot of they break the day down but it's um it's still um it's still this kids still need someone there you know the learning coach type person um to get through it which is challenging um and i also um have one of my kids also has some experience with the remote academy and that also seems to be what he's really happy um with that as well just seems i've been really impressed with the
046the work the staff has done to make this work for everyone actually uh just to follow up on that in terms of you know the best day of my life one of my friends told me that his son was hovering over the computer hitting refresh refresh refresh refresh waiting to see what color the map was going to be and just you know working out in joy i get to go to school i would like to volunteer another parent to talk about his experience also i would like to buy a volunteer another parent who has three children in school of the district uh mr bergeron what what were you looking for yes i was just hoping that you that you could describe your your three children you have have experienced the the school you can come
047over here [Laughter] that's under the bus oh you could only throw so many people all three of my kids love their teachers they love being present in school again um the kindergartner regularly on zoom starts every comment with um miss coleman i love you and uh and then you know the zoom stuff has been great um the asynchronous things actually for us i think it's all a question of finding the teacher is finding a rhythm the student's finding rhythm the family's finding a rhythm a lot of the things that they've been able to do outside lately like collecting leaves so they can then count the leaves are really nice little experiential learning things that you get to blend what you're doing outside the classroom with what you're doing in so it's been great but you
048know we're all thankful to be back in person i think it's been wonderful thank you yeah thank you for volunteering must be in the army um i've just not personal things are fine in our family and that everybody seems to be adjusting but i've in the comments i've been getting from other families in town kind of picking up on a high degree of variability um so people who it's going really much better than expected and others who seem to either their kids are having a harder time um just given the kind of disjointed nature and the transition to remote activity and being in or um you know for whatever reason is not that don't seem to have the same kind of spark or enthusiasm for school that they you know used to have and then
049just to pick up on your the theme you raised steve there's a high level of anxiety i think in the community about the going to remote metric and whether that's an appropriate metric given where there could be an isolated pocket of positive cases that actually wouldn't present a public health risk so i think that's something that we really need to keep an eye on um i think the child that you mentioned hitting refresh refresh i was joined by probably hundreds of other people in the district and adults and and you know some consternation that it didn't get posted exactly at 6 pm last night um so i um i you know i think i have some concerns about that metric and where we ended i know why we ended up where we did but um
050i i just think it's worth keeping an eye on so okay so at a previous school committee meeting i asked for permission to look at this metric and try to come up with a statistic that would more accurately reflect what the purpose of this is which namely is to get a sense of how much is covert spreading through your community and so i have sent a letter to the commissioner actually i sent it to all who passed it on to the commission of education and i have been teaching a class on mathematics of pandemics this semester and i've been working on this with my students and of course i can give you a very long complicated formula but i could also give you a really simple one that i think will address the issues we
051have right now you do not reward any community for the amount of testing that they do and one of the reasons that you should do this is if you test a hundred percent of the town and there are five cases that's very different than if you test only say 200 people and you're testing mostly the symptomatic people so one of the things is the more testing you do the more confidence you have about what's going on and the less impactful small numbers are so in the previous cycle before this week we had five people in a two week period and before that was six if instead we had had four people then we would have been grey and there would have been no concern at all and so i agree completely and this is actually
052one of the items that the education subcommittee is going to take up on our next meeting which is tuesday october 13th 3 30 pm by zoom is we're going to look at what the metric is hoping to capture what it actually does capture and what could be a solution that really does a better job of what we're trying to get at and i think we have some good proposals that we will be sharing with the state and looking forward to what they say that's great did you want to add something out of you can i just flag real quick just on uh i think that education there might be overlap between the educational subcommittee meeting and the dei meeting um just i don't know how long we're thinking that one will run but we just
053might have people wanting to switch right okay so next up on our agenda is are the subcommittee liaison reports and first up is policy which is carrie okay this is actually a suggestion from rob that we amend the um the time by which the committee receives the supporting materials for meetings it had been three business days and i think that's because we used to have school community meetings on tuesdays and so the idea was to get the packet out on a friday in order to prepare for a tuesday meeting and now that committee meetings are on thursdays it sounds like it's better for the administration to um do the what what is typical and state standard which is 48 hours so um do you want me to read the whole policy or do you want
054to just vote on the amendment um i think we can just vote on the amendment it's a such a minor okay so i'll just maybe just read that paragraph so the agenda together with supporting materials will be distributed to the school committee members no less than 48 hours prior to the meeting to permit adequate time to prepare for the meeting and i'd also say that we didn't used to have google docs in google folder so the fact that we can continue to upload things and just let the committee members know hey there's another document in your folder and is is great and the last thing i'd say is i noticed that the packet did become available on the website at the beginning of our meeting i didn't really check at the beginning but the packet
055is now available on the website where packet materials are always available at the beginning and so i think that's going to be helpful for people in the community who want to make public comment or who just want to know what it is we're talking about yeah it it's similar to the way it was when we would be in a room and have packets yeah so anyway i'll move the revision to agenda format policy b-e-d-b for approval i'll second and i have a comment okay green moves miller seconds discussion right and so just because it says you know no less than 48 hours doesn't mean we can't try to aim for more than that especially if it's going to be a long complicated packet that we need a lot of time to read and so if
056there's something that's very long it's nice to have some extra time on that especially if we know it's coming yeah okay any further discussion yeah i have a question on that it's great that the packets are being you know the links are on the on the public facing website and i just wonder if the timing of that if there's a reason it can't happen in advance of the meetings so that you know people who want to have a public comment can have seen the materials in the packet that they can become commenting on i just i don't know the kind of dynamics on that is something that's come up last year and then steven dravis raised it now recently and i you know other boards do it and it can be helpful for people who
057are looking to review the materials in advance of a meeting well in addition to distributing it to the school committee we could say that a redacted version will be posted rob do you want to speak to this because we were trying to work through this whole thought process because the way things had always happened before uh prior to the advent of online meetings and uh essentially of materials being just that the possibility of distributing materials well in advance the idea was that school committees would get a packet and then anybody who attended the meeting would pick the packet up at the meeting part of this is a description of that the school committee is the body which needs information in order to conduct its deliberations and typically what would happen is that that's why the
058school committee would get it in advance of a group i would argue that if everybody has it given the modern world we live in discussions could start long before the school community ever has an opportunity to discuss the material and what happens is that i don't know social media becomes a forum where things are discussed long before the school committee has an opportunity to open actually you know to discuss and deliberate and make a decision so one of the difficulties of of allowing not allowing of publishing the materials that you're going that the school committee is going to discuss uh well in advance is that those things can then become a part of the public discourse on social media which i don't think would be helpful to the deliver to calm reasoned deliberations by a
059school by this this deliberative body so the way we were basically trying to split this this problem how to deal with this is to be as descriptive as possible in our uh the agenda items so as to give a clear understanding of what it is that's going to be discussed and that's because otherwise i think we just run a difficult we run a danger of undermining the deliberative capacity of this body who has the responsibility of discussing these things and the responsibility for making decisions now that's my way of thinking i might be wrong but i'm just the modern world the actuation is model world the digital world gives uh basically creates a forum uh that that is that that runs way ahead of the work that has got to be done by deliberative bodies
060and i think that's a that that's a that's the difficulty we were trying uh the needle we were trying to thread in trying to figure out how best to do this and as i said in the past if we were not in a digital age which i know is a silly thing to say because that's reality as we are that everybody would have had the materials at the meeting they would never have gotten them beforehand and i i seem to think that the idea was that the school committee should have them before everybody else has them uh because i don't know why that was the way it was done but i think that uh i think the way we can address this is by being uh as as descriptive as possible in the in the
061development of the agenda so that that anybody who wants to speak about or basically wants to comment will have a clear description of what's going to be discussed that was my that was my thinking in recommending this to kerry and uh and i yeah i guess basically a way of trying to figure out how best to do this and also one other aspect is it is that uh as it was just mentioned materials are are often added documents are added right up until the uh the start of the meeting yeah and so that becomes uh you know that's and i know i i don't i'm not saying that's good i i actually as a part of our discussion we were saying is that we should have an end date of when any materials are going
062to be added to the school committee packets and uh because that's yeah i just think that's the best way to do this is that only go with what we you know go with what you got 48 hours before give it up there will be issues like this where something does come in at the last minute and it does need to be added i think it's advantageous to try to give more information to the public so that they can provide useful comments to us before we have our discussions and if you want to have that not the whole 48 hours to have you know 12 hours or six hours so that there's still some time for the public to read things and send in public comments or decide if they want to come and i would
063still give the school committee time and that would lessen the media impact that might be a nice way to balance and just see how that goes for a few meetings and as i said this was my thinking i i i am not sure that my thinking is is necessarily sound the idea that uh that we that we uh that the school committee that if we release this information it becomes part it becomes a social media conversation that's right that's just the way i'm thinking about it and i i don't know if that's the best way of thinking about it but that was the reason at least the rationale behind my suggestions yeah i think you know just i i agree with that and i think the way that um you know we've always handled the
064materials is that they're not public documents until the meeting begins right just because they're emailed to members it doesn't mean that they've become public documents and sometimes there's an issue when members forward packets to other people who aren't on the committee and then that becomes your ex you're you're sharing information that hasn't yet been discussed in the proper venue so this is intended to be the venue for conversation and it's not really a conversation between us and our constituents it's a conversation within the public body this is why we're elected it's one of the jobs we're elected to do is to deliberate on the materials of the meeting if we want to change how we go about doing our business then that should be a discussion about our protocols and our our procedures i think
065because there definitely is um a consideration for accessibility and i think that's that's the the other side of it it's like the digital age means everything we want everything accessible and we want it available now and we want it if you have it available i should have it available and that's just not how this public body has ever operated and i think there are good reasons for that but it is potentially a conversation we could have when we next review our protocols and our procedures i think that would be a conversation worth having and you know again when we were trying to decide what it would look like when people came back to school a big fear was you know will people be able to wear the masks will they keep it on and it
066turns out our fears weren't as bad you know there was a lot of fear what is it going to be like when the williams students come back i think it's worth experimenting a little bit and see what happens i think would be interesting if the montgomery lock regional school district meeting packet becomes you know trending on twitter and some of the stuff like this i'm not too worried about that i think this provides an opportunity for members of the community to make better public comments maybe provide some information that might be useful it doesn't have to be the full 48 hours but if you did you know six hours so that there is still time for people to look at before meeting that might be an experiment worth trying well if i just might comment
067i think that the process the the policy does not have anything does not speak to that right it is a procedure so i think that we could you know alter the procedure and i i was just i was just describing the procedure that we were trying to do and i think this you know alter the procedure depending upon what the school committee wants to do and i wasn't suggesting that that this idea needs to be embodied in this policy i think there's enough flexibility for however you know the administration and the board chair or the committee wants to you know do things i you know just it's just me personally i tend to on the kind of competing values thing i think i tend to just fall a little bit to the side of kind
068of engaging in more kind of transparency and with the hope that it might encourage more informed engagement when we get to public comment period so that's just all it's not something that i think is a huge issue it's just some i think something to think about okay and and one thing that um we could think about along those lines is moving public comment to layer in the media yeah that's true right so other public bodies have public after the agenda items have already been discussed so that people know what has been discussed you know that's another option how does it do you know how does that how does that work in the in the sort of hybrid well we can talk about it later but i'm just curious how you know if we were physically
069here there would be a sign-in sheet but without that it's you know yeah this digital sign-in sheet i don't know that other public bodies are meeting in person yeah right now so i've only seen it happen on zoom it's much easier so you can open up a you know raise hands q a all that kind of thing afterward it's a lot easier when we're all on zoom yeah okay i think i i'm going to support this and uh i think like everyone thinks the more information everyone has the rough we are i enjoy working with this committee i find i have to take a circuit i find that my fellow committee members come to meetings prepared i find almost invariably they all read what has to be read and they're not coming to meetings and
070not knowing that and uh i think was alexander hague secretary of state said if you knew what i knew you would agree with me so the more people know what we know the more they would agree with us okay so we have some action items that have any other further discussion on that motion all in favor thank you that motion passes okay next up um is finance do we have a finance update jamie uh no other than we um we've met met today to review warrants and also discuss agenda item 8 a um so we'll have you know some thoughts on that when we get to that but nothing until then thank you and education so we've talked a lot about i think the items just so that it's in this part of the meeting
071as well the next education subcommittee will be tuesday october 13th 3 30 pm by zoom we will be talking about in-person remote hybrid learning we will be talking about state metrics and i had one other item which i'm not sure if it quite falls in the subcommittee liaison reports so i will ask your permission and if it's not appropriate just let me know okay in previous meetings we've had representatives from the student council come and speak to us and i was just wondering if we were going to be doing that again and also might be worth expanding this and having representatives from the two elementary schools yes we definitely will start having student council reports that it's a very good point i was trying to think where to put that in the attention tonight for
072i know um i will add that to my action item because i think they haven't had their elections yet probably true but we probably could have included the um yeah i don't know how that dropped off i'll take the blame on that one no i mean there's so much stuff going on but i know you know i just find you know speaking of you're hearing voices hearing the student voices has been extremely valuable over the years and as we go through all of the stuff they're the ones who are living it with the teachers yeah for sure thank you okay next up is the business administrator update and so we'll turn it over to joe burton good evening your friendly business administrators here all right uh multi-purpose building project update and the final change order
073so good news is we've got our cfo sheet of paper in hand uh tyranny and all of their subs did an amazing job throughout covid of not just keeping their their own stuff in line but managing all the shocks to the supply chain and everything else so really i i can't thank them enough for being the calm in the middle of a literal storm they did a wonderful job we do have a final change order here change order number four which is in front of you on a sheet of paper and it got emailed out as soon as i had it today what we're looking at here if we take the the list of four items concrete curb upgrade from asphalt this is something where as the team was looking at the way the curbs
074were shaping up just being asphalt they realized that the durability of those was should really be called into question and so the the change here is to use a concrete curve gable and plywood this is in the the storage area um the insulation was being left bare which caused some concern with it it was okay by code but it was causing some concern that led people to say that they really should cover that up with plywood so if you go into the storage area when you look up to the left and right you would see plywood covering as opposed to raw insulation exterior door hold opens that was the the gang bathrooms on the back side facing the fields with those the people pretty quickly realized during construction that as you open a door there
075is no great way to keep that open and those exterior doors leading into the interior doors where the bathrooms are really should be open and remain open during an event during a time of use and then surge protection devices that's something where the line that runs between the admin building and the main building given the way it was designed initially if there was a ground lightning strike like the one that we had that hurt our water supply for a couple weeks that kind of thing could have taken out the security systems in potentially both buildings so this is an upgrade that that really seemed absolutely necessary all of this stuff is is not required by by code but it is they are things that everybody is in agreement are significant upgrades to the durability or
076viability of the building so this is a change order number four total costs twelve thousand six hundred and thirty two dollars and forty eight cents um i have it before you for review and approval um what it would do is it would take the total contract sum so that it's 2.5 percent the cumulative is impact of the four change orders over the life of the project uh 2.5 percent on the total building cost remove the change order number four for approval okay green art seconds any further discussion all in favor all right anything else on the on this building nope all right so review and approval yep i'm just hearing things great uh review and approval of capital gift related uh perkins eastman invoices in your packet you had five invoices one of them i
077just received recently it's a it's a standard course of the admin building invoice and we have it in front of you more as a formality the others are invoices that that are outstanding from prior to when i was here and they are invoices that are both per perkins eastman's contract related to both the admin building and some some of this work is related to the athletic fields initiative um so because they are you know they predate me um in discussion with the finance subcommittee we agreed that it's best to get these in front of you so that if any of you have any background knowledge any any reason that we should be questioning these you can voice that otherwise what i would suggest is i can put the total sum in front of you and
078the invoice numbers and we can move a motion to make sure these get paid as i believe we we owe them i think the finance subcommittee already made a recommendation that we approve these so they're essentially on the table already that's right yeah so the finance meeting is we work with you yeah we recommend the approval of these this is this is all work that the work had been previously approved by the committee at one time or another and um we're under contract we owe this money so what i would ask is that someone uh move a motion that the committee approves payment out of the willingness college capital gift to mount greylock of invoices numbers 15 20 22 23 and 26 totaling 75 963 dollars and 80 cents to perkins eastman do you want
079to repeat that number 75 963 dollars and 80 cents seven five nine six three eighty yes okay um i will move that we approve and pay out of the williams college gift fund invoices 15 20 22 23 and 26 from perkins eastman totaling 75 963 dollars and 80 cents okay our moves do have a second a second but could we also add a date range to that vote where the invoices are dating from when to win yes the first invoice is dated october 2019 and the final one is dated september 8th 2020. okay any further discussions i'm going to support this obviously because i recommended it and i apologize to my two colleagues because they heard this this afternoon i'll repeat it for colleagues and people that haven't heard of it when you look at
080these invoices this is an excellent example of what happens when we ask things when people say well let's do another study well let's let's have another committee and let's set another thing up that costs money and as you see what happens you see things like design they see things like uh that's paid someone has to do that work and that has to be paid for the thing that's most disturbing to me sometimes is that when you hear that from the general public it's bad enough but when you hear from town officials especially town officials that have been in office for many years make these off-handed things or let's do another thing they make it sound like it's a free it's a free opt-in is it free it costs money to do things and i think
081that this is the next example 75 000 is a lot a lot a lot of money i'm not disagreeing with anything that's there other than to point out that when you make recommendations to have things done you have to realize that that recommendation has a price to it i'll say one last thing about this i've said it many times it isn't so much the 75 000 that it cost because what happens is that that 75 000 is taken out of the out of the capital gift name meaning that over the next 10 years that money is not growing so that isn't a seventy five thousand dollar uh price tag rather what it is it's closer to a hundred and fifty 000 price there because of the value of money over the years so i just
082want to point out the fact that everything has a price and nothing is free and we have to be careful when we make recommendations about doing things because it costs money to do it so i just want to second our sentiments and it is important to do due diligence to understand what the various options are so that we can make the right decision but at some point rather than spending money on more studies let's spend money on doing things for the kids and for the district the other thing which i think is worth remembering is we are paying for a lot of things from the williams college gift fund that really should be paid for by the two towns yes and we are using the gift fund to pay for the trailers we've been using
083it to pay for the studies we've been using it to pay for the administrative multi-purpose building and there was a reason why we didn't include this in the original mount greylock renovation project but when we're trying to decide what to do with the money and trying to decide how much we want to keep in reserve and when we're trying to decide what obligations we might be giving to the taxpayers in the future the taxpayers have been relieved of a lot of obligations that they should have been paying for by using the gift to pay for these things and i think it's just important to remind people that we have been able to keep taxes low we have been able to have the building project coming at a little bit lower because we use the gift
084to pay for so many things okay any further discussion did you get a second yes as so all in favor of emotion as amended all right all right that motion passes all right anything else on that one nope great so fy21 update uh two weeks ago on the expense side you got a a very detailed update as to where where we were headed um that is the only shock to the shock to the budget so far for fy21 on the revenue side um as we've covered earlier in this fiscal year chapter 70 was coming in level funded chapter 71 and circuit breaker are still to be determined the state has indicated some some ways that they're trying to roll forward with it but but there are no promises yet so those are two pretty significant
085sources of revenue for us that we don't have locked in numbers for yet for this fiscal year i am looking forward to being able to take a deep breath now that school actually is opening and trying to get into a better rhythm with respect to reporting how things are going in in this fiscal year um i also need to finish closing out the last fiscal year which is something that i breathe a deep deep deep sigh of relief a week and a half ago when the state said that they were pushing all of these reports out by a couple weeks for everybody so i i didn't i didn't have as much of a fear as i as i did going in towards october 1st about the end of year report and certifying ent so big
086thanks to the state there for giving giving us all a break or a brief uh breath any specific questions though on fy21 right now so um so that we have two more weeks to close out the year and certify the end we have at least two more weeks and i do think that i will be asking for an extension part of that is uh i think that all of the hardship that other districts have experienced i think we've got a little bit more even to to fall back on as far as reasons that we might need a little bit more time to get that done so i will be putting that in probably tomorrow or monday to try to give myself a little bit more time my other question has to do with enrollment is
087that still an october 1st enrollment that we send to the state i'm actually not sure that that would be a rob winook question and i'm not sure whether or not those deadlines were pushed up the october one enrollment figures i can't answer that off the top of my head okay i don't see any other questions all right next up on our agenda is phase two fields project discussion and next steps um carrie do you want to speak to this item i can start um so this was put on the agenda originally with a potential vote or a possible vote which was a surprise to me um it's no longer on the agenda with a vote because i asked if we could maybe have a special meeting to discuss this but it got me thinking you
088know it sounds like there might be members of the committee that want to take a vote on this and i thought we should talk about it as a committee um is this something that we think we should do um and i'm trying i've been trying to see sort of both sides of it so i thought maybe we could kind of do the pros and cons thing and i also am wondering what a vote might look like like what would we be voting on if we were to vote so i can think of you know the the last document that we have which actually joe had never seen and i had never seen and i don't know that the committee had ever seen it i did forward it to jamie to see if if jamie had
089ever seen it was a value engineering that traverse landscape architects had done on september 26 2020 but i don't think it ever came to the committee so the last vote that was taken was on the um you know on the on the project which included the synthetic turf it went out to bid the bids came in too high and then there was um there was discussion of having some value engineering done which is what this this addendum was essentially or what the what the ve report was and there was discussion of doing some other things like having a community forum or gathering more information so um i've been thinking you know some reasons to take a vote either whether it's tonight or next week you know or this month i can think of three reasons
090one would be so that current school committee members can document their support or la or support for the phase 2 proposal with the value engineering prior to the turnover of the committee in november a second reason would be to stay on track with the april 2022 deadline on ada and title ix compliance we can apply for a waiver a second waiver as we approach our own you know the deadline that we have and joe has checked in with it i forget who you checked in with but there seems to be some indication that given covid waivers are are not as much of an issue as they might be um you know i had asked dan colley of perkins eastman what the process would be and he said that it's likely given the given given the
091pandemic that that would be issued but there are no promises and we can't uh call them well like we can't call them right now and say hey can we get a waiver it would need to be closer to the deadline which yes so a waiver extension i just i've got a lot to get through alex do you mind if i is that okay okay so a waiver is possible perhaps likely not guaranteed and we already have a waiver so the waiver that we're operating on right now is april 2022 which means if we were to meet that deadline we would really want to send things out to bid in december or january and get the work done so that's number two number three to provide an additional and potentially year-round field for use by the
092mount greylock teams the pe classes and community organizations during covet when there are perhaps more reasons to be spending time outdoors in open spaces so those are the reasons that i came up with based on conversations that i've had with people who've been working on this for much longer than i have been looking into it there are probably other reasons as well i also considered a number of reasons to s to postpone a vote or to not support a vote for the phase 2 proposal which includes the synthetic turf field and the main reason being that there are a number of members of the community that feel that the phase ii subcommittee and the school committee have not adequately addressed the concerns that have been raised the first level of concern is regarding process we
093heard from stephanie around some issues with process earlier this evening we did make or the previous chair made a commitment to gather more information but then that chair resigned we did talk or prior to my coming on there was talk of holding a public forum but then we had covid right i actually suggested and the finance committee approved forming an advisory committee but then the superintendent left and the business administrator left and we had reopening to deal with so there are very good reasons why we've not been making progress on doing some of the things we've talked about doing but here we are it's you know we're coming up on this this deadline where we really should be getting things done another issue is that the documentation and the process for phase two um is
094a little bit problematic so um we there has been a call for a current needs assessment for athletics and pe we've done some looking and the most i've been able to find is some indication that we should do but have not yet done a formal evaluation of a needs assessment there certainly has been discussion of what our needs are but if you were to point to a document these are the this is the needs assessment for mount greylock sports teams and npe there is no such document and that's problematic for people who need for us to justify why we think we want to spend upwards of two two and a half million on a project that includes synthetic turf we need to be able to justify that need there are certain milestones in the decision
095making process for which there is no formal documentation my guess is if we had hired an opm and had somebody professional sort of moving us through this process all of these we'd be able to go back and point to all these things but as as a result we're not we we can't and it leaves people wondering well why was that decision made where's the documentation i want to see how how we got to make this myth this choice as opposed to that choice um so we're left with this question was the subcommittee process exhaustive inclusive was it broad enough in its representation these are the questions that are coming up and it's important for us to decide how important it is for us to be able to answer those in a way that is satisfactory
096to people so does the school committee have an obligation to adequately vet this project publicly prior to voting i would say a lot of people would say well absolutely yes and a lot of people would say we've done the work right i would say we've done the work yes we we've we've talked enough and let's get this done so that brings me to the question of a decision-making rationale um al has talked quite eloquently in recently in the finance subcommittee meetings about how our focus should be on playability that this is not an issue of cost it's it we should not be um holding ourselves back because we need to figure out you know how we're going to pay to replace a turf field the issue is playability and if we all agree that the
097issue is playability then a turf field is a no-brainer if if we all agree that the issue is playability because there is no better solution to the problem of playability than a synthetic turf field but should the issue of playability outweigh concerns around long-term costs around the environmental implications around the health and safety of synthetic turf versus natural grass um you know and and again this is something that perhaps is not as well documented as how the focus became about playability as opposed to these other concerns so you know this this does not um provide me with any kind of solution here it leaves me with the question of what what should our next steps be right should we track down the existing documents um more existing documents that have not been previously shared with
098the committee or the community because my sense is that there are sort of a period of correspondence where some documentation came in but then everything kind of stopped and i think this was like last september well yeah about a year ago right where there's light like the the value engineering right it's just kind of sitting there in someone's email and it never went any further there's some documentation that we need to look at if we're going to make a decision based on numbers but those numbers are a year old already so there may be more documents to track down we need to organize well sorry not we need to we could be organizing the documentation in a manner that is comprehensive and cohesive so that you we can point to it and say here's when
099this decision was made and here's how here's the conversation that went on around finding this solution as opposed to that solution um we can determine what new information is needed if any and i know that this argument has been called a delaying tactic i've heard this several times from several people anybody who calls for new information is just wanting to delay the project and i i don't think that's true i think that there are people who really want us to look at different ways to get numbers around grass fields for instance and i think that's fine but i think the issue on the table is do we want to pursue this phase 2 proposal and if so do we want to do it now as opposed to waiting and making sure that we're actually we
100have all the information that we need we need to determine whether or not to hold this public forum that we said we would hold in march you know is that to the benefit and i know that people who have worked on phase two don't feel the need for another public forum right we've we've heard all of the comments we've heard all of the feedback we've heard you know but we've said multiple times that we want to hear from the community we want to hear what the concerns are we want to make sure that everyone's voice is heard and that everything has been well vetted so that's kind of where i leave it i i'm really i i would like to know from the members of the committee who want us to take this vote whether
101any of these other things kind of sway or outweigh the need to take the vote now meaning october as opposed to waiting until we have you know a new superintendent and not waiting until but that would be the result we would be if we don't take the vote in october we will have a new superintendent we will have at least four new school committee members potentially five right and someone's gonna have to take this up i mean if so that's kind of that's how i see where we are and that's just my voice so i'm gonna stop there no thank you i mean my feeling right now uh speaking as an individual on the on the committee is that we need an organized and concise document that we can an organized and concise document that
102we can point to whether that is a series of documents that as you described says this is the documentation this is why we made these decisions this is why we went forward here's all the information what's missing and i almost think we did promise a forum to the public we did promise that we haven't done that there as you pointed out there are various reasons why that hasn't happened and i do think that's unfortunate we were also supposed to be compiling this this documentation so that we could as a as an entire committee make a decision that was informed and have this document and say this is why we made this we made this decision i'm sitting here right now saying i haven't seen that document it hasn't been created i i would be uncomfortable
103making a decision right now i would like to personally get you know i i know you feel like you can vote i know you feel you can vote and other people feel that way but what i would like is to see that documentation so i can feel that we're making a responsible choice because it's a it's a big choice and it involves a lot of pieces and i just want all of those pieces to be in order so that you know i can state what my opinion is and feel that i've made an informed decision just to clarify that so are you is there something specific you feel is missing that you want or you just want something that packages what we've talked about i think there are pieces missing and i think there should
104be something that packages all the things that we're talking about because it is it is a giant financial commitment down the line i mean we're taking money from one thing that we can afford a certain amount right now but then it's going to have a financial implication further on down the line and i just want to see how that's played that out how we got to i still don't i've been sitting here for two years i still don't know how we got to the pure focus of artificial turf versus exploring some of the other options and maybe they were explored we just haven't seen that documentation so it's just those pieces and i think if we have that kind of documentation for the public for the constituents who are you know wanting to to provide
105their feedback on what's going on if we had that documentation would make everyone feel better that they they were a part of the decision because we have we have explored everything don't we have this though i feel like we have it it's just in minutes and bits and places over the past however many years we have it send it to me well again if it's in bits and pieces it's not in a comprehensive document that we can point to and say here's the trajectory here is the conversation here is the the the journey of how we went from point a to point b we need to be able to you know point to a you know any project manager would have created a binder of all of the documentation all the minutes all the decisions
106all the votes and that just doesn't seem to have been done we have a powerpoint that was presented in you know 2017 and another one in 2019 i think that would be really good for us to have but i would also argue that at least i don't feel like i need that before i vote um because i think that we all have that information and it'd be really good to be able to provide kind of a very short summary the pros and cons and how we ended up where we did and the timeline but i don't think i need that to vote and i think that you're the reasons you laid out for reasons to vote i think are very compelling and i'm not as compelled as the reasons for postponing i think um one
107thing that we um we don't really talk about also is that we currently have fields that are or the field is not only not really playable but it's not in compliance like it's not sufficiently accessible it's not compliance with title ix it's kind of unfair um to to the students i think that's a point that jamie made in the finance committee meeting when we last talked about this was that yeah your level of comfort i'm not comfortable with i don't think it sends the right message and i'm personally uncomfortable with saying we can push off the accessibility upgrades code requirements and the title ix compliance requirements that's not to say that there's probably not a way to get into compliance with those regulations that's a much smaller project with a much smaller budget right the
108accessibility ones really is accessible surfaces maybe some accessible parking or drop off areas and and bleacher improvements or bleacher removal right like that's um that's that and the and the title nine is comparable facilities for um boys sports and girl sports so we're really comparing softball and baseball and the baseball field is not such an elaborate infrastructure that it's it seems to be a much smaller project to do that so i i think it's really important for us to try personally to try to get into compliance by that deadline it seems eminently feasible it's still a year and a half out and it's not a huge project um it sounds like you would advocate doing that i would i would definitely say that that's something that we should try to to hit that target my
109my personal question right now i have a few of them but the most immediate one is to pick up on you know what does the vote look like like and do we do we have even have a project that would be ready to go out to bid right and what does that look like and i don't i don't know the answer to that you know i haven't seen the plans um for that at least not in the last you know nine months or so so i don't know when there's a problem the phase two committee went back and did some value engineering whether those resulted in plans or not no i think that documents so so we don't really it's not like we're even at a point at the moment that i see it that
110there's something to a project to approve seems like we could indicate which direction people feel comfortable or more comfortable heading but i don't think we have even as i understand it something that we can approve we can't prove something else that we have a quote attached to it you know that's right some other questions that i think a forum or a meeting of you know subsequent meeting would be helpful to address i still don't feel like we have an answer on um life cycle costs i mean i think there's some data in the spreadsheet that you pulled together carrie that was really helpful i think in much better numbers or estimates ball for ballpark figures than had been presented back in the fall of or this the early summer of 2019 there were some i
111think really poor numbers that were thrown up on a powerpoint um poor being like didn't add nothing was adding up to me but i think the more recent data that you had pulled together with more recent estimates um seemed much more realistic to me so what what i tried to oh sorry first of all so hard let's talk first of all about a waiver just in case everyone know we've already asked for a waiver so we're asking for a waiver on top of a waiver okay now if you're not disabled and if you're not a female doesn't matter we can just ask for another waiver because it doesn't impact you but the bottom line is is that we should have ada and we should have title ix done by now we just keep kicking the
112can down the road and like i say if you're not disabled it doesn't matter to you if you're not a female it doesn't matter we just ask for another and joe's ready they'll grant us another waiver so we're now going to uh 2023 is that when if we ask for another wave but that's when we have to have it done i don't think anybody at the table i know i understand when people say that when people say well you know i'm not saying anyone here when people make statements like that let's ask for a waiver they have to understand what that means that means that a certain population is not going to be serviced that's what that means it doesn't mean otherwise it means that that's what meant the other thing about this forum thing
113i don't remember in march anyone making a motion and that was voted that we were going to have a second forum i may be wrong i think i'd go to prenatural meetings no it was james it was in january when dan was chair he talked about having a forum yes thank you individual people on their own certain certain including the former superintendent and former uh chairs of this committee acted separate from the committee and they did things and then said the committee did this well we didn't do that a matter of fact the first forum was decided by the the that sitting chair and this and then that acting superintendent that was never voted on by the committee it was done on then and and okay just so you get the history of what's going
114on right why do i sometimes do this get down the road we want to know more information we went through a whole big thing about remember we we we put written questions towards our consultant remember that the consultant replied and written questions we had a big deal about that and what did what did the chair of the committee do nothing we never discussed those questions that was going to be the turning point of decision making that we were going to ask these questions in writing we're going to get answers in writing and then we're going to decide we did all that the chair did not take it died then then the committee said well what do you mean now i'll tell you what we need we need a good assessment thank god i don't even
115know who john dupri is i know he's a professional engineer i know he's part of the superintendent's advisory committee a professional engineer does a course analysis presented to this committee the chair of the committee guided it it never went further we never discussed it we never wouldn't do anything wrong so the idea that we're not doing these things it's just incorrect and people started talking about then we made the phase two committee when i was on it has since changed then the phase two committee said listen we're not gonna pick the chrome rubber you know we're gonna do we're going to put brockville in it's not it doesn't have any toxicity to it it it it it was great we thought that was a great compromise people were still talking like we're talking about putting
116in astral turf we're talking about putting in brock film that has nothing to do with it and it goes on and goes on and goes on and goes on then we got we changed the subcommittee we had another face through accomplish subcommittee that face up to the subcommittee never even met the chair of the committee never called the meeting of the second phase to a subcommittee then we decided well we're not doing that why don't we and i'm just telling you what the history of the whole thing is and why i sometimes feel that we know they keep kicking the forum down the road then we had an advisory committee formed in which you were chosen carried through so headed up so when i hear people say to miss we haven't done anything i said
117yes we have everything that was asked to do we have done i i can go up there i don't want to involve forever but this is not only a school project this is a community resource this is something that the whole community benefits from not just the students at this building and we saw with the williamstown soccer club over 100 students they are our students they're going to be here so the idea that that is controversial that isn't true and we have made gigantic what does this sound like you know what does this negotiation sound like we keep making uh uh concessions and the other side keeps moving and keep moving does that sound like something in the in the very present day that we have gone through without exactly what the proponent of opponents
118of that of artificial turfism they keep moving the goalposts every time we make a concession it this to me is an absolute no-brainer and if you want to talk about money i'll be happy to talk about how we can spend it if you want to talk about how we can how are we happy to do that and that's not me it's been on the boards for literally months and the idea that we're hiding this well i don't know what you want to do i think we should start digging a hole tomorrow that's my personal opinion that's where i'm coming from and i got you want that little documentation and i want to stephen do you mind if i just remind al that he i thought al made a very good point about the long-term financing
119again in the finance committee meeting which is if we know what the cost for replacement is we either put the money aside ourselves or we ask the towns to put the money aside and we just say hey in 10 years we're going to need x amount of dollars to replace the thing so let's make sure we do that so yeah i think that's a that's a valid argument so it may not be the intent to delay but that is definitely the effect and it's time for us to step up i i think unfortunately we have had a failure of leadership on this committee for months now and i thank stephanie boyd for highlighting the issues and bringing this to our attention in terms of what we said we were going to do i thought the
120objective when we talked in june was to be able to have a vote in october that we would have everything assembled we are doing far more for this than we did for the administrative multi-purpose building i think that's great i think we're doing due diligence but i think the due diligence has been done and i'd like to make some concrete suggestions so that we can have a vote so that we don't have to did you say you have something can wait okay um so that we don't have to reset the clock again this has been going on for four years the gift from williams college was not meant to relieve the taxpayers of the two towns from the expenses that they should be doing it was meant to be a gift for the district to
121do wonderful things to provide wonderful opportunities so far we've used it for administrative multi-purpose building we've used it for a trailer we've used it for paying for studies it's time to use it for something for the children i'm not sure who is chia phase 2 right now i am happy to step up and be chair of phase 2 to reconvene it and to get documents ready for a meeting so that we can have a specific detailed vote i am happy to receive comments from members of the community and members of the committee as to what do you need so that you will be able to make a vote the proposals have been changed from what they were originally taking into account the feedback from people what is going to happen unfortunately is that this is
122an issue where the town and the committee are not going to be a hundred percent in favor and this happens on issues and we can try as much as we can to find common ground but at the end of the day there is going to be a difference of opinion as to what to be done and it is our job as elected officials to take the vote it is not the job of future committees we have been looking at this for years we are the ones who have been reading the material who have been studying it who have been listening i remember dan made a remark at a previous school committee meeting that this is the only time he can think of when a unanimous report of a subcommittee was not adopted when we have
123had a people filled with listening to members of the community when we had phase two committee meetings members of the public were allowed to speak up at any time and their input was taken into consideration if we need to have another forum so that people can express concerns and express comments before we have a vote i am fine to do that but we owe it to our community to have the vote now in october that is what we said we were going to be doing back in june when we postponed things you know the other thing to just really remark is as has been mentioned the best thing we can do right now for our children is to give them opportunities to be outside when you look at how covet affects indoors versus outdoors when
124you look at the social emotional one of the best things you can do students were so excited even when school was remote that they were at least able to go to practice at mount greylock it is i think almost criminal for us not to do our duty and have the vote while we are the committee we have been looking at this for years we've been following the stuff we asked for additional documentation if we need more let's assemble the facts everybody put in what you need and i am happy to work with people to make sure we have that information so that we can have a vote i have a quick comment um i understand where you're coming from steve i just want to push back on the idea that there's been a failure of
125leadership or that somehow we have been negligent and not advancing the phase 2 project between june and october i just went through i've been keeping minutes at all our meetings i went through and i counted somewhere between 2030 meetings that we've had in the months of june july august and the beginning of you know september and we have had an incredible workload going through leadership changes and figuring out how to reopen the school in that time period so i don't i understand your impatience um and where you're coming from and the desire to get this done on a schedule that we set at a different time when we're having different circumstances but i will also say that i think it's totally understandable given the bigger picture that where we where we are where we are
126today with still some open questions and the fact of the matter is i don't think it makes sense to beat ourselves up over how we spent the last six months or eight months or nine months on this project we have had much much bigger priorities as a district and i think we did the responsible thing in allocating our scarce time and resources between them and now so the question really is how we go forward in a sensible way but not going forward just to get shovels in the ground tomorrow just because that feels like that's the schedule we agreed upon months ago when things were different can i just make a quick comment if it had started in june i could understand that more but this goes back to genuine goes back before then in
127terms of just how long it's been and if we've been having trouble getting things done because i agree getting the school year starting as a higher priority but if people were having trouble getting the information necessary we could have said we need some help or we could have reached out so that we could have the material assembled now and i think that's where we had the failure that when we see that as october is coming we're not going to be prepared for this meeting to then say well what do we need to get that done because this has been discussed for quite a long time it's been discussed before we went into the new normal and that's why i'm saying i am happy to step up and i'm happy to work with anyone members of
128the community members of the committee and find out what information do we need so we can make a vote i'm trying to close seven i disagree that we should have another form i couldn't hear your help i disagree that we should have another forum because kind of hear the same thing from the same six people who say instead of thanking over and over again and i want to finish yourself but they keep moving the goal both sides the people that are in favor of some kind of artificial field have made great concessions i made great concessions because i think it's best for the clown and i want to say something that when we talk about it being controversial i don't know what that means all i know is that our present athletic director our previous
129athletic director who we named the field esther both strongly recommend artificial turf or our coaches or the coaches that wrote to us not one coach didn't recommend artificial coach uh teaching staff you know brian gill when people say we wanted to brian gill got up twice and made an outstanding discussion talked about sections talk about how many students there are talked about how many classes there are fulfill i don't know what else more you want for documentation i mean we're tan this individual who has great respect in the community that's up to outlines line by line the number of classes etc and it goes on and goes on i personally have talked to uh i have talked to other course cultures i've taught officials i've talked to soccer officials and they have said the same
130thing it seems anyone that's involved in athletics and involved with children in sports are in favor of some type of artificial uh three years ago maybe someone on on this committee we're here we spent 55 000 i'll say it again 55 000 renovating john allen field that really isn't the number because it it went into two fiscal years the military john allen field is probably 65 to 70 000 renovating john allen field okay this committee and i agree i put i also got another thirty thousand dollars to do this present field projects that we're doing now so we're going to spend a hundred thousand dollars and we can't play soccer i i don't know i just want to tell you i i don't know the numbers are still the numbers are still so blaringly in
131favor of that it's just a hundred thousand dollars and we can't use the field um so i think in terms of looking at how do we go forward with and when do we go forward with the vote i mean the reality is that now it's october as jamie said we need to figure out the most sensible way of moving forward and to me it really comes down to a question of do we want this the current committee to vote on this vote on the way forward or do we want to take more time to engage the community more and i don't think we can do both i would argue that i mean i think we have when i joined the committee two years ago this was already in the works and um aside from the
132community engagement and information gathering we have not moved very far forward i think it's going to be very detrimental to this process to put this decision on a new committee where there may only be i mean worst case two people moving over from the current committee to a new committee there are other really important things for the committee to address moving forward that i would hate to i'd hate to take the time away from from that the community engagement that we have had over the past year in particular um year and a half has been great and really appreciated and i think really helped um i mean speaking for myself helped me think through all of the different issues and what's important um to to al's point on concessions i'd argue that they weren't concessions
133made there are improvements i think the shift from chrome rubber to brockville is huge and i think i think we've been able to mitigate a lot if not all of the concerns i'll say a lot of the concerns at least to a great extent that were raised and it would be good for us to clearly lay that out in some sort of document i don't know that we need that before we vote necessarily in writing but the shift to brockville the discussions on on finance the discussions on how we can set aside some funds so that when it's time to replace 10 15 years down the road we're in good shape i think that the engagement we've had today has been really helpful but when it comes down to it i don't know that we're
134going to hear anything that we haven't heard or that we haven't considered and we would then be in a position where we've helped the community feel better about the decision but the decisions the the processes as being um it's being tampered with in in doing so and i don't think it gets us to the best result so i would i would strongly advocate that we we send this forward as our current committee i would agree with that and as you know jamie was saying about all the pressing issues we have it would be good to have this issue resolved and i think we have the ability to resolve it while listening to all the voices and making an informed decision and then it would be in our best interest to do that and not to
135have to almost reset the process again with the new committee and getting a new committee up to speed this is our responsibility and whatever information we need let's get it so i have a question what does that what does the vote look like well one thing we can not tonight i'm just saying like but what are we building towards to resolve this issue if we're going to try to resolve it before there's a turnover in the question is do we talk about what that looks like or do we talk about if we have a special session and we've you know we've set aside time and we've discovered when we can all meet including um the incoming superintendent who i think you know would be valuable to listen in on the conversation because whatever we do
136vote on that's something that the new superintendent has to carry out um do we talk about what information we absolutely need gathered if we can have it done by the time we've said we've set aside do we need to know what that vote looks like to have that discussion i don't know well we've we've sent something out to bid in the past so we've actually been able to do this before and i would say let's use that as a starting point and let's get something on the table for that meeting that i think is going to be october 16th at 12 to 2 i think that was the time the one time that worked for everybody so the i think what you want to do is go back to traverse and say um give us
137a plan i mean again it's going to cost money but we're going to want the plans to put out to bid based on the value engineering that was done assuming that no one else wants to look at the value engineering and see that it actually makes sense i mean that's another question it's not been vetted by this committee or phase two it's a if it went in an email actually might have gone to the phase two committee i don't know i think it just went underneath there there was one meeting at least where they talked about they're all beginning to blur and when together because there's been so many right there we were talking about if we add this if we remove that what order do we want to do things on because they have
138to be taken in a certain order right so so i would suggest and i would love to hear if joe has anything that he can add to this because joe is is going to be a great partner in this but he has limited time right and he has potentially has access to some of these documents but maybe not all of them but he also has history with this and he was here on the committee before you know the the public presentation was made but has some you have some perspective to add to this as well i think i don't know if you have anything you want to add to the conversation but um you know now i'm serving the will of the committee and trying to figure out what the what the will is um
139i think i've heard calls for organizing all of the information that already exists so reaching out to everybody who's previously supplied information and getting it into some kind of palatable format in terms of the the plan that went out to bid last september and the subsequent value engineering options did any of you in a committee setting review those value engineering options that are any provided and then prioritize or make recommendations on them which which which value engineering are you talking about that was done by who so uh art eddie yes had um in september after yes yes the bids came back and we went through and went through all the options including we talked about talked about the track we talked we did all that and we talked about the order the order we said
140we're missing this and this and this and even when we had the meeting if you remember i can't remember the name of the gentleman that stood up and he and we came in like a 2.8 and then was from who wanted to do the fields for us and he says and he said i can get this down to 2004. you know 2.4 if and i shut down we can get this down to 254. he said that standing where you're standing right now joe he made that statement and that was completely ignored by this committee so just to make sure those were things like eliminating the under drain system for the softball we went through all that stuff eliminating the warning track yes you know i'm going to take some auditing and and we're on to
141committee we asked him dozens and i mean dozens and dozens and dozens of questions and he answered every one of them and i want to tell you the people around the committee joe there was eight people on the committee if i was to do whatever they were the talent that was on that committee there were people not only phds in education in mathematics but there were business people on that committee there were people on finance community so it wasn't a fly-by-night committee and we asked eddie and i i can't think of like dozens of questions and we went over that report with them and then later we went when they said well how much of course that's when john dufress came in we thought it was all done john came in and gave us some
142value engineering a professional engineer came in and listened he listed how much the course was per hour use think about that how much it costs if you use the field i mean he did what a professional engineer does for someone who has a brother and a father and an engineer i know what that's like so okay yeah i don't know what else to tell you though yeah it's two points that might help the discussion in terms of some things that have been said before john's report was extremely valuable to me in terms of trying to come to a decision as to what is best because it's not just about cost it's about playable hours yeah to give a sports analogy if you could have the best player in the league versus a pretty good player
143you would take the best player until you hear that you can only have the best player for five minutes it doesn't matter if it's a better alternative if you only have it for five minutes it's not adding that much value when you look at what's going on right now when you look at how important playability is playable hours we heard earlier this year that if we had a turf field we could have had more of a soccer season right now the other big concern we had was what would happen to the williams endowment and we were quite concerned as to you know would we still have the money for this after the administrative multi-purpose and you're fortunately the stock market has not really fallen it's and so i think we're in really good shape to
144be able to do this i think we can collect the information we need and i would like to suggest to the committee that that is what we do yeah i would be in favor of the finish saying okay the 16th is that our number is that our day and that not not we all go home we'll take a deep breath myself included and come and come ready on the 16th ready to vote and vote even if we don't do anything at least we could say okay we're in favor of either a b or c okay we don't have to dig a hole in the 17. i'll consent agree to that but we we make it the vote a b or c whatever our option is okay and it's over and if we want to start
145and we want to start the project but if our daddy can come back says we can start the project in december we'll start in december if he says it we'll start it in march we'll start it in march but at least it's finished and then we can move on we know what we're going to do we're going to do option whatever option we chose we use artificial artificially for or organic fields or or engineered grass what was the other one joe engineered grass or something yeah you could choose a field like a little bitty option allen you could have an idea or an engineered yeah we make a decision and then we move forward well it sounds like you're you're saying we shouldn't just vote yay rna on the phase ii recommendation value-engineered with rockfill
146but we should look at the you know just a we should choose just ada bringing it into compliance that's option one option two is a grass field option three is engineered grass field option four is artificial turf yeah we're saying we should look we come right in the 16 okay because then you're not voting on a specific project that you're sending out a bid you're voting on a direction to work with you for the people who who i i'm convinced what to do i'm trying to give options to people who are wrong i'm saying okay you have six days to think about this okay if you don't want to put in the brockville if you think that that's inappropriate okay then what's your option and then we should then we discuss that in front of
147the superintendent in front of jail and we make a decision we make a vote i'm going to vote for brock phil i'm telling you right now okay but i'm willing to listen to whatever anyone has to say in relation to a reasonable explanation on why we should plan plant grass on the field i'm going to listen to that so again i'm similar to that i'm willing to listen to things again you know to have everything all in one place to put the packet up there and let the community see the packet before the meeting so that people can come prepared but i think we should be a little bit more explicit that this is not just indicated direction i think we should be deciding at this meeting what are we going to do are we
148going forward with an artificial terp yay or not are we going forward with natural grass if not and so on and so on we should have a definitive end this has been going on for four or five years on october 16th we're going to make we're going to make a decision and i am happy so i don't know do we have a chair of the phase two subcommittee right now i think the phase to sub kenny was the finance committee yeah so what was important on that was that the dan was the phase two subcommittee the last time there was a phase two committee and then when he stepped down it ended up going to the finance committee what i'm seeing i just wanna just just so that's what that just on the idea about
149like how the vote is is framed or what we're actually deciding at the next meeting you don't actually have a project until there are plans that go out to bid and we get bids back and we accept a bidder and a proposal so just like in both of the the phase one and the initial bids came in too high and then had to be re-bid and then in the phase two the initial bids came in and there wasn't one that was acceptable to the entire committee and so we can kind of indicate a direction to head in the next meeting but that does not mean that there's a project that's been approved right this is all needs to go forward through the whole procurement process right but we but we could approve sending a proposal
150out to be bid okay and then if it comes in at the level we approval less then we go forward with it if if if we have plans for that i don't think we've seen those if they exist i have not seen that so i guess that what we're hearing is that the value engineering list was approved by the phase 2 committee so what i would recommend is that we go back to traverse and ask art eddie if he can provide for us plans that can go out to bid based on the value engineering list and the brock fill component because those are the two things that were significantly altered from the original phase ii proposal well i thought barkfield was in the phase two proposal it wasn't a phase two for four no not
151that one was the original i thought the one that went out to me not the one out the lid okay the last i think the last and i may have there were so many meetings on this and stuff but i thought there was a meeting where there was a vote that says when we go back out to bed we're gonna have we're going to do bidding with the base project being code upgrades to the softball baseball fields and then have alternates for a grass field of some sort have alternates for an artificial turf field of some sort and have alternate for a track um i don't know if that vote is still alive but that was the last the last i think vote that we took on what we should go out to bid with
152um obviously we're not in a position where we have all those plans developed to go out to bed but i think the theory behind that motion was an attempt to demonstrate to the community that we had actually gotten some sort of cost comparison for the different ways that this project could unfold now there may be other ways that we can give a cost comparison not with the same level of accuracy as going out to bid but you know in the last whenever it wasn't it was in june or over this in the spring at some point kerry you pulled together the spreadsheet that had more kind of current data on on what the the kind of cost of the different options would be i think it would be helpful before we take any vote on
153which direction to go to actually talk through those those those types of numbers in the in a school committee meeting so the public can hear and understand what the different the financial implications of the different approaches are and then we can revisit how we how the project unfolds with the bidding but i'm not sure what you're asking on october 16th okay are we going to work out of the meeting knowing what type of a facility we're going to have at memphis or we're going to say well let's wait another three months for another three years what are we what are we saying i guess i don't know what you're saying here i'm saying that on october 16th we're not going to have a project to approve because we're not going to have we're not going
154to have a bid from a contractor to say i will build you this one but that never happens what always happens is that when any project comes up i don't care what it is we rely on our consultant who gives us in their best judgment what the project should cost okay and then it goes out to bid this has happened in phase one and sometimes they come in higher sometimes and so so if the object is that we're never gonna wait to make a decision until we get in the bid then we'll be sitting i won't be sitting here but there'll be a committee sitting here six months from now and they have an exact same conversation we're having right now on the 16th and i don't care what the number is i don't care
155if it's 2.4 million dollars or 2.8 million dollars okay we have the money we should go forth with it we should make a decision it's the best thing for the school and it's the best thing for the community period and that we're never going to convince a certain portion of any population that we should have anything but what they want and there's nothing and we that's one of the reasons why dan resigned because of his of trying to to negotiate with people that were not negotiable so they said that's the end of that thing that's what it is because that argument goes both ways right well are we listening to well we did but you don't you know but but we had the face took me didn't make it go go in good good physical
156one with good faith thing we i don't want to repeat ourselves again yeah we realized you know what i said the rock filled decision was that was a gigantic decision and that that eliminated the injury it examinated so you're trying to say something doesn't negotiate in good faith there's not there's not a fair estimate of what the phase two committee did for for almost three and a half years uh al so i think at the meeting we should bring this up and we should provide you know documentation provide timelines you know provide evidence as to what has been done and one of the points kerry made earlier is a lot of it comes down to what is your priority if playability is your priority then as she said it's a no-brainer and so we need
157to have this discussion amongst ourselves the way i'm viewing the meeting on the 16th is that we will have a conversation and that we will potentially approve sending out to bid a project we won't be able to approve you know a project because we won't have the numbers yet but that the goal is that we will task a project to be bid is that a correct way to interpret the will of the committee that that's the goal we're looking for for the 16th to reach a decision if possible i think it's the will of half the committee where would you put yourself carrie that if we're if we're able to reach a decision on getting something out to bid is that a worthy goal for the 16th i think it's awfully ambitious well i i
158do feel if we had been if we had kept this at a higher burn level that we would not be suppressed for time and that's why i am willing to step up as much as necessary in the next week and work with members to get the information we need so that everybody from the committee says what do you you know just let us know what do you need to be able to make an informed decision i think that should be our goal and if we can provide those answers then we should be able to send something out to bid we've sent something else a bit in the past so we have a template we've done the value engineering the information is there so that only works if you if what you want to send out
159to bid is what we had before with substitute with brockfill because we don't have plans for the other parts of that so um that's a fine objective if what you're in your mind what you think is the best path forward is to go rebid a synthetic turf field ultimately the decision is going to be made about whether you're going to do that project by a new school committee that's not going to be the decision that's made by this collection of people because if the the number the numbers won't come in until long after a new school committee is in place so there's a there's a there's a first question about whether it makes sense for this committee to go through this process and then have the new makeup be faced with a project that might
160not be their project might not be what they want i'll say one last thing went up i'll give you last week we were talking with steve and steve was adamant about what we should do about uh in person and and they presented his case and we talked about it and talked about it i even said to steve says steve you don't have the votes and he conceded with that and we went on to our situation okay and and that was what it is and then he said at the end of the meeting he said we disagree but the committee as a whole so i'll support the committee that was kind of my feeling tell you the truth about the seals i thought that all this stuff is a lot of white great noise and i
161was kind of conceited to the fact that well i'm not going to get the brockville i was on a committee i've gone to community across we built a new high school we got regionalization those are my two major goals the fields is like cherry on on sunday so he was kind of accepted that that was the evality it was obvious that that the former superintendent was not in favor of the field it was it was obvious that the former a former uh had a school committee chair was not saving the fields and i just accepted that said well you know my grandchildren live in california and north carolina they're not going to use the field and i was ready to go on with my life on that it would it was something that happens and
162now it has come up again well if it's coming up again then i want to discuss it again but i was willing to accept whatever you wanted to do if you want to have organic fields or grass fields that's the committee's choice fine but we should decide it should be all it should be our decision we have worked in this long enough odd decision and whatever it is whatever size you're on you say okay and you move forward that's that's what i think we should do in the 16th and it will be over which that's my feeling we have a unanimous recommendation from a committee that had been looking at this for a long time that had listened to public input that had changed its proposal based on public input and so i i would
163like to move that on the 16th we have a meeting where the goal is if possible to come up with a proposal to bid i stepped in that motion i think we have a vote on this i don't know if we can do this as a motion i mean it can just it just needs to be a consensus to have a meeting and what that meeting will be um do we have the necessary pieces jamie what was the the last vote that you just you mentioned there were certain components that the committee agreed to do you have that that you can send to i mean it would be in our minutes that was from fall of 20 but i mean we did have a committee that approved voting for an artificial turf and what prevented
164us from going forward was it came in a little bit more expensive than we thought and so we then went back for value engineering and so and then so i see a december ninth meeting of the phase two capital gift committee where there wasn't any value engineering information in the packet but it does seem as though that was a topic discussed i don't see a vote by that committee but can you recall if there was a meeting after december of last year i'm just trying to figure it out because of what i can try december of 2019 2019 yeah i i don't see any more meetings of that because when did dn become chair because then we had the reorganization and then the phase two committee was changed and dan as chair became 19. the
165school committee became chair of phase two and i and phase two did not meet them in in march of this year there was a field discussion community info session for march 17th it was cancelled probably due to the pandemic um i don't after that i i see this email that art eddie had sent in march to john scaflin and the and the superintendent indicating possible next steps that was as of march of this year um it included a value engineering list and it looked like john had discussed that list with lindsey the athletic director um that seems to me to be the latest bit of information that is kind of new stuff that might be inserted i don't know i i think both you al and you steve indicated that you that you had seen
166that and that it had been but i'm i'm trying to figure out what i can point to as being the most recent meeting went through all those options and we looked at all those options and then after march and then we went through that whole series of changing the the subcommittee etc uh uh you got it right just what happened is that it was that's when i went that's that's when i said well obviously artificial rockfield isn't gonna work unless came april like and i said well let's throw over and what's going on with other things and now we have obviously never again but you're correcting that and eddie went over all that and we talked about all that stuff this isn't anything new stuff it's just that it was just ignored by by by
167the powers-to-be and it just you know just put it off on the sidelines you know so alan steve on the track that you're talking about the next step would be for the full school committee to see a recommendation for value engineered yeah for valued engineered rebates that was that that was put down the road and and that was without a road and that was the whole thing that came up we were getting committee going my john and i had talked to freshmen about are doing some private funding about the track how we could get private funding on and that was but then of course when we when when that wasn't being supported by the threat by the former superintendent or by the the chair of the committee at the time it's like every just you
168know just faded away but yes all those things were all that was all in in the mix what to do how to get the track how to get private funding but this was all talked about and and we talked about we even talked a little bit about i don't know it's getting late you know but yes that was that was definitely discussed but this is why i think it's important that we're explicit about what we want to accomplish on the 16th because i think that failure to be explicit has led us to have meeting after meeting after meeting going back to january if not back you know earlier than that if we've put something out to bid before there was consensus on sending something out to bid it came back a little bit higher than
169we wanted to spend at the time and so we look to do value engineering so i think we should be able to take that as a really good starting point i mean i i think we should have been able to do this a while ago i know we've had other things to do it's going to be a busy week and i am willing to do the work that is needed so can we have consensus that this should be the goal for the 16th it wasn't the last will of the committee is the problem right so it makes sense to me but i wasn't here when that vote was taken to come back with an alternate you know to to start with the base of the compliance and then to to add the fields fields and
170then artificial turf so i mean it seems to me that can be done because that was all in the powerpoint all of those components were there it's just a way of structuring right right not the engineered grass but there was a field i mean i remember looking at it was like fifty thousand dollars yeah but if we're going to go right maybe you want to add engineered grass or something well the idea that the idea is kind of and now i'm quoting from this berkshires article which is that that the the motion was that the revised that the phase ii subcommittee be charged with that the revised rfp be constructed as follows of the base to bring the fields into compliance with title ix in the ada and then add alternates for a grass field
171a turf field and a track so it would be so so and i don't know if we're there i don't know if that phase two subcommittee did that or if they focused on the you know joe maybe now when was that meeting that you're looking at september 2009 of 2019. so i i did find a in october of 2019 phase 2 october 1 meeting of the phase 2 committee and in looking at the minutes they reviewed a set of value engineering options and the the architects were coming up with additional ways to create other types of value engineering and there was conversation about what was voted on the night before and how to make that operational the night before it it looks as though the the conversation is referencing a school committee meeting where where
172there was some sort of vote made so that would have been i think it's like the september 26 committee meeting the september 26 special session so one of my fears as we keep discussing this is we're going to spend so much more money on studies that rather than having a track we're going to have studies of having a track that at some point we have to act and we got this gift years ago but that's not a good reason to take a vote well the reason to take the vote is that the information has been collected and for the people who need more information we've already been asked once in the past what information do you need let's ask again and then i am happy to take point of making sure that we get that
173information i thought that's what we agreed to back in june when we said that right but some of that information costs money to get right so if you want a quote a quote from a different company on a grass field for instance you have to decide whether to pay for that and for some of these things then we we may need to decide as to how much we want that information because as al has been saying we're spending the gift not on the students but on studies but here's so that's part of the dilemma um you know there are a bunch of people who don't trust traverse to make a good quote on grass because they specialize in turf and you really want a company that specializes in grass to tell you what to do
174i thought trevor said that they don't specialize in turf that they do both i'm not saying with traverses i'm saying what other people say about traverse so this is part of the issue and then my response to that has been but that costs money and they're like well of course it costs money but we should be paying that money for a company that specializes in grass i don't necessarily agree with that but that's the level at which some of these conversations are happening so they're not going to be an easy solution to speak to that you say sometimes yes that charge was made at an open meeting the charge was actually made against art eddie by ann o'connor that he wanted to that he was pushing artificial turrets because he gets a kickback which is
175effectively illegal dan challenged her on the spot and she had taken back wolves and stayed there not only did they say okay that art was getting a kickback even there's no evidence at all that ever happened he has done dozens and dozens of then they doubled down and said not only was he getting a kickback but the face took committee i'm not away what's the word when when you know an act an eagle act is being committed and you and you don't say anything what's that what's that word they accused the the uh phase two committee of knowing that he was getting the kickback and not saying anything that was also disputed again so obviously that still kind of exists out there in this right noise that art eddie and the phase 2 committee has
176some kind of financial benefit from voting for artificial turf that is absolutely positively unequivocally untrue and we should say that and not perpetuate these rumors that certain people continue to use that tone okay and so i don't i mean if the face did the phase two committee look into the how to structure the project for bidding like that no that's not something that ever made it back to the full school community the idea of value engineering the brock value engineering and then swapping out the crumb rubber for brockville came back at a discussion at some point but i don't remember a conversation about yeah we can we can we can put out an rfp that is structured in that way so we'll have a we'll have cost comparisons of the different ways to approach things
177the two meetings that you we would all need to read the minutes of in detail with the october 1st meeting of last year of the phase 2 committee and the december and are those on the website they are okay if they're not moved to make sure they're good and we need to make sure all of this stuff i think it is up there i remember linking to it then my links expired because i made tiny urls which expire apparently but um i'm pretty sure it's all up there yeah if it's phase two committee meeting uh minutes i would definitely have them if anything is missing i have all the minutes here so i guess the question would be whether um that can be done you know in a week you know paying the invoices for
178traverse will help us to get some work done because those have been hanging over us for quite some time without her even knowing it um so i mean it doesn't hurt to ask but we don't know if we'll have something that we can vote on in a week but we definitely could have more concise documentation in front of us in which to have further discussion that's more informed because it does look like you know if nothing else this is not a lesson to make sure that both subcommittees and regular committees are documenting and carrying that information through so that it's not getting lost from one iteration of a committee to the next because in two years there have been four chairs and that information maybe three superintendents breaks down yeah so uh if we can
179start compiling this information right and i'm not sure you know steve i'll absolutely share the spreadsheet that i made i think it's been given to the full committee [Music] just so you know that all the questions that have come up from community members have been addressed right not necessarily to everybody's satisfaction correct but they have been addressed and some of them have led to changes in terms of next steps i'm happy to help coordinate i think would be useful to talk to some of the people who've served on phase two and if they have time they might be able to help either compile information or speak at the committee meeting and so i think we should explicitly send out invitations to anybody who has served on phase two to our athletic director to our grounds
180and hear what they have to say about this i think they're going to have a very valuable perspective i have reached out to the id and i know she is available excellent next friday and what's nice is if somebody can't make it they can always record something or send something i have not reached out to tim but i can do that as well great but it might be helpful to i mean do we want a presentation on the information that has been collected i think that would definitely be valuable carrie and i feel like as you know we we put you in this advisory role how comfortable are you with coordinating getting something together what help do you need i don't feel like i have a good sense of what needs to be done i
181really don't i just shared with steve the you know the spreadsheets i've compiled a lot of documentation but i don't yeah i just i just don't have a sense of what that final product should be yeah i think this is where i think this is the crossroads we get to on a regular basis so the question is how do we how do we move it forward so that friday is a productive meeting well i am happy to work with people to prepare a presentation i would like permission to reach out to the members of the phase 2 committee yeah i don't even how many members were there 13 14. i think the students already graduated and then anybody on the committee you know please email me what information you would need to be able to
182make it but i know we've done this in the past but you know times have changed and then it may come down to some people might want to have information about you know what would be the full costs of grass whereas other people might say that the playability issue in the covet era when the best thing we can do is get the kids outdoors that now trumps other things yeah the field won't necessarily be hopefully the copa error will be gone but well i i still remember my daughter you know reminds me daddy they told us we were going to go home for two or three weeks and that was the last time she was in school last year and so i i hope the new normal is ending but even if it does we
183are still for years i think going to be feeling the effects of cobit and you're being able to be outdoors with good air flow to have the kids doing physical activity away from screens this is why i think now more than a year ago i think the playability issue has become even more important so then you have that so i was just going back through back minutes on the from the phase two subcommittee and the agenda for the december 9th 2019 minutes um includes review design and estimate for an engineered grass field option and but there are no meeting minutes so i don't it would be interesting to see what was the content about this discussion that's certainly not anything that came back to the the full school committee that i i can recall so
184right now okay joe do you have anything in there about the marble head study i think i have that did you read the marblehead study yeah because it was presented at the public forum that was one of the documents read it i'll tell you what just read the maintenance part of the forehead study and then tell me what you think and then when you finish reading that read the one about the cave card study and then do do the one from the university of washington still okay so we're going to bring all these studies together then on the 16th in one document all the studies that were done over the last 50 years of artificial turf or just the ones that that that that prove a certain point in a certain way i mean during
185documentation we have literally 50 years astroturf is putting in 1974 in astrodome we have 50 years of studies i mean right wait since 74. that means i'm 50. right 1974 artificial sleep started and i just got aged a bit 74. we were talking about people do we talk about artificial text for literally a half a century so i i have a meta question how many school committee members can talk to each other without violating quorum now that we're six can you talk to one other person or two it's the same as if we were seven okay so it's still you can talk to two people because we have to just make sure that we do not have any deliberations going on where there is a chain of more than three people talking i am glad
186monday and tuesday is a holiday next week at williams reading puget uh are the um the marblehead study in the uw state i'm just wondering if some of i think we should be a little bit careful with like most of the um the studies on artificial turf versus grass are considering a crumb rubber field and let's just make sure that we're not accidentally [Music] um bringing that into the picture and then i just want to make sure people can email me information that they want for the slides and that will not violate any open meeting laws you're asking i'm asking because i want to make sure that we're not deliberating well i mean i guess the first question is are there questions that people have that are not already included on that athletic infrastructure question
187spreadsheet because it may all might be there already because i took all the questions that were previously asked i think a lot of it is a coordination issue is that this has been going on for so long and so many hands have been involved it's been passed down passed down as you've said we've had three or four chairs three superintendents right that it's going to be time consuming but i think a lot of it is there and then we the difficult thing is we have to decide right now what are our priorities what do we want to do right and is this the right time because the flip side to the argument of covid unique fields is covid you shouldn't spend money the message that we got from hugh which i don't you know the
188the tone aside it's it's a message it's a sentiment that is shared by a lot of people that this is not the time to be investing huge dollars in an athletic field right but the flip side of that is this could actually be the time to get a good deal as people looking for work i know a lot of times the college uses this as an opportunity and the the gift has been used for expenses that it should not have been used for it's been used for things that should have been part of the building process no but but i'm saying when people make the argument that we should not be spending this money we need to push back and say we shouldn't have spent the money we already did we shouldn't have spent the
189three million dollars on the administrative multi-purpose building on the rent for the trailer on all these studies that should have been sent to the towns and if that had been the case then it would be a completely different story right now in terms of how much money we have and so we just have to remind people could we also have either in the slides or maybe joe could present like the financial options that we have the the state of what we have the endowment and other options that we could use to help pay for the deal and be able to do that clearly so andy choice tuition fundraising fundraising um stabilization fund yeah yeah i know we're going to stop the meeting but if you really want to go back and i'm going to bring
190joe into this when we talk when joe was was on on phase 2 there was talk when we were when we thought we had what we wanted in terms of a package that we were talking about a whole athletic situation of both towns we're talking about having a whole recreational committee going we were talking about doing doing having major events here so and all of that came crashing down okay when people started saying well i didn't started bringing up something but this has been this was this was a very very big very uh uh ambitious project of a whole thing that can done for for not only both towns but for the school but that's what i say it's a community why did the communication with the town stop excuse me why did the communication
191with the towns about what happened with that we were doing all that stuff yeah and then and then we started getting bombarded with these whoa what about this what about that and and and then we and phil became defensive we started answering questions and then every you know uh everything kind of fell by his side because we kept on on answering his question after every time he asked the question they asked two more then we saw then there were three more and it went on and on and that's and all these plans that we had from from from an organized recreation program to uh fun that was all stopped yeah and we became and i guess al that's a it's a nice i'm glad you said that because it just reminds me of something that
192i i think i've shared with some folks but you know it's it would be really nice if we could get back to this being what it was meant to be which is a great gift to the community right and that's something that steve already said that the williams capital gift was meant to be you know something that we could all celebrate and i think the athletic infrastructure improvements we all wanted to be something that we we all feel good about and the sad part is that i don't i think again steve already said this but no matter what we decide not everybody is going to be happy with it because if we decide on just going with compliance they're going to be a lot of people very disappointed that we didn't do more and if
193we decide to go with turf they're going to our synthetic turf they're going to be a lot of people very unhappy with this committee for many years to come so it just feels like i don't know i think i i don't know if i would say would be many people there will be people who will be unhappy no matter what we do but we are the ones who are elected we are the ones who are supposed to be studying all the information and making the informed decision and as you pointed out we're not asking the tax payers for money we've actually used the williams gift already to relieve the taxpayers of things that should have been sent to the two towns and i think it's right now when you look at what the children of
194the district have received from the williams gift the children of the district really haven't received anything we've had administrative buildings we've had storage facilities we've had bathrooms built it would be nice to have something where we bring people in so i mean i i think at this point it's all been said and we're going to be unfortunately it's not going to be a 6-0 vote okay so path forward what are we doing how are we collecting information that we can put together and present in some meaningful way on friday are steve and joe willing to work on something i'm happy to help but i just don't feel like i have the narrative fully thinking and i think if we reach out to members of the community and again if anybody who's listening right now you
195have information if you have concerns please you know bring it to our attention and happy to have that but i i guess the thing that's really moved me the most tonight is when al was speaking about how much money was spending on studies rather than on items and i just keep feeling that more and more what's going to happen is we keep investigating we keep investigating that at some point we've done the investigations we had a phase two committee that looked at what is going to be the best option for the district and that committee was unanimous in artificial turf then there were suggestions from the community to go to natural grass or if you're going to go to turf how about the following which would make it more environmentally friendly and a lot of
196those were adjusted and adopted well right in the in the 5-2 there was a 5-2 vote of the committee that when we go back out with a new rfp it should have there should be bid in with alternates that would get numbers for all the different um components in an ideal world yes but and that was the charge back to the phase ii committee and it appears there were some meetings in october and december of 2019 about how that could be structured but the the minutes are spotty on on where that ended up and we never really saw plans back from that so it'd be really interesting to know what happened in those meetings and whether they ended up yielding plans that could be structured in a way for that type of rfp so how
197do we find out so then we need the minutes from those meetings and if there aren't any minutes we need to ask traverse what the last plans are that were talked about with them so i emailed the minutes yeah i found them i emailed them to you we know that john and lindsay were present um i can reach out to them to try to augment the minutes and i can also reach out to traverse and get a complete body of their work in one place and it it may very well be that that idea that we we bet this out in the different components doesn't work for some reason like that's entirely possible but that's kind of i think where things as a committee other than the you know we're gonna have a forum and
198we're gonna go through these other different reformulations of the phase two committee but in terms of where things were with the project and its specs that's where things seem to the trail went cold we have to decide how much money are we willing to spend to get information to explore different options yeah one thing is to see what information is already available correct correct i think that's what without spending any more money absolutely but it may come to the point where we have to decide is it worth spending more money or do we have enough information it would have been great to have had more but do we have enough information that we can move forward and you know i'm happy to work with joe and kerry and i will reach out to people who
199are on phase two to see what information we have and what information can we get and what would the cost be of getting that information you know could we structure a bid would it make sense for you to reach out to some of the more vocal opponents absolutely and you know that's why i said right now you know a few minutes ago anybody in the community who has you know concerns or issues please you know bring them to our attention i'm happy to you know reach out to stephanie you know since she sent a public comment i can reach out to hugh as well i'm happy to do that i just want to be very careful because i don't i don't want to speak for the committee and that's why i want to just do
200it more as you know i am gathering information to coordinate a presentation to the committee i don't want to discuss and debate i want to just gather information what questions do you have what do you need and i think i think you know again if if something is needed that is going to cost money that's something you can present to the committee correct and the committee might decide that we don't have enough information or it might be that a majority of the committee decides well it would have been wonderful if we knew how much all these options would cost given the information we have that's still enough information to act and that's when we create the agenda for the 16th i think it's very important that we do make sure that we give ourselves the
201ability to have a vote on sending something out to bid okay how does everyone feel still have a chance to say goodnight to my daughter have we uh beaten this dead horse should we move on to the next agenda item can i make just one last comment this is probably the best reason that we should make sure we get this done now so that future committees do not continue having these conversations again and again and again starting from square zero thank you okay next up on the agenda upcoming meetings and events steve mentioned the education subcommittee meeting on 10 13 at 3 30. 3 30 pm by zoom we have a school committee meeting remotely on zoom um on 10 22 and that's our reopening updates is that going to be at 6 00 pm
202yes and then as we have just discussed we have we will have a meeting friday october 16th at noon which will be purely to discuss um the fields project and that will be virtual that will also be virtual yes well the media 16 is going to be virtual yes sir do we want to have that in person i would think because it's i think it's really hard to coordinate this space in person and i personally can't come if we do it virtually i mean if we do it in person it's very difficult it seems to be easier for people to participate if we're virtual yep okay yeah in terms of commenting publicly and yeah okay the 16th at noon um i do not have any other business so do we have a moment i move
203to adjourn just before we adjourn you said discussions i just wanted to thank the administration the teachers everybody who worked so hard to get our kids back i don't know if we explicitly said this before but that work is greatly appreciated thank you okay we are adjourned at 9 07 p.m you