001Thank you. Good evening. Call this meeting to order the Sako School Board uh for September 8th, Wednesday, September 8th, 2021. I'd like to invite you all to join us in the Pledge of Allegiance. That brings us to item three of the agenda tonight, which is approval of school committee meeting minutes dated August 25th, 2021. Is there a motion, Mr. Mayor? School board member Lefortune. I move we approve the school board committee meeting minutes dated August 25th, 2021. Second. Motion's been made. Any discussion on approving the minutes? Roll call vote to approve the minutes. School board member Prebble, yes. School board member Richard, yes. School board member Lefortune, yes. School board member Truman, yes. Motion passes 40. Brings us to item four of the agenda. Any adjustments to the agenda tonight? Seeing no adjustments to the
002agenda, moving on to item five. Are there any correspondence this evening? No correspondence this evening. Brings us to item six, public comment. There's members of the public that would like to address the school board, please come forward and be heard. Seeing that there's nobody looking to speak with the school board tonight, move on to item seven, superintendent report. Superintendent Ray. All right. Good evening everyone. Uh several items to talk about uh tonight. Uh very first one is just um I want to give a shout out to uh Mr. Endorf. Um because one of the things that's happened recently and this is involved in all three communities that we serve is that the homeless rate in our communities has really spiked. Uh and between the three communities, uh we were at 92 and and obviously that's
003not all SACO kids, but kids move from Bifford to Saco or Old Orchard or SACO kids to Bifford in Sanford and others. And we have to collaborate with those schools uh and with those families to try to get them back in school as quickly as possible while providing transportation. So, we spoke to you a little bit about the um grant that we received and being able to hire a liaison. Uh but I think that's something that we really need to watch uh because along with the homelessness piece will become the food insecurities later on through the year, need for jackets for kids, backpacks, all of those pieces. Uh but that number is high for as early as it is in the year. And so I want us to make sure that we have a very
004careful eye on our student population and some of the challenges that they may be having at home. Um so I want to get that on on the table. Um just kind of as we look at the first couple of days of school and exciting to see school kids back. Um you know just it's it's great to see kids involved in activities again at school. And so our middle school athletics have started up. Uh, our elementary cross country league has started up and I know the I think you have 80 kids at burn schools signed up. Oh, great. Okay. 95. Okay. Um, and we're going to, you know, try to keep that as a local Bford Dayton competition. Kennabunks kind of stepped out this year. Um, but it will, it's fun for the kids that we
005can give them a free activity. It doesn't cost families a lot of money. Uh, they'll have a couple of meets and some practices after school. So, it's great to see that that's up and running. want to talk to everybody a little bit about pool testing because I know that is a topic that is difficult uh for us to all understand how the process would go and what is um where we are as in SACO. So, number one, we have received our code from the state. Part of the application process, you had to get a code from the state. We've received that and we've sent that out in letters to families. We've also received our supplies, which is a good thing because one of the challenges that we may see this fall is there's some talk
006about uh swabs, having a shortage of swabs in certain areas, and we've seen our supplies coming in in testing kits a taking a little bit longer. One thing that we're concerned about is we have an extremely low number of consents re returned within our schools, which thus if we don't have enough consents, you can't make a pool big enough because you have to have a pool of at least five kids. So, we're going to send out uh a separate email uh to school specific families so that they don't have to look at the codes and really hit on them to say, "Hey, how do we get this out? How do we make sure that our pools are large enough?" because until we get those numbers to rise, we can't even build the pool so that
007it's, you know, if all of us are in one, we all have to have consent for that. And we're hoping to start pool testing in about two weeks. We've been able to hire a couple of employees that will service uh the area. And we're also working with um some nursing students from area colleges that will help set up the pool testing uh and assist in that piece. as you know certainly hiring of more nurses is not the easiest thing in the world to do right now. So parents will should be on the lookout for another um email coming about pool testing. We hope to start in two weeks. We also know that there's been some challenges uh as we switched uh to a new power school server this summer with some of the emails, but
008it seems like that's starting to get corrected so that all families are getting emails. uh principles and uh Stacy and Chris worked real hard on that piece. Okay, transportation. Transportation is a challenge right now and uh these folks are all working really hard to fix that piece. Um some of the transportation challenges that we faced is just as we formed the school year the basically what we had to go on was what two years looked looked like because last year was totally different and the demographics and traffic patterns in our city may have changed slightly. We also have to look at our elementary dismissal times. Um what we're doing right now because we know it's such a that we have some challenges is we're keeping data for every bus. So I know what time every
009bus is hitting burn school and I know what time it's leaving. And we're taking that data throughout the week so that we can make um some decisions about how we look at the timing, how we look at the flow. Um, one of the pieces that's just uh, you know, again, we we are bringing all of our elementary traffic towards the center of town and we may have to look at a situation where um, we have our traffic coming from, you know, as we think about we pick up at Young School, we push all of our buses to the center of town and then we backtrack. And so we may have to look at how those rotations work a little bit differently if we can um change that flow. One of the things I noticed in
010looking at take Fairfield dismissal the other day is that we had a bus that left Fairfield at a really appropriate time, but to drive from Fairfield to Young School, it took like 9 minutes because of traffic. We could have walked faster. And so we have to look at what our traffic patterns are. We've worked with um Patrick Fox and Officer Huntress who have been fabulous to work with. Um and great collaborative looking at our pickup and drop off at Young School and I I mean at uh Burn School, which I know is much much quicker. We're looking at what we can do at SMS, but we may have to get creative. We may have to look at do we have the capacity in our fleet to travel the miles that we do quick and you
011know quick enough and efficient enough and we may have to look at the timing of our schools and how that all works. So taking data this week we're going to examine that and meet on Friday and find a and hopefully be able to propose a solution that is a fix and not a band-aid. Um because we just need to look at this wholesalewise. Um, and we'll be working with Jeie and Stacy and the and the crew and trying to figure that out. It's going to take a little bit of time. Lastly, building committee. We've had a building committee and a site inventory committee uh since the last time that we met. Um the site inventory committee obviously is the big one and it's doing that just that our goal is to inventory land that could
012be available uh within the city. We kind of had a formation meeting yesterday. Uh put together a Google form that we will be able to send out to the community so that if people in the community have ideas about what could be available property, they could simply type in the address, the owner, look at the acreage side, uh you know, we can research the acreage size and add that to kind of the chart of all the possible locations um that we have. We also will continue to be looking for additional members not only for that committee but for other committees um that we'll be starting up. The programming committee will will start next. Um so we're moving ahead on that process. Our goal is by November one to have a kind of a good strong
013I want to say report but a visual or graphic of really what the available land may look like. It's also important to know that sometimes during these processes you might get that first wave of available land and then you start people start hearing about it and more could come on the table as we go through that all land um in the site inventory at at some point we'll go through a vetting process of looking at what are some of the really important pieces to to whatever a property is and that's where you would talk about three-phase power sewer highspeed internet um public, you know, water, traffic, transportation. That's when after you get to those points, then you start talking about those pieces uh and following along uh through the process. Any questions? No questions. Moving
014on to item eight. I do have something. So, um, in the next couple of weeks, we're going to be going through the process to fill the two vacancies for W one and W five, um, to be filled between now and what would ultimately be December, which is when the terms ultimately end. It's going to be a process that'll be followed similar to what we've done in the past. Um, and I've been talking to Jeremy and we will be putting an ad out and probably tomorrow to uh notify the community and specifically members of both of those wards one and five uh that these vacancies will be filled and filled through a process typical uh that's been what we've used typically in the past which is um the prospective interim candidates will come and um be
015asked questions by the school board and then the school board will will vote on filling those two those two positions. So, that'll start with an ad going out tomorrow. And um and that's pretty much all I have. Thank you, chair. Moving on. Item nine, staff reports. There are no staff reports indicated in the packet. Uh item 10, board subcommittee meeting minutes. There are no meeting minutes in the packet. And then there is no old business under item 11 tonight. Brings us to item 12, new business. Item A, board member resignation. Is there a motion? Mr. Mayor, school board member Prebble. I move we accept the resignation of Christina Shea, Ward One, school board representative, effective September 3rd, 2021 with thanks and appreciation for her service. Thank you. Is there a second? Second. Second by school
016board member Lefortune. Any discussion on accepting the resignation? Roll call vote to accept the resignation. School board member Prebble. Yes. School board member Richard, yes. School board member Lefortune, yes. School board member Truman, yes. Motion passes 40. Brings us to item B, new hires. Is there a motion? Mr. Mayor, school board member Truman. I move we approve the nomination of Jessica Howard Sako Middle School health and wellness teacher and issue a contract for the 202122 school year. Motion's been made. Is there a second? Second. Second by school board member Low Fortune. Any discussion? Seeing no discussion, roll call vote. School board member Prebble. Yes. School board member Richard. Yes. School board member Li Fortune. Yes. School board member Truman. Yes. Motion passes 40. brings us to item C, resignations. There are no motion needed on
017this. Uh the board does not need to approve edtech resignations, but there are some resignations uh in the packet. With that, uh moves to item D, current student enrollment memo. Superintendent Ray technology. So, while my iPad is not allowing me to click on that pro appropriately, uh just for your uh reference is that we do have 1843 students. Uh currently registered in our schools. Uh this was the ability for us to uh just kind of give you the overview of where we stood on Thursday of last week when we uh put this report together. Um, we'll see some fluctuations up and down a little bit, especially as Chris uh and others we work through homeless situations. We work through our new enrollments, the kids who have come and gone. Um, but right now that number
018is I think we're eight off Stacy from where we were in October of 2019. So, pretty strong enrollments right now uh going out. We're still uh being careful with any uh new superintendence agreements uh because I think one of the pieces that you know I really would like to not see our class sizes espe at the elementary level get any higher uh based off just looking at how we keep appropriate spacing throughout the day through lunchtime. Eating in classrooms is difficult. 22 kids is not what we want to see in there. Uh, and so right now I feel like we're pretty solid. Any questions on the enrollment data? Moving on. Item E, a school start headlights presentation. Superintendent Ray. So, I uh asked our principles and uh assistant superintendent uh Meg Parkhursters to come tonight
019and talk about u some of the highlights. Uh there's a lot of positive that's going on in our schools and uh it's great to see kids and families back and we wanted to share uh some of the highlights knowing that we still have some challenges and so I'll turn it over to Meg. Thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to share how the school start has gone. Um, we have successfully opened schools for the year and begun transitioning students back into a five day a week program with our preK and K students starting this week. There are certainly uh numerous folks to thank for the opening of schools including our teachers who've had a tremendous start to the year as well as those who have welcomed students on buses, prepared buildings through
020technology support as well as our custodial and maintenance staff that have made sure that schools are ready to go. And lastly, we are grateful for the partnerships with the community that have allowed us to continue to provide vaccine clinics. We had 27 people vaccinated at the August 31st clinic and the next clinic coming up is on Tuesday, September 21st from 3 to 6:00 p.m. at Bifford High School's Tiger Gym. And there will be all three different kinds of vaccines to select from. And there's a sign up on the district website. I'm going to turn it over first to Mr. Mirs from Young School and then you'll get to hear a couple of highlights from each of our buildings before we close it out with some areas that we're going to continue to focus on. Good
021evening. Just want to thank you uh for your service and just all you guys have done for us. We've had a successful start at Young School. I just want to thank um just all the parents who've been so welcoming to me, all the students who are just so excited to be here. Um a highlight that stood stood out from day one, day two was just the smiles even through their masks. You can just see how excited kids are and that's just kind of blown me away. I had a a child named Lana who I met during summer school. She like just about jumped out of the car, gives me a big hug. I've met her once and she just said, "Do you remember me?" And and I am so excited to be here. And that
022just made my day. So, it's just super to see that. And the look of relief on parents' face on on their faces has been tremendous. And they're just excited to have us. So, I'm just thrilled that we've been able to open our schools for 5 days a week. Um, a couple other highlights just real quick. Um, I just want to thank the staff at uh, Young School who have just worked so hard so quickly at building relationships. I have an amazing staff and I'm just incredibly impressed with them. Whether they're new or old, they are fantastic. I also want to thank lastly the PTO is kind of like on the fly here. They have really stepped up and helped. We have um, York County retired educators coming that chose Young School to do a service
023project. The original project was to powerwash Young School, but a very nice man who works for the school system, uh, Bill Day, already powerwashed the building without me knowing it. He just did it on his own. So, on the fly, I asked PTO. It's like, "All right, I have a different idea. We're going to maybe paint the sidewalk out behind the building and put out games." And Julia and Nicole just stepped up and now we're not going to just have four square and games like that. They want to have um just about everything like Twister and all these great colorful games so our kids can be playing even when the grass is wet they can play there. So that's some early highlights. Thank you so much. Good evening and thank you for the opportunity to
024share a couple highlights tonight. Our summer started off with a major move to accommodate the relocation of our two second grade classrooms from the portable back into the main building and also to prepare for construction of storage units into all of our classrooms. The flexibility that was demonstrated by all of the staff within the building to make all of this happen is to be commended. We needed to combine programming and relocate a lot of staff in order to accomplish all of this. All classroom teachers have cleared out their classrooms in order to accommodate 3 ft of distancing to be put into place. I want to thank Mike Gered and all of our custodial staff at Fairfield. They were incredible this summer working tremendously long hours helping everybody. I also want to thank the entire Fairfield
025family. They really went above and beyond to make this move successful and to make our start really wonderful. I also want to thank everyone for coming out to Popsicles in the Park. Was a great way to have an open house outside. I think the kids enjoyed it as well as the parents and we know the bubbles were definitely a hit. I also want to thank the PTO for always helping us out. We had a terrific breakfast to kick off our very first day. Thank you. You everyone. It is a pleasure to be here tonight and I appreciate um all of you for welcoming me. It's been a great start to the school year at Burns as well. Um we also had an open house for parents and it was extremely well attended. I think um
026there may have been some displeasure of not being able to get in schools which was quickly turned around when teachers were outside really anxious and excited to meet their kids. Our counseling staff pulled off um snow cones for everyone on I think the hottest day that we have had this summer. So that was a huge success. Um we also had our PTO there and they're sponsoring some exciting events in the fall. I want to extend a thank you to PTO as the other administrators did. They also helped Mr. Partridge and I pull off a barbecue for our staff on the very first day. Some teachers had mentioned to me that they had never had that happen before. So, Mr. Noble was there flipping burgers with Mr. Partridge while I was running in and out feeding
027the staff. Um, and it was a great way for us to come together on our very first day together. So, thank you um for that. I also can't go without saying a huge thank you to the community, the parents, the town, the sheriff. They've worked really solidly with me every day on just looking at what the traffic patterns are with some construction that's going on at the same time right on Summer Street. Um revamping our patterns each day to try to make it a little bit better. And I can't say how incredibly supportive parents have been when I would expect maybe um just some unknowns of which way we're entering the building and now we're exiting the building. And people are just rolling down their windows with thanks and they're very generous. So it's been
028a great start and I just want to um thank again everyone in Sco the teachers, the staff, the community for being so supportive. Good evening. Thank you for uh letting us come up here and share with you guys uh the start of the year at SL Middle School. Um we started off extremely positive. We had our individual open house nights where we really got to meet parents and uh slow things down a little bit. The first year that I did it, it was uh I think uh probably 400 parents in the cafeteria and this year it was one sixth grade team, another sixth grade team 45 minutes later and you know they got to see who you are and if they had a question they could actually come over and talk to you and uh
029it it really slowed things down. And um so and at the beginning of every year, we always know that there's going to be a level of anxiety. There is going to be, you know, when we want to make sure no one gets lost. Um but once we got the teachers settled in, they calmed down a little bit and they knew where they were going. Uh and then we could have the students come in. So it was kind of nice. Um, Saka Middle School, we had, I think, somewhere between 25 and 30 moves for our teachers or new teachers or teachers taking over new positions. So, beginning of the year was really busy. Um, kids came in and we hit the ground running. Uh, it was wonderful to see, I think Mr. Mir said you could
030see the kids smiling through their masks. Uh, kids are moving around the building. They're they're getting to see friends that they didn't get to see last year because they were all together. Um we've started sports. Uh those practices have started today. I saw that we have um play auditions for a middle school play. Uh I was discussing with the band teacher uh about Christmas concert. So, all of these things are starting to come back into play and it's it's really really exciting to give all of our kids that experience and just really excited to move forward. Thank you. So, well, it's uh Sorry, Trey. Good evening. My name is Tmaine Walker and I'm the coordinator for SACO PreK. In previous years, we hosted traditional open houses like all of the other schools in the district,
031which have been very busy, whirlwindlike events. These type of affairs, while fun and enjoyable, did not offer much time to engage in meaningful one-on-one conversations with our new students and families. As you can imagine, many of our prek families may be relatively new parents and brand new to the district. We take our role of starting the homeschool relationship for our district very seriously and we strive to set the firmst and most positive foundation possible because of the co restrictions in our buildings that we were faced with both last year and this year and because many prek parents are very apprehensive and rightfully so about sending their children off to a classroom and school which they have not had the opportunity to visit and to a teacher they have not met. We chose to send our
032teaching staff out to our students homes to meet them and their families in a cos safe way before the start of the school year. Our staff went on these visits armed with teacher made digital books and videos showcasing all of the areas of our classroom and school. These visits allowed us to not only meet our new students, but they also gave us the ability to have one-on-one conversations with families in which we were able to explain school procedures and answer questions in an unhurried manner. We have discovered that these 15-minute visits with our families have been so much more wellreceived and beneficial for both staff and families alike that we are now considering ways of keeping these types of personal visits a permanent part of the way we start our families and students off in
033our school district. Welcoming our families and this individualized and personal way and setting the tone for the relationship we as a district want to have with our students and families has certainly been a very positive outcome from a very difficult situation. Thank you so much for your time this evening. So, a huge thank to thanks to all of our administrators for kicking off the year and just wanted to take the opportunity to close out with some areas where we know we really need to have continued focus moving forward. Though we're grateful for free school lunches for all students, a challenge that that brings to us is the fact that the meal benefit application still needs to be completed for funding. SACO schools have received over $1.4 million in the past through federal title funds and
034without the numbers through the meal benefit application form, we won't be able to collect that same amount of money. So, we certainly encourage all families to complete that form, we've incentivized that with a drawing for Hannifford gift cards for those families who do complete that form. Um secondly, as we've referred to multiple times, streamlining our arrival and dismissal procedures and ensuring that we have a really clear start and end to the day that maximizes our students time in the building and maximizes staff time, making those transitions happen quickly and ensuring that all students are able to start school at the same time and buses are there ready for them to begin their day. And lastly, we certainly have the challenge of continuing to understand the social emotional impacts to students as well as academic progress
035and be sure that we're really understanding where students are and pushing them to the next step in their learning. Whether that be developing relationships with their peers, managing their own kind of executive functioning and being sure that they have a handle on their academics, or working on the nuts and bolts of math skills, just really getting a handle on exactly where those students are and making sure that we're providing the learning experiences to push them forward. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. Any questions? I don't have a question, but I just wanted to uh thank all the building administrators and the teachers and staff that got everything rolling this year. My Fairfield kids and my Suckle Middle student uh were thrilled with going back to school and had a really boring weekend and couldn't
036wait for Tuesday to come back. And um the bubbles were a huge hit. Um, so I just wanted to say thank you very much for getting everybody back in and making it really positive experience. Question just to thank you as well. It's just it's tremendously gratifying to find out once we actually started the school year that it went as well as I think any of us up here could hope that it would have gone. Um, considering where you know where we were just a few short months ago, it's it is just it is really awesome to see how much work and what the fruits of that work that all of you and a lot of people that aren't even here this evening put in to make it possible. And just thank you. I'm going to
037echo that as well, all of that. But I'm just impressed on hearing the amount of amazing work that the entire district did to get all of our children back to five and getting everybody. My daughter was so thrilled to go to school for the first time in over a year after remote learning. It was amazing just to see that big smile get her on the bus. It was great. So I appreciate all the hard work that everyone from teachers, everyone has done. We loved our prep schools at the park at Young School too. Clara loved books too. So thank you. Thank you. Any other further discussion? Okay, moving on to I Superintendent Ray. Just also just again the thanks to everybody for what they've done to make this happen, but it's also important to know
038that our staff is also working really hard on the just in case plans that we hope to never have to use. Um, but we've seen some challenges that other communities are dealing with right now. And obviously the virus will dictate a lot of things. Um, but our teachers are also, not only are they doing that piece, but they're also making sure that we have some plans in place and there are some challenges that go along with, you know, handing out laptops again, handing out iPads, and making sure you have enough chargers and all of those pieces that we have to think about. uh so that if presented with a very difficult decision or situation that we're ready to go. Um and so everyone's working hard on that backup plan too. Um that means you're kind
039of doing double duty a little bit here at the beginning. So thank you for everybody for doing that work. Moving on to item 13 of the agenda. Other information. Is there any other information this evening? Seeing no other information being offered. Moving on, there's no executive session under agenda item 14. Agenda item 15 is adjournment. Is there a motion to adjurnn? Mr. Mayor, I move we adjourn. School board member Lefortune has made a motion to adjourn. School board member Truman has seconded. Any discussion on adjourning? Roll call vote to adjurnn. School board member Prebble. Yes. School board member Richard. Yes. School board member LeForge. Yes. School board member Truman. Yes. Motion passes 40. We are adjourned at 7:33 p.m. Thank you very much everyone. Have a wonderful evening.