001e e e good evening uh my name is Jennifer prebble I am board chair Welcome to our school board meeting for April 26 2023 it is a little bit past 5 please note that school board member Johnston is away and School Board member Gail will be with us shortly um would you please kindly join me for the Pledge of Allegiance all right and we are on to item three this evening for approval of school board meeting minutes dated April 5th 2023 do I have a motion chair Preble I move we approve the meeting minutes dated April 5th 2023 second all right I have a motion on the table for approval of school board meeting minutes from school board [Music] member Truman and seconded by School Board member Le Fortune no can I oh AR excuse
002me stay uncorrected um can I have a roll call vote please School Board member Archie yes School Board member I'm having one of those afternoons so sorry Jeff yes okay Schoolboard member Le Fortune yes and School Board member Truman yes motion passes oh I also vote Yes motion passes Z all right adjustments to the agenda do we have any adjustments this evening to our agenda all right moving on to correspondence do we have any correspondents this evening all right right we are moving on to public session please um feel free to stand before the school board and have three minutes anyone willing to come before the board I didn't see anyone had signed up formally all right um moving on to superintendent report superintendent Ray all right good afternoon everybody um several items to talk
003about uh first and foremost um Megan Chris had the opportunity to offer testimony and support of senator raffy from Kon buns Bill to establish a two-year state funded pilot to cover the extraordinary costs associated with serving uh homeless families and youth uh as you know the school department educates more than a 100 homeless families at this time uh 100 youth uh and we've been using a lot of ARP money that's been available um to help provide transportation nutrition other services um as you know the federal funding will go away and as those funds diminish um we've kind of Spun up an aid for Sako kids 50 uh 501c3 nonprofit to help us with grant writing fundraising Etc um the Senate bill which we hope will pass and passed out a committee would provide These funds
004directly to the homeless Liaisons uh for a two-year trial period um Chris has been invited by the housing committee to uh participate uh in the work session where additional details can be hashed out as the bills refined um you know we thank our local Senators uh for their support on this because many families are in crisis and um need that additional support and as schools serve more and more like s uh social service agencies we need the ability to tap uh funds quickly um when families are in need um we will talk about uh a construction update uh in new business um but just for people in case you're watch it now uh draft floor plans are available on the website uh and on Facebook uh that we were able to release at our meeting
005last night and we have a very important meeting next week with the main Department of Transportation uh to talk about all the turning and Curbing and all of those exciting things um today is administrative assistance day so we want to make sure that we say thank you to all of our administrative assistants in our schools uh for the hard work that they do um we received some great news today that uh our grant for Title One summer school was approved by the doe so that's about 50 plus thousand Meg 38,000 um that we will use towards uh Title One Summer School and then today um the administrative team uh participated in a fairly well attended probably a 100 plus people um in for an area school emergency training so Sako fire and police in York
006County with bitterford we were all together really thinking about um the needs of our schools for um you know a very tragic day and how we respond and communicate and so there was a pretty intense training which will allow for us and our communities to have great followup just want to make sure that uh I thank those the Sako police who participated and chief Clemens for his collaboration on that is we already have plans uh to come together for next steps uh and how we uh react as communities to um emergencies that may present themselves all right any questions for superintendent Ray all right moving on to the next item chair's report I don't really have anything new to update um so we're moving on to staff reports which we I didn't see any on
007the agenda um so we're looking at board subcommittee meeting minutes personnel and policy and Personnel committing meeting minutes for 4523 are in the agenda um and our next meeting is May 10th at 5:30 pm. finance and infrastructure committee meeting minutes are from 4:26 at 4M so we met today at 4: um our next meeting will be May 5th I'm sorry May 24th 2023 the curriculum committee is going to meet on 424 and our next meeting for them will be May 22nd um I don't see any other items under old business so moving on to new business um action item a new hires do we need any action on this I did not see any action noted all right um there is a memo in your packet um that you can download and take a look
008at under resignations um I seen no me Memo and no action needed at this time so moving on to action item C Sako Middle School Furniture update superintendent Ray and uh assistant superintendent Parkers is going to come up and tell us all the progress we've made with furniture at the middle school thanks to the support from school committee and city council uh last year during the budget process to really transfer transform the furniture in that building so I'm going to give you a pretty quick update as to some of the current improvements to date and then give you a sense of some of what we're hoping to accomplish into this spring and early summer so far we have completed classroom tables and desks we were able to shift to a little bit more of a
009flex flexible structure with uh teachers able to select standup tables standup desks regular height desks or regular height tables with accompanying chairs or not depending on the flow of their classroom instruction and a little bit more flexible as well in terms of their ability to fit together into small groups so that they're they're not quite a square shape so you can kind of configure groups of three four or five in ways that are a little bit more flexible for teachers and um also a little bit quieter to move which does make a difference in a classroom on order currently we have a full set of resources for our library our cafeteria and our teachers room which I'll give you a chance to kind of take a peek at what those um look like and then
010outstanding we do have some odds and ends that we will still be tying up including bookshelves file cabinets making sure that things really look consistent across all things without mismatching pieces in there as well as exploring other alternate seating areas entryway areas and other kind of special purpose spaces that might have really unique uses aside from those general education classrooms though we did outfit every office already in some Nooks we still have some punch list items there so unfortunately we or luckily did not have a lot of photos of the cafeteria pre painting but this photo gives you just a sense of what the color scheme was it did feel pretty dark in there with the color of the walls and on the other wall there was a a pretty large tree structure painted on
011in a dark brown so that's how it looked pre this year now we have fully painted the cafeteria and even without any changes to lighting or to the floors as of yet the feeling in there is pretty entirely different in terms of a brightness and a freshness and updating this is the current furniture that is in there now it's all the same tables that we have for students and in those long rows so one of the things that we learned during covid is that uh the cafeteria can be an overwhelming place for students and though we are back in cafeterias there are things that we can do with seating arrangements to create different spaces for students that feel a little bit more comfortable so as you can see from this picture we have some Round
012Table options with bench seating those tables that do have chairs around them that are circular are actually a standing height so you can have students that are sitting at that stool height chair or standing around a table to eat and then uh in the side kind of to the left hand side there you'll see Booth seating for students to kind of create a different feeling and some options for students as they enter the cafeteria of course it's set up like this in the schematic but it's highly flexible so you can move these pieces around which is also kind of nice because it kind of changes what kind of cafeteria you're walking into depending on what the use case is on any given day or how the staff notices patterns occur like we have a lot
013of kids gathering here let's switch up this space so that we can kind of move things around a little bit um just to give you a little bit of a closeup of those booths and tables they are all mobile so that you could have the option if you're bringing a classroom in there during a non- lunch time to kind of set up that Booth seating as a more like Stadium chair seating that goes across and as well the cafeteria tables that look in this schematic almost exactly like what's there are in fact uh separate pieces so that you can move those against the wall and have more of like a single wide eating area you can also flip that tabletop down so that those all become bench seats and then that way you can set
014up inside the cafeteria for a performance or other event without having to clear all the tables out to a storage facility and move in an entire set of chairs for the student body but you can actually kind of turn those into bench seating moving on to the library we were able to complete some painting so here's a little bit of the post painting and as you can see there's there's quite a creative accumulation of a variety of furniture to allow students to have some flexibility and what we're looking to do is kind of update that as we look to purchase new furniture while still creating those flexible fa spaces for students so this is kind of a bird's eyee view of what that will look like with those windows being on the right hand side
015and again we've tried to design this so that it's it's highly flexible we've been able to move the circulation desk so it has a better view of that student entry area we kind of have two separate classroom use spaces both with the tables on the right hand side and then the more um presentation area with some cushiony chairs that can be moved around for students to participate in that area and then some smaller group seating around those curved bookcases and just to give you a little zoom in on that and again everything is highly mobile and on Wheels so that if we want to kind of take this space and bring a whole grade level team or a whole team into the library we can push those shelves that are in the center aside create
016a little bit more flexibility with the chairs being able to face that presentation space or the person who's speaking and create another area for students to kind of gather more collectively for sharing work or performances or speakers and these this is a really cool whiteboard thing in the bottom right corner there are these whiteboards that then attach to those tables and either form dividers so that if we do need to have an assessment set up or that sort of scenario scario those double as both dividers or whiteboards that students can take to those tables and utilize for more group oriented activities we're also able to take a look at the teachers room which again kind of highlights the variation of things that have accumulated over time and we'll be able to update that to create
017some of the consistencies with the furniture and other areas as well happy to answer any questions about any of that I was just wondering um if you could give us a overview of the budget like how much is remaining on the items that you were purchasing and how much we've spent so far so we've we've pulled from a couple of different sources a lot of that has come from the federal funding to allow for us to space students out as a result of Co we were able to work that into some of the funding I believe we would we've put to date just over 250,000 and moving forward have um I think it's about 200 for the library and teachers room and another 180,000 for the cafeteria if I'm remembering correctly but I will follow
018up with those exact figures I just want to say that I'm really happy that we're investing in s middle school because it has been kind of neglected and it is a mish mash and I'm happy to see that it's got more of a CO cohesive feel to it and um being in the cafeteria for the last couple uh new construction meetings it was like night and day in there because it used to feel like a dark Cavern and now it's very bright and um actually probably can see your food now so it's nice any other questions all right thank you very much thanks all right moving on to item D summer programming superintendent Ray or Parkers yep I just wanted to provide an update we are a little bit ahead of schedule from last year
019so I'd like to invite Abby tras up with me who is our summer program coordinator she was able to serve in that role last year and after looking at candidates this year we've um elected to continue with her in that leadership role and I'm going to give her a chance to share a little bit about summer school you already heard from superintendent Ray about our Title One Summer allocation which was great news and we're looking forward to being able to put that money towards our programming this year thanks uh so this year we'll be running our summer programs from July 10th through August 3rd Mondays through Thursdays at Young School uh as with last year we will continue to offer both extended school year and our summer school programs for eligible students our special education
020extended school year program is designed for students who experience severe regression or significant lagging skills over summer break esy focuses specifically on students individual IEP goals and services as directed by the IEP teams however our summer school program for eligible students will focus on language arts and our math fundamental skills the focus for this is to catch up and build momentum for these kids um over the summer to decrease the likelihood of continued gapped learning we are excited to offer both of these options to eligible students and look forward to another great summer of learning so we've been really happy to have Abby taking the lead on that and one of the things that we also shifted which you've seen in the most recent two reminders is that we selected to kind of start with
021parental interest this year and then determine qualifying students based on interest because last year we did experience kind of a of identifying students and then waiting for commitments from parents and then extending more invitations as we could kind of fill spots so we're hoping to streamline that process this year as well as give families earlier notification about exactly who we are able to accommodate so that they can make their summer plans and we're happy to take any questions just a question on participation and and what are we seeing this year at at this stage versus last year we really don't have numbers for this year yet some of our limitations are around ability to find staff and the physical space available last year I believe we were able to serve one classroom per grade level
022um for entering K through entering fifth grade students and um we definitely had higher levels of parti ipation or bigger groups but with more support staff for our younger students with um we had intended last year to run a middle school program and just didn't have the level of student interest that we would need to make that viable but we're able to kind of shift classroom spaces that were allocated to ensure that we had space for younger students as well so great number on total qu total number of students I could report that out but it would take me a couple of minutes to look it up but I think we had about a little bit more in summer programming than esy yes definely yep and then um that one classroom I think the classes
023ranged from 18 to low 20s but we had two staff members that were working with that classroom so that there was an ability to work in small groups and such go ahead Schoolboard member Gail is there um do you track do you keep track like by cohort of these students as they move through the system to see how this intervention is helping them in terms of scores and and all that or yeah so part of our reporting out for our Title One Summer realation Grant was to report on those students that are Title One identified that are receiving summer Services we don't currently have a way to easily be able to pull like this this group that's Summer School from this so we need to do that right now on a student by student basis
024and so we only did that for title one year marked students that were also participating in summer school and then comparing that group against not that group I guess we're seeing Obviously good results with with that title one group as I guess it's still pretty early right right it's it's a hard comparison to make because it that correlation causation is not we in order to really determine if summer school was effective for those students we would have to compare Title One students that aren't participating in summer school with Title One students that are participating in summer school and we haven't gone to that level because if we just compare as we have to for the reporting the title one students in summer school with the general po population those title one students may be struggling
025with other things like they they did make improvements they did not make as many improvements as the students that weren't selected for summer school so it's a little bit tricky because we can't see if that's because they were already behind or because they qualified for different reasons but we certainly have had feedback from families about student confidence and we're able to provide reporting back to teachers about student progress over the summer so I feel like all of those are really promising ways that we are confident that we're closing that gap for those students that participate sorry last question I promise so the for this enrollment period and it sounds like last enrollment period we didn't have any issue with bumping up against um limits and having to exclude anybody it's kind of sounds like the
026opposite right we of struggling with recruiting students and parent interest so the way that we did it last year is we started with student level data and teacher recommendations and then extended invites as we could so we started with what capacity we could have we looked at the students that we felt based on test scores and teacher recommendations would benefit the most from that and then only extended invitations to those families so there isn't there in that methodology there wasn't a way for us to know what the interest level was because we didn't extend the invitation first and then select we selected and then extended invitations so this year we'll have a little bit of a better sense of if our program is able to meet the demand in the community any other questions all
027right thank you very much thank you all right moving on to item e um construction update superintendent Ray all right well thank you for all those who attended last night um the exciting piece about last night was having the ability to finally release draft floor plans to the community um and that was obviously something that we needed to get clearance from the DOE that we were at that point where we could do that so now that the draft floor plans are out there we will start having some review groups um starting this week like one of those being meeting with the recreation department to say okay thinking about how you might use this building after hours do we have the things that you need have we thought about those and then taking those plans and
028saying okay what about the cleaning of the building and how does that work and having some conversations with Mike and having conversations with Jess and Abby about around special education programming and the flow of the building because like we said last night that is draft number one of probably 300 that will happen over the next couple of years of trying to make sure that we have the building you know set up in a way that makes sense for how we want to use it for the next 50 to 60 years um additionally um as you saw in there we had done very well with space allocations and that we were only a little over 3,000 uh square feet over kind of what the minimum would be for the state which is good news for us
029because certain spaces as we highlighted last night like gymnasium and cafeteria those are spaces that we would want to be or recommend to be a little bit larger to meet the needs of our community whether that be for after school school plays or concerts that we would hold in the cafeteria to the amount of use from Sarco parks and wck and others for Youth Sports and other events um in our gymnasium so that's a big step for us next week uh Megan I The Architects and many members of the city staff will attend an M do scoping meeting which is the next big hurdle um for us to clear to take all of their recommendations to think about traffic and sidewalks and all the things they are seeing in our plan so that once that
030meeting takes place we have the recommendations to put forward in our application for site approval which still is our goal is um June with the State Board of Education which would leave us kind of August as building approval program approval at the state level that's what keeps us on track for November uh so a lot needs to happen in that meeting next week is probably one of the bigger ones um now that the floor plan has been kind of released the next steps in development of the building we'll start to be thinking about systems uh in oako and the doe thinking about which systems for heating and um would be there so we've made some good Pro uh progress I ask people to look at those plans share those plans give feedback on those plans
031um because that's um you know that's a big step in the progress uh process is to look at what we're going to have and how we feel about the flow in the building and uh all of those pieces so lots happened we'll have a meeting uh is it May 18th May 18th is the next meeting um that we're thinking that in that month's time the community will definitely had seen those plans and be able to give feedback on those uh for both of the buildings any questions for superintendent Ray School Board member Le Fortune I don't have any questions it was just uh to see the presentation last night and I know it's draft and it's it's really just stimulat some conversation but it was very exciting to see a at least a draft floor
032plan and start to see the site that was proposed take shape into something more than just a a drawing it's uh you know definitely exciting to see that start to really really come together starts to feel real yep all right any other comments or questions all right moving on to item F April 1st enrollment update superintendent Ray yeah and this is just informational on your packet uh each year we provide an October one enrollment and an April one enrollment to the doe um and as you can see from here we have 1894 students prek through 8 and currently 856 students at Thorton Academy any questions from the board for superintendent Ray all right moving on to item G first reading of policies we have KF Community use of Sako school facilities we have ebcc bomb
033threat we have EC a security camera system EC a-r security camera system administrative procedure ECB test Management in school facilities and on school grounds gbb workplace bullying gbbb staff conduct with students gbec drug-free workplace GB G light work return to work GBF work rated injuries GB o Family Care leave gcfa employee social media policy G BC fb- recruiting and hiring of administrative staff- administrative staff procedure do I have a motion problem I move we approve the first reading of policies KF ebcc EC a d EC a-r ECB GB EB oh gbbb gbec GB G GBF gbo gcfa and GCF b-r so I have a motion from school board member Truman do I have a second second second by school member Le Fortune can I have a roll call vote Schoolboard member Archie yes School Board
034member Richards yes I vote Yes School Board member Le Fortune yes School Board member Gale yes School Board member Truman yes motion passes 70 oh sorry 60 I just wish Beth was here look at that all right policy H policy procedures to strike um I have kf- use of school facilities kf- a school facility form eb- safety program administrative procedure eb- R1 safety and wellness program administrative procedure eb- R2 Sako school department safety and wellness committee mission statement EB a-r chemical Hazard chemical hygiene plan eb-2 employee chemical Education and Training record eb-3 record of trainings received EBC C- R-1 bomb threat procedures EB cc- r-2 bomb threat checklist e EA EA a-r drug and alcohol testing of school bus drivers administrative procedure do I have a motion chair Preble School Board member Truman I move
035we strike policies kf- r kf- a eb- r eb- R1 eb- R2 EB a A- r eb- R2 eb- R3 EB cc- R-1 and EB cc- r-2 and um do I have a second second second by school by Marilla Fortune I just want to add that um we're striking these correct me if I'm wrong um because these are procedures and not policies there's no need for them to be in our policy handbook so if for some reason the procedure needed to be changed this should all be handled at the administrative level and not the Schoolboard level so and having the the check forms and the papers is kind of redundant where a lot of things are done electronically all right any other comment before roll call vote all right roll call vote Schoolboard member Archie
036yes Schoolboard member Richards yes I vote Yes School Board member Le Fortune yes School Board member Gail yes School Board member Truman y motion passes 60 moving on to item other information I don't see any other information was reported this evening all right um and there's no executive session scheduled for this evening so moving on to adjournment do I have a roll call vote so moved and a second second all right we have have a vote motion from Truman Schoolboard member Truman with a second vote for Schoolboard member Le Fortune roll call vote Schoolboard member Archie chair Pro oh yes go ahead really quickly um I was wondering that U could we have the next meeting for the finance and infrastructure committee for the 24th uh can we have can we have that change because
037that's um uh the time is not on that oh just for the next meeting are you referring back to the next meeting for finance and infrastructure for May 24th yeah do we have a time for that yet it will be at four o'clock is my understanding okay um so for public knowledge just to reiterate the finance and infrastructure committee meeting will meet on May 24th at 4M any other questions or concerns and also uh it couldn't hurt to have the times for for the curriculum committees as well even though we 4:30 we do it every every week the same time but okay so just for public knowledge curriculum committee will'll meet on May 22nd at 4:30 p.m. and just to backtrack a bit policy and Personnel committee their next meeting is May 10th at 5:30
038all right back to adjournment can I have a roll call vote School Board member Archie yes okay School Board member Richards yes I vote Yes School Board member Le Fortune yes School Board member Gail yes School Board member Truman yes motion passes Z zero thank you so much and have a great evening everyone