001i see you there okay so next to the camera [Music] i'm [Music] okay we're being recorded [Music] i can hear you i can we'll get started in just a minute we're just going to give another minute for folks to join us and get all of our technology set up and everything here so um that is that is up to all of you you have a you do have uh dr leggett hanging out behind she missed remote instructions so she thought she'd go back to it it's good to keep up with these skills yeah for all of us yeah we'll just give it another minute just for folks to join us and make sure we're all everything's working here but it looks like it's it looks good from our end how does it seem from your
002end perfect thanks okay so i'm gonna go ahead and call the meeting to order um so i'm calling the meeting to order at 6 32. thank you everybody for joining us we do have some folks here um in the room with us and then we do have folks that are joining us um virtually as well and the meeting tonight is the priority is for the meeting to be held live in person um the our previous practice of having remote meetings is no longer in play because of the end of the state of emergency so our priority is for the meeting to be held here in person our superintendent is joining us remote today for the meeting which is in accordance with the regulations since we do have our full board um here in person to
003do voting and all and those things but any updates or discussion that we need to have um with dr leggett will happen with her remote so um we will have time for public participation and i'll go through what that will look like when we get to that part of the agenda but i just wanted to remind folks that um since the school public boards and public bodies are asked to meet in person again should there be technology issues or something like that that comes up the pr the meeting will continue because we do have a quorum of the board here in person um minutes are taken during the meeting that are available once they are approved and there is a recording for what the technology can give us in that sense so we will move
004forward to our first agenda item which is approving the agenda do we have any changes or um additions to the agenda for tonight okay so we'll need a vote to approve the agenda second okay so we have a motion from leslie and a second from christine um all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay all right so we will move to our public participation um in this forum if you are here in the room with us you're welcome to speak during public participation we ask that you state your name and address before you do um address the the meeting all of your comments should come to the chair of the board um if you are joining us virtually and you would like to participate we ask that you use the
005q a or the chat feature you can type your comments in there as long as your name and your address are included in your comment your comment will be read out loud while we may not address each comment individually during public participation we do try to make sure that we address comments as the board goes on in the agenda and does our work but this really is a time for the public to have a chance to address the board not necessarily for there to be a discussion on topics so i think i know why most of our public who's here in the room with us is here which is later on in our agenda um but if anyone here in the room would like to share something during public participation please feel free to do
006so or anyone who's joining us virtually please feel free to go ahead and be typing behind the scenes and we'll just give it a a minute or so here to see if anything comes in sydney because your co-host you can see those chats coming in is that correct yes i can and do we have anything virtually okay all right so we will move forward to the next part of our agenda which is hearing from our student school board liaisons um i am not sure who's with us tonight so it'll be a surprise senior chris oh um ellen ellen woolston home had a swim meet tonight so we'll be wishing her luck in the pool and i'm going to move seth carl in and he's going to be joining us so i'll be promoting him to
007panelists right now perfect and it was last month that we were missing south for soccer correct yeah yes and i think we should probably say a little something about that yeah we should our super involved students school board liaisons we love it all right hi seth hello first of all congratulations we missed you last time but you were you were absent from our meeting for a very good reason so yeah um we are state champs for soccer now so yeah i think it was a playoff game that i had to miss um for the last meeting or like i had to miss the meeting for the playoff game yeah that is an excellent reason so um well we'd love to hear from you since we haven't heard from you um in a couple months now
008just how things are going so far um any sort of differences or you know things that you've seen um especially if there's anything that's been noteworthy or surprising to you about how this year has gone so far since we still are in a pretty different time um or if there's anything else that you would you know like the board to address um during your update um i think this year is pretty similar to last year uh in general just besides um the fact that like we're not like the main priority is keeping us in school like last year i'd say the main priority was like keeping us safe well that is still like a big priority like they want to make sure that like we can all be at school learning rather than like doing
009it remotely or in a hybrid situation so i think like that's a little bit of a change but like we were already um in school for like at least half of last year um but like this year there's been no remote days um so far at least and um i think everyone's doing like a good job just wearing their masks at all times and and being safe so i think it's going pretty well good any questions um from the board uh are most kids vaccinated now so um i think i think most kids are i know that like there's some younger kids who um you know like their parents or whatever don't want them to be so but i think that's fairly rare i think most people um are vaccinated in high school though i
010don't know like just how high that is but um i i i'd say that the majority of people definitely are um and i know like there's oh there's a school trip like school trips are allowed to happen this year so i think people are like there's like a plan in the spring to go to another country with a group of kids so i think um we'll see how that goes but it seems it's pretty promising and also like this um winter break i'm on the nordic ski team and we'll be going up to craftsbury um and i'll be skiing there like a group of i don't know 40 of us or so uh and that one of the requirements is that you're vaccinated so like obviously a large portion of us are if like that
011large of that large group within the team can go and participate in this so just based off that i'd say that a lot of the schools vaccinated so i had a question for you um much later on in our agenda today we're going to be starting to talk about um we're taking on sort of a a revamp of our website of the the school and the district's website and i would just love to hear from you from a student perspective do you use your school's website what do you use on it what are the resources that you think are helpful to have in terms of website based resources um and if you can think back what might have been helpful to have um even when you are you know an elementary student um well the
012thing i like about your website um in comparison to maybe leviton's is the fact that you can find the calendar pretty easily you just go to the bottom and it's right there uh sometimes like ah where do i find the school calendar and it gets kind of complicated but yours is pretty accessible so i like that um but i guess i don't know something just at the high school there's like a lot of library resources and i'm not sure how many of those you guys have on your site but just making sure those are easy for the kids to find when when they use them besides that um i don't really think i use the site as a student for much else um because everything's like on classroom or being emailed to me so i
013i couldn't really think of any other reason for a student to really need to use the site but that's just my opinion you that's why you're here you're here to give us your opinion yeah i mean unless you guys are like through powerschool or whatnot i'm not sure do they do that we actually just left paris when we use alma which is a like a similar type thing yeah but yeah you probably don't want the kids looking at their almost that's kind of young to be like so focused on grades so that probably doesn't matter as much any other questions from the board are you looking forward to your winter break yeah i am good all right well thank you we might be able to see some some family this year you know since stuff
014is a little bit better than last year so good well thank you for joining us tonight we really appreciate it um you know as always you're welcome to stick around and you're welcome to stick around for several uh more agenda items if you wanted to hear us talk about a website survey but i imagine you have other important things that you have to get back to tonight so um we appreciate hearing from you and um good luck with the end of this year and have a good holiday all right thank you bye seth okay okay so our next item on our agenda is honoring our next honoring our team so this is something that we've been able to do for the last three meetings uh where we've been able to recognize and honor different members
015of our school team here uh for really just going above and beyond over the course of the last year going on two years um and so tonight we are really excited to have the chance to recognize our food service and our custodians and i'm so thrilled that so many of you are here thank you um and so sydney kristen brenda i'm not sure who wants to jump in and and do the formal and official recognizing i'll be there i think we all want to be for sure i guess because i'm present i will um i'll start but you pretty much said the first few things i was going to say um that we get to honor our custodians and our food service people and how awesome it is how many of you are here and
016honestly you know i don't think you all get the credit on a day-to-day basis for everything you do um you are here you are are like front front line workers you've made sure the building is clean and kids get fed and we're all healthy every single day and you know with except for days maybe that you are sick you haven't missed a day so we so appreciate everything you do thank you for being here and i'm just going to really quickly [Music] i'll wait until brenda's finished with the gifts i'm glad that owl cut on and now they can folks can see can see who we're handing things to thank you [Music] over here thank you sydney you're on so i'm just going to quickly share my screen so for all of you if you
017can kind of turn towards me for a second what i've been thinking about when i think about our facilities and our food service staff is we often talk about um maslow's hierarchy in schools and you know how we actually get kids and people to where they need to be and i was looking at this and i was thinking you are quite literally our foundation of everything that we need so when we can give kids safety and when we can give them security and when we can feed them and give them the comfort that they have during the day when we give them a healthy and warm place to be and when we can provide all of those things and when all of you do that not just with that basic foundation but when you also
018give that foundation with the love that i know that you give to the kids every day and how much you care about them it's just an absolutely incredible foundation for our school and one of the things that i just wanted to say since of honoring the incredible work especially that you've all done through the pandemic is you know i think um like mrs reed was saying you did so many things that so many people don't even know about and when i think of mrs bailey and the food service team not just delivering to classrooms and for snacks and lunches last year but delivering to people's homes and finding ways to pack up food and get food to every home and grant them for a child who needed it and then when i think of our
019facilities crew at that you know quite concerning moment in march of 2020 when the rest of us bugged out quite literally you stayed here when we still didn't know a lot about the virus and what was happening and you stayed here to clean uh and sanitize and disinfect the entire building and make sure that everything could be ready whenever we are ready to come back so your work is absolutely admirable and i credit every smooth day that we have to all of you so thank you very much thank you all very much um we the board you know echoes everything that kristen and sydney have said um and we just really appreciate you um and what you're like they said we our students would not be able to be in the building um without the
020work that you all do so it really is foundational to everything that we do um and just so you know at the end of our presentation of honoring you one of the ways that we honor you as we make it okay for you to leave whatever you want so we honor you by not making you stay for the whole agenda if you don't want to you're welcome to we love to have folks stay but we also know that you are here late and up early and all of those things and so if some of us have a birthday here we go excellent so if and when at any point during the rest of our chatting here you want to slip right out we we take no offense to that whatsoever so thank you all thank
021you everyone [Music] [Laughter] thank you okay so our next agenda item is an update on our covet protocols um we um cindy and i in our pre-board meeting felt like this is a good chance for us to sort of check in um see a little bit of a reminder of what the protocols are that the school is following this also came out of the last progress monitoring committee meeting so there was more discussion at the last progress monitoring committee meeting about sort of re-upping and revisiting some of those protocols um and so that's where this agenda item comes from number one i think it's really just good timing after so many months of um being in school to revisit them and make sure that we're all still aware of what we're doing but we're also
022in a situation where we need to be realistic about rising numbers um variance all of those increased risks and is what we have um appropriate sufficient doing what it needs to do um moving forward so that's where this um the intention of this agenda item comes from and it looks like sydney has something for us yeah i do um now i know that this is up on the screen but i'm not sure if it's up on zoom for everybody is it also on zoom if somebody who's watching from home if you could tell me in chat if it's up on zoom at home that would help me out a lot it's on my screen so i would assume that means okay thank you becca it's there okay um [Music] this very first slide is not
023intended to be red so i didn't worry about the blurriness but um i wanted to put it up there just because we're we're going to generally be referring to those swiss cheese layers that we continually talk about with um with our covered protocols so what we have is our current gvs protocols as we currently have in place our three to six foot distancing lunch at six feet in snacking classrooms universal indoor masking and outdoor masking optional our hand hygiene we have surveillance testing right now we have about 50 percent of our student and staff population signed up for our pool testing which is great and the more the merrier it's also not too late to sign up if anyone is still interested we are doing symptomatic testing for kids in that surveillance testing program who
024show symptoms while at school we have a limited campus unlimited field trips depending on where kids are going we continue to have cleaning and disinfectant in disinfecting routines for high chat surfaces and we even though it's winter we're still continuing to maximize our outdoor space and time as much as possible so those are the biggies our progress monitoring committee met again last week and some of the big concerns were do we need to consider any adjustments at this point specifically concerning the current surge of cases in new hampshire um the new variant and i i didn't specifically name omicron because it's so new but delta delta still is playing a huge role in the transmission rate that wasn't specifically taken into consideration as much when we were creating our protocols and the fact that we're
025at holiday travel and gathering time so those were the big things that we wanted to bring that group wanted to bring to the board's attention to see if any adjustments in our protocols from previous slides might be warranted at this time we have um information as to well i'm not sure what can be shared or not but have we had many cases of covid within gds so in the last two weeks we've had four gvs standards in the last two weeks we've had our our own mini surge or spike um i don't even like using those words burst i don't know what you want to call it but for gvs standards we we have had a rise in cases so over the last two weeks we had seven cases um two staff and five students
026positive and by gvs standards that's high for us so on the one hand that's high for us on the other hand um it has not been defined specifically as a cluster or an outbreak which are the definitions used by the state to show that there's in school transmission specifically so you so the cases most they are most likely a reflection of just what we're seeing around the state is that the state has the highest number of cases and hospitalizations that it's had since the beginning of the pandemic we know that the delta variant is um is much more transmissible than uh what we've seen before and it's most likely a reflection of that more than actual cases being transmitted in school that's you know to be completely transparent we never know if it could be
027transmitted in school of course that's always a possibility um but when they define when dhhs defines a cluster or an outbreak that's the way that they define an identification of the potential of in-school transmission and we haven't had those yet and do we also know or are we allowed to know are these breakthrough cases or are these unvaccinated cases well the kids wouldn't have been vaccinated yet it's still too soon for them to be considered fully vaccinated the staff members are vaccinated um i noticed that the um the daily screening wasn't on your list of protocols so did that daily screening go by the boards beginning yeah that's what i thought i don't know that whether that would add to anything to bring that back no i think it was proven to be pretty ineffective
028yeah and what sydney's saying is we don't yet know if and it doesn't appear to be that transmission is happening in school yeah yeah take that like and a big part of that was our taking temperatures in the morning and once it got cold last year the thermometer is not working so yeah and i think there was maybe um i think mrs islander may have told me there was only actually one student that we found with a fever that we sent home through that through the entire year so that didn't prove to be highly effective what we found through the daily screening with the app was basically that parents would be doing it anyway with or without the app parents who would be doing it are doing it and parents who wouldn't be doing it
029the the app itself didn't make that difference i'm sorry i don't know if you lost me or if i need to be so now you're fired we had a door door closing door openings oh okay okay so one of the things that what came up at progress monitoring meeting is um you know should when we talk specifically about should we be doing anything else is some of the staff members had been concerned about outdoors since outdoor masking is currently optional while we're in this current surge in new hampshire and our kids are mostly not yet considered fully vaccinated and we have holiday travels and gatherings would it would the board want to entertain the idea of looking into adding universal outdoor masking while this is all happening there was a a really good conversation in
030the progress monitoring committee about especially at younger grades especially in those age groups that are not yet eligible for vaccination um a lot of what's developmentally appropriate play brings them very close together so two young kids in a sandbox together are going to be within three feet of each other potentially for an extended period of time um and and in that situation they aren't necessarily um wearing a mask and so that was a something that was brought forward by the staff as a question um you know if we're if we're putting these these layers in place um is that one that the board should consider along and they also brought up um you know small group instruction and just being aware of the distancing in the cafeteria so some of those distancing times and and
031we did talk about how we did know that uh the move from six feet to three feet well you know what it was six feet it was more realistically like three feet when you go to three feet more realistically they're getting closer than three feet um and so just knowing that and is there something is there additional need for action at this time so the progress monitoring committee asked that to be brought forward to the board how difficult would it be to um encourage masking outside and we've been happy to give them mass breaks but is this going to keep them more safe or is it going to be more of a hindrance i just don't think we have any evidence even with delta that outside exposure is like a thing that right is like
032a major consideration i just think it would be really daunting for the kids it makes me feel actually a little bit i'm also thinking when it gets really cold it's going to be wet and slimy and you know the kids are so resilient and so wonderful but i feel like that is like a really big psychological moment for them where you have to get a break i think so it's huge to be completely honest i think adults have a harder time with it than kids the kid it really doesn't faze them at all in fact a large percentage wear them anyway yeah i'm not saying yeah or nay for the outside masking yeah i'm not sure the evidence is there i have no i don't know i don't have enough knowledge in it um but
033i can say the kids are super used to the masks and lots of them wear them outside and in fact um lots of us including the little people are finding it's much warmer outside but they really are i don't think that the mass cause for most kids um any ill feelings i think it might be a different situation if we we knew there was transmission within the school but the fact that these are cases that have been contracted outside um i think i'm in favor of keeping the outside masking optional i had a very similar thought christine yeah we were uh the last progress monitoring committee meeting happened a day of pool testing and so we had the conversation of depending on how the pool test comes back tomorrow um you know that may be
034a very different conversation i think we're sort of like on at this point with cases the way that they are and numbers moving the way they are we are again sort of on that like treadmill of like okay every couple weeks where poised to have to act again um and i just feel like when they're outside how great for them to see each other laughing and smiling and uh being kids that can have a respite from this [Music] i i would be in support at this point knowing what we know to keep keep mass optional outside if some choose to wear them any other thoughts or conversations specifically about masking what i'm hearing is that the board is comfortable keeping that particular um protocol in place as is right now yes okay are there other
035protocols from that list that folks would like to discuss or revisit or look at tonight um let me pull it up again so everybody can see it i'll do my best [Laughter] i will speak as a parent who was very grateful to have the symptomatic testing option with karen it's very um smooth and it's incredible and i'm deeply grateful that she is willing to offer that and to do that same i was going to say something about that the testing i think it's wonderful that we're able to do that how is the supply of tests here right now we're still so far so good that's wonderful yeah i feel like this gives kids and staff a feeling of empowerment too to say i can be part of the data of what's going on in our
036school yeah and i think this is great my own knowledge base that the systematic testing of the rapid tests what's the rationale by not being i mean you get a positive and my understanding is you can't test with the pcr you have to change the 10 days what's what's the rationale for not allowing the pcr to get you out of the protocol if your pcr comes back negative that was the guidance we got from the cdc for the department of health and human services dhhs yeah yeah okay and it was and the same thing was we that question had come up in progress monitoring and the medical folks who are on the committee said um it's they they see it almost like a pregnancy test once you get a positive you have to assume you're
037positive that's why you get a real test and you know either way i guess that would be my i think i think they see that as a real test yeah if i could just clarify a little bit if you look at the pers if you look at the percentages of false positives false negatives with both antigens and pcrs depending on when the test is taken and depending on the course of the virus it it's not worth parsing all of that out so if you get any kind of a positive you treat it as a positive okay yeah that and that was pretty i would say it was across the board from all of the sources that this protocol was developed through um was across the board to to have that in place yeah as we
038developed the um the you know that the for new hampshire and then you know and looking at the you know for the group that put that together um all of the medical folks that were involved in that that was the guidance don't go ahead is there any testing is it after the 10 days do you need another test or we just 10 days and you're good to go after the 10 days assuming you're asymptomatic right so you have to be you have to be cleared of symptoms in 10 days but um basically if you did a pcr test it could be up to 90 days that you would test positive because the pcr test is going to still find covet in your system um the antigen test might actually look for active infection but um
039you know so that could at some point turn negative but if you're going for a pcr test at three months up to after you've had cove it could still be positive at least on the nodes it seems like there's still a lot of um for lack of a better way to say like tension in the system around surveillance testing and symptomatic testing and parents who for their own reasons are not comfortable being in the pool testing but who feel that's maybe less equitable but we can't make it available to everyone i think i'm just curious if either you being the board member there or sid or sydney or kristen want to speak to that a little bit yeah we had a really good progress monitoring committee where we talked about a lot about that um
040and the um the one of the thoughts in the development of the symptomatic testing protocol because it is something that's entirely optional um one of the thoughts behind how that protocol was developed was to um offer a benefit to families who enroll in the pool testing as like an incentive as a way of increasing our pool testing numbers um and knowing that in the the the day-to-day sort of practical as it's implemented in full testing um you know we've heard from karen um you know that you know if there's kids who are absent or if there's kids who are just having a hard day and can't pick their nose with the swab or if you know if they refuse you know those are it's no one is ever forced right to do the pool testing
041um you know and the kids are doing it themselves so it's a pretty it's you know it's a kind of an empowered like a self test that they do on themselves excuse me um and so using that symptomatic protocol and knowing that we had a limited supply yeah of those tests um and there was a very good conversation amongst the committee about uh just sort of like the the reality of why that protocol was put into place and knowing that there are options for folks the symptomatic testing at the school is only offered if karen has time and there are tests available and there are other testing options in the area so if it's if that was the only option to do a symptomatic test um you know that would be a very different approach
042in conversation but knowing that it's one of many options for folks in the area was part of of that conversation too and sydney or kristen i don't know if you had anything else from that conversation that you would i think that summarized it thanks um i would just add as we're sort of wrapping up our conversation about the covet protocols is i mentioned this earlier you know that we're sort of back in this cycle of like every couple weeks like okay is where where do we stand especially as we get the pool testing and as we look at numbers you know and if we ever are in the position where there's a reason to believe there's been transmission within the school just putting a reminder out to the board that there could be situations where
043we would need to meet in a in an emergent manner and under our definitions emergency doesn't necessarily mean like emergency red flashing lights it just means the board meeting outside of our normal meeting schedule so um you know it's always i think it's good to sort of remember or keep keep an eye on your email um and and know that as we look at some of these things if if we did see something where like a cluster or an outbreak happened or if we had a large number of pools come back positive or something like that we may be in a situation where um either myself or sydney would feel that the board needed to meet emergency meetings so all right anything else from that just before we get off this topic has there been
044any further discussion about the um the department of education's um uh prohibition of move to remote learning if the school district feels that's appropriate so it's interesting that um they have their hearing on it in november and they are supposed to they were supposed to have it on their agenda for an official vote um this thursday and i looked at the state board agenda and it's not on the agenda so i checked with the superintendent's association to ask what happened to it and nobody knows so they expected it to be there but it isn't so my guess is maybe there's some committee that's still reviewing it at this point and that's maybe the position of the numbers in new hampshire they've decided we'd better back off this that would be great if somebody came to
045that logical conclusion [Music] like the situation with the funding yeah no oh we didn't mean that okay we'll go ahead and move to our next agenda item um the rfp selection for the landscape architect and playground designer um so we have two um sydney sent through in a separate set of documents to the board we have two rfps and then we also have a summary of the playground committee's feedback on those so i'm just going to briefly say i don't think we can go wrong with our topic we have two wonderful top two bids that are in from the playground committee recommending ron king natural playgrounds and also se group ron king is located in concord new hampshire and sc group is out of burlington vermont they are both highly experienced they both rang true
046to what grantham and gvs would be looking for in terms of a playground design lots of pros and cons um you know balancing out but these two definitely rose to the top and i can answer any questions that you have about them but i thought that you would need some time to talk as a board before we choose this just to clarify for anybody who's listening in first of all this is a really exciting decision because this is choosing our partner and this partner is going to be designing with the community with all of you and with our kids and with our staff of what our um gvs grounds renovation and playground project is actually going to look like and become so it's a really exciting step and then secondly this phase of the project
047is strictly for the design this is not getting into any kind of construction beds or anything like that so this is just for the landscape architect design firm and what kind of questions do you have for me um one question i had was uh did the playground committee get in touch with any of the sites where these contractors have previously done projects yes so they both come highly recommended okay sydney as i was reading both of the reports which of them would incorporate more flexibility with the design it sounded like one was going to be much more nature focused and um i'm getting the impression that we want to see a combination of nature and you know places for soccer fields or other types of things and then i thought about the drainage is that
048going to be taking care of no matter what design are we going to be able to use it in the winter yeah so that's number one priority um so both places have been to the site they've done a site visit and they both recognize the drainage issue is is the number one priority so that kids can access the playground all year round so i don't have any hesitation with either of them i think what you're probably talking about is that the ron king natural playgrounds really has a focus on natural playgrounds and natural playground elements so if we wanted any traditional equipment um if we wanted swings if we wanted any kind of structures or anything like that he would leave a space in his design for it but we would have to do that
049part separately because his his focus is on strictly natural playgrounds incorporating i mean he'll do slides and things and rope structures incorporating on a hill and tunnels but he is not going to do anything except leave a space for any any structures or traditional equipment so that would be an additional expense if we need if we wanted but we don't know if it would be additional it would just be an additional piece of of the puzzle that we would coordinate i did want to speak a little bit to the price because on our playground committee some people were talking about a price difference between the two because there's about a ten thousand dollar price difference between the two um when i was really pretty going into more detail in each bid before tonight i really
050think that the price difference is actually a wash i think they're just about the same because with ron king natural playgrounds um if you'll note in one section of his bid we would have to in addition to the fee that's listed pay him 150 an hour that's his rate and we would also have to take his design and hire a cad engineer to put it into cad to get the final plans because he doesn't do that part of it so between those two things that's going to make up for the 10 dollars difference so i in my opinion they're equally priced so i've had experience with the sc group in the past not with obviously playground constructions but um you know personally i found them super responsive um super professional um one of the things
051i like about the sc group and again i'm not overly familiar with ron king but um se group is a little bigger of an organization they do have a lot of resources to draw upon you know if they get in here and find something that is unexpected um they do a lot of uh civil design work for various companies i've worked with before so um and i have found them super it sounds like from your report sydney we may have something unexpected with the the septic and leech yeah already okay so i'm well first of all i'm incredibly thankful that we had some kind of good luck that we were able to get the site survey going before it was covered in snow and done for the year they were out there today so thank
052very thankful for that um but we you know as as we mentioned before in addition to the site survey we've had really big concerns with this septic and so um many thanks to mr campo who worked with stern septic to go out and have a camera go through and figure out what was really going on down there i am extremely thankful that he did because of a couple things one we have some very good news with our septic which is um it looks like we can probably get another 10 or 20 years out of it so um we're going to do as little with the septic as possible in this design which is going to save us money and that's a good thing um a little bit of the not so good news is that
053we found a um a pipe that goes under the building and there's really nothing that we can do about it that's just a really kind of drawn out you it's like a really extended u-trap that goes under the building and it will at some point cause us problems but at least we know about it now and we can try and flush it out as much as we can but someday that's going to be an issue um that would actually cause us to you know dig up the floor of the school so let's hope that that can be proactively taken care of for a long time and then uh the third thing is that the um the plans that are the official plans for the septic system do not at all match what is actually there
054so um for that i'm incredibly thankful because the septic lines and the junctures and where the leech fields are don't match the plans that we have and if we had at any time started building based on the official plans we have we would have been in a lot of trouble so again thank you very much to mr campo and to stern so now with that in addition to the site survey we're going to have a really comprehensive really accurate map of what we're working with one question i had for both of these respondents is did they uh did the committee speak with them all a bit at all about maintenance costs once the project is completed no we didn't get into that that would this is just for the design um yeah so i'm not
055i would assume maybe i'm assuming incorrectly but i would assume that maintenance kind of things would come when we get more into the construction bed yeah okay and the design of it like the actual and this is the design and the engineering and the plans and the permits and those kind of things would be happening at this pace but i was just looking at the photographs and you know there's there's trees there's borders there's um lawns um you know like wood chips or something in some areas um and just you know that kind of thing is it's going to take wear and tear yeah i mean at this point you know whoever we select during the actual design phase itself is when we incorporate yeah the low maintenance this is what we're looking for right
056yeah that kind of stuff yeah one of the references today um that i was talking to because i was doing some final checking today made me really laugh because he said make sure this is really kid focused because it's you're gonna involve the community and it's gonna be great but the kids really don't care if it's really pretty ornamental grass just remember that i was like okay i'll remember that so christine now i understand what you're saying about the maintenance so starting right up front you know in the design we can start to control what the long-term maintenance will be yeah um i'm just thinking sydney when you said we have another 10 years or 20 in the septic um is this design going to be including looking at potentially in 10 years that has
057to be replaced are we going to have to redo the playground again i think we'll have to talk about that in the design but you know that's all going to depend on um you know what can be built around and near our leech fields and where future leech fields might be able to go and that's above my expertise sydney were they saying that the the leash field had another 10 or 20 years or the actual septic tank itself they tested the soil so i think they were looking at the leach field okay any idea about availability of either group are they both ready to go yeah i confirmed with both of them because we're on a really tight timeline um and i did confirm that they would both be ready to go if you know
058if they're chosen so um i think they were a little surprised by the tight timeline but they both know what it is and they've recognized that and i think you can see at least in one of the beds that they actually put our timeline in it [Music] what what do you folks i appreciate and i i like and it that was echoed in one of the comments what you said about the um se groups having more resources and more connection to to resources available to them just it seems like it might be for those things that come up because we know there's going to be other unexpected things that are going to come up as they always do yeah um and it seems like you know that's a that would be a plus in their
059favor to me i think i was i was thinking more about the cost responsibility but then i did the same thing sydney and i was reading back through and i saw that hourly rate um and that there it seems like there would be some more additional costs with the wrong king that weren't outlined in that you know in the matrix that he that they had um so yeah sort of the ron king is is the design it's more of like um and i think he would do a fantastic job and if we go with him i'm there are no hesitations whatsoever and but i think the cost will be a wash it's just putting together the puzzle pieces so like if you decide to go with the wrong king playgrounds um it's just that we'll
060have to have a few more additions where we have somebody do the cad engineering um in that part of it and then and then with se group that's more of a one stop where they do everything together yeah so both of those work you know both of those can work equally well um i'm influenced by by ed having personal experience with this company sc group so that swings me in their favor and i do like i mean well you know i think we certainly could manage the other pieces um that you know ryan came to build sort of outlines that he would have to either coordinate or work with um you know let's face it no one here is a civil yeah engineer or exporter you know typically my you know my my you know
061sort of standard position is you know if we have a organization that is willing to do it all and coordinate everything then that is uh you know even if it ends up being you know two or three thousand dollars more in the long run it's well worth it um because you know you very quickly could pay you know 10 20 30 times that if you don't catch something that you know maybe somebody would you know more experienced with a problem i know we haven't gotten here in our agenda yet but i was thinking too about one of our exciting donation things that we get to talk about tonight um and i felt like um between the the incorporation of natural but also perhaps some things like swings and more traditional playground equipment plus the potential
062if if we decide to accept uh what's you know coming down the pike a little bit later in the meeting um it seems i felt like there was more flexibility and more willingness to incorporate some of those elements from the sc group um it seemed like the the one from ron king is incredible and has really great examples but um seemed much more like they come in sort of with a vision of what they want to execute and anything that else that we might want to incorporate there they say like okay we can leave space for that yeah but it's not the same sort of like all-encompassing design yeah um i really liked at the beginning i thought what got to that was at the beginning of the essie group um proposal when they talked
063about that space being like that entrance to the school and how does it reflect like from the drive in all the way through to classroom experience it felt much more all-encompassing um and it just seemed like sort of the tone of that was much more inclusive of some of those other elements that we might want to bring in beyond just the natural playground elements so i would say i'm leaning more towards the essay group because of those things that that was a similar feeling that i had reading to both and then like ed said just reading through their um personnel um the uh qualifications of the different people involved yeah we don't know what's going to come up and it sounds like they they have many more resources than possibly the other yeah i have
064to say one thing that occurred to me looking through oh it's union elementary school design page 21 on the sc proposal and i'm looking at these spaces and thinking okay if you have kids out for recess and there's some there's some like looks like wooded trails um did the committee give any thought to how kids are going to need to be supervised with this different kind of approach to a play space well there's like a whole design process that goes on so like i can imagine they're going to obviously meet with the school folks and talk about here's how we here's all the spaces that are available how do you i think it goes the other way around i think they talk to the school folks and they're like here's how we manage recess and
065here's our people resources how does that hate design elements yeah i don't think they come to us and be like we're gonna put stuff in the woods and you go supervise it i've been through a process similarly in another school and that's how it worked they really looked like took me back from people i would be i'd be careful sort of looking at some of these displays and say uh you know and thinking that's what they're going to bring to the table here because these are just illustrative of what they've done in the past yeah who knows the land constraints and the budget constraints that you know union had for this project so you know yeah i mean well it just occurred to me looking at this tea if i were yeah no recess duty
066what would i do like if they were putting our grounds on one of these they might include all of our trails yeah but our kids don't go out on the trails at recess yeah okay so it's in the picture but that's not part of recess yeah okay so like if they if if they were putting our you know if if this was a picture of our plot of land it would have all kinds of areas that are not accessed during recess yeah yeah it may have also been made go ahead sydney i was just gonna say back to what leslie was saying they come here for two full days and nights for input and community you know kind of gathering of information and it's our vision with them yeah yeah i was also thinking with
067the snow on its way you know the ease of clearing the play space for the kids and how much are we putting on custodians on a particular design to keep it clear and open um it needs to be manageable yeah yeah or we need to figure out a way to clear the snow into a sledding hill yeah so yeah any other conversation about this or are we ready would someone like to make a motion to um accept one of them i'll move to accept the se groups proposal second okay so we have a motion on the table from ed to accept the se group's um rfp proposal and a second from leslie any other discussion on that okay all those in favor of accepting the se group please say i i any opposed say nay
068okay excellent thank you and thank you to the playground committee and to sydney and for everyone to so far in this process to the person who is here surveying today because the the ground appeared i pulled in and i saw them i was like yes never been so excited about surveying he was literally here all day i was under the impression it was going to be a couple hours and every time i looked out he was out there she's still here wow um okay our next agenda item very exciting is um accepting some donations and so we do have taken one at a time we have a letter in the board packet um from sydney um so we are um i'm just gonna read the letter here that the memo that we have here from
069sydney so it is with great pleasure that i request request the grantham school board accept the donation of fourteen thousand dollars from a local anonymous donor previously reviewed in august the donation comes at this time as the gvs grounds renovation and playground committee has successfully raised seven thousand dollars in order to meet the criteria for this two to one match again many thanks to this kind donor this puts the district only seven thousand away from its final goal so we would need a motion the fourteen thousand dollars from leslie in a second from denise and all those in favor please say aye aye and any opposed say nay okay and thank you thank you if anybody wants to have discussion no no no um if we have an address for um our anonymous say thank
070you and i will just say you know individually thank you for this you know we're so appreciative i also just wanted to do a quick shout out and say thank you to everyone that donated to help us get to the point of being able to accept this if you made a five dollar donation to buy one raffle ticket or you're writing a check like this every single one of those is a piece along the way so we wouldn't be able to be accepting this if we didn't have those individual five dollar raffle ticket donations or the change that kids brought into school all of that makes a huge difference and we i just wanted to recognize that and say thank you so much okay our next uh donation which i have a hard time even
071seeing this is real um is a donation and a conversation um that sydney has had with yankee barn homes um so sydney i'll let you can i talk through that well i was just gonna share my screen so everybody who's there and at home can see what we're talking about if that's right so as we've been looking at our renovation and playground project one of the things that we can call a good side effect of the pandemic is how much our staff and students are outside and enjoying the outside for eating for a snack for instruction and for meeting time during school and after school and in summer school etc etc in looking at this whole project and talking with some of our amazing partners in the community i started meeting with paul marinelli from
072yankee barn homes who is such an incredible advocate for the children of grantham and i get pretty choked up talking about this but anyway yankee barn homes has offered to build this at a great donation to the gvs playground project the grantham elementary pavilion designed yankee barn style this is a size that would accommodate two of our grade levels and complete grade levels outside and in our biggest grade levels we took our biggest grade levels and um i'll just let everybody kind of soak it in for a minute and then just to get into some of the details of the donation let me turn it this way um so mr marinelli is clearly interested in a contribution that demonstrates support for the school system and the children of grantham the cost of this structure for
073yankee barn is a hundred and ten thousand they will donate 82 500 approximately 75 percent the portion that would come from our gvs renovation and playground project would be only 25 which is 27 500 which is less than even cost and um just to kind of put this in perspective for everyone um mrs lessard knife we're looking at the cost of our tent rentals over the last two years and those total 31 000 um in renting our tents during the pandemic so when you compare our tent rentals to having this absolutely gorgeous um outdoor space that gvs can have forever from our amazing partner in the community i just think it's a really wonderful thing and there are other schematics that i put in your board packet but i think probably the first one is
074the one that everybody would want to see and i didn't know if any of you had any questions for me um mr marinelli was supposed to be here tonight and unfortunately he got called away um but he did ask me to present this on his behalf and his kindness and generosity i'm sure won't be lost on all of you it's very quiet there i think i'm checked out i'm complaining that it's an overwhelming generosity you know the timing is important because i'm sorry i'm sorry there's a delay it must be that the timing is important because um if we accept this donation then se group would actually take these schematics and work this into their design as they work with us yeah yeah and just from a like a technical perspective where where would these
075funds come from this would be part of the entire playground project so we actually have the funds technically available now but um this wouldn't happen i don't think unless the whole playground project happens so this would become part of the the bigger playground uh bucket as you well okay so this would get so if the bond doesn't pass this goes away i mean you could decide that that is an interesting question adam yeah i mean that's not a given but the board would decide that yeah okay the other piece just i mean again this is fantastic all the way around it another thing to keep in mind is the foundation work that we'll have to put in in addition to the 27.5 which again i i still think this is a no-brainer but it you
076know just to be crystal clear that this isn't going to be a 27 5 projects yeah it's really you know somewhere between 40 and 50 000 i would imagine by the time which still seems like a home run but well and i think some of that will also factor into what happens with those tennis courts that was well that was my next question of if this is going to accommodate looking at the plans i didn't see uh there's footage yeah i'm just i mean it's a very good sized structure um i can't read the numbers but they're on there it's about 500 square feet so okay okay 20 25 or so um yeah we'll just have to look on where exactly this goes um whether the tennis courts are you know all that overall i
077think this is a fantastic opportunity for us sydney is the uh uh the donation from yankee barn just the structure or is it also all the preparation site work and we have to do the pad we're doing the foundation and then they do the structure okay i just wanted to be clear thank you to your point ed though we'll be doing site work no matter what anyway so in a certain way you're right that it's an additional cost and another way it's just but it's wrapping into yeah it's an additional entire budget if the bond doesn't pass yeah yeah which you know unfortunately we're not going to know until march which at that point this will be well underway at least from a planning perspective for them i'm thinking about if having this you know
078outside of the the playground project of having this structure meets the need that we're currently filling with these tent rentals what that sort of like yeah i i'm thinking of it like you made me sort of rethink like it is is this something that we if we decide we want to move forward with it that maybe we pull out and say we're moving forward with no matter what because yeah if we sink thirty thousand dollars into another two years of tent rentals when we could have a permanent put it towards this yeah especially if and i don't know where we stand in terms of our um our grant money you know for for the you know coven relief money i know we have a longer timeline out to use that we still have you know
079we're still you know years within the timeline of using that um but it seems like this would be a much better investment than tents [Music] they would start when they came in no we took them down for the weather just um a lot of people watching this or or listening to it recorded later might ask why aren't we just buying tents um and just to let everybody know that that it's still cheaper and safer for us to rent them because the safety inspections and the insurance make it a little prohibitive for us to buy them and be responsible for them and insure them and to do the weekly checks and the training for the weekly checks and everything so um you know just i i think that's probably a logical question so just to answer
080that one is that i'd be thinking it too okay other thoughts on this it sounds like from the conversation i'm hearing that we may be moving in the direction of a motion to accept this but i want to see if there's other conversation or discussion before we i moved to accept the donations in the environment okay so we have a motion from leslie to accept the donation from mankind homes oh stephanie a second from ed all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed okay and when you communicate with paul please extend our thanks to him and we will say that many many more times to come in the future but this will be our first one okay okay our next agenda item is a follow-up on the voucher presentation um and i think
081sydney will have that for us yep um this i'm just going to be really fast because i'm not sure of how many of you have heard but i we did the voucher presentation when the select board was here there are there's now an amendment that has been passed to the vouchers have you all been aware made aware of the amendment all right so the amendment will essentially make it two main changes um i just have one slide to pull up so just give me one second we'll make two main changes to the current education freedom account that we talked about last time but they are two very significant changes so um number one is that it will the plan for the amendment is to remove the income limit of the family so right now families
082have to be 300 percent um [Music] within the poverty level which i believe is 78 000 a year for a family of four and then the second really big one that i think and hope will kind of make people's make people wake up and kind of eyes pop open is that the intention of the amendment is for all of these vouchers to be funded locally and what that would mean is that as you go through the grantham school district budget there would be a line for education freedom accounts and it would come out of our local budget for every child in grantham who wants to access a voucher to go someplace else besides our school so there's a formula that they put out in the amendment and um i asked mrs lessard to figure out
083what the cost for a voucher would be for every grantham student so remembering that adequacy is currently 3850 approximately per student um the formula is here and i'm not going to go through the entire thing but this is what the formula would look like for grantham specifically and what you would see in your school district budget line is grantham taxpayers paying ten thousand nine hundred twenty dollars and ninety nine cents per student for any student who decided to go to private school religious school or home school or to another school that accepted tuition students and would the district have to fund every student who applied yep yep yes every single one so that removes all of the operating money that we need to fund yeah so you know if you're looking at 20 students and
084i could very easily think of 20 students almost off the top of my head who are home schooled or a private school or religious school that's you know we're looking at a two hundred thousand dollar budget line that we would have to raise and appropriate from grantham taxpayers or cut two hundred thousand dollars one or the other and these schools don't have to be approved or fit within any criteria nor are they overseeing they give the money to the family exactly yeah so if somebody wanted to go to a religious military school um not of a christian faith that would bother others we would just have to let that money go yeah and and the district itself would raise and appropriate the money and write the check and no accountability for where the money goes
085nobody sees where it goes yeah that's just irresponsible i'm sorry i think so i mean i know that the last voucher conversation that we had was concerning but this amendment is yeah it's critical it's this amendment is is truly destructive yeah with no funding yeah here's our mandate yeah make it happen and the only way to raise that revenue is tax there's just no other way to do it property tax and and there's no limit on on what the request could be i mean somebody could ask to go to private school in france it literally doesn't matter the money goes to the family okay that's cool and if they want to go yep they do that it could be families saying they're homeschooling but not educating their child at all and then what if the
086child then comes back into the school yeah and wants to leave again to go to another just so destructive this is just how is the money paid out like is it done in quarter payments or it's quarter payments so it goes i think 30 30 20 20 throughout the year what recourse do we have with this none well there's legislative recourse so anybody who please let people know about this because not a lot of people know that this piece of legislation is out there um and people need to speak out about it and talk to legislature and representatives and talk about what this would do to local district funding this one has the potential not in grant them i will say but this one has the potential to shut down some small schools [Music] i
087mean yeah think about it going forward claremont yeah well thank you for the update yeah okay it looks like brenda has her hand up i don't know if she needs to say something no in real life or in zoom in in zoom i was like hey i didn't raise my hand okay i talked with my hands so much that zoom now raises my hand automatically you look like you're trying to raise your hand like i'm not i just talk with my hands okay our next agenda item is the budget so um our first uh line for the budget tonight is instruction okay so that's it that's you you're on um so in doing this this year i realized that i knew i was green last year but now i realize how green i was when
088i did this last time thank you for being so kind to me last year we were all in a deep covered fog um so i some of this i do and some of it karen sydney do so um i'm just gonna go through the things i do is that how i should do it sydney yeah and i'm trying to think i can share my screen so people can see it but i'm trying to think i'm not sure if there's a way for me to highlight the lines but i might be able to just use my cursor if anybody wants to try and follow along the board's pretty far away from us so yeah we can you're probably all right meaning we'll look when our binders i think yeah of people at home if anybody at
089home wants but fair enough we're talking about thank you for being considerate of this is the same yeah the the first one that i what we got to work on is um a summer program regular ed summer program and for summer program next year we're not asking for any change in funds we're hoping that we can provide the same sort of program that we offered last year which was super beneficial to our students [Music] and then about uh two thirds of the way down is 53210 achievement test scoring and that remains the same and that's for our nwea which we are actually using more efficiently and better now that we've really started focusing on mtss and data driven instruction intervention which is really neat um under that 53220 is in richmond there's a 14 decrease
090um i don't know why that decreases there just those are the field trip requests that were made when we get to the instructional supplies there is a 29 increase um this year we included the summer book bags which last year we incorporated that into a grant and then we also added mountain math and language which is an intervention tool that teachers felt strongly would be beneficial it could be used whole class small group or individual and it um it's daily practice of skills that they've already learned in a very independent way that students are able to do it on their own so that that adds about uh 1400 to the public and then with our mtss there are some fundations and prevention supplies and we found this year that as they were doing running records
091and reading data we have a couple different versions of our um of one of our assessment systems that aren't diving together really well so we want to get everyone up with the current margin so that everyone has the same data so that's what um constitutes the increase in instructional success before i go on are there questions on that because i know sometimes i talk really fast so then 56110 is workbooks again a 17 increase last year before ordering i asked everyone to go through their cabinets and drawers and everywhere else and count up books so we didn't order as many last year because we found everything that we had but now we've used everything that we had so now we have to order full supplies um textbooks we had a 36 decrease periodicals there's a
092decrease again i'm not 100 sure why but i can speculate that last year i think people purchased more periodicals not knowing whether they're going to go remote and if they needed things they could send home um there's a very large increase in av materials and software of 165 which seems a little bit crazy but um this line item i absorbed soundtrack and then being which were historically in the library media but we found that they're um they're a better fit in this line item because they're not used whole school they're used for certain classroom for their instructions and then there's no new equipment so the 1100 line um well i'm going to stop there because it includes other stuff so i'll let sydney talk about the other stuff the only other thing that it includes
093is tuition and we're looking at approximately if we go student per student we're looking at approximately a 58 000 decrease in our tuition for next year does that include um extra people it does not include any extra people so that's just sure it's just student for just moving students forward plus lead your charter school we budgeted for three students um and we do currently have i think four students at ledger so that was act close to accurate this year um so we didn't build any um buffer students i don't know if the board would like to do that this year i think that it goes we should have that on our list to visit at the end that's always a good reminder that if depending on what the final budget breakdown looks like something that
094we potentially could add in or [Music] just to revisit well there is the tuition trust fund so yeah and i i need to clarify that 58 000 because it's a 58 000 decrease from our actual this year not from budgeted last year from our actual payments that are expected this year so the the decrease is just slightly different from what was budgeted last year sydney on the the wages the instructional down about 45 000 3.5 um what is driving the wage decrease i believe it would be new hires but let me clarify that with karen lazard and actually can let me pull karen in while we're having our board that's what i assume so it's usually going to be people leaving and people coming but she can clarify that there she is there was a
095couple retirements last year of some folks who had been here yeah quite a while for a very long time yep there's actually four new staff and that's that's what makes up that whole amount okay the difference in the salary so it's basically just um yeah change in personnel any questions about this area right now kristen i appreciated you sharing the breakdown of things with us um because i feel like there's some really intentional stuff there that's really good for us to know kind of that i could see connections to like knowing about the mountain math and language like from other conversations about encouraging students to become more independent that we've heard you know that the board has heard um and and just some of the other sort of connections to stuff that i think we've
096gotten from you or from other folks during updates so i think it's just nice to don't always see the specific breakdown but i think in this instance it was really it connected to a couple of things for me that you've mentioned before okay so our next area is let's see in my book it's counseling on my thing it's library media what are we doing that tab should be all right i think you should say i know mr pollard is ready so library meeting we're doing library media library media was listed next on my and i'm just going to bring mr pollard in [Music] so we changed some of the tabs so instead of canceling instead of guidance i think on your tabs in your binder it says now counseling budget yep so in the end
097we'll get all those matching um [Music] welcome mr pollard hey everybody hi so i apologize for any background noise in my house it's bedtime now with three crazy children so if things are happening in the background i take no responsibilities happy about that yeah uh so like kristen did i'm gonna start with the lines that i'm responsible for which most of that top section i am not responsible for so we're going to start um library online which is about halfway down the page in library media and you'll notice a three percent decrease mainly because uh chris as kristen said she took a couple things from library online and moved him into instruction um and we're keeping pretty standard on what the uh software things that we're using whole school-wide so that stayed pretty similar uh
098library supplies no change there uh library books was a ten percent if i'm looking at the right line hold on yep ten percent decrease uh i feel that our library is is chock full right now and actually we have a lot of full shelves and a lot of really stock shelves so i didn't think that we needed to kind of keep that line where it was and we were able to take a decrease in that for sure uh periodicals is 100 decrease just the fact that we weren't using them and they were not necessary uh library software 51 increase uh due to just or sorry 51 decrease um due to a couple pieces of software that we weren't using anymore uh and that are not needed uh nothing in furniture and renovations uh nothing for
099new equipment and nothing for do's and fees i believe that's all i'm responsible for thank you of course any questions for mr pollard thank you thanks yeah you're welcome of course thanks for having me [Music] what's the insurance buyout oh so um when we offer health insurance to all of our employees they also have the option if they're insured by a spouse to get a buyout so if they approve insurance through the spouse then they get a buyout for a certain percentage of our insurance premium okay what do you have up next for us sydney so we've got school counselor which is pretty self-explanatory and we we didn't ask mrs whidman to come because this one's pretty steady able every year yeah she doesn't change yourself kind of like our school counseling department just the
100way you want it absolutely all right yeah any questions on that one okay are we real quick are we moving to uh we're moving or maybe that's in the speculation no problem all right which one's next on your screen sydney attack you can get your spotlights out there so this is all the 2225 stuff uh the first line i'll talk about is gvs technology services uh what that includes is our second level tech support and uh the folks at itc care who are sort of my backup whenever there's something that you need they also manage the server backup for that including our firewall and running the vpn that sends uh all of our network stuff over to the sau uh this also includes all of our domain names for tvsdocs.org sau75.org those sorts of things
101also some services for monitoring the chromebooks while the students are in class so that the teachers can kind of watch over what they're doing and keep them on task it also includes money for our mobile device management which manages all of our apple devices at the school the ipads the computers allows us to push software out and manage those things remotely last year we had included some money for year rate category two this year we don't need that what that money was for was to buy infrastructure stuff for the network itself and so we had budgeted for some switches for the network and i'll talk about that in just a minute too when i get to the next line but that's everything that's in technology services and i think the number's actually less than it
102was last year [Music] the next one is gvs telecommunications management that includes our internet and telephone for this building um we also are part of the e-rate program so basically half of that internet cost is paid for through that particular program um one of the we just redid a new three-year contract with firstlight who provides our uh our fiber internet into the building that was at a lower cost and they tripled our speed so we went from 100 up 100 down to 300 up 300 down that potentially could go up to a gigabit if we ever wanted it because the infrastructure's just fiber and it's great um so the reason i wanted to talk about that in the context of the other e-rate stuff is that um that theoretically allows us to have that level
103of speed in the building we're limited by the switches and our wi-fi in the building to about 100 at the moment so even though that's coming in there's actually only one place well two places where we can get it there's a newer switch in one of the cabinets here we got some outdoor wi-fi last year so we have a new wi-fi that gets the speed out to it so the fastest internet in the entire gps place is in the parking lot so we did order the new switches we ordered the new wi-fi because of the chip shortage that stuff is not going to show up until maybe february ish but we're hoping that by the end of you know this school year all that infrastructure be in place and we'll be operating at the 300
104300 so that's it for gsl communication management and that's almost exactly the same as last year sau telecommunications management is the same that's telephone and internet over at sau that includes just comcast and the ip phones that they have um there is something going on with the town with fiber so maybe in the future we'll have much better speed and stuff over at the sau would make everybody happy um next one we have a small line for technology enrichment um that's like 400 bucks that have been used for tech team in the past and i think mr will put that to good use uh this year also uh technology supplies just includes things like printer toner repair parts various stuff that i need to keep things working around the school software is almost all microsoft
105licensing that's for you know basically the way that they budget that is your school is this size this is how much you pay and even if we only use one license it is what it is uh replacement technology uh every year as you know we get a batch of chromebooks for the third graders it follows them through this includes that uh we're on a four-year cycle for replacing the uh the max for the teachers it takes us three years to do that so next year is kind of our our buy year is in football right so basically we have no expense for teacher laptop replacement next year which is a great thing um we have a couple of things i think we're going to get a new machine over at the sau and we're thinking
106of getting some ipads also but overall that number is down also and that's why um [Music] other new technology equipment is a couple of printers the ones that we have recycling out because they are ancient and they've been here since long before i was here and then there's an item at the end which is uh fairly significant uh 19548 that says lightspeed what that is each one of the classrooms has a teacher microphone teachers use to speak with to the students especially during covid with wearing masks that's been critical for them to be able to communicate so that the students can hear the systems that we have here in the building have been here since the renovation i talked to uh to leslie brown about so when in 2009 uh when those things were installed
107you can see one of them up there with the little red light those are well over 10 years old they're analog the knobs on them are like if you ever have saw a guitar amp where you turn the knob that's sort of how it goes with some of those at this point now so this is something that definitely is a need to occur at some point in the next few years at the school next year since we're not buying the max for the teachers might be a good time to do that but it is a significant expense and that is what i have for tech and i'm happy to answer any questions you may have about that i don't understand that correctly the 15 000 increase in the technology replace the majority of that coming
108from his lightning system yeah yes that would be for the the light speed otherwise i just did that thing that then that would have dropped otherwise the delta yeah oh okay you know the cost i just want to say sorry go ahead randy no i was just going to say that the light speed itself is about you know 19 almost 20 000 but the difference is the reduction from what our regular event and what i was going to tell the board is that that 19 000 um i would recommend that we add that to the list like when we get to the end of the budget that that could be something where there are some other options depending on where the budget lands because depending on what the board chooses to do with the remaining
109sr3 money as we move into um 22-23 we have potential of using uh reap grant money for some of that for the majority of that next year so i would recommend that's on that you know let's see where we land and decide if we want to fund that a different way i think it's definitely a necessity you know having those systems they've been around too long and they do make a really big difference in um in attention and focus and clarity of instruction so there's no concern with getting them it's just that there's a variety of options of how to fund them and it would represent a pretty good upgrade for the teachers as well because the current systems work on infrared uh it's line of sight but if your hair gets in front of
110it it kind of cuts in and out you know or a student gets in front of you or you bend over the wrong way or you're facing the wall so they work they've been very reliable and they've been a mainstay of the classrooms but i think an upgrade is definitely overdue okay and i missed whether you identified a replacement uh it would be the same it would be a newer type of the same sort of system and what it would use is actual radio as opposed to the infrared um so this is basically what a vendor has quoted us to upgrade the same type of system that we have to much more modern technology and new equipment the new stuff would be from the same manufacturer as the one that we currently have it's called
111lightspeed that's the company okay and they are the recommended vendor for that ten years is a long time in technology yeah yeah yeah actually i think let's see yeah we're like 12 at this point so it's time yep any questions on this area okay thank you thank you very much all right thanks for watching all right we're gonna backtrack to health services and like school counseling health services is very self-explanatory and just about the same every year so so we didn't ask mrs islander to come in for this one any questions on health services okay and last one um i'll have mrs reed walk you through and it is uh course so in reimbursement development the course reimbursement line did go up and it's a good problem that it went up we used all of
112our course reimbursement money this year already um and part of [Music] the union agreement for cba is that if we use it all we have a thousand dollars for the next year so um i think that's fabulous um and other than that everything remained the same except for professional books last year we did not request money for professional books just in an attempt to with coping and everything else try to cut down somewhere um and we went back to requesting the historical 3000 dollars and that's for instruction right so that's for uh professional development books so okay for example the um anxious child anxious parents anxious childhood who did last year came from any other questions about that area okay that's it for our budget presentation for tonight thank you thank you kristen and mr
113pollard and mr britton and sydney thank you all and karen thank you karen hi karen okay so our next agenda item is my least favorite part of this whole thing that we do we do have a resignation in our board packet and so there is a very thoughtful letter you will find in your board packet um from madeleine crudo burke um to her plan is to um this would be her letter of resignation effective at the end of june 2022 so we get her until the end of june but she's giving us plenty of lead time so um she actually has given us a couple years so we do need a motion to accept with uh deep and professional gratitude i don't even have the words some profound gratitude and like she says that she
114will say final words uh at the end of her tenure and we will have final words for her as well so we do need a motion to accept the resignation of madeleine trudeau burke um effective at the end of june 2022. so i have a motion from leslie and her second from ed all those in favor please say aye aye and any opposed say nay yes no i don't we're gonna make it hard for you though it's one of those things where i you know i'm so happy to to launch her out into her next adventures but she has given us every ounce that she can get so sad for us more than okay our next agenda item is the special education posting and so you will find in the board packet um the posting
115for director of special services and i will let sydney speak to this yeah i normally don't bring postings to the board but this one is significant because we will need to know if it's acceptable to the board to post for a full-time position so this was something that was recommended at the last board meeting where um we started to justify the pre-k through 12 need for a director of special services that is a year-round 1.0 fte before we start getting this ad out and this is the right time a year to start advertising for this position to make sure that we get the best candidates the board will need to decide if this is something that you would like to move forward with or not i'm extremely supportive yes yeah i guess it needs to
116be full-time yeah i am as well okay so we need pre-k through 12. right yeah and beyond 12. oh that's right yeah we need a motion to approve the um posting for director of special services at the full-time um as a full-time position so moved second i have a motion from leslie and a second from denise all those in favor please say aye aye aye and any opposed say nay all right quickly do we know what the market is like for good people i don't know i looked um i looked on ed jobs new hampshire today and i didn't see any for special ed director which gave me help um yeah so that's good so far so we want to get this out there pretty quickly this is sort of like very start of that
117yeah yeah okay so our next agenda item is uh to approve the survey that would go out as we start to rethink uh or think about redoing the um website yeah so we've been um brainstorming and i'm just trying to get the right direction for all of you i apologize for somebody who i'm probably making dizzy but anyway we want to get a website out for community feedback on making sure that before we go into the website process which is something we've been talking about this year there we go that we've asked all the questions of the community and staff and students parents guardians every everybody taxpayers community organizations partners anything that we would like to make our website as accessible and as useful as possible so i wanted the board to be able to
118take a look at this and to be able to review it to see if you'd like any edits on it before we release it do you think this will give you um a good basis of information to move forward to the next step i think it's a starting place that's one of the things that we talked about this is step one where we will have an initial idea of what people are looking for what people use the website for and how often they access it and then i think the next step will be to dive deeper with those subgroups we'll need to probably take a deeper dive with staff a deeper dive with students in a deeper dive with parents about how we can make those different uh sections more useful but i think this
119will give us the direction that we need where we would probably start researching and demoing some websites to see who could be the best for gvs to work with what were you thinking about for timing of when this would go out the survey yeah there's really no rush on this you know so you can discuss that as a board i know sometimes it's good over the holidays because people have time at home to complete a survey as opposed to the um you know the other busy work weeks and sometimes people don't want to be bothered with it over the holidays it can go either way i think it would be um my only thought on the timing of it and i i didn't imagine you were going to release it in the next three or
120four days but would be to wait until after the first round of all my report cards go out good idea um because i i know that was one of the things that's you know referenced in here and you know parents have haven't really had too much of a chance to interact with that um and so you're just holding off until with that one piece that is still new this year holding off until folks have had a chance to like get in and find those and see those and all of that stuff great are there any additional um questions or responses that you wanted on here the only thing i could think of is do you want to have a you know can you do what any other input kind of final question oh yes absolutely
121yeah pretty common i can add that know that um brenda also suggested we have one question about where you get your information and she also suggested we add grantham news because a lot of people do connect to grantham news which would be good for us to know so in this one we can add it do you need an official approval of this from us or do you just need us to give you feedback and give our stamp um usually with a big community survey you you do give an official sure okay unless there's more questions or conversation about this we'd need a motion to approve the website survey second okay so we have a motion from leslie and a second from christine all this in favor of approving the website survey please say aye aye
122any opposed say nay okay our next agenda item is accepting the special education reports and those are in our board packet uh just one question i had was how frequent does this review happen i don't recall seeing this before these they're also uh changing everything so some of them happen once a year summer every two years summer every three years and i can honestly tell you i don't know what the timeline is for this particular report um actually let me see its review that was three years ago three years ago three years okay so this one this one's a three year a lot happened yeah so anyway like most of our special education reports we did extremely well in our compliances excellent um we have we have been notified that the department of special education
123is going to be changing the way that they do special education administration compliance where it looks like they're going to be changing to more of a like we'll be getting a special ed report card almost so as we hear more about that we'll let you know they've released a draft out for us to look at and madeleine and i have talked about it briefly but not in too much detail but maybe that will start to streamline some of these things for what it's worth i worked for a time in the massachusetts department of education and the special ed section was by far the largest component of the staff mm-hmm oh yeah okay any other questions or comments on the special education report so we need a motion to accept the special education report all those
124in paper please say i i and any opposed say nay okay our next item is um the curriculum cycle take it away mrs reed okay so when i was just looking in the board packet i apologized i didn't pick up on this earlier i think unless i printed out um the second table is there but the first table isn't so we're missing the first set of eight years that was thinking 20 29 yeah oh and oh but sydney pulled it up i was gonna say i can't because i'm i'd be confused with everything i have going on i got it um so this first table isn't in there um oh no because you're playing the same thing but the initial original document that i had sent had a initial eight years but it was it
125was the same thing so it doesn't matter so if you just change the years eight years back because it's eight years it just replicated itself um so when i started working on the budget this year and looking at teacher requests and thinking about the meetings we've been having for mtss and our plc meetings and staff meetings talking about curriculum and ensuring that we have um [Music] continuity in curriculum through the grades i was realizing that we don't have a curriculum psychopath in middle school and in an attempt to kind of streamline things and ensure that we are going in the right direction um sydney and i talked about it and created a curriculum cycle starting with um reading is our first focus because that's what we're focusing on with the mtss right now um and
126you can see it's built in an eight year cycle with the first year of each core subject being research and review then moving into develop and define year three implementing in year four through eight um living it living the curriculum revising and seeing what other needs we have before we then go back and research and review on the next eight-year cycle and it just in terms of the budget specifically um makes it so that we're not trying to change everything and financially at the same time and it also in terms of staff resources makes it so you're not doing everything at the same time so i think we developed something that would um work really well and keep us working in a good path for um curriculum research and development and when i have my
127computer back to me taking charge i can forward you the original document actually kristen i pulled it up so people who are zooming can see it okay oh i forgot to mention now that i see that little bright yellow spot um in the decision that we really need a perkins cycle one of the things we were looking at was in and i don't have my glasses on so i can't see but in everyday math we're going to have a huge if we keep everyday math increase in the cost because all of our online stuff we have to we'll have to renew so we're looking at roughly ten thousand dollars above what we usually have to spend for everyday math supplies um so we kind of put that in a logical spot so that it fits
128nicely if we do want to make a change we can do it before that big chunk of money comes along this is great it's great i don't know if you have any questions listen i don't know if you can say this um do you have to well it's probably not the right time you have feelings about everyday mom yes how many of them are positive how many are negative no don't answer that question it's a separate column it's been around for quite a long time yeah i assume it's been it's live oh yeah but it's yeah i'm just scary we can have another conversation another time we can have another conversation i'm stuck thinking about things in my life that i want to make a curriculum cycle for like this is so like it just
129makes so much sense to like should be a good house community seriously they didn't have to do it yeah i really hope you changed the eight years [Laughter] no this just i think it this just lays it out so clearly um and would be really easy to wrap your head around if you were especially i'm thinking of like new folks coming into the school to be able to just see like where they're coming into a process like in one document to be able to look and see like okay in these different topics here's where i'm coming in and i think things like today i was having a conversation with mrs hutchins as our math interventionist talking about spending title one funds and intervention materials and this intervention material would go great with everyday math but
130then thinking okay in the next couple years we're back in cycle one for math so do we want to put that money into something that mirrors well with everyday math or do we want to look more globally so it just makes the conversations more meaningful i think yeah much more expertise yeah yeah and and as a board i think we love the idea of having an intentional staggering of some budget impact well i'm also thinking about the work involved especially you know especially for changing for filming or just yeah i mean just you know each of those steps is that like the first few years they're significant yeah [Music] it also keeps you scheduled rather than putting something up this is the year we focus on this the flip side of that is if you're
131finding out that something is not working in year four yeah i assume you're not going to year eight with it until so it's measure refine and revise so you can refine and revise during that time um add things or take things away to make it work better but those would be conversations we'd have to come to the board sydney do you have any thoughts or um concern you know do you do you think that there could be the potential of i know in the past we've seen the state try to do some stuff with mandating curriculum changes and specific sometimes it makes sense when arizona looking at it sometimes it doesn't um do you see any sort of like potential enough of an interruption to this by things that the state might do that it
132would make it that it would interrupt this work i don't right now um to be honest right now the curriculum is not really the focus of the state's work i mean so well just to put it put it bluntly area that's the commission yeah and i think mrs reed did an amazing job with this and it really does spread out the work and the budget and the focus and priorities every year so it's it's a great thing for now in the future and this is something that we are taking action to accept to approve you should um formally approve this um because this has this has implications for other curriculum policies so for example if you're talking about curriculum policies and we do have one coming up tonight um looking at our course offerings and
133our curriculum and how we look at things would be a reference point remember to accept the um curriculum thank you it was literally like escaped i'm going to accept the curriculum cycle i'll second okay so we have a motion from leslie we have a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay all right we are on two policies for tonight so tonight we have some so speaking of which yes yeah some new some changes some to rescind so we'll take them one at a time so the new policy is policy ige i g e f and we have it in our packet ige being the policy ige f being the form um and this is a required this is one of those priority things that we're required
134to do we are and this is um we of course strategically put this here after the curriculum cycle not by you know by any chance because this is specifically important as it is parental objections to specific course material and directly relates to the discussions around hb2 and divisive concepts so it's a requirement for the board by law to have a way for parents to object to specific course material and for parents to have an avenue and a specific path to object to those materials so this outlines the purpose the policy and also includes a specific note on two-week notice for any human growth and development human sexuality education and then the form that parents would fill out and documenting a meeting with mrs reed about that and the decision that's made so this is basically
135the the path that any parent would follow per that new law for the for um to object within the school but parents also have the option to just take it to the human rights council this is just covering one of the options within that law right so if you look at the two paths this is i don't have a complaint about a teacher i just have an objection to for example this book that is about to be taught and i have a suitable replacement i believe and so i'm going to fill out this form because i object to this specific course material and i'm going to meet with mrs reed to see if we agree that my child can read this book instead of the book that the class is doing that's the most basic
136example if we have a case where somebody feels that they are going to complain against a teacher for violating or an administrator or a para can be anybody any educator for violating the divisive concepts law then that person would file a complaint with the human rights commission the language up from this one was just handed to us correct well this is what the school board association recommended okay yeah all right so this is this policy is not limited to divisive concepts no this is addiction this is sorry it just becomes important that you have this because it's a legal requirement and it if we didn't have this and something happened with divisive concepts you know we we don't want to go down that road we want to make sure that we have this avenue available
137to anybody who wants to go down this road there's one um statement under statement of policy the fourth paragraph nothing in this policy shall be construed is giving parents or guardians the right to appeal to the school board um and it just seemed to me um if if the parent the parent fills out the form um and it doesn't come to agreement about what the alternative is what what's the parents recourse i think they could bring that to the school board but they can't bring the initial request oh to the school board so the initial request has to go through the form and yeah um but it does say appeal i mean there's nothing there's nothing in this law that grants an appeal to the school board okay so what happens if there's a disagreement
138yeah so the parent could bring some could have another avenue through um you know through any kind of regular disagreement that any you know parent would bring about a student to the school board so it's not like the parent would never be able to meet with you it just couldn't be a specific appeal about that specific course material accordingly before they've taken the step that's outlined yeah maybe maybe it's past my bedtime but um this reads to me that under for this matter the school board won't hear it it does come yeah i mean basically it stops with mrs reed um so essentially if the parent doesn't agree with the decision that mrs reed makes they're done there's no other recourse there is no other recourse yeah but the the parent can always meet with
139the school board and discuss it and they could there are probably other avenues that they could you know file any other complaint the way that they would about anything else it just can't be you what what this means is that let's take that book example okay so let's say that you you're a parent and you come and you have a different book and that's the book that you want your child to read mrs reed says no i'm sorry that's not a suitable replacement it doesn't meet our curriculum standards this parent can't come to you and ask you to approve that book yeah yeah okay yeah oh yeah yeah does that make more sense because they go find the other part yeah yeah so right so it's looking at mrs reed has the instructional expertise to
140decide if that book is going to meet the same curricular needs as the book that's being offered in the class and i know you're an amazing school board but the assumption is not not every school board would have that educational expertise to say that that book would meet that so when they're talking about that kind of an appeal that's what they're talking about so the parent could still come before the board and make a complaint about kristin yes which is laughable um but they couldn't ask the board to approve their report or the content right we can't override her decision not not about a curriculum choice in this case no okay it's just i think it's something about the wording it is it sounds so um over over and done and and um i don't
141know intractable well you can with the context knowing that the school board association recommended this language like obviously they're going to say that it's trying to protect us right but maybe we can adjust that language well i think you're right leslie because i think the school board association doesn't want to put school boards across the state in the position yeah review and curriculum units and books 100 yeah yeah okay it makes more sense it just i think could have been worded yeah a little more gracefully but offhand i'm not suggesting what they should say the specific note on sex education um what are their current operations for that do we have one yeah oh yeah yeah that's our current operation anyway because that's actually already a law yeah this is what it is currently i
142i guess the question i have is to be the way i read this is we stuck it on the website somewhere saying that we were going to teach it for two weeks and then we caught it we essentially meet that requirement but i'm just i'm slightly i'm slightly just worried that you know it's not saying that we're going to bury it on the website but so in terms of i can speak specifically to the sex education yeah that the classroom teachers send the curriculum to parents ahead of time in a formal letter and send the links to any videos that they're going to be showing so parents have very explicit um information on what will be taught and can make those decisions so yeah we don't just put it on the website it's yeah i'm
143just remembering one of my friends you know i forget how old her son was but um he he was he was immature for his age and he just wasn't ready for it and so i think a parent needs to be able to make that judgment yeah okay so we need a motion um for the first reading of um policy i g e i g e f exactly all right so i have a motion from leslie in a second from christine all those in favor please say i i any opposed say nay okay so our next one is just a renaming this is a name change for the student transportation services policy so we're just renaming policy so the old name is e-e-a-a and that's not in our packet it's just a renaming oh oh okay
144so there isn't there is a policy in our packet that's e-e-a-a but we have to rename the student transportation one first okay and that was my error i coded it wrong and i put an extra a in there and so i just need your permission to change the name and and i actually don't think we need two readings on that if you're all right with that yeah so we need a motion for the name change um to rename policy e e a a and e e a a dash r two e e a and e e a dash r exactly all right so we have a motion from leslie in a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye and any opposed a okay so now looking at policy e-e-a-a um this
145is audio and video surveillance on school property this is a updates for um pertaining to new laws yeah yeah several new laws passed over the past two years with video and audio surveillance and specifically on school buses so all of those are reflected here um just a couple of usage things at the very bottom of the first page i think that last point maybe should read although videos surveillance is permitted rather than permissive yeah and on the second page under audio recordings there's a list of bullet points and then the paragraph on the um underneath that should say audio recording says i'm missing oh it's only if they're done and out it's only for you i gotta make it funny yeah um and then at the top of that section on audio recordings in addition
146to recordings buses transportation it only mentions audio recordings could some of those also be video recordings like the musical performances ceremonies assemblies well this is this section yeah this we don't really need to put that in there because there are only specific laws for how long you can retain an audio recording so i'm i'm sure that these are only listed in here because you can keep video recordings oh because it's about how long okay all right right it's about how long you can keep it yeah okay and when they're authorized both yeah under the um video and audio recordings used for student discipline matters does the school board need to be listed in that list of people who can view if they ever if something ever came to us so uh i would say let's
147not put it in there and you could be there if you need to be because that would be if it's investigators or attorneys related by the district and we'll leave it up to them okay any other questions on this one okay so we need a um motion for the first reading and revision of policy all right i have a motion from leslie in a second from denise all those in favor please say i i any oppose the same name okay so our next one is ehaa computer security email and internet communications this is a new policy required by law was this one we were given from school board association or a little bit of school board association and a lot of your admin team at gbs thank you we talked about this one a lot
148any comments or discussion on this one i had a question about um item nine any communications credit center retrieved using email may be read by individuals other than the intended recipient and i just occurred to me what about material you want to keep confidential um well essentially we're saying email is really like the idea is that email is kind of like a postcard you know especially public email that there's there's very little that's confidential so the idea here is letting everybody know that you know somebody else can read your email so does that mean that say discussion about an issue over some special ed um practice could not you couldn't discuss that over email you'd have to have a private conversation there are things that we put in email and there are two specific people
149um most things would be left to a conversation but there are definitely times where we use email it's just to that restricted group and then it's going to be up to for example me randy kristen any of the case managers involved to make sure that that email doesn't ever go anywhere else okay so you have some procedures for email and that and those kinds of issues okay and when we do send emails like that we always use initials and never spell out anyone's name just in case yeah okay okay so we need a motion to approve the first reading of um policy e-h-a-a you need a second i have a motion from leslie in a second from ed all those in favor of a first reading of policy e-h-a-a um please say i i any
150opposed say nay okay our next one is e-d-c-a which is oh these are good ones okay yeah yeah oh adios yeah again we're in the we're cindy um so we're rescinding policy edca and policy e-g-a-h i assume these have been incorporated other places they have yep um edca has been incorporated into e-h-a-a and e-g-a-h has been incorporated into ehb-r which is our records retention policy so we don't need full policies for either of these anymore okay so we need a motion to rescind policies e-d-c-a and e-g-a-h so give it to ed this time a second we have a motion from ed um and a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye and any opposed say nang all right so our next agenda item is the principal's report okay the only thing
151that i wanted to add is we talked about policy ide idea and um in our january pd since reading that policy our january epd we're going to work we're going to have some time devoted to starting um revamping our current curriculum unit maps so that we can put them online because we need to be transparent with that so that is on our agenda to start working on and we we have some but they're really old so then the other thing is that um all the report cards come out on friday we had a couple glitches just for learning new technology and doing something in a different way but all in all i think it's gonna be really great are they a different format from um so they are before we were using powerschool yeah and
152now we're using all of us so it's it's a different process in putting the grades in but we're also um sending them electronically oh so that's exciting we were only getting paper and it's not really sending them it's in alma so when a parent logs into unless a parent specifically requests paper save the trees we're trying oh whenever you have to save it at home and get your paper oh yeah sign it save me from having to remember to return that little envelope yeah those cost a lot of money yeah so there's the parent floating does the parent acknowledge electronically i've seen this well you can probably see if they've accessed that event i honestly don't know oh um because we haven't done it yet i don't know if i can see if they've accessed
153it um but kind of i feel like you could eat a horse to water i can't you know yeah we didn't have to acknowledge that yeah i was going to say i don't remember ever having said anything you were supposed to send me back but ask for acknowledgement it's that it actually made it from the backpack to the parents versus the you're hiding it where in this case parents have access to their child's home yeah yeah they can't hide it yeah and they're yes they're on notice that it's there if they don't mm-hmm that's great thank you all right next up is our superintendent's report i'm gonna just submit my report as written the one thing i was going to talk about was creating a like more informal forum about the playground but now that
154the board has selected se group and they're kind of doing that um i wonder if we just kind of let it go with them since they're going to be doing two community nights anyway yeah and then we can get a lot of feedback on what we what the community is interested in doing about tennis courts and design and all the other kind of things i think it would be great to have them frame that conversation too rather than yep so i'm good excellent any questions or comments for sydney from the superintendent's report okay um right i wanted to just mention um i don't know if folks have seen and you know will continue because we have talked about you know the voucher stuff we've talked about the divisive concept stuff i don't know folks have
155seen that there is a new uh bill being proposed that would take the divisive concepts bill a step farther and i just want to just mention that we're going to keep our eye on that and keep aware of what that is looking to do it would limit teachers that teachers would not be able to um if they were going to teach something that portrays um a negative part of our history and needs to be done in the context of what was happening at the time in the whole world and it's referred to as the teacher loyalty bill oh yeah so just i just want to acknowledge that you know we're aware of that one too that's out there and we'll keep an eye on it and we'll continue to have conversations as that moves forward
156about what that would look like um but at this point it's just uh proposed legislation um you know so so folks know and so our teachers know um you know that we're aware of that and that we're keeping our eye on those things and looking at that legislation that's coming forward um but it's it's made some like national news and so because we've talked about some of these other things i just felt like it was important for us to acknowledge that we are aware of it and we'll be watching to see what happens with that so yeah i've been waiting go ahead i just think brittany one of the things that the board should be acutely aware of is that the same group that did successfully get um divisive concepts pass is backing this bill
157yeah um and that makes it a little more concerning yeah yeah yeah yeah so we'll keep watch on that and you know what we need to do as a board to respond to that so and i think there was some news today about a proposal that will make it illegal to even propose a vaccine mandate so that's been out for a while yeah and that is also it's uh that's also tied to um it would be um it would impact um any kind of like tracking or registry information um so there's actually some good information from um in the medical community right now about it because they're one of the groups that's um putting light on that so i know in the progress monitoring committee uh the medical professional folks in that group have brought
158that one up yeah yeah okay so um next is our consent agenda does anyone have any changes um edits to the consent agenda okay so we'll need a motion to approve the consent agenda i have a motion from denise thank you i'm looking at it but i still need a second so i'll second it perfect a second from leslie all those in favor uh please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay we don't have a non-public session tonight we do have a non-meeting um our next meeting is january 4th um so we will meet again in this format um january 4th and um we will not be coming you know this will be the official adjournment of the meeting we won't be coming back in so we can um you know any folks that
159are are still with us um we will adjourn the meeting for tonight but board members you got to stick around so january 4th here or eastman oh did we talk about that the january meeting in here or in eastman we didn't talk about it i'm not sure what eastman's doing with gatherings right now i think i think we're still wrong yeah we have a performance tomorrow night in eastman yeah right that's indoors there's we haven't had an eastman meeting since we've also had the virtual option do folks feel like we need to change our physical location since we have a way for folks to join virtually i don't know if we got many more people to attend because it was our attendance has been declining when we go there we haven't had many people come
160to make it easier [Music] we gotta come all the way here we gotta come down here i can check on availability but it is less work for the staff let's check on availability and check on let's make um i know let's see like let's just make sure they have would have the technology stuff for us to be able to because we would still have the remote access for folks okay we will update on that thank you okay uh other than that i just need a motion to adjourn so move okay one second all right so i have a motion from leslie and a second from ed all those in favor please say aye aye all right and any opposed say night okay and we are adjourned at 906. um thank you see everybody in january
161so kristin we will have to i'm just thinking if you're going to i just thinking of access