Grantham School Board Meeting - Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021

001oh sir yes hmm going to get started in just a minute just for any folks that is doing dust get started in just a minute here we're just getting a few things set up um [Music] all right we're going to get started in just one minute we'll start it was great this was a good day yesterday it was nice outside yesterday okay we're going to go ahead and get started i'm going to call the meeting to order um we're waiting we may have one more board member joining us but we do have a forum of the board here so we'll go ahead and call the meeting to order at 6 34 and uh just a quick um revisiting of our meeting expectations now that we are hosting our dual format here so the board does

002have a forum and is meeting here in person the priority will be given to the in-person work of the board um and we will um if for some reason we have difficulties with our technology we'll do everything we can during the meeting to address those um but so far it looks like the technology is set and working for us but if for some reason we do lose the connectivity of the remote part of the meeting the board meeting will continue on because we do have on the board here in person and as always the minutes from the meeting will be made available once those are finalized so just a quick revisiting of that and then we will also i'll go over the um the guidelines for the public participation when we get to that part

003of our agenda so thank you to folks that are joining us virtually and to folks that are here in the room with us and we'll do a special recognition we do have the um selectmen for grantham here with us but thank you all for joining us tonight too so um just to get started we will approve the agenda our first item so do we have any changes or additions to the agenda tonight okay so we'll need a motion to approve the agenda to move second all right so we have a motion from um denise and a second from christine all those in favor of approving the agenda please say i i any opposed say nay all right excellent so our first agenda item is public participation um and cindy do we have some folks joining

004us do we have folks that have we have some people who are attending online so okay open up the chat perfect okay so what we'll do is we have some folks here in person um and then we also have folks who have joined us online and just as a reminder if you're going to speak here in person or if you're going to comment online we do need you to provide your name and address with your comment so that it can be recognized and read your comments should come to the board chair and any comments that come in virtually as long as they have the name and address will be read uh questions that come up there this the board will take note of them if we have a quick and direct answer to the question

005we may provide it but not all questions that come up during public participation may be answered in the moment we will try to answer them later on in the agenda public participation really is our chance to um hear from folks that are joining us tonight so with that said if we have anyone that would like to participate please go ahead you can speak in the room or on if folks online would like to type into the chat any public participation this is when we wait quietly to see if anyone has anything they're typing in and we'll just give it a minute or so here i think i know why everyone who's here is here so i think my my in the room the in the room people i think i know why you're here but

006we'll see if anyone that's joining us virtually has any comments at this point while we're waiting can i ask them a question sure do you know why i've hooked up a computer to the big tv out there yes and the volume is not coming out of the computer it's just coming up and knocked me out of the tv just my computer i know what's happened to staff before but i've got a wall mounted monitor in the cafeteria no the baby tv oh really it's okay it's in there then do you have to change it on um like is it coming up on zoom is it on zoom zoom there's a setting and zoom that you can change where the audio output is it might be in there yeah yeah i think you can do it

007in that little the bar that's along the bottom okay let me do a quick check and then it's not enough all right do you want me to go play with it sure come play okay so i don't see any public participation coming in um so we'll go ahead and move forward with the agenda our first agenda item is our student school board liaisons and and uh we have one who is with us tonight um ellen wilson home will be here seth can't make it tonight he is in nashua they did win they won four years nationals he said what was he playing soccer yeah awesome and they just wouldn't make it back on time so he couldn't join us tonight so i will move ellen in as a panelist okay they're going to championship hi

008ellen hi how are you i'm good how are you thank you ellen you're our one school board representative student school board liaison tonight so if you um want to just give us a quick report out of how things are going if there's anything specific that you think the board should know or that you'd like to draw attention to and then we'll see if the board has any questions for you yeah um so things are going pretty well right now it's kind of the transition period between sports you know sports are ending like seth is soccer right now and they're at their championships um school field trips are starting to be like open again i just went on a spanish field trip to see the murals at dartmouth it was great and also the travel opportunities

009to icelander rome and rome next year being opened up again um also when i was entering into this meeting i saw like a short blurb um under the meeting link and it was talking about the grantham school district's non-discrimination policy and this reminded me that um the lebanon high school library is starting to try and move away from the due decimal system because it has such a problematic past with discrimination and representation i was just wondering what you know gvs's library is doing with this or what its stance is about it i i can tell you that we haven't approached anything with changing the duodecimal system at this point but we do have um a new library media specialist this year mr pollard so as we grow the library with him in charge i will

010definitely bring this up to him i think it's pretty fascinating yeah there's a lot of articles online it's quite interesting we are working we do have a non-discrimination policy but something that we started before the pandemic and need to finish is a non-discrimination action plan and so i would love it if you would maybe be part of some of those meetings with us i think it would be great to have your perspective thank you for bringing that up that's something that i wasn't aware of i think that's a great thing for us to be honest for us for us to have on our radar so thank you for bringing that forward any questions or things from the board um hi ellen how how are your classes going this fall um they're going pretty well i

011would say that they're more intense than last year for people who have taken the same classes i've taken last year they would say that last year was a lot easier than what we're doing this year just because i think teachers are trying to you know catch people up which is understandable one of the things that the board has on our agenda later in the meeting is we're going to be looking at um talking about destination imagination legacy teams um and i don't know if that's something that you were involved with at all but even if you weren't involved in it um i'm wondering if you have a perspective that you would share with us on that on your thoughts um the idea being legacy teams from folks who have left graduated gbs and are at

012lebanon middle or high school um there there isn't the same opportunities offered in lebanon for destination imagination so the request has come to the board for the board to fund legacy teams for those upper grades and as seen as they are grantham students part of our district but within a different school system we're just going to be discussing and weighing some of those ideas and so i was just wondering as someone who's involved in extracurriculars and clubs at uh you know beyond gbs if you have any perspective on our that you could add to our conversation about that tonight yeah i used to do destination imagination it was really fun um i don't think it's talked about a lot in the middle of high school and i don't think the lebanon kids get that opportunity

013in their elementary schools not that i'm aware of um i think there would definitely be people who would be interested in that um i would only say the only problem with destination imagination is it's such a big time commitment and lots of people already have so much going on any other questions from the board i thought there would be questions with lots of volunteers to shop around those room trips [Laughter] okay all right well thank you thank you for joining us tonight we appreciate it feel free to stick around if you'd like we know you're busy so we certainly don't expect you to stay and listen to all of the other very fascinating things we'll talk about tonight so thank you so much thank you bye thank you bye okay so our next agenda item

014is um something we started last month so honoring our team as we head into our blue ribbon year looking at some recognition for some of the folks that have made this possible for us and so tonight we're honoring our para educators and we are thankful to have a couple with us here so i will turn it over to sydney i'm going to move madeleine crudo birkin as a panelist also because she and mrs reed have a quick thing that they would like to say to our para educators whether they're zooming from home or whether they're here with us um before they go i just wanted to say thank you so much for the work that you do and especially during um this past year and a half which has been particularly trying and you're working

015with our kids who have had the most struggles you know not just every day but especially through the pandemic and your work is just so greatly appreciated and i we have some small gifts of appreciation for you but this one i loved that said every student can learn just never in the same way all on the same day which i think pretty much sums up a lot of what the paris day can be like and thank you so much for being the sweet kind patient para educator who every single day is a grantham child's hope and support um and i did find a small picture up here i'll have to post that online because it's too small paraprofessional a multitasking educational rock star who lives to inspire and loves to encourage they're kind of a

016big deal so thank you so very much and i'll hand it over to mrs reed so i ditto everything that dr leggett says but we so appreciate everything that the paris do in our building and when i say everything i mean everything um the pair is where many many hats and are so flexible and change hats on a dime um so thank you for your flexibility and for your hard work and we're so lucky to have you with veteran village and mrs crudo burke oh you're still muted mala [Laughter] it's not a meeting unless we tell somebody they're muted still i agree with everything that was said and i also want to say that i think that the really grantham is blessed because the um integrity and the professional responsibility that gets taken by the

017paraprofessionals in the building is really exemplary and they do go above and beyond and i do think they are the backbone the daily backbone of special education plans for students where students get pretty unconditional support from these individuals who step up every single day so it's it's really a privilege to have such a dynamic team working at grantham village school they're great so i will say um from since this is looking back at you know the last year and and thanking you i know um one of my experiences with many of the peer educators was this time last year which i'm sure you've wiped away from your memory because for a lot of our para educators they in that like other duties as assigned part of their job description they became the folks who had

018to herd cats on class-wide zoom meetings um and so i got to see the work of several of our parent educators managing a virtual classroom of eight-year-olds nine-year-olds five-year-olds and uh you would think managing kids on a screen might be a little easier but it took a diff whole different sort of skill set and i know a lot of our parents stepped into that role of being those folks who were facilitating and managing those weekly um you know group meetings of the classes and so that's just an incredible thing that they were that you all were able to take on and do and offer our students so that they could have that connection back to their classmates even if they were not seeing them in person um for weeks or days or months at a

019time or you know even just some of those longer breaks in between when they were seeing each other in person it just kept those connections really alive um and i know that what you do every day in the classrooms in person here goes so far above and beyond that but that was just such an interesting example to me of well we're asking them to do something that they probably never imagined they were going to do so um thank you all for what you're doing and what you have done in the last year for our students and for our community and sydney did you say we have some of our parents who are joining us i think we have mrs brown this time excellent so much [Music] thank you thank you and as always like we

020said last month to our folks we wanted to recognize you but we don't want to hold you hostage so if you would like to stay for our some or all or any of the meeting you are welcome to but if you have things to do tonight to rest and recover for tomorrow we also understand that so don't feel like you're sneaking out um behind us if you would like to head out tonight your your role here was to be recognized not to be made to sit and listen to all of that thank you thank you springfield thank you very much okay so our next agenda item is um meeting with the grantham select4 so uh we're really grateful that you were willing to meet with us and to have a chance to touch base between

021our two boards and our work that we're each doing i know one of the things that one of the reasons we've done this previously but one of the other reasons that we wanted to meet was last year when we got into our our budget the depths of our budget season and we realized that both of our boards were bringing forward large-scale projects we decided it might be good to touch base before we're bringing those on to our warrants to see what kinds of things are happening um we also would love a chance to just sort of bring up and look at the population growth that we're seeing in town what that's going to mean for us potentially what it could mean for you and then any other issues that that you all have um and

022sydney i don't know if you have anything else for that i did a little presentation perfect i don't know if you want me to do it now or if you want to wait and it's up to you all right go for it okay yeah let me just pull this up and then i'll be able to share my screen [Laughter] okay i'll make sure that everybody gets the key points anyway okay welcome grantham school board and now you'll be seeing this up here and everybody who's online with us should be able to see this at this point thank you for being here tonight there were a couple of topics that i know we wanted to bring up from the school district one of those is just what brittany was talking about with upcoming projects so we

023are still moving forward with a gvs grounds renovation and playground project it's going to be important um as we all know from last year to emphasize that the majority of this project has to do with site work which with fixing the drainage um out in our play space so we have a cur currently we have a bid out for a landscape architect and engineer for design which would include the drainage mitigation ada compliance all season play for k-6 making sure that we have that span of all of our ages and sizes and we plan to have an estimate ready for our warrant article in february one uh one question that has come up is the tennis courts um obviously nothing that's going to be decided tonight but i can tell you that whenever we look

024at the playground the question i get is the tennis courts are always empty are you going to keep them um so that is something that we'll be discussing as we go through the design and engineering process i've looked into the history of the tennis courts to and i understand that they used to belong to the town and then the school inherited them i think around the time of the renovation from what i can tell or was it before then um connie has the most background but weren't the tennis courts um created with a federal grant no okay they were they were raised okay so um i again it's nothing we'll decide tonight but i i know that that is always coming up in terms of um do we keep those as we're re-designing the playground

025or do we you know talk about either relocating them possibly or just not having them and opening up that kind of valuable real estate on our on our playground for our new design our fundraising efforts are going well so the initial warrant article for 50 was there was a commitment from the playground committee to match that in grants and donations fundraising we have already 25 000 with matching donations promised as we reach certain goals in the amounts of 14 000 and 10 000 respectively so we are just about at our 50 000 goal we have a few fundraising uh drives right now that are going well and i brought you information on them in case you would like to do any of them um but we have our brick uh custom brick sails that we're

026going to have and the brick um engravings our goal will be to sell 500 and those 500 bricks will become part of the new play area design either as a a sitting area or a walkway or something like that we have raffle tickets on sale with great prizes and we also have a donation site so thanks to the incredible generosity of grantham residents family and friends from a distance some local grants that we've gotten from local charities we're doing incredibly well and i'm confident that we'll reach that goal or maybe exceed it um do you want to do you have any questions about the grounds renovation and playground space before i talk about enrollment okay um in terms of enrollment and growth i'm sure that you've heard that we grew a lot last year um

027in terms of our gvs enrollment so we did have a population boom during covet 19 a lot of people moved to grantham um essentially to escape cities where maybe their schools were closing or they didn't feel that their kids had enough opportunities during coven because of other shutdowns and we just this past year we went from 247 students to 277 students so that's a big period of growth for us we're still seeing some transitions and moves but enrollment is now stabilizing which is a good thing for mrs reed our largest classes right now a grade level is 42 so that's two classrooms of 21 and i don't think we have any bigger than 21 at this point yeah not yet it could change tomorrow and then um so we i have some vital birth records

028people often talk about a baby boom during a pandemic we're actually not really seeing that um so you know i'm always projecting five years of how many babies now will be gbs students in kindergarten in five years and it doesn't look like there's going to be a huge jump from 2021 at this point but we'll keep an eye on it and we do have to keep an eye on move-ins definitely the one thing i really wanted to bring up tonight is i did some projections looking ahead at tuition because of our big classes that are here now so when we're talking about the fact that we not only grew during the pandemic but we also have very big classes from grades four down are much bigger than the last four or five years that we've

029had so our projection for next year's budget is a total number of students that we would tuition to 7 through 12 for secondary for about 3.4 million i took the average tuition per student and i put the average tuition increase over the last five years which came to about 1.034 and if we project that out assuming all of our current students stay and go all the way through um lms and lhs just as a heads up um by 2029 we'll be looking at about almost 4.8 million dollars in tuition so it's uh it is this immediate boom because the pandemic and these students seem to be staying you know as far as we have seen nobody's moved back at this point and it's not just that it's that our k-4 classes are large compared to

030the older grade levels that we have in the current middle and high school classes so i just wanted while you were here to kind of have that bigger picture of enrollment and where we're headed okay thank you um any um other things from the board that you wanted to bring up to the selectmen all right from you all any questions about any of that for us or things that are on um your what your work is where your work is focused or what you guys have going on right now we'd love to hear um some of that well your initial concern was uh bonding and we don't have anything on our agenda at the moment anyway so i was surprised it might count but uh nothing on this upcoming budget season for any uh we're

031just uh getting our feet wet with the budget we're probably not um as much as you guys are through yours at this point um our project this year will be broadband to the areas of town that are not served or severely underserved we all know where those are self-driven and north grantham we have a committee that's working on that it's not looking like we're gonna have to use any taxpayer dollars but that we're still early in the process but we'll use we'll be using our upper months toward that the three hundred and four thousand dollars that we got um capital projects there's no are cruisers coming forward on this warrant uh next year or the next this time next year well there'll be vehicle replacements but hopefully capital reserves will supplement that i don't know

032if you guys have anything else to add except i found a copy of what you were representing oh sure this luncheon yeah you can email it to us that'd be great i can't think of anything else do you have any questions for me i think this is just a good opportunity for the board in this lecture to talk about the upcoming year yeah i know last year when we met there was some concern about um revenue from the state have you has that do you have any sense of what that's looking like in terms of state money and state revenue well so um you'll be getting your tax bills soon um they i think most of them were mailed today um the town uh the overall rate went down 54 cents so state revenues came

033in higher meals and rooms came in 46 000 ish higher for us so that's um almost 10 cents on our tax rate so that was really good it won't be there next year so we'll have to make that up and there's a swept reduction so reduction for the school tax the statewide educational property tax yeah just people notice that on their tax bills too so that's your tax rate does that have work that's part of it yeah yeah yeah i was so i was surprised when you know our highway block grant was the same meals and rooms was higher than predicted so that's always good when the revenues are higher than you anticipate yeah we have a town hall bond we've got a couple more years on that and then the library bond i think

034is two years beyond that so within the next five years all of the bonds will be paid off on the town side 2020 by the fy27 so what fiscal so it's all right did i get that right yep so i mean that's kind of where we're at things could change and in a heartbeat um you know that but hopefully i'm done with where i would say things are similar financially with the district right now because we got about 92 000 more in adequacy than we expected um we returned more to offset taxes this year especially because of our utilization of a lot of the esr grants so financially speaking we're in good shape as well and the school's uh tax rate went down i think 27 cents was it i think so yeah fourth instance

035anything else from anyone right now i know we've said thank you but pass our if you see them pass our thanks on to the um fire and police for joining our parade for helping us with the parade we appreciate it yeah it was great um and we actually put our the next um couple agenda items on here intentionally if you all are interested in staying the presentation that cindy's going to give for the state voucher program um there is a potential tax impact for districts through that program and it's um she'll let us know more but it is um very unpredictable in terms of what districts are going to see and so she's going to talk a little bit about why that's the case and what we're trying to monitor for how that's going to

036impact our budgets and then the next is our first budget presentation for our budget cycle so um we really appreciate you all meeting with us you know again this year and um i think it's great to be able to touch base on some of those projects and keep that communication open um and if you if you do need to have an early evening and you find yourself less interested in some of our later uh agenda items we take no offense to an early accident i just keep waiting for the media when someone says that to me [Laughter] yeah so thank you we appreciate it um it's good to see all of you too um okay so our next agenda item is the new hampshire state voucher program um cindy's gonna give us a presentation on

037that uh hopefully it will give us some answers my hunch is it will also create some questions so the biggest thing that will create questions is we're right now operating under temporary rules for the voucher system and the permanent permanent rules are being discussed by the new hampshire state board of education on november 10th so it's coming up pretty quickly so i will just quickly get this ready i know it's hard to predict but are we anticipating any big changes to the rules they don't seem to have a lot of changes from the draft yeah i read through the proposed rules today will they be just discussing the amount of funding they allocate to their program yes um which i'll talk a little bit about here um the problem is they're not gonna be able

038to predict anything either make sure everybody at home can see this okay so the the voucher program is called the new hampshire education freedom account so when you hear about efas that's what everyone's talking about it's education freedom account program it's a little slow tonight okay so um this was i'm not sure if you followed how the education freedom accounts came into existence but they were their own uh bill at first which failed and kind of got shot down and then it was rolled into hb2 into the main budget so it was one of those situations where if the entire budget's passing the efa program became part of that they have adopted emergency or temporary rules in order to get the program started so the program is currently in effect for this school year and

039the final rules are for november 10th and everything that you'll hear about tonight is applicable right now so here are the current parameters is that 10 percent of each voucher goes to the new hampshire children's scholarship fund and they're the scholarship fund who's been chosen by the state to administer all of the vouchers so for example for every it's about i think a little over eighteen hundred dollars this year plus any just um any um differentiated aid ten percent of all of those costs go to the new hampshire scholarship fund first facilitating this program and then the new hampshire scholarship fund contracted with class wallet to do all of the financial transactions with the individuals and families who apply for the vouchers so i think that one thing everybody needs to understand is that this

040isn't a direct check to families it goes through a scholarship agency and then it goes through this class wallet and that 10 of all funds do go to these agencies for facilitating and administering the program anyone is um is eligible for an efa if they are earning up to 300 of the poverty line which is going to be 78 600 for a family of four according to national statistics the new hampshire voucher program is now the largest voucher program in the entire united states in terms of students who are eligible to mitigate the initial impact this is with the temporary rules districts lose only 50 percent of eligible aid in the first year so that's why it's a little over 1800 but moving forward it will be the full adequacy amount which is close to

041four thousand dollars vouchers can be used for students in homeschool programs private schools religious schools and public schools that accept tuition students and funds can be used for the following although this isn't a complete list tuition and fees tutoring services textbooks instructional supplies computer devices internet uniforms test fees summer programs therapies and college tuition if the student is still in high school so those are some of the main uses and i have um concerns so i just want to list some of the concerns that i see as a public school administrator and educator in new hampshire the funds come from the new hampshire education trust so this is the same pool of money that all of our adequacy funds come from so um there was a much higher draw than advocates presented so when this

042was presented to the state board initially they estimated that there would be about 130 000 access this year and it's now 7 million for requests so about 7 million will be coming out of the new hampshire education trust um there's only a one-time financial disclosure which means that you can present your finances to show that you're eligible financially and after that you don't have to do it every year it's just um special education students get an additional two thousand dollars which is the differentiated aid and this is a concern as an educator because you are eligible for that if you're an efa student if you have any medical provider in the united states sign off that you are have a disability so you don't have to go through the iep process you don't have to

043have an evaluation a team the way that we look at evaluating services i kind of wish i had a camera for the looks on everybody's faces and in addition with that two thousand dollars if you're eligible that for special education there's no um accountability there's no requirement that you spend that on special education services so you can still spend it on whatever you want there are concerns about dual enrollment violations so for example we have quite a few not quite a few but for grant them a few homeschool students who still partake in sports and co-curriculars and some classes at the high school which is great it works really well but those students are now eligible for the efa and they can still access all of those things there is a lack of lack of

044accountability right now because i can tell you that there's no district in new hampshire right now that is aware of exactly who is accessing a voucher we just don't know they don't have to tell us so the state has said that at some point there will be a report that comes out once the scholarship agency is up and running and we'll be able to look by the student's identification number to see how many vouchers are being accessed from grantham resident students but at this point we have absolutely no idea um there are some concerns legally about the separation of church and state in terms of the fact that this is eligible to go to religious schools and um what's being sort of parsed out in the courts right now is the difference between is it

045okay to provide funds public taxpayer funds to a religious affiliated school or is it going to be just not for religious instruction of a particular religion so right now the answer is yes you can send these tax dollars to religious schools another concern is that new hampshire scholarship fund and class wallet have refused right to know requests to access any financial information regarding the vouchers because they state that they're private and right to no laws don't apply to them so i have a concern in terms of transparency of public tax dollars that you know that we would need to be able to access any right to know requests through them they do have an audit that the state will complete so it's not that it's nothing there's an audit process but i think it is

046a concern for your you know every taxpayer has a right to this information so i think that will become more and more of a concern and since we're under temporary rules and we don't know what the final rules will be right now there's a possibility of grandfathering in everybody who's accessed the temporary rules under the temporary rules which is that original seven million dollars that's already going so those are my concerns yes i was just curious if what on the right to know access yeah wouldn't it be similar to what nhma went through with the right to know about um you know schools and towns paying mom they they were not disclosing the salaries of their um staff are they private though i thought they were public no they got sued um and they have

047they have to disclose but it's very it's different than a real right to know eligibility yeah so yeah maybe they will be sued for that as well i just wanted to clarify so a large number of families have already applied for this yes did everybody who qualified get funded or did they somehow select because i understood there was a very small amount of money that was allocated for this about 100 yeah 140 000 or something so um they haven't either they're doing quarterly payouts so i don't know if they've already done the first quarter payout but um i believe the way that they set it up is the first payout is 20 of the allocation for example on like september 1st another 20 percent another 30 and another 30 so you don't get the big

048chunk of money all at once it goes out throughout the year so if we're talking about if all seven million have been approved because they have to be approved by the scholarship organization that the money that would have gone out at this point would be twenty percent of that seven million okay but where did the seven million come from that's what did this it came from the education trust it came from the same tool does that mean that this program is taking away from adequacy yes so if there isn't enough adequacy every text goes up again absolutely so there's there's a there's a lot of pieces moving in and out so for example the reduction in swept also has to do with that education trust right so say there's there's almost an average of about

049a billion dollars in the new hampshire education trust and then swept would normally be 363 million dollars raised of that for this year and this year only as far as we know they cut that back to 263 million so that's 100 million that's also out of the adequacy there's this seven million and then um you know and then the rest goes to adequacy so right now um i guess we're hopeful about our finances in the town in the school the state is feeling hopeful that they will be able to get the tax revenue and business tax revenue and lottery and everything to get the education trust back up where it's supposed to be um i think one of the things that well i believe personally that our adequacy needs to be higher you know it's

050we can't educate students on you know 3 800 each but the other problem is that whenever there's been a surplus in the education trust it's almost run like a non-profit where the surplus goes back into something for schools so remember we got an infrastructure grant and we did the safety audit and we did the window film and everything all of that came from the infrastructure grant that came from the surplus and the education trust so you know those kind of opportunities will will disappear is there a rule that says adequacy has priority over nothing i know not that i've seen i mean that's an equity issue well that's and that's part of the cornerstone of the legislative lawsuit right in the midst of the lawsuit brought against the governor and the commissioner about this issue

051this is what's happening um how about the children who whose families may request the vouchers maybe they sent them to school maybe they didn't we don't have oversight of this and they don't have to send them to a school and it doesn't work out when the child is back in the public school so we have no money there either there's no appointment well i'm just trying to think there would be some protection since it's not one big check you know so if they come back and if they come back to school you know they wouldn't get whatever that next payout is do they report it to the scholarship fund though if they've put their child back in they're supposed to yeah there are concerns with other states um you know particularly arizona has a big

052voucher program there are concerns with fraud um so i think that isn't and i'm sure a lot of people will use it very equitably and very professionally and very respectfully but there is a history of fraud that goes along with these programs oh this thing about the special ed students where they don't get the usual kind of evaluation yeah and it's anywhere anywhere in the united states any any medical provider so this is coming in what's here to the board i mean it's coming to the state board on the top correct yes november 10th so all of this will affect your budget that you'll present and search it doesn't it so if we have a student we still have adequacy for that student so it doesn't take away what could happen and let's hope this

053doesn't happen and grant them but say it starts to pull away a lot of students from school we start to lose big chunks of adequacy and then when we lose those bigger chunks that means we need to cut positions it means we need to cut programs it means that we can't fund the things that we would normally fund because we always work on you know the bigger economy scale in terms of you know we maximize a resource so that we can have for example one person who can provide something for all k through six you know if things start to get chipped away we might have to say we can't afford to have that person or we can't afford to have that position and because we're losing students and then we lose the adequacy and

054i think this is something that we'll see the the impact from year to year of it there's a the the way the funds come in the way they go out and the way they impact the districts is a very non-linear equation and so some of those impacts for us could be later on down the road in terms of things like building projects or infrastructure things that previously there may have been that surplus that districts could safely assume there'd be state money for we may be looking at less and less opportunities for state funding which then shifts those costs locally so you know our our building still needs you know upkeep and our our vehicles still need maintenance and those things and previously there were often opportunities to get funding for those from the state this

055may remove some of those funding opportunities so in terms of our like long-term planning it just puts more instability for us in terms of what our funding sources are for those things um i see some really significant legal battles coming especially with say you are a student an efa student and you have been granted the differentiated aid for special education and then you choose your parents place you in another public school because you can go to another public school if they accept tuition students i think there's going to be a lot of questions because technically if you're parentally placed you are kind of waving your right to the free and appropriate public education and special education but if you're in another public school does that mean that they don't you know do anything and who's

056responsible is it the public school where you've been parentally placed or is it your sending district because most of the time it's your sending district i think that's going to be particularly confusing um cindy could you maybe address what you know of the lack of public input with the department of ed and addressing this hole um i can't remember the numbers off the top of my head but i think they had something like 800 people speak i it was a huge number of people spoke and the majority of people spoke in opposition during the hearing during the hearings and that was for the original that was for the temporary rules yeah for the temperature also for the original original bill and that's the one that got voted down and then when it was put into

057the budget bill there was no public input during that process so if i'm looking at the math on that 3 800 roughly a student 27 students definitely a million dollars roughly 10 of our overall budget that is potentially being impacted is that an accurate way of looking at it so you're gonna do you're doing that a lot faster than i am so you're saying say we lose 10 of students no what i'm saying is overall we get 3 800 per student we have 277 students so we're getting roughly a million dollars little over a million dollars a year from from democracy funds really that's that's the number that's at risk it is for us yeah so say we have say we have 10 students who decide to access an efa and say five of them

058get four thousand and five of them you know get eight thousand and then so you know we'd be looking at taking that bigger chunk of money and for us when we're doing our budgeting that's going to be incredibly close in terms of looking at um that's 60 000 that's going to be more than a pera could be two pairs it could be a teacher you know that's and that's just for 10 students i guess i just have the hardest time with the lack of transparency because i think about what we do as boards in the town and the public needs to know where their dollars are going and that's our job to be accountable and have this information available and yet i don't understand how this process can not be a transparent process with public

059money and i think that the perspective from the people who are advocates of this program is that it's completely transparent that it's the parents right to choose their child's education and their curriculum all right well we will uh check back in and revisit if there's major changes that come after the november 10th after the state board so november 10th is a very big state board meeting because they're discussing this they're discussing the um ability for local districts to move to remote instruction if they need to for health and safety and they're also doing the holocaust and genocide legislation like uh implementation of that legislation those rules that day too so it's a it's a very big state board day yep okay thank you for presenting that now okay our next agenda item is the budget

060presentation for special education and related services do we get to see this is crude oil burke again thank you so much for coming thank you have a great night i think do you guys want to separate out a little get some space hello everybody [Laughter] it's me [Laughter] and so if you want to go to the special education function 1200 in your budget book so i'm going to have madeline and i'm actually going to bring karen lassard in as a panelist as well so they'll both be up here to walk you through all these different lines hi karen hello are we gonna see you or are you in your pjs i'm not my pjs but i can't quite figure out how to have you see me so maybe not oh wait a minute i found

061it it's a beautiful color so um the special education budget has some changes in it that you may recognize as significant we'll start at the beginning the first line is just special education instruction which is your professional educators and you can see that there's very little change there it's the next line that i think we really need to pay attention to you'll see that the approved budget was 65 118 um and we're asking now for 87 000 and you all know i think that i am leaving my position this year um and you have to hire somebody and so we've had lengthy conversations about the ways in which the position might happen could happen and we've collectively as an administrative team talked about the advantages and disadvantages of a full-time special ed administrator somebody who

062would continue to also do be the lea for all of the meetings at the middle school in the high school and that would include at the middle school in the high school all 504 planning so in the budget you have a um the figure of 87 000 is a figure for a full-time special education administrator madeline i'm going to interrupt just for a minute because i'm going to pull up a quick comparison uh some other just oh good oh good well somebody's doing that kind of curiosity on the wages on the special instructional we're seeing a decrease in the wages uh it was a new hire so with a new hire somebody is going to be on a different step in track than the person prior to that yes they came in at a lesser

063amount of with a lesser amount of experience let me zoom this [Music] oh there we go a little better right zoom and share so as we've been talking about this i tried to find it's not always easy for us to find comparative districts but um basically what you'll look what you'll see here is the district the sau number their student population total student population and the full-time equivalent of their special education director um special services director so if we started a low end and i tried to choose districts that were like grantham in the sense that they are their own district and then they send to middle and high school or that there are a district in itself that's about our size um or close to our size so monroe is 127 with the 0.7

064fte uh we move up to lime with 290 student population and there are 0.8 centipede has 401 students they're full-time fte moultonborough's close to that plainfield and cornish combine one person with 437 students for a 0.8 grantham we're at 461 students and we're at a 0.5 um gilmanton pittsfield alton and barnstab would be the next ones closest to us in population that are their own districts that send to a different secondary school and they are all a full-time fte so you can kind of see how we are a misfit yeah um i don't bring this request to you lightly because you know we know that increasing the position isn't always the easiest thing to do we've also for the last two years tracked um miss crudo burke's actual hours each week and the thing with

065this type of position is that it's not really part-time because she is still a pre-k through 12 and through transition special education director for all of our students and including 504 she is still our lea for everybody 7 through 12 and beyond so um we toyed with the idea of keeping this as a 0.5 and then hiring a basically a 504 coordinator for 7 through 12 because that would be another viable option i'm going to recommend that that's not the better option because i don't think you would save a lot of money even including the additional benefits because you would lose well you'd have to pay the two part-time sellers which would probably be about equivalent but you would lose that one person who has the oversight of all of the district resources this person

066has to allocate personnel to all the communication and allocate resources and i think having one person with that oversight is a better way to go for the kids for families at one point of contact and better coordination with lebanon too all right so i am going to stop sharing and hand it back to madeline and karen and see if the board has questions before we go to any other lines i will just say my um as i was looking through the board packet and as i was thinking about this my uh pitch for supporting this proposal from from you all is i think special education is a high liability point for a district and i think a strong special education director who has the time uh that they're being compensated for um to do that

067work is has the potential to save a district more money than it costs them um that one person uh is i know i i think we all know that in the time that we've had madeline she has done work that has probably resulted in significant budget savings for us just by virtue of what she's able to do um and so to me this is one of those areas where investing a little bit more in a person who's able to do that work uh saves us risk and liability and that's a really a point where the district could be at significant financial risk um for special education needs anybody else okay we can always come back to it so we can go on to the van driver yeah the van driver we haven't used that money

068um but we've decided to keep it in there in the case that we do need a substitute that's what that was for correct yes yeah um and that would be if we had to hire somebody ourselves and this year we've been able to use uh first student drivers um the special education summer tutoring you know we had some conversation kristen and sydney and i about how just well oiled and well put together the summer program was this year and how we integrated special education services into that program and how really highly effective we all thought it was so we put the exact same amount of money in there anticipating that would be glorious if the program could work in the same way um and if it doesn't you know we have extended school year services

069that would would happen for a specific number of children that either had regression of skill um had difficulty recruiting recouping skill after an extended period of time out of school who had an emergence skill or had a low incident disability where they would lose skill totally without some level of intervention that was related to their current iep so i think that's a fair number to keep back in there um paraprofessionals speaks for itself we didn't reduce um we didn't reduce this the bathing expectation for next year so what we have now is what we're requesting paraprofessionals uh do a lot to support the infrastructure of the school and kristen and i have talked on more than one occasion about the idea that less would not be helpful but of course we defer to you i

070just have a question about that line um now as i remember the paraprofessionals are included in the cba so did you anticipate and increase we didn't negotiate coming out of the negotiations no i don't care you haven't done anything with um salary increases right because of the negotiations right those are um the actual people that are in the building and the actual wages that they're earning this year okay so what accounts for the 47 to 15 increase year over year so before the end of last year we had to hire two additional para educators because of specific student ieps so they aren't new this year or new proposed for next year they just didn't show up in last year's budget and that that could also change if we receive another student who has a need

071for more at any time yeah and we never know we you know we don't know who's coming or who's going until really it's kind of late in the year usually um and then preschool wage is actually the preschool instructor and um she's doing a great job and then the rest of the the buy out the insurance the deductible i know i i'm going to guess that you don't have any specific questions about those all the way down to um um services contracted services but if you do i'm sure between karen and myself sydney we could answer them answer you might have one question about the 1753 increase i'm guessing that that might be a question for the special education oh for which one because i know that you we there aren't any increases due to

072negotiations but we have a track change so somebody will be earning a new degree okay so that's why that there's nothing you're saying yeah yeah um i had a question um the line item that says special ed teacher nhrs and i'm embarrassed to say i don't that's the requirements system so i guess that but there's a line retirement above it one is for um support staff and one is for professional staff yeah okay thank you oh the second line is professional staff okay thank you and the reason for the increase is the um full-time special ed director right now madeleine is not in new hampshire retirement because she's only half time but if you move towards the full time then that person will be in new hampshire retirement oh you should have told me that

073a couple of years ago karen you want to stay no you've got to go so we um our gmr is a 4.2 for next year which in my discussions with other districts we should be dancing some local districts are looking at seventeen or eighteen percent gmr and our dental actually decreased by one point five four percent okay and i noticed it someplace else yes those numbers will be we lump them all together because in some function codes if we didn't do that it would kind of identify what type of a plan a person had um so we lump that all together into one number at the very beginning of the budget so you'll see those at a later time [Music] uh the next one is special education contracted service and you see that there's a

074huge um actual spending was fifty six thousand six hundred and seventy one dollars seventy one cents and the requested budget is eight thousand and there is a legitimate explanation for that well we had unanticipated we had not anticipated a family moving in one of the children most of this one of the children had significant needs and although another school agreed to the child staying in the school that they came from and we did not have to pay tuition we did have to pay all of the contracted services associated with that and i think karen that came to like 26 27 000 it was quite a bit of money it was forty two thousand oh forty two thousand even more and that would have been for the bcba and otp speech uh time with the special

075ed teachers so we didn't pay tuition we did pay all of the related services or direct instruction by a specialist so you can see the difference there eight thousand dollars we would anticipate lots of money was specifically identified under a different function and object code and this eight thousand dollars would be applied to like um maybe a special education evaluation that that was outside of the wheelhouse of deer creek or something specific that we were not anticipating so it's not a large amount of money just something in there for a cushion is this student still attending the other school they're not in our district anymore oh okay yes they're not anything else there there's no money in preschool-related services because we put all of the services whether it was ptot or speech it's all in

076the function and object code related to the uh specialty area so nothing is specific to preschool we're gonna and we're gonna skip back up one line to van operating expenses though oh sorry that's okay and where we had originally put in 4859 and we're going to lower that if you want to make a little note in your books but we'll be changing these pages as you make your changes and karen we are going to go for it is it correct so it's actually a decrease and when we're looking at van operating expenses um we'd be looking at um inspections repairs do we need new tires you know those kind of things would go into that mount everything we're we do because um we checked on we bought new snow tires and we checked on other

077tires and we think we're pretty good right now we had to replace tires and brakes in 2021 that's why it was so high um so we're hoping we don't have to do that again one would hope too soon yeah the next one is special education transition services and i'm going to ask you to look at that hundred thousand dollars and then go down to special um secondary special ed secondary tuition and these numbers are somewhat related we are expending or anticipating spending around a hundred thousand dollars for a very special program that is related to transition services for um an adult student who is not yet 22 um and that's why it's transition because that would be the focus of the work being done and we would not be using three of them down the

078special education secondary tuition um which would be a decrease in 124 000 is that right karen yes okay there's any question between that one and the next line down to right those two yeah it was also 106. yeah so that's right so um secondary tuition private and private residential were together so the total cost there was a significant amount of money that would be a reduction of the 124 and the 149 and instead the expenditure would be the hundred thousand dollars i don't anticipate any secondary tuition out of the district we did um we did talk about oh i guess elementary tuition doesn't have anything in it oh the van lease we should probably talk about the families that's just basically the um increase for the third year of our three year contract with first

079student for the driver and then um no elementary tuition anticipated so there's no money there um no private or public and then secondary no private no residential so there is a an amount in there which is a cushion amount of fifty one thousand dollars we sometimes do not know if we're going to have state place or court placed children in the school where we have a financial liability where they're placed somewhere and we have come across that in a couple of two or three years ago when i was here and so there were some pretty significant unexpected costs so we've put that 51 000 in there cindy do you want to say anything else about that yeah i just i've i would always recommend having at least one court placement in the budget um because

080we did get we did have two several years ago and caught without it so i think it's a good thing to have in there and the 51 covers that that's the so the state sets the rate we're ready to move on um special education travel that's really travel uh reimbursement for me but it's i mean i guess you could reimburse me from going from the chair to the porch or from one chair to the other but i don't think you want to do that okay i know that wasn't nice but you will you will within you with a new individual who is physically present who is moving from school to school there will be the need for um travel money so that went back in there and the money wasn't i think 53 dollars was

081used the year before and then special ed supplies um we're keeping that at 2 000 um gasoline that's gasoline for the van right yes yes um no software needs special education equipment and that that does come up from time to time it's not a lot of money i think it's important to keep it in there we we do use grant money if we have it available and special education dues and fees that's for participation in the um in the special education administrators group at the local the regional level which is west central and or the state level any question about any of that that completes the 1200 function before we go into the related services so i don't know if you want to discuss that function before we move forward i just want to ask

082for clarification so um you were saying we ought to have court one the cost of one court placement correct and so if it's not in here now how does that come i mean it's the uh under um that secondary tuition okay and i may have been out of the room at this time all right thank you karen i didn't number my pages is the next page um speech no psych services 21 okay any other questions for that first batch okay thank you we'll deuce okay the next section yeah psychological services currently we contract with deer creek associates um and uh you can see that we pretty much stay in the ballpark and so i'm budgeting the same amount of money that we had for last year seems to work out in a pretty balanced way

083and for the most part just so that you know that's most almost exclusively just the elementary school psychological services because per the area agreement um although the there there in my four years there was one exception where we used deer creek and it's complicated why but i thought it was legitimate the middle school and the high school have their own school psychologist and the services their psychological services are handled at the building level any question about that increase in that this year picture coming out of the bandwidth today all that stuff yeah i'm sorry i was just going to say we also have the we also with our idea grant we tend to write in some money for contracted services as as a cushion in case we do go over that yeah and just so

084that you know the reason that we need a school psychologist because children who are on ieps every three years are we're required to do an evaluation um and then in addition to that if we have somebody coming in from another state we're obligated to determine eligibility in new hampshire and then in addition to that we do take some referrals either from parents or internally from teachers or staff and then the decision the decision gets made about will we move to evaluation so um it is not a huge number of children that get evaluated i think it's been pretty stable over the last couple of years and we can pretty much predict how many children that's going to be all right karen are we on to um speech otc yes speech okay i keep losing myself

085here all right uh you'll see like last year there were no speech wages health insurance insurance dental life none of that because we contract with boothby we are expecting to have a contract with boothby again for the upcoming year um it has been a cost savings to some degree um i think that we're getting really exceptional service from uh cheyenne smith who is the speech language pathologist that we contract with with luffy and she's been an outstanding member of the community so it's pre-k to sixth she screens does intervention direct instruction evaluates and has full participation in meetings where children have speech service on their iep so you're getting about 37.5 hours a week of her service in this contract that's all right questions i know one of the reasons we went to that and

086it seems like like it's working but i know one of the reasons we went to that is because there's just a workforce shortage in that area is that still true it's still very true it's incredibly difficult to find a speech language pathology so trying to bring that position back in house right now would not make sense no since it's working and there's no one to hire got it we're very happy with this arrangement yeah i don't think you can really tell that she's meant to become slps i've already done that yeah it's the field took one of the great fields to go into i'd say yeah yeah ot pt right here yes okay so um you all know that we have an occupational therapy assistant that's um an employee of the district in addition to

087that we have we use booby for the occupational therapist who provides direct super clinical supervision for the coda which we are obligated to provide um the ot also provides direct instruction to a child and that is one-to-one service and then she evaluates does consultation with teachers parents and the evaluation planning team reports out and works in the summer so what you have i'm just talking occupational therapy now and if i have it right karen um i'm gonna i'm gonna switch for a second and say out of the 41 9 sixteen thousand one hundred and thirty of those dollars are just physical therapy it's not the forty one nine it's the forty thousand down at the contracted service the forty one nine is our coders salary sorry i should have started at the top i'm going

088to go back to the top so it shouldn't say otp coda wages it should just say coda right we can fix that yeah i think it's just that that's the title of the whole function yeah oh ah so that's that's our coda and then she's got the health bio and then the rest are the usual social security medicare um retirement unemployment compensation workman's comp and then we're down to the forty thousand dollars right which is ot and pt contracted services so of the forty thousand dollars karen if i don't get this right i know you'll correct me of the forty thousand dollars sixteen thousand one hundred and thirty of those dollars are for physical therapy contracted service yes okay which leaves the rest of the money as occupational therapy that contract is a contracted service

089that we have with boothbay also with boothby and of that there there really are some components to what the occupational therapist does the occupational therapist provides about 10 of the rest of the money is for clinical supervision for the coda which is required direct instruction to a student both during the school year and in the summer because mary provides direct instruction to everybody else and then there's the individual who we contract with does evaluations consultation to teachers parents the evaluation and planning team and works in the summer because our coda does not work in the summer so then the instruction that happens just in the summer is direct for that person any questions about that they do audio audiology or vision audiology first then vision okay so audiology is um it's a couple of things

090they're all contracted services one of the services that we are contracting for next year is for an audiologist to maintain the um [Music] i have to be careful what i say because i don't want to identify the children right so uh it is for both the mechanical making sure that the instruments that are being used for a child who might be hearing impaired that they're working properly that there's been an assessment of the material that the the devices are properly calibrated and that anybody working with a child with any kind of hearing devices knows and understands how to put the devices on how to maintain them make see if the batteries are dead and then also understands the implications for a child with a hearing impairment in a learning environment so part of that twenty

091five thousand dollars is that and then the other part of that is for a teacher of the deaf part contracted any questions about that and the last one is vision contracted services provision um what the contracted service for vision is divided into two pieces one is orientation and mobility for a child who is visually impaired and orientational ability i'm sure you know this i'll just say that it is making sure that the learning environment and the playground is accessible to the child to the greatest extent possible in the safest way given the visual impairment of the child and the other part of the contract is for a teacher of the visually impaired and we contract with two separate one is an individual and the other one is an agency teacher the visually impaired that's about

092print that's about making sure that the learning environment the lights are right that the child has access and is stimulated by uh books augmentative communication devices anything that would promote learning for a child has a visual impairment any questions about that okay that was easy peasy madeleine i just want to tell you how appreciative i am of your knowledge of the budget and how well you explain it so it's not always done that way thank you we're very clear thank you oh good you're welcome well that's because karen coached me all roads lead to karen that's right i'm gonna give credit where credit is due we're also wondering how far flattery will get us no i do want to say something though i know now is necessarily the appropriate time i just want to say

093that it has been an absolute and continues to be an absolute gift and a privilege to work in the district with sydney with karen with brendo with um you know what's her name kristin with this incredible board it's it's really been an honor for me and i do enjoy the work and and now i you know now you need to get somebody really vital in there who's going to shake the place up and sound pretty vital it's my time you're a cousin but you deserve a next chapter just for you yeah exactly your feelings mutual yeah thank you thank you both for your work on this and for the presentation we really appreciate it um any questions or conversation the board wants to have about this budget area before we well i just wanted to

094say i i support the recommendation for a full-time same director um i just trust your judgment that's that's the better way to go let's i'm sure you already have it on there but let's put that on our short list of things to come back to when we get to the end of the budget process awesome all right thank you both very very much we'll let you come down off the big screen yeah thank you okay so our next agenda item uh is the um destination imagination request and so we actually have that memo in our board packet i finally get to say something's in our board packet um and so we have a memo here from sydney um looking at the legacy teams and i actually had a question as we get started on this

095cindy have we had like have we funded legacy teams in the past so we funded when they went to competition okay yeah but we didn't fund the like when they made it to globals and they weren't sure if they could go we did fund that we have not you know upfront funded a coach and their fees made supplies so this would be new for this time around i did just um text mrs bechdel to see if she might be able to join us um so if she gets back to me i'll poke her in absolutely um and she want to say she's actually here nope she's not on youtube so have have students um at the middle and or high school expressed interest in continuing the grantham students have they have yeah so um i

096i have to tell you that okay i put the pros and cons down because i do feel a little torn about this you know yeah because on the one hand i think everybody's gut reaction is of course destination imagination is great and these are our kids and why wouldn't we support them i think that when we're looking at some of the things to consider is you know moving forward would it be better if grantham didn't support it because then it could be part of lebanon which means that lebanon students plainfield students and grantham students would be doing destination imagination um because i'm not sure if i would recommend funding it for everybody and i know that that's hard to say but there there will be a fine line in starting or creating a precedent where

097you're funding certain things that you know that the area agreement should be funding or not and who decides that and how far does that go so i think that's worth consideration and um [Music] yeah and you know the other option is is that you can fund it and you can say yes this is something that if grantham students aren't given this opportunity then we want them to be able to continue with this opportunity and be able to move forward with it um lebanon does not have di as far as mrs bechta is aware and plainfield does not but they do have a robotics group so um and as ellen said maybe there would be interest if di started at the middle of the high school i know that um we tried to get a coach

098at the middle school a few years ago with some of our teams that were moving up and um and it wasn't going to be included as one of their activities okay so there's been some outreach to look to limited about supporting this yes at the middle school level i don't think they're as far as i'm aware there hasn't been anything at the high school level but there have been requests at the middle school so when i was thinking about you mentioning the funding if this was funded here and just the grantham students participated would they be going as lebanon students because that's where they're being schooled another i'm not exactly sure how that would work yeah but and that's pretty tricky um i do know that they would probably physically have to come do it

099here or in grant them because if it's a student activity and if we're funding it and lebanon isn't there would be you know kind of insurance and liability issues where they wouldn't be able to practice in lab schools um is this considered a club it is okay it would be at the middle and high school level here we have so um we budgeted this year in our enrichment for five di teams and we have enough for 10. kids here at gvs are just dying to do it so there's no shortage of interest on the gds level and i know that there are students who want to continue doing it through middle and high middle anyway again hi we're not sure i do understand what ellen's saying about the time commitment but again i think this

100is precedent setting and that's what you really need to consider is is you can set this precedent but if you do that i would advise that we come up with very specific parameters of what types of clubs or activities are funded and what types aren't do so we could have it another situation where the t if there were if there were legacy teams that happened without sort of the initial coaching and v funding and moved on and needed financial support we could again support absolutely in that situation at any time okay um you know anytime they make it to states or regionals or globals or something like that you you support them and support that the question would be do you want to support sort of the foundational level level club it just may also

101be something that you use to get this program off and running within the area school so i would say if you know the interest is high from the grantham kids and we did fund this if there was increased interest among the other districts that they once they force their hands that may bring bring the conversation a little more to the forefront of doesn't let me need to do something about this i i think around the rules of what clubs were going to fund and like outside of i sort of view this as these are clubs that we have at the elementary school um we did something like you know we would consider funding clubs that are continuations of the programs that we have here may provide some security to us in the back end of

102getting you know one of the requests for this glove and that quote i mean i think the reason it's so popular in branson is largely because this is becca and like her enthusiasm for it and i feel like without that foundation in other districts it's a little hard for me to imagine it being quite as like extraordinary as it is here just maybe to your point and not so much about like the particular proposal i'm struggling a little bit because i feel like it's good for our student i mean i'm very close to a number of di they're not even alums yet they're still like some of the legacy kids in the high school i think ellen's point about especially the high school is really well put i know that the kids that i know

103are not really sure if they can keep it going with all their other commitments um the middle school maybe is a little more room for that but um i also like the idea that they i don't know if they take on some independence with it meaning it's like really they have to find ways to make it happen i hope that doesn't sound like harsh i just feel like it's part of like developmentally appropriate growing independence with it um and that's sort of where the dialogue is that i hear from like the legacy students and i think it is hard if they're in love like in lms lhs it sort of feels like we're like and running some of the things that you know and i know that's not what it is but it feels a

104little like that i think i think um thinking about ed's point and then yours you know at ed's point about how you know doing this and funding this could create interest and then it gets handed over to them i think the same could be true that if they have to find a way to make it happen or parents have to find a way to fund it or make it happen then that could also be a way to get leb to start to adopt it you know and open it up to all area kids is i think they could both happen yeah do you know is is this likely to happen whether or not we fund i don't know okay is mrs bechta intending to work with these kids she is intending to work with one

105legacy team that she's kind of been following um but as far as i know and she's working with teams and she's board meeting too so she's incredibly she's all d.i um but i think there is one legacy team in the middle school that she's sticking with yeah yeah this yeah i'm finding this difficult because i i don't like the idea of funding something that seems to me is really the responsibility of lebanon as an area of kind of responsibility on the other hand these kids want to continue this don't want to let them down either i honestly think the pros outweigh the funds on this i mean for 1400 you know we're investing in progressive students to continue to do what they what would be lebanon's role uh if they did this wouldn't they have

106to approve taking on the club they would have no role no wrong no no yes i know um if it's not you know under gbs i know that some people run you know practices all over the place yeah um what if um lebanon students would like to be part of the group would they be able to with insurance this is where i feel like i'm like where did i how did i become this person but um i would recommend that if we're funding it that it should be granted some kids yeah yeah yeah so therein lies a little bit of an issue right to me so you can see well yeah yeah they're in the school 11 school system and you can understand where the sending district so in some way that makes perfect sense

107but on the other hand it's not like this greatest optics right i would feel like a helicopter parent funding a grantham group in in lebanon it just doesn't feel right but i see the desire of the kids to want to do this i'm not sure what options we would have that will be the best it's tough to i get i guess i wasn't saying this as explicitly before but i also feel like they go to the middle school in the high school and there are new there are different opportunities nothing can replace the eye and this is back i know i firmly feel that but on the other hand it's not like they're they have they have opportunities right maybe less a little less at the middle school and certainly at the high school um

108so i don't that's what i mean about and running i mean everyone if they choose to pursue di after their time here and sort of have two minds about it like i know a lot of family the families i know have like self-source a lot of the money when they need it you know i was wondering if they would just fundraise i mean if that's a you know an equity and access issue but it didn't happen but they can self-source a lot of it i don't see this as a large request of money but it i think it's a complex yeah it's like it's not about the money yeah we can very clearly afford it yeah it's really not about the money and you'll notice that a lot of times i provide you with a

109recommendation and you know i think this could really go either way i think it's a difficult decision and is it 14.50 for both teams yes do we have to decide this tonight yeah [Music] i guess i'm coming down on unfortunately it's problematic and i would pass on funding i feel that way too i just worry about like larger implications for it i can imagine other scenarios that yeah and i was thinking if we had a similar program that wasn't being run as well as some would like in lebanon having a competing club in the same school and i don't know i would say like if this was me and i have a better course here and i don't like the chorus at the middle school yeah just fun this one i mean that's just an

110example of you know competing interests and i'm not really sure it's competing doesn't have it so it's not like i'm you know comparing courses or bands or it's this is something that the women's school district is not offering our gps kids i'm not sure i see the competition here well maybe it's the op it's like what i'm saying about the office meaning like if we fund this we can't have kids do it and therefore it looks like it's a little bit engineering yeah and grantham already has a reputation of being somewhat elitist um i think especially in the middle school there's that perception yeah i think the the precedent idea that i think about is down the road if you know best slash worst case scenario if the 10 teams that are currently forming here

111if all of them continue forward depending on how many there are different grade levels and things like that you know in five years are we looking at continuing to even if it's not a huge amount of money um what's the sort of expectation of the the grantham kids you know that are in the lower grades in terms of being able to to do it continuing on upward in terms of yeah that precedent um i i guess for me i like knowing that there is still sort of an option and an outlet for us to support this so if they do that's why i asked about if they do move forward in their competition um you know if they go to a different level of competition where they need funding and even if it's not like

112the global level if they go to a state competition or they go to um you know maybe that's an ask of you know that they're moving forward at the competition level that we could support them financially for a part of it that seems like that's something that we've done in the past and also isn't committing us to um it's not setting that precedent but it is still supporting our our kids in the district that's such a different you know it's like a special request versus like running a program yeah yeah i also think the cost goes up as they go to state level oh so it's not fourteen hundred dollars anymore that's right yeah three five yeah yeah yeah so they need additional support and has lebanon been asked about offering yeah at the middle

113school and they're not interested so i mean maybe these kids will hopefully learn sorry that's sometimes the way the world works [Applause] and it's not fair i was also thinking to myself from a lebanon perspective if i was like a teacher in the middle school and like grantham kids were peeling off to like do a grantham specific thing that we were supporting and that that feels kind of sticky to me if i was hoping to let's say doing something not bi but something similar and they were like oh well we already do grant marie supports us yeah we're going back to our you know we're going back to grantham and doing our thing yeah it's that's their school community now right um yeah we have a lot of active lobbyist type people in grantham they

114could start lobbying for next year [Music] yeah if we don't support it but it's something we can bring up at a i mean i know it's not for a few months but we can bring it up at our next area meeting just to as a board yeah you know sort of speak board to board yeah about it do you need us to take action on the request i do okay so if we could frame it in a positive yep um so the motion would be to um approve the motion would be to approve the um destination imagination legacy team request second leslie and a second from denise okay so all those in favor of approving the destination imagination legacy team request please say aye and all those opposed to approving the destination imagination legacy team

115request please say nay nay okay so it is the motion fails and please extend if they do have legacy teams this year extend you know that that in the past the board has supported uh competition costs and that kind of thing and will continue yeah and would take requests yeah okay so our next agenda item is the um letter to the state board um sydney reached out and asked if i would like her to draft a letter on behalf of the board to submit to for written testimony to the state board this is what she very kindly put together um if this is something we had we hadn't discussed this previously but since the meeting is coming up in about a week um we can look through the letter make any changes we'd like to

116it or say you know that the board would not like to submit something so anything's on the table here for this letter we can have it submitted as is we can edit it or we can say we don't want to submit any um in person or um written testimony oh this is the one about instruction yeah this is for the their and they're only taking written testimony for this they're not taking any in person um no oral testimony this time yeah i just want to thank you for directing this lesson yes very clearly i think it's great i hope it has in bed as we're having the conversation i'll just say something you didn't mention since i said yes when cindy offered to write this letter i am in favor of sending this in yes

117i am awesome um one clarification and then one uh wording thing um on the second page we asked to encourage you to reject propose we keep the current rule in effect so what's the current rule the current rule basically gives local districts the ability to decide to do a temporary remote instruction yeah okay my brain is having a hard time switching from the the final shout out this is why they're doing them all in the same day yeah um and on the first page this is just a wording thing but in the second paragraph uh the second line where it says uh didn't have the opportunity to pride provide input prior to this language okay moving forward to you for review i just found that a little um awkward i guess this language oh what

118if i just stopped it prior to this language moving forward yeah yeah just put a period there yeah okay but yeah i think have we been asked this is what we would expect yeah thank you for asking this is what this is so i know it's just showing your local control and um not giving consideration to each school district's needs which is the whole point of public education who served in public it also just shows no appreciation for how difficult the staffing has been it is every day i hope it's going to get easier me too any other edits or changes or thoughts on this okay so um we would need a motion to um authorize our superintendent to submit the letter um on behalf of the board as amended so i'm a motion from

119leslie in a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye and any opposed say nay okay perfect our next agenda item is symptomatic testing protocol so we've had a pretty successful run with our asymptomatic protocol we have about a third of staff and students who do it every other wednesday um knock on something we've had 100 negative results every time that's great um you know grantham's just an amazing community in terms of following protocols we have a really high vaccination rate in the community people are very conscientious of others you know we're very very lucky that way and we like to keep it that way but um now that that's up and running and we have a pretty smooth process for it i would like to propose that we start doing symptomatic

120testing so this is the protocol that you'd see for that so um anybody who is already whose parents or guardians have already given consent to the surveillance testing that we're doing if their children are at school and they come down with symptoms instead of you know it's really hard to get a test right now it's incredibly hard that we would be able to have our school nurse karen islander who um has amazingly you know volunteered to add this to her her daily tasks but um it helped her too in a way because she knows very quickly what's what's going on with the students so the student would be able to go down to see mrs islander she would call the parent just to say this is what i'm seeing happen if i give them the

121test she could do the rapid test have results in 15 minutes the student would still have to go home until the symptom is gone because we want the symptom itself out of the building um but then we could get them back more quickly you know and then we would know what was going on with them yeah if a student is home sick um they would be able to actually call the main office and if mrs islander has the tests available and the time the parent you know again since it's difficult to get a test would be able to kind of come around in the car loop meet mrs islander she'll don her um code the testing here and do the rapid antigen test and kind of you know be able to give a phone call

122and get those results quickly to the family so um one of the things that you've probably heard about in the news is a shortage of antigen tests we have enough here um already to get this started there is a chance that every place is going to run out um and that's probably what you're hearing on the news and in the state updates but um they the state is supposed to get another 750 boxes i think early next week we have plenty to be able to get this rolling and i i wouldn't recommend that we don't move forward with this just because we might run out of tests right you know i think it's a better idea to just go ahead and do it yeah yeah and staff are eligible as well so it might help

123with our staffing yes so because i'm not a nurse my customer would be the symptoms that kobe can present are very everything and they can be so common to regular childhood um illnesses or sometimes at all what would warrant the pulpit test for the child do you have the symptoms yeah yeah any of that any of any of the lists any one cause right now it helps and that it would rule it out and which is one of the reasons why it's so difficult right now is not only is it hard to get a test but once you get a test depending on where you go it can take days to get the result um so that affects students education and then that makes our staffing so you can just get it rolling you know

124what the accuracy of the rapid pressure so if somebody's symptomatic they're very accurate the sensitivity is very high um they're not as accurate if somebody's completely asymptomatic but with symptomatic testing they're good i believe they said 96 because we were discussing their later progress yeah yeah i thought i thought somewhere yeah which is pretty accurate i think it's quite a resource that we have available yeah i mean if we can do it why not it's going to keep more kids in school and staff in school and people less worry right that's what the surveillance testing has done is that it gives people a lot of peace of mind and there will be a time where we do the surveillance testing and we get back some positive results but it means that we have caught it

125early and we've done what we need to do so that the problem doesn't get worse and this will hopefully move the needle on the surveillance section because you can only be eligible if you are in the surveillance testing exactly and so it's only a third of the students right now as well okay so hopefully we'll have a lot of increased participation and how are these tests funded today they're all state funded okay um so we don't pay for the staff for the tests or anything that's good what what's the procedure we get a positive or rapid dura for symptomatic or during the surveillance testing because it's different system symptomatic so if somebody um comes in and they have the rapid test and if it comes back positive they immediately have to follow the isolation and

126quarantine guidelines for a positive covet um and then we have to report that to dhhs so those would follow kind of that chart that we sent home for everybody for their fridge of you know what what you do next so yeah i'm not sure if i included that did that answer your question well i'm just wondering yeah i guess i'm not okay if they go get a pcr and it comes back negative are they allowed back in are we are we is it still the 10 days out so if they have a positive rapid antigen and then they go and do a follow-up pcr the pcr i believe is the more accurate one so that would be the overwriting that would be the overwriting i can check with mrs islander and dhhs on that but

127my understanding is that the pcr is going to be more accurate that we're negative i also have to say the chances of having a positive rapid antigen are pretty small if you're symptomatic yeah um you know that's pretty pretty slim yeah and how easy is it for students who are not yet um granted permission for the testing to pronounce just permission from them yeah i think it takes about two minutes to sign up and i'm nice to the parents to know that that's an available option you we haven't chosen yet okay so and i before we interrupted you again it's okay go ahead you're probably gonna say what i'm gonna i just wanted to say that you know the um the staffing issue with the lab that we're working with they're dealing with the staffing

128issues that everybody's seeing everywhere and especially in medical profession right now and i do want to say that you know we've talked to mrs islander a lot about this and she's on board with it and this really is additional work that she's doing if they can't send a second staff member if they can't send a staff member doing the testing um but you know we talked a lot about it with her and she's willing to do it because it also gives her a lot more control over navigating things with home and with the physicians offices and the notes and who's coming and going and who's isolating and quarantining and all those kind of things so ultimately what i want to say is a really big thank you because with this symptomatic protocol it wouldn't be

129on the table in front of you if it hadn't been for her agreement and willingness to do it superstar yeah so just for like super clarity yes if if there are symptoms the child is going to be home yeah no matter what the result is so you still you want the symptom out of the building so say there's somebody comes in and they present with a cold right they still have to go home because we don't want 20 other people to get that cold who now need to be tested yeah so but if they have the negative rapid antigen test they're going to go home and we know that that's negative so we know that at that point it's the cold and they can come back once the symptoms are improving which is going to

130be a lot faster right then without having to hear scheduling a test and getting into a doctor's office and all those things so we still want the symptom out of the building but staff and students are going to come back faster so i think one of the things that we have to be really like put it multiple places multiple times is that if there are symptoms that this test isn't a come to school that same day you mean if you're sick if you the symptomatic okay yeah so if they're because there's no one get tested yeah right right right but it's it's not so like if someone comes and gets tested if they are at home they have a they have a runny nose they come and get tested the test is negative they're still

131going home so we have to be very clear that this isn't uh come and get the test wait five minutes and your kid gets to come into school because i think there's going to be an assumption that this is a like fast pass yeah back to school it's not yeah yeah it's faster yes yeah and more convenient and all of those things but it's not a because i think some of the the idea out there is that the schools that are offering symptomatic testing are letting kids stay stay yeah so you go you get some you get the test and then you can just go back to class or you come in in the morning get the test and you can come in right and there are a lot of schools they do it they

132call it and actually where i live it's called the test to stay program yeah um we did talk about that the problem is that then you are passing the symptom around right and then you need to test 20 or 30 more people probably yeah and you never know if it's the same cold you know you always have to err on the side of caution so it'll be a negative test and a resolution of symptoms improving right it's not resolution improving something yeah improving we all know you can sniff for weeks yeah and the same applies for a fever as always no fever at all ever unmedicated yeah unmedicated yes what is a super child with allergies well see mrs islander will know that the child has allergies and is diagnosed and that's all taken into

133consideration yeah and sometimes if you forget to give your child their claritin in the morning you panic as they're getting out of the car just saying her friend i did i did just um get a message from mrs islander for one of the questions and she said that this first student that we have positive was a positive antigen test and then a negative pcr but dhhs said to go with the antigen test and count the student as positive mm-hmm so you can possibly positive as a positive yeah and i guess um i remember when we discussed that at the time because i remember we talked about it with a pregnancy test like if you do one positive and one negative you still assume you're still pregnant yeah i'm like [Music] yeah okay and for the

134the other thing that i think we should be really clear and that i was glad was in here and that we should be really clear about is that for students who are become symptomatic during the day that it'll be done at the parent's request or with the parent's permission yeah they're already consented but mrs islander said she'd always still call yeah yeah they're gonna they're gonna get the test yeah because a parent might say i'd rather just take him to get a pcr and that's exactly perfectly acceptable option yeah yeah any other questions for this do we need emotions we do we need a motion to approve the symptomatic testing protocol so my perspective okay so i have a motion from leslie in a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye

135and any opposed say nay excellent okay next up is the mtss presentation okay and i have to use sydney's computer because mine is in the cafeteria what yours is at lunch mine's at lunch it's going to work really hard to do coherent but it's way past my bed we should have put you at the beginning yeah then you can give us the bullet points if you're not wanting to elaborate it's a lot of hard work so it is okay so this year we introduced mtss which is the multi-tiered system of supports at grantham village school we had a team of teachers working over the summer to plan it out and um kind of figure out how we wanted to roll it out and how we wanted to work and then in september we took off

136with it so i'm going to share a little bit about what that is this slide has a lot of words and i'm actually going to share the presentation with you so you can read it at another time but in general what is mtss it's multi-tiered system of support it's a um an approach to to education where we have collaboration among um special educators interventionists and classroom and grade level teachers to work together using a data-driven approach to come up with the best learning opportunities for all children and from where they are now to where they can go so the the picture the pyramid is probably something you've seen before previously with rti um so our genius mtss um model is this year we pulled in through two so we're really focusing on k through two

137right now next year we're going to try to pull in three and four so that bottom red tier is the biggest base and that's the core classroom instruction and the goal of mtss is every child is getting quality core um classroom instruction so sometimes in schools kids are pulled out of that core classroom instruction so they can get their intervention or get their special education services but in mtss we want all kids to get that core instruction the next tier up is tier two which is targeted small group at grantham village school the way that we have been able to schedule mtss all kids are actually getting that targeted small group instruction which is pretty cool um so i'm going to explain it a little bit later or maybe i'll explain it now and skip

138it later but um the the mtss teams are getting together every week in looking at um data that they they've gotten from um progress monitoring and deciding what um what to focus on with each child and what grouping to move them to and what's going to best serve service them and because of the way we're scheduling it all children are getting those services so even if you know it's a child who is above grade level and reading we're giving them enrichment to kind of move on forward and then that tier three is intensive individual intervention and those are for our identified students and our goal is that those students are getting tier one tier two and tier three so they're getting lots of support and instruction so like i said um it's a real teamwork

139approach so it's the classroom teachers the special education teachers both interventionists um any specialist so ot speech behavior specialist specialists myself mrs widman all coming together to look at the data to talk about the kids needs and to create the best plan for every child now is this is this just for focused on academic rights right now we're working we're focused on literacy and social emotional learning okay um we had to kind of take it in smaller chunks i think i covered that so at the beginning of the school year again this year we started with k-2 with early intervention and we started in september by the we called the data team um actually i think they called themselves the academic data team and they said they were the 18 and it wasn't mrs buckley

140mrs hutchins mrs o'reilly and this is geodesis kind of swooped into those grade levels and did star early literacy and star math testing with the kids um it was a screening they did it in september they're going to do it two more times during the school year and through that kids kind through their um the results of their testing they get put on paths so to speak so the green path is you know academically they're solid they don't need any intervention so the team got together to determine what extension activities can we do how can we bring them to that next level um the blue arrow depicts those kiddos that you know what they don't need intervention but let's keep an eye on them because they're not quite green right now yellow was kids who

141showed that they needed intervention and red was intensive intervention that team then took the red and the yellow group and did a star cbm which i don't know what cbm stands for to be honest with you um but it kind of delves deeper into things to get more information on what are the intricate needs of those students and then all of the students as well um had a running record with founders and panel which we've always historically done um foundations fluency assessments and then sight word assessments to really kind of dissect what their needs are um besides those three times a year screening every six weeks that the team with the classroom teachers are doing progress monitoring they're using using the star data system um and they're using that data and their data from their

142day-to-day interaction with the kids to to make changes to groupings and academics and and what they teach so it's pretty exciting based on measures i knew it was curriculum dates but it's so awesome um so right now at grantham village school our schedule every morning from 9 to 10 30 is academic intervention time which is our mtss time and literally that whole team the specialists the special educator the interventionist the classroom teachers they all kind of swoop in and there's groups happening everywhere it's so cool to walk in and see because they um the routines are so set and the kids know what they need to do and where they need to go and just so much neat learning going on and i have some pictures to show you afterwards so that's happening every day

143and then one afternoon a week all the adults are getting together that are part of that team and looking at data and doing planning and really directing instruction so in the classrooms i had the opportunity this is all these pictures are from like 15-minute snapshots of two classes there are two grade levels and so you'll see there's a lot going on um there are a few kids in here that don't have photo permissions but i reached out to parents and they said for this it was okay so thank you for doing that you're welcome these are exciting pictures there's no music so someone can sing if you want did the kids seem to enjoy this work thing they do and i'm going to share some quotes when this is only like a minute um [Music]

144um what a cool way with some of those bigger classes too like there's no there wasn't one of those pictures that had more than six kids in it right it's really exciting yeah and so i asked the teachers oops i'm trying to get to the next slide you know at the very beginning there was a lot of apprehension a lot of fear because it's something new um and it does take a lot of planning um so i asked them what do you think of it today and this was last week and some of the quotes which are just so exciting are there's a great feeling in the classroom during mtss time groups are having fun in kids here [Music] sorry hear that and feel like learning is fun i love that when you look into

145any of the primary classrooms you cannot tell which student in the class has an iep from a student without one our small group learning time is no longer interrupted by having to transition to another space within the school in order to receive learning supports and i'm not sure i really touched upon that earlier but kids aren't we're not pulling them out to go to whatever room they're all staying in one spot following the mtss model allows students to remain in their classrooms with peers as they participate in small groups they are not missing any poor instruction to receive an intervention which is so positive it's amazing having so many hands on deck to help meet kids where they are and help them move forward students are loving the extra attention they're receiving in small groups

146the collaboration among the team has been extremely helpful and then all of these are powerful but i thought this last one was super powerful when we first started planning for this year's mtss model i couldn't picture it and i wasn't sure how it would work however this has become a wonderful part of our day we are seeing growth and progress which is backed up by data that we have more time to collect and look through as a team than i ever could by myself all students are getting individualized instruction including below grade level at grade level and enrichment groups i do not have students who have been pulled out returning to class in the middle of a whole group lesson not sure what we are doing and possibly most importantly i am noticing students feeling

147like they are reading rock stars and using very positive language to describe themselves as readers because of individualized small group instruction which they see everyone getting i'm feeling very optimistic and positive about this model for first grade [Music] so that's my good thing just a quick summary of mtss that was awesome yeah and i will send you the slideshow so you can read through it that'd be great yeah it's been so much work and thank you to everybody and like i said there really was as any change always brings apprehension it's scary especially after we've gone through a year and a half we've covered and everything's changed yeah but it's been such a positive positive experience i'm happy for you because that's probably a stress relief for you to see the the positive yes i

148mean it's an absolute dream not to focus out and have them feel like that's really truly inclusive differentiated instruction approaches totally dreamy so huge kudos amazing is everyone doing this at the same time so k through two has that academic intervention block because of staffing yeah um the the team kind of swoops into i don't remember the order but i think they start with second grade and then they go swoop into kindergarten and they swoop into first grade um and as the year progresses and we get to know students more more there's a chance that kids might cross over from grade level depending on their needs so next year you're looking at three and four we're going to add three and four not at the um time wise it would be impossible to add the

149same amount of time but really we we want to have that large chunk for k2 because early intervention is our goal and then hopefully we won't give such a big chunk as we move forward yeah so kind of taking that wind time that we've always had and that they the big kids have now yeah and doing it more of a collaborative and approach well i'm happy for you thank you thank you um all right so our next um agenda item is just a quick report out for the delegate assembly just to let you know what went down there it was good um there's so there's 161 districts in the state there were 50 that were in attendance so that was the and that's pretty normal so um so the business part of things was very

150normal as always goes um when we got to the the resolution so the continuing resolutions from last year that had to be re-adopted there was uh two that were successfully pulled out to look at individually the rest of them were just adopted to move forward for another year they have to be continuing resolutions for a certain number of years before they move into the whatever this is called the um policies resolutions and statement of belief manual so the ones that were pulled out and changed were um number six which is about the um idea allocation um and this one i wanted to mention specifically so the what the language of it says is the nottingham and stratford school boards oppose changes in the idea allocation calculations resulting in funds being dispersed directly to the school

151or district in which the child is registered in towns which do not have high schools and not to the student's residence the nodding ham and stratford school boards calls for the immediate return of prior method of calculation for idea federal and state funds as well as maintaining this commitment in the future to keep any and all funds distributed to the student's town of residents that was discussed because some of the districts that don't send students out didn't really understand the implication it was kept exactly as is moving forward so that'll stay on for another year um and then the biggest discussion of the entire meeting was about the next one which is the school administrative units should be held harmless during the 2021-2022 fiscal year for differentiated aid differentiated aid for fiscal year 2021 and

152to 2022 should be based upon free and reduced meal numbers for fiscal year 2019 and 2020. the new hampshire school boards association will make this a priority in its lobbying efforts during the upcoming new hampshire legislative session so that was adopted before the legislation had come through that effectively did that and the legislation says that it will use a prior year or the current year whichever is more favorable to the district so depending on what your free and reduced lunch numbers look like a previous year may be more beneficial to you than your current um and so what there was a big long discussion about should this be a resolution all of that kind of stuff what they ended up what we ended up approving was it was amended to widen the scope of what

153the language was and remove any of the dates so the scope of the advocacy will be to advocate for um like equity in free and reduced lunch calculations and for that the the benefit to always be given to the district in terms of how that's calculated um and so removing the dates from it if this is you know is an ongoing thing where that fluctuates from year to year depending and the big push um and manchester school district spoke out a lot about it because they have adopted the um i can't it's like the summer school or something like that it's what they're called that we didn't take part in which is free lunch for summer yeah see the so it's free lunch for everyone so they've seen a huge drop in their application numbers

154because everyone's getting free lunch now so families don't have to apply so but then they requested the applications for the calculations right yeah so um quick summary it stayed in but it was just amended to make the language more broad and to take the baits out and then the ones that we had looked at um the eight was the one about a scholarship fund for student representatives to school boards it did exactly what we had hoped would happen which was the resolute it failed as a resolution but they pulled the room and that almost unanimously i think it's like two people that said no um the the representative the delegates were in favor of the school board association establishing a scholarship fund for student school board representatives so they'll be moving forward with that um

155in the future um the number nine which was about like the um paying dues and segregating the dues into like this rsa no one even the person who brought it forward made a motion there wasn't a second so it didn't even wasn't even considered um the one from keen about diversity equity and inclusion in all aspects of our schools uh in response to the divisive concepts bill was approved um so that one will move forward 11 was about the uh transit post graduation transition program um and that one there was a motion from the district that brought it forward there was no no there wasn't even a motion from them there was no motion made whatsoever about that one so no action was taken i don't think they were there i think that was then

156the um one from hannover dresden which was the other one about equity and inclusion the one that we thought had really good language but was a little too specific because it called out a bill specifically that one had a good conversation um but it did fail in the when the dell the delegates voted on it it failed so that one is not moving forward but the other one is and then there was a late resolution um that someone brought forward the vote allowed it to bring up um very interesting um it was to amend rsa 91a to allow for remote participation in meetings and committees so that board members could have remote uh board members could remote into a meeting and still um go vote still vote still participate sorry you can already do that

157right so the what we were told was no yeah so there seems to be some confusion about that within the nhsba yes um my hunch is that there are boards that have successfully done it but it's not something they are recommending be done like st they're not saying that everyone can do that statewide because it could become a right to know thing so their recommendation at this was that it not happened um they there are bills moving forward to do this already so senator khan is sponsoring a bill to do this already and the um body the delegate body voted yes to add this to the call the things that the school board association will advocate for is remote participation of um board members there is some debate about if it will be for if

158the focus of it will be for meetings like like this one or if it will be for committee work because of a lot of the boards that are big boards big districts their committees what they're really aiming for is for their committees to be able to meet virtually um so that board members aren't meeting in person multiple nights you know in a month so um and that's what happened yeah thank you it was good it was interesting did um i can't remember the timing did the delegate assembly happen before or after new hampshire pulled out of the so so the it happened after they had sent the first email they had sent the howler okay and i think they may have sent it so that it didn't come up during the delegate assembly because that

159seemed to sort of placate some people who were there were rumblings about it oh they sent the howler before the delegate assembly but they didn't withdraw yeah until after it yeah yeah yeah um so there wasn't discussion about it at the valley assembly nope yeah so that's that that's quite a saga yeah and yes i haven't been to the letter yet but yeah i'm just saying yep um okay any questions from that was interesting um all right so our next agenda item is our policies and this is nothing new we are looking at the same ones that we did last month so we're looking at the um resin of three and the second reading and adoption so a whole host i made the um recommended changes from your first reading in all of these and

160just to answer christine you had a question about if one level of a five-day in-school suspension basically there's a different term change of assignment i think they call it but it's five day in school suspension essentially if that's appealable and i did follow up on that it is not available so um the recommendation and the way that the law reads is that only suspensions or expulsions 10 days or more should ever be available thank you okay so any let's take the second reading and adoption list first so all those um any way for this i don't want to say no i'm going to the second reading they'll say them later any discussion of the policies for second reading and adoption that's what i have perfect okay so we need a motion uh to approve the

161second reading and adoption of policies j i c j i c d j i c d r e b b e e b c a e b c b j f a b d and j f a b okay so i have a motion from ed in a second from leslie so all those in favor please say i i and any opposed say nay okay and then the rescind is any discussion of the policies tourists in same ones as last month okay so we need a motion to rescind policies e c a b e b b c r one and e b b c all right so i have a motion from leslie in a second from denise all those in favor please say aye aye and any opposed say nay all right excellent uh

162you have a principal's report from kristen and um she shared you shared the photos with the whole board correct i did so she shared some photos from the parade and from the blue ribbon day at school with the board if you haven't had a chance to check those out what a nice day that was um we won't make you do tons more talking is there anything else you wanted to add from your report so did you see how amazing our entryway looks yeah i took a picture and i think brenda gave him the directions on where to put things so it looks amazing and so exciting so thank you to that crew and brenda for making that happen um like i said like brittany said i shared the pictures and two absolutely amazing days we

163had um you know the parade was fabulous and it was fun to share with the community but i'll tell you yesterday with all the kids was amazing um they were so for the picture they were so adorable they were just like this is so good this is so awesome it was amazing there's a lot of pride yeah yeah and that's really all i have to say just another ordinary month i'm amazing now you have to get your rest so you can get ready for your trip yeah i just think i haven't finished packing just remember your glasses i know that's the biggest thing she told me the last time she went someplace she forgot her glasses and her contacts oh oh my gosh so i do daily wear so i just kind of put them

164in solution and worn degrees any other questions or comments thank you for your work on this you're welcome all this stuff it does seem like these months go quick so all right and our next item is the superintendent report so most of mine we've already gone over perfect at tonight's meeting i do want to say that we do have um interest in our bids that will be coming to the next board meeting for the um renovation and play space project um which is great because i know we were worried we only got one bid last time so we've had four site visits so far and people are coming for a site visit that's a great sign um our fundraisers are going well which i discussed and um i attached the progress modern committee minutes because

165i know that you like to see those and there's another meeting tomorrow night and other than that um there's been a lot just going on with me attending state meetings and the statewide things in the law update there's a lot to keep up with these days and brittany and i were able to also attend the area meeting one of our three required meetings per year it was a nice meeting there was a request by plainfield to set up a meeting in the spring of just a smaller group not the full area board to just talk about more ways that the area districts can work on cost savings and efficiency and student benefits so i think that's a great idea i know that mrs reed added to her report the letter from ruth ward who came

166to visit we also received over the last couple of days really nice letters from senator shaheen and senator hassan right so i'll be able to forward those to you as well and we'll we'll put those up on your bulletin board unless they're already there um i think i printed one to get laminated and i i don't think i got the second one [Music] okay we haven't got to frame them it's like one of those like gallery walls yeah yeah thank you do we have any given i mean i'm like floating slightly off my seat given the good news about pfizer vaccines today 4 15 they decided right yeah yeah do we have any have we heard at all about yeah like like so what's the plan of approach okay so the plan of approach will

167be that there will be pharmacies that are designated as available in addition pediatricians offices and we do know one regional clinic it won't be on-site here but we do know that there's going to be an upper valley regional clinic um i believe it's the second weekend in november pretty soon november 13th where we would be able to start vaccinating 5 through 11. originally we talked about um you know clinic right here at gvs but it seems like the regional public health network is going to be doing it yeah you know that's going to be there and it'll be easy to access for everybody um do you have any sense of parents who are reluctant so we have i haven't talked to a lot of parents about how they're feeling about it i know that if

168you look at these national surveys it's pretty much split the third or third or third um a third are going to do it right away a third are just going to do it do it but they're gonna wait and see and a third are no way i'm not doing it yeah yeah um you might extrapolate though in this town with our high rates of vaccination yeah right that's probably a higher yeah inclination yeah yeah that's good kristen and i will be out for progress monitoring committee tomorrow night but i wanted to ask you well i know you'll be talking about vaccinations i'm wondering if some of our members there might be willing to do a panel q a on zoom or something yeah some of our medical professionals might be able to just do a

169q a and it's more local and they can get more of a comfort factor yep yeah yeah it's a good idea but we also you know we already require quite a few vaccinations for school attendance i think it will uh i think it's exciting news coming forward that it's approved and happy for our kids safer yes yeah because i mean a lot of people focus on the kids will go back to normal or masking or those kind of things but the real focus is we have a lot of kids who are still anxious yes we have kids who are nervous or worried about giving it to a family member you know just that that social and emotional benefit is going to be big yeah yep okay and we're getting boosted yes that's good anything else

170for sydney i hope you have a nice little giveaway yeah in celebration it's a nice dinner it's hard to believe actually it's you tomorrow things have been busy so it's probably good we haven't thought about it you should be fine traveling okay our next agenda item is the consent agenda any comments or anything to pull or look at from there okay so we need a motion to approve the consent agenda from a second okay of emotion from wesley and a second from denise um all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay and we have a non-meeting tonight so we can adjourn and then non-meet right you can just adjourn this meeting entirely yeah we don't have to come back okay okay all right so we're gonna have to go into

171public correctness yeah so no non-public session tonight so um our next meeting is december 7th um and it's crazy tracy occurred to me that i said those words out loud and uh other than that thanks to everyone who joined us for via zoom um or watches this later on we appreciate it and you can uh plan to see us again on december 7th so yes i just want to remind you since you're talking about the next meeting at next meeting you'll need to give some thought to whether or not you want to have the january meeting in eastman if they're allowing meetings there at that time because we usually do our january budget meeting there all right just food for thought perfect thank you they're they're doing those wednesday night presentations okay in person so

172that's usually you can it's hybrid so i suspect that will be okay unless you know the numbers change let's see all right so we just need a motion to adjourn all right i have a motion from ed and i need a second second second from leslie so all those in favor please say aye all right in any opposed say all right