Grantham School Board meeting Tuesday October 5, 2021.

001all right thank you it's super easy it just does it itself that's official probably the easiest piece of tech i've ever used yeah that's awesome okay and we have some people logged in right joining us we have attendees so far okay perfect we're gonna get started in just a minute here we just uh got our we're using some new technology tonight that um we're seeing how we can continue to improve access for folks um so we're get start get started in just a minute here um we'll let's see if there's anyone else joining the meeting and then we'll call the meeting to order in about one minute or so i'm very distracted by how nice it looks okay we're going to go ahead and get the meeting started so i'm going to call the meeting

002to order and it is 6 34. um we are holding the meeting live in person tonight and we do have the full board here in person um and we are meeting in person we do have some folks in the audience here as well um we do know we have folks joining us uh via zoom so thank you folks for joining us we appreciate it um and just so everyone knows because we are meeting in person and we do have a quorum of the board here in person um that is the priority for the work of the board to continue at the time of the posted meeting and we are we'll try everything within our best power to make sure that access stays available for folks to join us via zoom if for some reason that

003is not made available the meetings are being recorded and we are taking notes and we have minutes of the of all of our meetings available um for folks so if for some reason we did lose connectivity knock on wood we won't somewhere um but just so folks know the board will continue um the meeting forward so we thank everyone for your patience as we figure out how to have our meetings in person but also available digitally so so far it looks like our new owl friend who i can't show you because she's doing the work of showing you the meeting um is going to help us uh make that a little easier so before we get talking her oh her name is hawkeye so thank you okay so before we get started i just want

004to take a few minutes at the start of the meeting and use my prerogative as chair just to make a quick statement i just want to take a moment on behalf of the school board to recognize the grantham village school for winning the national blue ribbon schools award for exemplary high performing schools the board has not met since the announcement was made and so i want to just take a minute to recognize this incredible accomplishment and we look forward to celebrating with all of you with the whole community while our thanks go out to the entire gvs community students staff families as well as the grantham community at large i would like to just take a minute to call out a couple of folks who are here tonight specifically for recognition so to superintendent sydney

005leggett to principal kristen reed and to sau administrative assistant brenda malloy um this award would literally not have been possible without your leadership dedication and hard work this last year so thank you you shepherded us through not only an academic year a pandemic but also an exhaustive year-long application process to see this recognition through to fruition so i know the work that it took behind the scenes for you to show the department of education what all of us already knew which is that grantham village school is exemplary so the grantham school board is honored to serve this community and while we would be proud of gvs with or without this award the national recognition shows what we already knew that our hawks are high so thank you and congratulations okay so our first um item

006is to approve the agenda so do we have any changes additions anything um to adjust on the agenda tonight okay so we'll need a motion to approve the agenda so we have a motion from leslie we need a second i have a second from christine uh all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay so the agenda is approved our first item on our agenda is public participation so just a reminder for public participation we have folks here in the room who are welcome to participate we also have folks online who you are also welcome to provide public input we ask that you state your name and your address just as we would if you were here in the room for both anyone in the room or online um we will

007leave public participation open on our agenda we have for 10 minutes if it's less than that we'll take less than that if it seems like we have more input we will give a reasonable extension to that time frame and for folks who are joining us virtually you are welcome to write in q a or chat those features are available during public participation for folks here in the room please feel free to state your name and your address and speak if you'd like to so we'll open it up for public participation now so my company has started having the like hold music playing during like at the beginning when people are like joining the meeting and stuff and i can't decide if i like it or not so that's a piano over here yeah oh my

008gosh because it's always like you're like part way into a song and they like turn it on it's like oh i liked that song did anyone in the room want to publicly publicly participate now okay i think i know why each of you are here just give some time if anyone's joining us online wanted to share anything give it just a couple couple more seconds just in case anyone's typing see anything come in did you okay okay so we will uh close public participation we'll move on to our agenda and our first agenda item is our student school board liaisons and i think we have seth with us is that what i see and do we have and ellen and ellen perfect all right i will come in excellent so we're going to bring our

009student school board liaisons in and they are not here in the room with us they are joining us and i'm actually not sure i wasn't sure how this would look moving somebody as a panelist but it works pretty seamlessly and we will bring ellen in perfect hi seth and ellen we have missed you yeah it's been a little while since the board has heard from you so um just to open it up we'd love to just hear from you how the start of the school year has gone um for both of you and um if there's anything particular that for the start of this year that you think would be important for the board to hear about uh you know we'd love to hear just about your experience as students starting the year but also

010if you think there's anything that we should know as a board we'd love to hear that as well so um seth your top on on the screen that i'm looking at so i'm going to call on you first okay um yeah the school year has it's been a great it's been a lot better than last year i think um coming to our new covent world i think everyone has kind of adjusted now and it just is um way better since it's not hybrid and everyone's you know permanently in school it's easier for the teachers and everyone and um great to see everyone again um trying to think of things that i guess you should maybe hear about but i i don't really think there are many i mean i think it's a lot of the

011kinks have been worked out and i was happy to hear that you guys got the blue ribbon award and i think grantham's a great school so nice how about sports um sports sports are they're doing very well i most of our teams were um undefeated for like the first couple weeks we just had like our first loss like last week but i think we're all doing really well and sports are a lot it's a lot better season like this year um we've been able to like make every game there's only one game that got cancelled because of covid um so it's been a lot more normal and practices have been normal you know no masks or anything or um no no like real social distancing outside that we have to worry about it's been nice

012other questions or comments from the board for seth right now one tonight by the way we got an update did you guys hear that we got an update from the room that lebanon golf won nice all right thank you seth all right so ellen thank you hi everybody so first i just wanted to congratulate gbs for becoming a blue ribbon school i'm just super honored to be a part of this community it's amazing um so at the high school things are going pretty well um i feel a lot safer knowing that a lot of people have gotten vaccinations a lot of clubs are up and running now in person there's a lot of new clubs actually uh including chess club the crocheting initiative which is part of i see seth going like yay um and

013there's the crocheting initiative which is part of the interact club it's a spanish club now there wasn't initially a spanish club there was only a french club and now spanish students can enjoy it as well over 50 people turned up to the last meeting which is great homecoming week is coming up and we have all the social events planned out there's going to be a bonfire for the seniors at the football games have been a lot more socially active there's student section and people can enjoy that um people haven't people outside of the school haven't really been allowed in yet like college representatives and advisors and i think that may affect like um junior's perception of uh applying to college but we do have a tent outside which is good we can have speeches and

014stuff out there it's just a little bit different this year i think it is a bit harder to social distance now um once everyone's gotten used to it but people do still wear mosques which is great so yeah any questions or comments from the board when you were talking about the attendance at things it made me occur to me or i'm wondering do you think that there's been an increase in participation and attendance at things from like before the pandemic to now are people like coming out and doing more and like is there sort of like a rebound of like excitement to be able to get together and go to things yeah i definitely think so i'm part of science olympiad and i think freshman year when i joined there was around 20 people on

015the team last year only varsity members could join and then this year there was like over 40 people joining there was so many people and a lot of freshmen too the newer people in the school just wanting to get to know people it's great yeah i guess one thing i uh thought of and it's kind of something i think i mentioned last year but um busing is still like a little bit you know really on the fence for like bus drivers like there's plenty of buses but i'm sure you guys are experiencing the same thing just hiring bus drivers uh it's kind of difficult and i know like a game or two people haven't been able to like make i think maybe like just a girls soccer field hockey game they couldn't even go to

016it because like they had to run like the normal bus routes and they didn't have an extra bus driver to get them to the game so i think that's the only real thing that i i would say is seems like an issue but yeah as ellen says i think a lot of people are really like showing up to these social events like now we can have you know our football games and i think the bonfire is gonna be great we collected like 200 extra pallets that we didn't even need so i think there is a lot of camaraderie around that after you know we couldn't do much last year any other questions okay thank you both and happy start to your school year we're glad to see you again and we appreciate hearing from you

017and i think that that's um some interesting stuff to think about as uh it hadn't occurred to me that like students would you know be excited to see each other again and want to join clubs and go to football games so that's great um so thank you both you're welcome to we won't make you stay on screen you're welcome to stay and listen to us talk about other things or i'm sure you have lots to do tonight so um hopefully we'll see you next month um and thanks for for joining us thanks good night okay so um our next um agenda item is something that we're going to try to do uh for the board meetings this year where we're just taking some time to honor the gvs team both i think we have lots

018of things to honor folks for right now one just above and beyond during the pandemic times but also in light of the um blue ribbon award so i'll turn it over to sydney well uh we do have um every single person in the community to honor but we're going to start with different groups and one of the groups from the very beginning of the pandemic really starting with the very first week of march 13th 2020 is our parent guardian check-in group and they are all here with us tonight so for those of you who aren't familiar with the parent guardian check-in this is a group of our jvs educators who every it started every thursday night every single thursday night at 7 00 pm we would get on an open zoom and just be able

019to offer some new information for what was happening that week mrs islander would give some covet updates mr britton was talking about tech updates and getting computers home and how they could manage them at home mrs woodman right from the very beginning was targeting social emotional health mrs reed was jumping in in terms of transitioning in as principal and making sure that everybody knew what was happening in the big picture of school so we were on every single week we were excited towards the end of last year to start to move to once a month because i have to tell you after a while when we were doing every week by thursday night some of those meetings we started to get a little punchy towards the end [Laughter] but it was really amazing and it

020was an amazing community experience of just having this parent guardian check-in group show up be available there were at the beginning nights where we had over 100 parents on there and then you know we've dwindled down to maybe a dozen or so and sometimes even lower than that which i consider a good sign but just uh the comfort that we were there and that parents could be there and listen and ask questions and that it was just open um for everybody so i really hope that um the board will share in my thanks to this group who um went way above and beyond to make that happen for the entire community because it really helped hold everybody together so thank you very much and we have some gifts um i'm going to start with mrs

021reed which is a thank you and this is for you yours is a little different and one of them is something that i hope you can wear at some point oh thank you i haven't seen you off duty ever so i'm hoping that that happens i don't think my husband has an encouragement thank you very much thank you and mr britton everything from getting every device home to kids and making them work at home and at school and back and forth and in between and in every model thank you so much thank you very much [Music] it just found you it's a set mrs islander thank you so much for navigating all the medical information and being a true voice of reason throughout cohen and making sure that gbs was doing everything you needed to

022do to stay completely safe thank you thank you and for giving us dinner inspiration yes every week it was like what's your silencer having for dinner i don't know let's find out then we'll make you try to make it before 7. and as i've said this before and i will say it again to mrs woodman who from the very beginning helped keep all of our kids together socially and emotionally and she kept all of us together much of it so thank you very very much and everybody learned about their ambiguous yes well maybe you wouldn't be i i referenced those videos a lot in both of my jobs thank you all very much yes thank you i know some of you were on some of those but i don't know if any of you who

023weren't on any of those if you want to ask any questions about them but they were they were quite the i remember starting the first one joking with randy which may not have been a joke in retrospect thinking should i start this one off by saying captain's log march 13th 2020 not knowing how long we would have been going remote um but i i don't know any other school that did this that just had that open session you know as long as parents wanted it so um it's an incredibly it's another thing that jbs should be incredibly proud of so thank you all very much so well i wanted to say thank you too because you were part of every meeting and everything we did also so thank you i remember that the thing i

024remember most and still remember is trying to find which room in my house i can do it from which kids are home i don't know if anybody has questions another questions okay thank you all we really appreciate it all right i know in my house over the summer it was like we don't get to talk to them to see them this week doing nope no you don't they get to have summer all right so our next agenda item is and you all this is why we called you not you you have to stay this is why we called you here so you are welcome to stay and listen in on other things or stay for other parts of the agenda but we also will understand if you if you take your plant and sneak out

025yeah so you don't even have to pick up them thank you all we really appreciate you and like we don't want to hold you hostage thank you i always felt like you had our backs thank you thank you have [Laughter] all right so um next on our agenda is the budget timeline for the 2022-23 and this is in the board packet the only other thing that we will add on here if we move forward with it is if we decide to pursue the playground bond again so those will go on the schedules and move forward with that any other questions or adjustments the folks had for the budget timeline please just all follow our regular board meetings great except for thursday okay then we will need a motion to approve the budget timeline for oh

026and we do need we need to change at the top the oh the um dates of zoom this time yeah is that because it's our time technically this is this timeline but it's for the got it but in here it says oh yeah okay yeah yep okay so we need a motion to approve the um budget timeline some motion from leslie we need a second second from denise so all those in favor please say aye and any opposed say nay okay next on our agenda is the glenn hudson trust um this was something that we received some communication about to the board um from um maria dalman about the glenn hudson memorial fund which is uh low in its fund balance and so there's an email in the board packet and then the accompanying um

027information to show the current balance so i reached out to um maria dalman about this and asked if there was any family to reach out to or anybody who might want to continue to you know reload this trust to keep it going and there is not so since we have 277.45 we usually give 300 my recommendation would be that when we get to may um that the district funds it up to the 300 we give one final glenn hudson scholarship this year and that that is pretty much the end of that trust and there's there's nobody else that's come forward to continue it okay this raised a question also about the hunt scholarship fund which is only a hundred some dollars yes yeah and i'm not sure if she's gotten to the bottom of that

028one yet oh okay yeah i think she's still researching that one isn't she the hunt one yeah yes but that's one that's probably not going to be funded for a long time right so we have to she has to do more research to figure out to figure out if we can do the same thing with that one yes just another point um i had i had coordinated the um garden clubs scholarship um awards for a few years and um we gave larger larger amounts and we still felt this is a drop in the bucket and you know we might have bought a couple of books so i think unless you can give a serious amount it's not that much much of a help to the students i do think that for a lot of kids

029everything helps yeah even yes yeah um and it's still i mean it's still a recognition from the top yeah even though it's sort of like a token from a better term so uh you know the intent of the scholarships is nice even though you're right and i think that's good to consider like we wouldn't want to lower the amount given to try to extend the life right right award like we wouldn't want to start giving like fifty dollars yeah like that wouldn't that would minimize the sort of impact in a in a way that wouldn't at least in my opinion any other thoughts on this so we would need to take action to at this meeting would we would we we don't have to do anything right now but we'll just get in touch with

030maria to say that in may this would be so we'll set this sort of wheels in motion to do a final 300 scholarship and then we'll take action to remove that okay okay okay so our next agenda item is the blue ribbon school of excellence ceremony funding request and there's a memo in the board packet um from sydney regarding this any other information on that you'd like to share with us no um this would just be a great honor um the teacher was selected by the teachers and the it was sam hutchins who's been selected to go the only comment i had is the meal allowance seemed pretty low so what i did was i looked up the um federal meal allowance for maryland um which is i think it came to like sixty dollars

031and i cut it off a little bit because some of the meals are at the uh i think there's one that we might get at the conference um so we i just kind of went by that i might get one of them one meal per day yeah worked for the department of education in massachusetts i mean this was in the 90s but still breakfast allowance was like 250 i think lunch was four dollars and dinner was seven dollars there was no way i couldn't stay within that budget and i was just like for heaven's sake you know be reasonable so i'm just thinking yeah i think i think you should you should give yourself i'm not sure we can go higher than than the federal federal rate though yeah so we're we're capped it's not

032like we can say a hundred dollars a day because i think that was taxable so it was 66 let me just do a quick the other option is receipts well we would have to do receipts no matter what your auditing so is this not a per diem i'm sorry this 50 wouldn't be a per diem well for our what we would do is we would use a p card that we have a district p card um both kristen and i do so everything would go on that and then to process everything for the p card karen lazard would have to have every receipt that it would so we would just go we don't do a certain amount we don't have a cap you only have a federal cap on per diems so if this is

033going to be an actual expense the meal comes to 300 dollars it is what it is um yeah 66. so there's no there's no cap i was looking at the federal just to get a guideline you know we are a government institution so i figured that would be a good safe way to go feed yourselves and we'll reimburse you yeah yeah yeah i mean yeah whatever we'll feel like [Laughter] i'm very excited about meeting the secretary of education yeah that's the guideline for maryland for the federal rate yeah i mean this 3200 numbers it's not going to be that anyways because right we got or is that 188 with the taxes and fees or is that plus questions yeah so i mean this is going to be it'll be four yeah yeah it's an s

034yeah it's just a i mean this is an estimate yeah that i would say just if we're going to have receipts just use your discretion yeah have a reasonable meal get the steak do you get your flag at this we have the floor we have the flight we do we are working on ceremonies and it looks like there'll be one town wide ceremony and we're just finalizing plans with the town and with eastman and hopefully we'll have some information to go out about that soon and then we're going to have one kid ceremony so there'll be two different things going on and i think we're going to save the flags and the sign for the kids ceremony yeah yeah because then we can have everybody here yeah okay yeah it's very exciting so we do

035get the plaque at the ceremony okay the official plaque is this a hotel where all the recipients are staying oh that's so nice so you'll get to meet other school people i do find it amazing when you when you think of it big picture that we are one of only 352 schools in the entire country doing this for 2021 and of all years to win it it is pretty exciting to win this year yeah i did want to add one thing and i nearly forgot this um the new york times magazine sunday magazine it was earlier in september um had a feature issue on education and um and one article in particular was about it was through the eyes of a high school kid in a small town in the mississippi delta and it just

036made me realize how blessed we are in granville we have resources this was like reading about a third world country this kid would have to sit in the gym for class periods when they didn't have a teacher to teach that class um i mean the plumbing was breaking down i mean it just broke your heart and there were also um a series of vignettes from educators in different roles in different schools all around the country um just talking what it was about what it was like going through the pandemics for in in their role and i meant to bring the magazine in case anybody wanted to look at it but um it um those experiences that they documented were so much in line with what we experienced here and the big thing everybody talked about

037was the social emotional impact on the kids and the staff i can tell you we are seeing a lot of interesting things in kindergarten right now with kids who really didn't have early school experiences and community experiences really kindergarten and preschool i would say are where the mean parts of your day are spent i do spend some time down there yeah and yeah and and you and uh christina denise um you may not have heard it through our broken feed last month but that was one of the things that came from the progress monitoring committee was one of the paras who works with the preschoolers brought back the feedback that what they're seeing is a group of kids who have spent half their life in a pandemic and have not gone to a story time

038at a library how they've gone to a play group um don't know for the kids who didn't have a traditional daycare experience they don't know things like come over to the circle to read a story yeah they just sort of stand there they're not sure what to do in those situations so just thinking about what those impacts will be um for the kids coming in in the next couple of years and how that classroom structure and those sort of base level things that i think we used to have an assumption that kids came in having listened to a stranger read them a book before that that there's groups of kids that haven't yeah so yeah well just for my great nephew who's going on three is in speech therapy because he didn't have enough contact

039with other children and so he didn't have to try and make himself understood because mom and dad kind of knew what was good um so he said speech therapy yeah yep yep new challenges i think you'll get to talk to all these other school blue ruined schools about all of this yeah okay so um we do need a motion from the board to approve the um blue ribbon ceremony expenditures second i have a motion from denise in a second from christine as long as you get good meals as long as you need it we will approve it as long as you eat [Laughter] is sam has she said yes okay good good okay so next on our agenda is our facility director nomination we have the agreement in the board packet we also have the

040facility director here with us tonight if folks haven't had a chance to meet him i asked toby campo to come and meet you tonight um and we are extremely happy to have him uh i can let mrs reed tell you how happy she is to happen i'm so happy and that's gonna be part of my addition to my principles report she really misses checking the bathrooms and worrying about the snow coming and everything like that um no uh toby comes with to us with a lot of incredible experience and um it was clear through the interview process that he was just going to be a wonderful fit at gbs i asked him today if he's already feeling like gps is home and i hope that that's true and feel free to um toby if you

041want to just introduce yourself a little bit to the board yeah basically um i'm from hill right now i'm looking at different options there but uh yeah i mean this i worked at grafton county helped the new correctional facility i think that's 2011. uh they put in a new facility and i helped get that commission so i got a lot of experience with facilities here i had owned and operated my own business doing gas appliances and refrigeration for northern new hampshire did all home depot and lowe's work for the factories up there and i also was a facilities director over franklin school district for a few years so yes this is uh out of all the facilities i've dealt with that this is definitely a welcome treat but it's much saner [Laughter] face mask no

042this is great i couldn't talk yeah so right now just trying to get my feet under me and see what's going on but it looks like a great community and a great school so i'm excited we're glad to have you yes very good to have you welcome thank you so i'm very pleased to nominate toby campo as our new facilities director in the official capacity so we do now that we've said welcome we do need a motion to accept the nomination um for our facilities director don't move second all right so we have a motion from leslie in a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay well now you're officially welcoming all right thank you and you are welcome to stay just as we released the other

043place you're welcome to stay or if you need to to head out no problem yeah yeah all right so our um next agenda item is the capital improvement meeting with the select board so i'll turn this over to sydney so last year when we were going into our annual meeting season and we were talking about our grounds renovation and playground project and we were talking about a fire truck and miller pond road and all those other things going on um melissa white and i started talking about the fact that this coming year it would be great if um maybe sometime in november we could talk about more of a maybe not completely official capital improvement planning meeting but getting the board and the selector together to talk about what was coming up at both our

044annual meetings so i'm hoping that we can extend an invitation to the select board for a time in november which could be inviting them to our november meeting and talking about some any big ticket items that might be coming forward and also i think it's going to be important to start talking a little bit about the future in terms of growth um we definitely have experienced growth we went from 247 to 285 last year um obviously that rate isn't going to stay that rate of change but that was big growth and it's something that we need to keep an eye on in the future and we need to keep talking to the town about in terms of is there development coming you know what are what do they have their eyes onto any questions about

045that from the board would you prefer to do the november meeting or would you like to do a separate night in november i know it's long but i would prefer to maybe put it in the same night a little easier yes i think so if we can [Music] [Laughter] we got a couple of long weekends and a holiday in november it's gonna be good to do everything on one night if we can do it but if our agenda looks impossibly long then we might need to consider a second well we have our first budget presentation that night but it's all of the special education functions and those are usually pretty streamlined those usually go pretty smoothly so it would be a good night to add this left board in i think okay all right our

046next agenda item is negotiations so we need to set our uh folks from our representatives from the board who will be the negotiating team um heading into this year's um negotiations it feels like just yesterday we negotiated this through your contract but we're ready to go again wow um on top of the fact that we did the moa's last year it seems like we've done a lot of it yeah so thank you first of all thank you to denise and christine um and i know we've said it before but we appreciate you you um taking on not just the negotiations but also the moas and those things in in the interim um if we we would be happy to have both of you do this again but if you would like a reprieve from that

047work um that's totally acceptable as well so i'll just open it up and say is there anyone who is like excited willing any of those things uh to serve on for the negotiations this year we'll start there before i have to start convincing people well i would like to say that i would be happy to be a support person if someone cannot make the meeting but i feel like my family situation is not going to allow me to be a regular negotiator in this bargaining session perfect thank you um i'm not remembering the timeline exactly but my term um on the board is up um as of the end of february so um i think the negotiations might go beyond that so we would have to have a warrant article on by february so all

048the negotiations would have to be finished by independently and depending on when the election is we may get to keep you from march too oh all right because if the if if our board meeting falls mark if our march board meeting is before the election then you are so you are at the march forward meeting there you will be all right okay yeah thank you christina thank you thank you very much yeah but definitely somebody else because then um because somebody else needs to i know i'm happy to do it awesome thank you oh great excellent thank you and christine i'm not going to read any into anything that you just said that makes it sound like you're not going to run for school board again so i'm just going to pretend i didn't hear

049any of those little like subtle things that you said too much for a thing we're gonna yep so but thank you christine and ed appreciate you guys doing that i think that'll be great to have someone say this yes and denise will be our i'm sure perfect i really appreciate you all doing that very much okay so our next agenda item is the new hampshire school board association resolutions so this is in the board packet um we pushed this from last month so um the first thing that we should talk about is if we would like to have someone attend the meeting and if someone would like to attend the meeting we don't need to look at the resolutions or any of that stuff if we are not having someone attend so last year we

050did not attend it uh i have attended it a couple times before that it is not a mandatory thing not all school boards send a representative but if we would like to have a voice in the um in the process of setting the um resolutions for the school board association especially pertaining to the ones that they that districts have put forward this year then we should have someone there so i don't know if any folks have any um thoughts or questions about having someone if you one if you feel strongly about us having someone attend or to if you yourself would like to attend brittany this is a question but that's usually in january isn't it so they moved it up to uh it's october 16th oh oh yes sorry i should have said that

051it's october 16th from 11 to 1 in conquer so i'm not even in town okay yes no um are we allowed to submit any support of these proposals only you that's only if you're only in-person voting because the one the one i think we probably would want to support is the um diversity yeah divisive concepts so i i'm open and and am willing and interested in going i don't want to be i didn't i don't want to always be the person go like i find it really fascinating so i'm happy to to go but if somebody else really wanted you can only have you can send more than one delegate you can only have one voting delegate yeah um so i'm happy to go if folks are i appreciate you guys yeah yeah you're really

052great in the process and yeah and i feel the same way about a couple of the resolutions on here i would like to voice support for those and also it's i think it also gives us a good sense of where other districts are the conversation that happens around some of these can be really fascinating so yeah okay then so i will plan to go and i i'll sign myself up for that and it's a much shorter day than it usually is usually it's like five hours long it's only two this year so um okay so in looking at the resolutions what we want to do is as a board decide what our position on these resolutions is so um we can either say that we are in favor of the resolution as presented by the

053board we can say that we are supportive of the position of the the nhsba board of directors which may or may not agree with the board's position or we can take no position on the resolution and all of those are totally fine so if we have no position on it then i won't i wouldn't vote during that one which i've done before we've had ones that we've taken no position on um and it depends a little bit on how the final vote is called um sometimes they call the vote for the resolution as it's submitted by the the district on some of them they sort of wind up moving in the way of being worded to support the board of directors recommendation so like for example if we look at the first one which is

054the one submitted by mascoma valley school board about the scholarship fund the board of directors recommendation was not supportive of it because this is outside of the realm of looking at the their legislative advocacy but the board of directors would look at this as something that they might like to pursue so we would decide as a board do we want do we support the mascoma valley resolution do we support the board of directors recommendation or do we have no position on this any thoughts on that i'm generally supportive of it i think the board of directors recommendation puts it well meaning yeah the request from a number of districts it seems like a nice supportive gesture i don't have anything against it um so yeah i feel like the board of directors recommendation makes a

055lot of sense to me okay yeah i was reading this i didn't get the sense that if they don't support it they're going to do anything but maybe i'm misreading this if the delegates vote in support of this proposal the new hampshire school board associate the association will establish this continuing scholarship without the proposal being official resolution but if they don't i don't see anything in there saying that if if we don't support it yeah brady's just looking for us to say whether we want her to vote in favor of the board of directors or whether we don't take the position right yeah but if i'm reading this correctly if if it fails it doesn't seem like they're going to do anything that's correct if the if the delegates don't vote in support of it

056nothing will happen i think we should certainly support them yeah we should okay all right the next one is the wilton lindenborough cooperative school board i confirmed that all saus are paying and segregating dues payments to the nhsba in accordance with rsa 15 5 that this isn't a resolution this is something that they would like to explain let us explain it's the law i don't yeah i don't think you need a result so it sounds like we're not in support of their resolution right right okay and did we land on not support we are supporting conservative directors supporting the the mass coma the mountain or supporting the the mascot what they proposed so the resolution the resolution yes yep because of that last part about if the delegates vote in support then they will establish

057the scholarship program okay yep that's a tricky one that was a like double negative yeah okay so um 10 is the cemented by the keen school board supports diversity equity and inclusion and all aspects of our schools is committed to the concept that free and open dialogue around such concepts as racism and sexism is a vital component to education and opposes any actions which limit this free exchange of ideas the board of directors recommendation is to support yes support and just um number 12 also yeah to do that why don't they just make one resolution or one well the other children the the number 12 the the here let's do 11 and then we'll jump down to okay yep because they are a little bit different yeah yeah okay so 11 is merrimack valley school

058board the new hampshire school board association calls upon the new hampshire legislature to fund a post-graduation transition program for each school district to provide a continuum of guidance for graduate transition from high school to vocation college and career and the nhsba recommendation is not support um because it is um falls outside of the purview of the k through 12 setting yeah i agree with that also the community colleges are very good at this so yeah but i think just to clarify the point of this is that there is a period of time if you don't have a good post graduation transition program there are a lot of there are a number of students who don't know that community colleges do a good job at it like they just fall through the cracks that's sort of

059the intention here i'm not saying we should support i agree with that i'm just clarifying i think that's the intention is there are students falling through the tracks who don't even know what their options are yeah but it just seems to be before they graduate from high school they should be having contact with guidance to figure out yeah like you're going to fall outside of k-12 but yeah so i'm hearing not support the resolution right right all right okay and then 12 um similar to 10 so hanover and dresden school boards the resolution supporting equity and inclusion there so the recommendation from the board of directors is not support because they believe that this resolution is too narrowly focused on the bill that's in question rather than a broad-based policy statement um so having gone

060to this before i know that when there's resolutions that are focused too narrowly it ties the school board association's hands to be able to apply that resolution more broadly in their legislative work um if it's if they're not direct if it's too narrowly focused then they can't advocate for things that might do similar approaches but don't address it head on so i think that's where they're um but the the final the final statement says oppose legislation such as but not limited to names hb you know containing language that promotes restriction on free speech it seems to me that is yeah but i i would say the keen one is broader and if we're going to support that i'm not sure why we need to support something that may be a little more narrowly focused and

061we can support them both i mean we can support this one as well um the the big because the keen one does mention free yeah the big piece with i know i know having um i know having sat through particularly a few years ago um there was a very very difficult conversation at the meeting about some of the bills regarding like control of firearms and weapons on campus on school grounds and some of the language that they were talking about the the school board association hadn't been able to take a position on those bills because of the way that things were worded it too narrowly focused their um the what they were being asked to to do and so i think that's where they're they're not supporting this one is coming from well would they

062be happy with it if they struck out the references to the particular bills although the other resolution does mention free speech yeah so in some ways 12 is redundant yeah i think the keen one is more open-ended which is probably the better course of action here and a lot of what happens during the meeting too is that they take sort of like this the the folks who do the legislative advocacy work are there at the meeting and so they take the like the spirit of the discussion and use that when they do their their advocacy work so they like there's a lot of conversation that happens around each of these resolutions and so they don't take just the exact like language of the resolution itself they also take into account like they'll say things like

063at our annual delegate assembly this matter had 15 minutes of discussion and the body moved in a way to support xyz yeah so they'll they um can take sort of like the spirit of the conversation at the time of the assembly as part of their work but if it's limited by specific that they can only do that specifically related to certain bills then they're not able to do that more broadly i'm not going to die on the hill but i i support both because i do feel like the language and this the hannover dresden one i actually would kind of play devil's advocate like all you all know where i stand politically and i so i'm very much behind number 10. but i also appreciate that this specifically really does clearly talk about unconstitutional restriction

064on free speech and on like the devil's advocate side of the opposite side of my politics like i think it to me it's more clearly inclusive of like our all of our free speech rights whereas the other the other resolution which i support wholeheartedly is more a little more specifically about dee and i know there's language at the end about that here but that's my read on on the book so what i'm clarifying is that the other one reads to me as um more specific i mean they're both about the divisive concepts work that's happening in the bill that's happening but this one i appreciate that it's i appreciate the unconstitutional restriction on free speech that includes all of us i tend to agree as well and we can support both of them and yes

065it's not that neither or so yeah but it's good to have that to be able to i suspect similar things to the come out the discussion at the meeting yes well this is the conversation that'll happen yeah and for boards that have had this conversation they're able to like i'll be able to chime in and say our board discussed this this was sort of the nature of our conversation yeah yep so are folks in favor of supporting this one with the understanding that we like the sort of direct language here don't like the sort of anything that would focus the narrow the focus of the um group too much okay yeah i do i agree like if you strike the hb 544 that makes it feel a little more political if that was not part

066of that resolution i think it's probably a little more powerful and a lot of the resolutions don't have bills specifically attached to them it's just sort of like the spirit of like that this group in reference to will advocate for you know fair funding for right yeah okay okay i think that's the last one that's actually not very many according to what they usually yeah good night all right perfect okay so our next agenda item is the um substitute rate of pay and so we have a memo from sydney in our board packet yeah uh it's not it's about as high as we can though if we go any higher than a hundred dollars then we're starting to go over what our you know some of our pairs are making but every little bit will

067help so i'm requesting that for the remainder of this year we increase our daily sub rate of pay we need to do absolutely everything that we can to continue getting subs into the building mrs reed every morning is still doing a massive puzzle of trying to make sure that we have enough staffing in the places where we need it it's not getting any easier in fact um it's probably a lot more difficult even than it was last year and i noticed you're still advertising for someone for the after-school program we are just we've just hired one more person we're leaving the ad out there in case we uh um there's there's one tentative right now yeah but right now we're good we brought in um all students from the initial waiting list we've sort of

068gone to a second wave of a waiting list of people who came in after but we are at 50 i believe you're 51. [Music] yeah so um it's really our daily subs that are the biggest concern and i don't know if you want to add anything about what your morning is like but every morning um kristen sends out an email of what we need and where and duty coverage and people have been incredible about helping but it really is not a situation that's um that's getting any lighter or any easier and at some point it's just going to continue to wear on people so i don't know if that triple digit of 100 or continual advertising might draw more people in but it's the most that we can do right now where does this put

069us against other schools it's a little bit higher than other schools i'm surprised that that's not the goal rate but every day now um i think every day is the school year maybe except for one there have been some positions that we just haven't been able to find subs for right and so then generally those would be para positions because we have to fill the teacher positions but then those are duties that aren't being covered um and thankfully our staff is so flexible and i put a like hey who wants to do and somebody always reaches out and does it or the office staff will cover a duty but it is a problem that we're just we just don't have enough people to cover i've started dreaming about it but it's the first thing i

070do when i wake up in the morning as i look and see you know who's not coming in so i think i'm anticipating that and then there was september 13th yes we had we had one day that we had no absences wow wow that's it but ed what what um what the issue is in terms of other schools is they're always going to run into what we're running into is that you you don't want to have a sub rate of pay that's going to be higher than what you're paying your repair educators and our para educators are paid pretty competitively yeah right so you know because the easiest thing to think of would be well throw a lot of s or money at this problem but then you're you're really kind of getting you're getting

071yourself into a binding yeah and there also wanting a lot of people who really want to sign up to substitute right now yeah still but i guess are you getting into self trouble because it sounds like you're to me you're comparing apples and oranges i mean the pear is a full-time salary position substitute is there's work one day there's work not one day yeah and that does get benefits i'm not sure sort of comparing the two wages i'm not sure i would make that conclusion yeah at least initially just my initial thoughts on it just seems yeah um you know one's more of a temporary position one is something just thinking from my personal experience i pay temporary people significantly more than i pay my you know full-time staff just because of the nature of

072the work um but i'm 500 yeah i did i did sort of run through that in my head i think it would and it would be the benefits that you know would be the the kicker but yeah i do think that there would be issues and i can always just reach out to the paris and ask them you know how they would feel about it but i think that in my opinion there would be some concern of saying we're bringing in people and we're paying them more than we pay you on a on a daily basis and i think it's just some i'm not sure what you would think of the reaction of that i would think that would be a hard sell and i think so if the parents are picking up some of

073the extra duties and whatever they might be happy to help have another person there so that there's less burden on that and some of it i think comes back to you too that like one of our pipelines prepares us through being a sub like we have several pairs who they're starting they started with us as pretty regular subs and now they've moved to the para position and so i think i i mean i think there there's always a risk there that if for like if there's somebody who doesn't need benefits and they may go back to they may leave their para position because they know i'm gonna always be able to get a sub job like i mean we may have some folks who who know like they know that every day there's a need

074for subs and so they could leave their full-time they could leave their parent position take a sub-job every day and make potentially make more money than they're making as a para yeah and that i'm not sure i'm perfectly fine 100 a day i'm just not sure i would completely close the door and say we're done even if it works great if it doesn't work look at it people need to revisit it yeah we also don't know if we raised it to two hundred dollars a day if we'd get more out of that yeah well and as you've said to me it's the the we can get as many applicants as we want it's the people who actually accept the subjects that we need we need folks that are taking the question because last year we

075had 20 people sign up as subs and only three accepted jobs yeah um kristen how many do you have the equivalent of meeting one person a day or do you often need two people a day keep going lately um i could go back and look but probably six or seven wow that you could keep like full time i mean how often do i guess what i'm thinking is exactly um how some schools have a permanent cell and that person is always there to schedule um is one person adequate enough to fill the needs one person would fill one position you know what i mean it's i feel like because i've had that thought too it would be one person to fill one opening but then my next thought would be what if we had two

076and what because we have a lot more than one one opening every day did we over did we we advertised for a permanent sub last year didn't we we did yeah and actually i heard two we did we did hire two last year who were long-term from one subs is that worth putting out again well i feel like we have people who are kind of permanent sons they're coming in regularly every day okay yeah religiously and we did toy around with the idea of hiring somebody just for that heavy duty period of lunch and recess in the middle of the day but then there's always something else that comes up you know so we've been playing around with a lot of different options and it's really just again getting more people to apply and then

077getting them to accept the positions and there's no staffing type agency that specializes in no and i think when we look around at you know all the businesses around in all the openings i know we had one sub that was coming in not regularly but fairly often and she was she had this was her third part-time job and her two other part-time jobs were trying to fight her to come full-time because everyone needs help it's just we're up against a lot of openings [Music] for what it's worth because when we first moved up here i did something at the middle school in high school and after [Music] i had been in those schools for a while i just subbed when i had advanced notice because it's really hard to deal with the phone call at

0786 30 in the morning um and so i i had enough days by just being booked ahead of time in our um we use frontline so as soon as the person puts in the absence it calls out to all the subs so it's usually pretty far in advance and then on sunday nights i send an email out to our sub saying hey these jobs aren't filled yet um and hope to get a couple more yeah so we do try to do that advanced yeah i mean there are always some that on average how many calls are you getting the morning of or you know middle of the night um like a last minute absence yeah those are actually more rare right now anyway so one of the things we took the opportunity to really look

079at why are there people absent um and they're all big life things or colbit related where um somebody in their household has kovit or you know like a child that they have to stay home and take care of or um some kind of contact or um cold like symptoms and then so maybe maybe water in terms of the covert system is it one syndrome in their home or they could be a closed contact yeah it has it's a one symptom for the staff member but lots of staff members have children so if their child has one symptom and has to stay home they have to stay home and take care of their child oh yeah absolutely yeah yeah come on vaccine and then discussing staffing with other superintendents and districts in the area the response

080that i get from a lot of them is we're lucky to be staffed yeah yeah um and yeah i mean just like our biggest story is substitutes we're lucky to have staff a lot of schools are running just not even with a full staff it's just a really tough situation right now yeah it's something i mean ball parker will be around 12.50 an hour based day [Music] just given what other retailer maybe what retailers are paying now 17 18 hours a day or an hour i don't see this problem going away anytime soon supply demand and sentence let's try 100 and see yeah see if it helps okay yeah absolutely try okay so we need a uh um motion to let's see approve the increase in the sub rate of pay second all right so

081we have a motion from leslie in a second from ed all those in favor please say aye aye aye and those opposed say may okay all right on to our big list of policies we are back into policies and there were a lot of laws passed last year and so we're going to be playing catch up for a little bit um i was telling brittany that there's really we have been culling policies and really streamlining and i think we're going to be creating a lot of new policies unfortunately because of all these new laws that are coming in and there are a lot of school board memos coming out that these are new and required by law so if they're telling us they're required by law we have to have them okay so let's look

082first at our one for second reading and adoption which is um we looked at this previously this is for the this is b-e-d-h so public participation um at board meetings so it's b-e-d-h and b-e-d-h-r and so we're looking at a second reading and adoption for this any comments or questions on that one okay so we need a motion for second reading and adoption of b e d h and all right so i have a motion from ed in a second from leslie all those in favor please say i i any opposed say all right so let's look at um can we just go back to the last of this question yeah yep on the b-e-d-h-r um there's a sentence saying all comments submitted remotely will be read aloud for the public record but as we

083saw in a couple of board meetings do we need to say all appropriate comments we have to read all comments that come in with a name and address i mean if there's anything vulgar or defamatory or anything like that we wouldn't read it because we wouldn't let somebody say that in person okay thank you that was only yeah it'll be comments that are um within those guidelines so have a name and address attached to them and don't respect them and don't you know address an individual by name those things yeah thank you thank you funny questions i'm trying to remember where do you are these in the handbook these policies so they're just hosted on our website yes there's a is the index of policies in the handbook it's so we have an index for

084each um letter each section and we're cleaning the index for each section as we go through it but that's not in the a b c and d should be clean and ready we're in the middle of the e yeah they're not in the handbook though they're just on the website yeah i'm just i was just asking and there's references in the handbook too policies yeah perfect thank you for that yeah at the very end of the family handbook there's a list of the ones that are particularly pertinent to families yeah i remember that i think that's why i was asking the question where do i see all of these and then just when we went through last year i think for the first time we tried to link whenever there was reference we tried to

085link it to the website so hopefully those are there awesome thank you okay so let's do we'll start with jic so this is the the first day i see that you come across in your board packet is being replaced by a jic that's later a couple pages down um and so the one that we'll be looking at is the jic student conduct and it starts with the statement of purpose the grantham school board is committed to promoting a safe healthy orderly um give you a quick summary of the purpose of jic jicd and jicdr which is that there have been some laws and policies in place for um discipline and specifically suspension and expulsion for special education students and if you remember the omnibus bill that got passed through last year those disciplinary practices moved

086over into application for regular education students so these new policies represent those practices for basically all students at this point there are still a few exceptions for special education students you know such as a manifestation hearing or um there are some 45-day protocols those kind of things but it's making it um putting the onus on the school to use positive behavioral planning and communication and a lot more before the student loses any right to an education through suspension or expulsion any question pretty much sums up these 10 pages yeah and i have to tell you that we are required to have this policy and this may come into play if we get involved where we're working in concert with lebanon but in terms of gvs we really don't suspend our expel students we occasionally suspend

087but it's rare any questions for jic okay so we need a motion um to accept the um revision and this is a first reading of jic all right so we have a motion from leslie and a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say may okay so jicd under that same 10 pages any questions on that one um i did have a couple comments um so at the bottom of the page first page under item one removal from the classroom i think after um the second paragraph is say removal is not appealable rather than detention second paragraph under removal it should say removal is not appealable because that's what it's about removal no that's the best okay [Music] okay but isn't jicd aren't you replacing it with gicd-r no

088it's that's not different yeah that's its own ours are perceived it's its own animal yeah thank you and on the second page okay under or temporary reassignment it didn't say anything about whether or not that's appealable and all the other ones did so i don't know if that's pertinent or not okay we'll check on that to see what the specific law says and on the third page under 6 a short term suspension item i uh it's in the second line um personnel including but not limited to [Music] i think it's supposed to be m active theft not and and on the next page it's at the top long term suspension may be imposed for and um item three is possession of firearm bb gun or paintball gun should we say other weapon or dangerous materials

089that's what i had a question about too because i was thinking what if a child had a knife so this is specific to the law so there are other places where we can do that for for suspension and expulsion but when they're referring to this part of the long-term suspension this is specific to oh maybe okay yep oh and then skipping a page going over these aren't numbered but under modification or reinstatement after suspension or expulsion i had a question about the date there um submitted and writing to superintendent no later than august 15th why was i questioning that um okay i must have misread that and thought it said september but well the school year's already started okay sorry about that anything else for jicd okay so we'll need a motion to approve the

090first reading of jicd second are we saying as amended yes for jicd as amendment a motion from leslie in a second from denise all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay j-i-c-d-r is our mou with the grantham police as updated to a line and the chief parsons has given his knot of approval to this and he's good with it as is any questions there okay so we'll need a motion to um approve the revision of j-i-c-d-r i have a motion from leslie in a second from ed and so all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay so ebb is uh required by law school safety any questions on this one okay so we need a motion for um first reading of ebb so the motion

091from christine and the second from leslie all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay all right so ebca is another new required by law any questions there okay so we'll need a motion to approve the first reading of ebca i have a motion from leslie in a second from ed all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay ebcb at some point this is going to be a rock club in a punk club in new york um ebcb new um as required by law any questions about this one did these all align with our existing practices right now at gps they they do we will need to um mrs reed and i will need to update the safety plan not the emergency plan but the safety plan

092yeah and then we'll need to change in the handbook where it says student conduct we'll just need to change that to read code of conduct just so that that aligns but other than that we're in pretty good alignment because we already had positive behavior and we already followed these practices just for the record i will say that ebb ebc a ebcd are all policies i really don't think we need um but do we really have a file through fire drill every month yeah well it's technically your fire safety whatever hazard we do except you're allowed to not have them in winter months like if you stack them in other places so how many have we had so far so we've had three so far [Music] yep and we try to plan them when the weather's

093nice yeah yeah yeah do you get to count the the one that wasn't a drill we did end up counting that one yeah we were like more realistic conditions and we actually learned more from that one than we did from any of yeah and if you run summer school you're required to have a fire trail for summer school too yeah that's gonna make sense yeah okay practice the drills here that um where you select some students that you pull out of the student body and you don't tell who's missing well i did this i have that in my old school yep and they're assigned to a staff member whose job is to meet with them in a specific location and it's just your checks and balances if somebody's missing how do you find them and

094who are they and so that actually normally happens during a fire drill because kids go on services or whatever so we're constantly on the radios trying to do you have we're missing so and so do you have so-and-so so we are checking on that there was a time in my tenure here that the fire department would come over and stand in front of doors and block them so we had to come up with alternative ways and every once in a while they'd take a kid and we didn't know where they were but that hasn't happened in a long time good now i like it well denise and i probably remember getting under the desk from the atom bomb gary [Laughter] all right so we need a motion to prove the first reading of ebcd [Music]

095second i have a motion from leslie and a second from ed all those in favor please say aye i okay then we're gonna lump together e c a b e b b c dash r dash one and e b b c dash r dash two because those are all ones that we are rescinding because they have been covered by the ones that either we just did or other things good any questions about rescinding those policies okay so we need a motion to rescind policies e c a b e b b c dash r-1 and e-bbc-r-2 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 alrighty so j f a b d um we're looking at a revision

096of this and the changes are marked on the policy any question about this one or information you can give us i have to add one thing to jfabb that miss woodman and i needed to clarify so if you look at the second page under number seven is uh awaiting foster care placement i need to add in their awaiting foster care placement and meets at least one other criteria under this homeless list and the reason for that is because they have this whole new policy for foster care so right now if a student is awaiting foster care placement that's not significant enough under the homeless policy they have to meet another homeless criteria or they have to meet something under the foster care policy so awaiting placement is not i mean that child has to be

097living somewhere right but they're not just because they were awaiting a foster care plan oh okay it doesn't necessarily mean they're homeless right a camera right okay any other questions about that one i think i did have something yesterday it's a lot of pages yeah um the page that's with dispute resolution at the top yep just in the second paragraph under dispute resolution um third line from the bottom of that paragraph i think it should be the parent or unaccompanied youth because that's what it says everywhere else [Music] and then on the next page i didn't at the very top i didn't get why we needed that a second appeal and quotation marks because it says dispute resolution appeal on the previous page at the bottom is that saying that it would be referred to

098as appeal that's what i think it's saying no okay instead of resolution oh okay that both of those things will just be referred to as okay appeal okay and then under item c second line date and time uh strike the word of date and time the appeal was filed yes got it thank you didn't you have a question about this policy sure and it might have been answered in here so let's say that a student and family are homeless and are residing at the hixson shelter and is it i can't remember so how does that impact you know what district is that child uh where are they being schooled and how were the transportation costs how did they determine so if the students were at gds and the best thing for them is school stability

099so if they're at the haven then the best thing for them is to stay at gbs so um with their teachers with all their services you know anything else that they would have so if the parent can transport them that's the best situation and then we would reimburse the trans the parent for mileage and share that cost with the other district with the hartford district and then if um the parent can't transport then we would have to find busing you know some kind of busing or hire a bonded service a bonded car service to do it which is the craziest of situations um but we are responsible and and districts are excellent about sharing those costs where the where the child should stay and then where they're residing at the moment but um the most

100important thing is that they can stay stable right okay and then at some point um when they do find a stable place to be they will always be able to finish the year wherever they were and then even if they do find a stable place they could for example finish the year at gps and then move to their new district over the summer that's good at least we have that okay so we need a um motion to accept the first reading and revision as amended of policy j-f-a-b-d second promotion from leslie and a second from ed all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay all right j f a b e j fave is that the most letters these can have yeah i like it when they spell something so i

101can say things like jp and this is a new required by law any questions about this one um on the second page under best interest in marriage determination dispute yadda yadda um second paragraph and the second line says place within a new school within this district should also say another district i think they're just saying if it is within the district you're not going to worry about records okay oh okay it's just okay because it's within it's within the same okay so we'll need a motion to accept the first reading of policy j f a b e i had a motion from leslie in a second from ed all those in favor please say aye any opposed say nay all right good job that was a lot of policies all right so our next agenda

102item is the principal's report so um i loved having the chance to see the letter from secretary cardona that was very cool um anything else that you would like to add or highlight from your report um first of all just randy and i had a really fun time making new letterhead yeah it's not perfect but we had to work with what we have i like on the top i always put card enrollment and since i wrote this we have one more student okay so we're up to 277 um and then i just want to reiterate that i'm very thankful for toby and who's coming to [Music] and we had previously sent out letters to the community to get other people involved i had i didn't go out anywhere because i didn't want to be seen

103in what i was wearing so i don't know if anyone took part in it [Laughter] i've seen your um your we support our blue ribbon school sign in places in town and i have more to give out we just i love that it's hard to get out of the building to go bring them places especially when you're dressed like rainbow brite yeah hey what is this little ball those are so cool so i think that they used hula hoops oh and made them all stay together so they could be inside of them in p.e yeah yeah i heard i heard about this at home that they were they've been really constructed building these little yeah they are building them out of hula hoops and pe these little con these little vendors they roll around in

104them no they just they just feel fuzzy it's like a little a little force in fact i don't think they can even touch it or it's gonna fall over right yeah i love the pictures yeah yeah the pictures are great yeah it's all about the kids thank you you're welcome all right next up superintendent's report anything that you would like to add or draw our attention to i do just want to draw your attention to two quick things in my report one is just to keep your eye on the state board vote coming up about the ability to move to remote or just as distant instruction um right now it's going to the state board at their november 10th meeting and the commissioner is proposing that there is absolutely zero ability for schools to remove

105to remote under any circumstances so under any circumstances yes and didn't he make a statement that we should already be functioning as if this is as if it is law already yeah yeah so when manchester moved some of their elementary schools to remote because they had some cases really rapidly rising he made a call to the manchester superintendent to ask him not to do that um but i'm just curious did they did they follow his request no no they went remote until they felt it was safe to bring everybody good so doesn't this step on local control good question and public health practice yeah yeah and what's happening on the 10th is that a public event that's the state board where they will hear his request and see if they will um yes agree with

106that and they are public yeah and it is public and my guess is that they'll they will do that they'll agree do they just not count that as a school day right so so basically if we kristen and i were walking down the road you know what if we really felt that we were putting people in danger and we decided to go to school or go remote even for a few days just to get on top of people getting tested or something you know nothing even long term the looking down the road what would happen is we would technically lose those instructional hours we would take those off of our 945 hours requirement we would look at where we are at the end of the year yeah we would probably at the end of the

107year ask you to write a waiver if this goes through they would probably deny it and then we would have to see what would happen after that and if we're denied money or something like that some kind of funding so i don't really know where it's going to go but it is a concern at this point because we don't know where the winter is going to go with with coveted cases and and the bigger i mean it is a it is a problem but the bigger issue is that schools which are you know we just finished this discussion about staffing yeah he's saying that we can go ahead and provide remote instruction if a parent requests it when kids are home but you know i have a good friend who's a middle school principal who

108had three quarters of two of his grades who are home and there's no staff when they're still in person to be able to provide remote instruction so however you know it's the expect expectation that you're supposed to provide both environments simultaneously with the same staff is an impossible expectation which is i think vermont is similar to that if it's remote it doesn't count for their number of hours yeah so i'm not really sure it'd be different if if it was clear that this was getting behind us but it's not yeah and kids can't be vaccinated or if there was a demonstrated situation where schools were taking advantage of it and like right yeah i think all schools are trying their darndest to be in person yeah and if they're going remote it's out of significant

109need it's not just because they want to stay home for a day right or when the pandemic was raging they didn't want to give us guidelines but now when we're in this another limbo region they're going to lay it down yeah if we had any kind of data that schools were going remote just willy-nilly then maybe that would make sense if there was a problem to respond to yeah but it seems like this is a a solution in search of a problem problem that's exactly well it's just such a blanket policy that it doesn't take into consideration anything about the differences in the realities yeah yeah it's very irresponsible yeah so that one's one to keep our eyes on and then the other thing i wanted to keep uh have you all keep your eyes

110open for is that our fundraising campaigns are really going to be launching we have one um fundraising campaign site that's open we already have i think close to three thousand dollars that have been uh donated there we are launching our brick and great engraving project so our goal is going to be to sell 500 bricks and for those of you who know the song i will walk 500 miles so it'll be on 500 bricks i i heard from the proclaimers today that we can use their songs so it's really exciting yes oh my gosh that made my day do they want to come i i'm going to oh my god stop it we're [Laughter] [Applause] so i was thinking if everybody on the school board wants to get a brick anyway why don't we have

111school board books together oh that would be great that would be really nice yeah and maybe even see fast board members it might be interesting oh that's a great idea yeah yeah so we're setting that up and every brick is going to be 50 and you can have three lines of engraving of 15 characters each so that's going to be launching on october 15th and then the next thing will be a raffle for the 17 days that um kind of bookend thanksgiving and the holiday break so we're just finalizing that and that'll launch on november 1st so we're really moving pretty um in the school or it's it's going to be everywhere you know everywhere around the community so um it's it's the fundraising effort is really going well and and going strong right now

112so we're pretty excited about that so keep your eyes out for all of those things and everybody's going to be singing the proclaimer song and i did ask mr pollard to make his own birthday and maybe a little music video yes okay three quote situation not clear about the three quotes so we you have approved originally the rfp that went out where we only got one back and we decided to put it out again yeah within that rfp was a site survey where they basically just come out and do the whole lay of the land yeah um what i would like to do is just go ahead and do that now before the snow falls yeah and that's not going to be anywhere over ten thousand dollars in fact i don't think it'll be over

113five yeah so that would just apply in our policy to three quotes and i'd like to go ahead and move forward with that because that's just going to help our playground project move along so oh okay yeah so if you want to bring that to a vote for action tonight you can but since you already approved that in the rfp i was going to move forward with that yep okay yep good because it's harder to use those transoms once the snow is down there any questions for sydney all right thank you okay okay so our next um item on the agenda is the consent agenda any additions changes amendments to the consent agenda okay so we need a motion to approve the consent agenda so sorry second all right so i have a motion from

114leslie and a second from christine all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay and um we do have a non-public session tonight um we don't have any business following on our own public session so anyone who's still joining us thank you for sticking with us we help our owl our um oh no guy hot guy we hope hawkeye made this a a good experience um and we will come back into public session to officially adjourn the meeting after our non-public but there's no business that will be taking up no votes nothing like that um and just a reminder we have a budget forum yeah it i'm sorry we have a budget forum on this thursday from seven to eight on zoom the link for that is on the website um

115so that's our next thing is the budget forum um this week and then our next board meeting is november 2nd so just for folks that are joining us so we will come out of or we will go into a non-public session we'll come back out to adjourn um but we won't have any votes so we will not restart the zoom meeting so when this zoom meeting closes we'll just um be done with the remote access for tonight so thank you for joining us and for watching if folks are watching this um after so we do need a vote in the public session still to enter non-public and what is our um rsa for non-public we're going in under 91832c 91 a 3 2 c all right okay so we need a roll call to enter

116um we need a motion to enter a non-public session under rs891a32c so all right i have a motion from denise in a second from leslie so we need a roll call leslie bye denise hi christine i ed brittany i alright so we'll move into non-public which means we'll good night everybody turn that ultimate shut the door