001oh come on oh it started there you are have you ever seen those pictures of like a squirrel photobombing someone's family photo okay we are um just for anybody who is joining from home we're just setting up technology because this is our first more in-person and hybrid meeting where we're working out what's going to be best for everyone to hear us and see us if somebody who is at home would you mind typing in the chat if you can hear me all right okay great thank you carrie okay i think we're good to go okay we're gonna get started in just another minute here we're just figuring like sydney said we're just making sure we have our technology ready to go here i think we're ready okay all right so um the board already had
002was called to order before our non-public session which happened at six so we're just resuming the um public portion of the meeting uh we are going to go back and revisit our agenda we do have an agenda item to add and then we'll re-approve the agenda so we're actually going to add a new first agenda item so we're going to renumber we'll have a new number one to it'll be accepting a playground donation and any other changes to the agenda at this point okay so we need a motion to approve the agenda as amended so right and we need a second second all right and if you're in favor of approving the agenda please say i i and any opposed say nay okay so the agenda is approved so just really quickly before we jump
003into public participation for the meeting i just wanted to just briefly acknowledge that we are out of the executive order meeting regulations that we've been under for the last year and a half which means that uh the board is meeting in person obviously but we did still want to provide access through zoom and so we're not required to provide this access um but the board has decided that this is something that we'd like to continue since it's been working so well this year that means that um how the meeting runs is gonna sound and look a little bit different than what everyone's been used to this last year which means my brain is rewiring itself as we meet um so we are not we no longer need to roll call every one of our votes
004so you will hear the board taking more traditional calls for votes seconds and then a voice vote unless there is a matter that we need a roll call vote for so and in other terms i think that that's really the big change that folks might hear tonight so as we're sort of getting used to what it means to have the hybrid in-person and virtual board meetings we are working through some of those kinks still so we appreciate your patience as we work through those and the board in on in the agenda we'll be looking at future meeting procedures and how this is going to work for us so thanks everyone for your patience as we work some of this out and we really um appreciate everyone joining us in person um and virtually so as
005we figure out how to move forward with that so with all of that said our first agenda item as usual is our public participation so just a refresher on the guidelines for public participation if you would like to participate we ask that you do state your name and address before giving your participation that's for folks virtually and in person this is an opportunity for the board to listen to the community and to get um to hear from from you all that are joining us tonight so if you do raise questions the board may not answer the questions during the public participation but we do try hard to make note of those questions and make sure that they are addressed or they do come up later on in our agenda so if you are posing something
006to the board and the board thanks you for your participation but doesn't address it immediately please know that that's just the nature of the public participation part of the meeting please do direct your comments to the chair during this part of the meeting and depending on how many folks we have that would like to participate we may either have a time limit or a word count limit for those who are participating um after the public so this is this is a change for tonight's meeting um so that we are able to provide equity in terms of the folks who are here in the room as well as virtually after the public participation part of this meeting the q a and the chat in the virtual session will be turned off so that we're equitable in
007terms of providing access to the meeting um essentially the q a and the chat during the the board's deliberation part of the meeting would be the equivalent of someone um you know standing and interrupting and speaking from the room and since we don't do that here in person we're going to ask that that not happen um in the virtual format either and i do just have to say we're getting a message that the view that we see is not the view that everybody at home is seeing okay only seeing mine up there oh okay i'm wondering how kristen i don't know if you need to adjust something on the ipad if they want to see that yes they can click i think it's at the top right hand corner of that box um okay so
008if you're on zoom if you go up to view you need to do gallery and then you can do gallery view hopefully that will help okay somebody said we're now seeing everyone okay great thank you all right and um and so we will open uh the floor for public participation at the end uh for folks that are virtual please feel free to type into the q a or the chat at this time and um and then we do have some folks here in the room with us as well if you folks would like to participate um and we will begin so i do have one that's come in here and so i'll read this from the q a and then we'll hear from folks if there are folks in the room that would like to
009speak as well so from megan alexander 98 smith hastings road when i look at the cdc page for covet guidance for k-12 their recommendation differs from what the grantham srs has recommended pertaining to indoor masking for the upcoming school year the cdc site specific specifies from an update on july 9th cdc recommends schools maintain at least three feet of physical distance between students within classrooms combined with indoor mask wearing by people who are not fully vaccinated to reduce transmission risk the recommendation for indoor masking is further stressed in a recent update cdc recommends universal indoor masking for all teachers staff students and visitors to k-12 schools regardless of action vaccination status i'm wondering what research or science is behind the decision of srs committee to dismiss the recommendation by the cdc or is it more
010a gut feeling i'd personally like to reduce transmission amongst my children and their peers indoor masking seems like i don't know if there's additional um seems like a simple solution until they are eligible for the vaccine okay thank you yeah go for it i think you may need to flip it on i think both of us just really want to understand a little bit more about the capacity and limits for after school program and figuring out you know what's the process forward so if we can't hit september 1 full capacity we'll work towards october one we work towards november what resources do you need what help can we offer thank you [Music] hey okay we'll see if there's any other great just going to give it a minute or so here since i know sometimes
011for folks that are joining us virtually it can be tricky to type in everything that you're wanting to type while we're waiting and if there's anyone else in person that would like to speak feel free i think the shiny floor is extra loud when we like drop things on it and bump things on it i think it's okay i'm just gonna give it one more minute to see if anything else comes in virtually okay all right so we will close public participation at this time and so just a reminder that means we will be closing the chat and q a features um for our virtual participants um just so that we're equitable in terms of how we handle in the those types of comments in person as well and we're going to go to our
012first discussion and action item for the board so the first item is to accept a an anonymous playground of donation to the playground font i'm going to accept the donation um i'm just going to explain a little bit of the numbers um we have some incredibly generous um residents of grantham who have been paying attention to our playground project and they are making a donation of match a two to one match so um up to fourteen thousand dollars so if our playground committee raises seven thousand dollars this um amazing family will donate 14 and if all of that takes place we should have very quickly reached our goal of matching the fifty thousand dollars that the town um gave us as kind of seed money to start thinking about this project so we are incredible
013incredibly grateful it's just very kind and generous and uh we already have two thousand nine hundred dollars out of that 7 000 from just the dunk tank alone thank you for all of you who i'm looking at who were dunked that day in the fire pond water um but yeah we're really excited about this and i think it's going to really help our playground project move forward okay so we need uh and thank you and we need a motion to accept the anonymous donation to the playground fund okay and we need a second all right um all those in favor of accepting the donation please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay all right and our uh next agenda item is the review of future meeting procedures so a discussion and action on this
014so for the board thinking about this hybrid model is this something that we would like to move forward with making a decision about that and then also the logistics of what does it look like to have um you know equitable public participation um just for the information for the board uh this is something that many districts are moving forward with right now is continuing these hybrid meetings um some of the recommendations that we've gotten from the school board association one of the recommendations pertains to something that we did earlier which was to disable any chat functionality for your virtual participants uh just because that's in keeping with how you have your business meeting in person and then the other recommendation is to use either the q a or the chat feature um not have both
015of those active particularly if your board uses your public participation as more of a listening session the q a sort of implies that if questions are asked answers will be given um and but we need to discuss are is the chat available to everyone on all platforms you know is that still a viable option for people to be able to participate um and then also and i apologize i meant to do this earlier uh reiterating during those meetings that the board can always be reached outside of the meetings through board email addresses which are published on the gvs website or through the sau office and so what those other channels of communication are so just opening up that discussion for the board for what we want our meetings to look like moving forward um i
016just have a quick screen that i can share and so that we can see it up here on this screen oh do we need to turn the projector off again so um i'm just going to share quickly some of the things i reached out to the school board association about looking at this and here are some of their recommendations just to give you a guideline so in terms of public participation um we would be really looking if this is the direction that the board wants to go in long term in some kind of a hybrid format which i i think is what i'm hearing because we have so much more participation at home um from families especially because they don't have to find childcare to get here so um some things that we would be
017looking at in a policy change in the future so the name and address must be given in person or through technology all final decisions on the public input are the responsibility of the chair hybrid access is excellent and helps my families to participate and stay informed however remote access is an additional benefit so here would be one change which is therefore unlike the emergency orders if there are technology access issues the in-person meeting would continue you know so that we would keep going even if somebody's saying that they're having trouble with access all public input in person and remotely must be equal so the things that they asked you to consider are that if we have a time limit in person we have a word limit in chat so that those are equal they recommend
018taking away the q a because q a implies that it's a dialogue and so it would really just be chat or we can actually have somebody speak like we've done before so leaving it to those things and then chat would be disabled once public input is over so like as brittany was saying earlier if we're not going to let people shout out from the audience we can't let people just type in and chat then you can put it back up okay did it disappear okay i will say in terms of future board meetings um randy is going to look into some technology for us to see if we can get something that does a better job capturing the video and audio for everybody okay we're up on the big screen here we go you have
019to have a quorum in person as always and if you have somebody participating remotely i think you still have to do the roll call votes i don't know if the remote person is allowed to vote okay even through roll call okay no i think um any remote participants uh of board members are observing they can and um at the chair's discretion they can participate in um discussion but not vote was the last that i had heard and that may be updated but looking ahead to wintertime i think it would we would go back to yeah i think the the procedure moving forward would be um board meetings like they used to be only now with more screens we would have virtual people yep but i do think we should make it as open as possible
020and if it's easier for parents to participate on soon okay how explicit do we need to be in terms of how we laid so you don't really need to do anything tonight because brittany can sort of guide us through this but um if you have anything that you want this will have to go into our policy for public participation so you would see a first reading in september so if there's anything outside of this that you want in that policy now would be the time to discuss it i assume that policy yes i just got a text message that anyone other than cindy and brady should probably speak as loudly as possible and i think it may be we can put a microphone down i think we're getting yeah i think sydney's our audio yeah
021so we set it there yep we have a second mic for you it seems very loud it is loud in here yes okay so it sounds like uh the board is in favor of adopting putting a policy in place for the for us to look out for the next meeting that adopts some of this language here okay yeah all right okay that's it all right so our next agenda item is taking action on some nominations and we have those in our board packet so for this board meeting the nominations that we're looking at are for brett matthews in the position of physical education and health teacher lisa fagan for elementary teacher assigned to grade two jake hansen for elementary teacher assigned to grade three and leanne roo 50 position at 50 social worker 50 after
022school program director yeah and i did have a couple of questions about that i wanted to let everybody know this is the 0.5 fte social worker that was proposed in the spring um the same person doing 0.5 fte is the after school program director because we are bringing back the we're proposing to bring back the after-school program and i wanted to let everybody know that all salary and associated benefits are covered through the after-school program account surplus and the sr3 grant so there are absolutely no funds from the grantham school district general budget and we talked about this being a one-year position and being grant funded so even though it's these two roles it still doesn't come out of our general ledger anywhere any questions about any of these nominations okay can we take them
023all in one fell swoop you can okay all right so we need a motion to accept all of the um nominations that were brought forward at the august third board meeting all right so we have um i'm gonna just i think it's hard to hear some people so just for our note is it the mic i'm taking two i'll just i'm just gonna say who's doing the first and seconds so uh we have a motion from denise and we need a second second all right so we have a second from leslie so if you're in favor please say i and if you're opposed say nay and all those in favor i and any opposed okay all right so our next agenda item are resignations which is hard to move from nominations to resignations it is
024um we do we did get a resignation recently i'm very sad to say that kim johnson in grade five has given me her resignation so she will be leaving gvs we are all extremely sad about that but again happy for kim moving on to the next things in her life um so we if you well if or i guess when you accept this resignation we will have an ad ready and we will be advertising for a grade five teacher um for the start of the school year so we need a motion to accept with uh gratitude and thanks and sadness for all of her her time and her work at gvs gratitude for everything she's done for our community uh the resignation of kim johnson so moved so i have a motion from leslie and
025a second from ed and i know it's hard to say you're in favor of this we'll recognize that one more time uh but it's all those in favor but like sydney said happy um for her to move on to to what speaks to her next please say aye aye and any opposed say nay okay and then i did um this isn't anything you need to take action on but i did want to let the board know that our middle school school board liaison mariana utel just has a lot on her plate right now she's an amazing young woman and is working on finding a little more balance so she's going to take a break from being our school board liaison for the middle school and i'm saying taking a break because i'm kind of hoping
026she'll come back at some point so we'll um see if we can find another representative from the middle school so the the board absolutely would like to express gratitude and have the minutes reflect our gratitude um to her for her time with us as a school board liaison in the very first round of school board liaisons we've had and during a very tricky and different sort of year we never even got to have her in person at a meeting and we really also want to just recognize that the uh her her courage to be able to understand herself and say to the board i need to step back from this right now so we appreciate her uh time with us and we look forward to seeing what she's gonna do next all right so our
027next agenda item is uh in the board packet and it's the lunch price increase we have action to take on that i also want to say there's a specific order to this because i know everybody's anxious to get to the family handbook stuff but these are things that the board has to vote on before we get to the handbook um so as you know each year we look at the price of lunch and each year i know that this is something that the board never likes to do however there's a paid lunch equity tool you know that is part of our food service program and part of our federal guidelines that is suggesting um that we charge three dollars and fifteen cents and we are at 290. um because we can never raise the price
028of lunch more than ten cents in any year my proposal is that this year we change our lunch price to three dollars and then the staff and guest cost will be three dollars and 25 cents and there was no increase last year there was no increase last year so this would be the first increase in two years questions or thoughts from the board on this we did have a tough you know the lunch service is supposed to pay for itself it's supposed to just be a wash and usually the board subsidizes about 23 to 24 000 last year just because of covid and families in need we the board will be getting at the next meeting a food services transfer of about 37 thousand just it was not a year where food service could even
029come close to breaking even so this is something that i would recommend and i know nobody enjoys raising the price of lunch at school but we're it also could put our program in jeopardy if we're too far off of what we're supposed to be charging this seems very reasonable okay so we'll need a motion to approve the um proposed lunch price increase of 10 cents so we have a motion from ed and we need a second second we have a second from christine and so if you're in favor please say i in any oppo or if you're if you're in favor please say i i and any opposed say nay okay all right um and i should have asked this when we were talking about it but this is just for lunch this doesn't impact
030the snack or breakfast or snack breakfast any of those this is only yeah the lunch at lunch okay all right our next agenda item is the 2021-22 family handbook and this is when we will be looking at the reviewing um a presentation from sydney on the work of the srs committee and for folks who weren't able to see it uh last week this was presented to parents um last week as well so we'll get we'll have sydney walk us through her presentation and then the board will ask questions and deliberate and take action on this so um i know that a lot of parents were able to attend last wednesday which was great and it allowed parents to send me some feedback so the presentation is not exactly what everybody saw so just for those
031of you who did see the presentation last week or who watched the video on our youtube channel anything that i changed from last week's presentation shows up in orange so the date is like an example so obviously change the date so anything that's new from last week will be in that orange color so last year we talked a lot about um srs planning which was our safe return to school we've decided that this is a different covered year even though we're still in covid so this is going to be our strategic recovery for school so that's our new srs acronym and i do want to say that never have we all at gvs felt that out there starts here that everything that we're doing really involves the community and is a microcosm of the community
032and reflects you know everything that's happening in grantham and new hampshire and the us right now so this is a whole new slide i wanted to go through this with the board because at the end of this you're going to need to vote on the family handbook as a whole so i wanted to have a pretty systematic way of discussing each of these things as we go through them so that we have all these conversations instead of just at the very end when you take a vote so what i'm i i know that i don't think the people on zoom have to see that but weak the screen you can see it yep okay got it thank you thanks so we're going to review each section i'm going to take ask you to have time
033to discuss and ask questions before we move on at the end i have a list ready of all the key issues that you might want to talk about before you do your vote and then we're going to do the final vote okay so just so we know that how we're going to go through this so our goals on the srs team was um obviously we want a really smooth transition into 2122. as last year we are have a goal of keeping school open consistently and safely and we want to provide the best education we can in the current and changing circumstances around us it's interesting because we all know that we're going into recovery planning but kovit's not over and we're still going into recovery while we're still entering a coveted year a different kind
034of coveteer but we're still we're still in those two worlds of um immediately addressing coveted concerns and recovering from last year at the same time overview of our srs planning process we have had meetings and information gathering from the parent and garden surveys that we did last year in the spring the staff surveys that we did last spring progress monitoring committee meeting that we have in july our strategic recovery for school team meetings we've had three of those meetings so far the cdc guidance which was updated july 9th and again just last tuesday that's why this is an orange with um the newly released unpublished report for universal masking based specifically on the delta variant so there's even since last wednesday's parent meeting there's a lot of information coming out about masking in schools in
035the fall so that is new the new hampshire dhhs update which was july 21st with dr chan and he said that they will be updating their school toolkit but they will not be putting out any new guidance this year the american academy of pediatrics report um we discussed that which is also looking at universal masking for anybody unvaccinated the updated information about delta variant and children and as i said new hampshire has stated they will not be issued issuing mandatory guidance they're having another meeting about all of that on august 11th but obviously that's pretty late for schools some schools are already starting to open their doors and faculty coming back by then and then there was a new report just this week that came out from the usdoe which was guidance in support of
036the aap and cdc for masking in schools so i'm sure all of you have been hearing everything for the last week that's coming out about schools and masking as we get as schools all over the nation get ready to open some of our big picture considerations is our population so gvs is now at a record 285 students as our population here is increasing all our operational design is increasingly more difficult with the bigger class sizes and two grade levels in particular are large we are welcoming 20 preschool students 43 incoming kindergarten students and 18 newly enrolled students in grades one through six this fall we are a popular place uh the operational information general our school operating hours will be 8 30 to 3 15. it's going to be five days a week following the
037approved calendar from the board during the 21-22 calendar year and all of the information is same about opening school in terms of the staff will come back on the august 27th the new staff on the 26th and students first day is september 1st one of the things that was a big part of our plan last year was that we offered the gvs academy for parents who were opting to stay part of gvs but to keep their children home we will not be recommending a gvs academy this year if parents want to keep their children home they need to be looking at remote options of vlax which students can do part or full time or homeschooling is always an option and the expectation from the state is that all students are are expected to return to
038school in person so there is no state guidance saying that we need to offer a remote program anymore do you want to stop there and see if you have any questions or want to ask anything about that do we address [Music] the operations we address drop-off times later on they are um they're in the handbook so basically what you're going to be looking at is students will be able to be dropped off and start coming into the building at 8 30 and then they can start being picked up at 3 15. so it really is that 8 30 to 3 15. what time is the first class of the day um they would start at eight four eight thirty five eight forty it's it's roughly eight thirty five it's dependent on the age group the
039children and how quickly they get their gear off and get ready um littles tend to take longer than the big kids okay and five ten minutes is adequate if you're gonna start dropping kids off at 8 30 yes yeah they get in they start get go getting going and especially for our younger classrooms you know getting in the classroom and doing their routine as part of what they do every day we believe so mm-hmm one and isn't the speed we had last year yeah everybody was in within about 10 minutes last year it ended up being pretty quick and then this year um as sydney keeps presenting there are other things that should offset the number of car writers right which we'll get to a little bit later anything else on not offering a remote
040academy this year okay so masks oh sorry on the remote academy no no i think everybody knows that the the guidance and the recommendations are getting kids back in school five days a week masks has has been i've received a lot of feedback about masking as we were just talking about so there's i want to be clear about you know the what i presented last week and the new information in the orange because everything that's come out this past week so the originally the srs team was um proposing that everybody at gvs will wear masks indoors when interacting with others three feet or closer and then then all this other stuff and the new report came out over this last week it is in line with the cdc the aap and the new and the
041usdoe are all recommending the reason that we talked about three feet or closer is because we took into consideration the fact that um we have over 90 percent of our staff is vaccinated grantham is at grantham itself is at 82 percent um and that sullivan county is still at moderate transmission so we had talked about you know do we start with that and then if we reach substantial transmission or if the delta variant comes in then do we do universal indoor masking the next bullet is i believe that everybody is in agreement that outdoor masking at all is no longer necessary in orange i have or the option for the board tonight is or universal indoor masking with mask breaks at three feet so if people are seated and not moving around do they take
042breaks at that point but it's not just a clearly no mask time so that wouldn't actually be a huge change in what we presented because we were saying mask to move whenever you're up out of your seat you have a mask on and then what this change would be is that you you were we would be looking at more mask time but if everybody's seated and not moving around they can take their mask off and have a break if they need it inside um all staff and students in our proposed plan um are going to be follow whatever masking guidelines we have independent of vaccination status and again mass to move is what we had talked about and i put a question mark there because i think the board needs to really decide how you
043would like the doors to open in terms of masking this here i do want to emphasize that anybody choosing to wear a mask at any time will be able to do that without question they're going to be families who have specific circumstances kids who have specific circumstances where they just want to be masked and that is always okay we might have kids who teachers who want to wear masks outside that's totally fine so masking is always always permitted the more that somebody wants to do it we had talked about how this may change if the transmission rates change in the fall and winter and again that's kind of what the board will need to deliberate tonight the only feedback that i've read that i've received on masking since the parent meeting has been requests for
044universal indoor masking to start um i that doesn't mean that's what everybody wants but in terms of parent feedback after that meeting that's all i've heard from parents in the community so i think we should probably stop there one of the considerations that was brought up during one of the progress monitoring committee meetings is that for uh some of those larger classes we don't have a guarantee yet and kristin can correct me if the floor plans if the grids have been established but we don't have a guarantee yet that those classes are going to be able to have three-foot distancing so there may be some classes where even seated at their desks they are within three feet of each other and so one of the things that was brought up during that meeting that i
045just wanted to bring forward to the board another consideration was will we be in a situation where there are some classrooms where they're allowed to take their masks off because they're able to have that distancing and then there are going to be other classrooms where they have to keep their masks on all the time because those class numbers uh they're not able to have three-foot distancing between their desks so you know is there going to be a situation where the kids know in so-and-so's class they get to take their masks off but in my class we have to wear our masks all the time because we're within um even seated at our desks we're within three feet of each other and does that set up a um a dynamic within the school that we wouldn't
046have that we didn't have previously i can also tell you that right now with our furniture we're keeping everybody at three feet but in those two grade levels it could be just a matter of a few students and we won't be meeting it so that was just another consideration that came up during a progress monitoring meeting that i wanted to mention i asked my my primary care provider last week if there was any data on delta in new hampshire she said the testing isn't really that fine too yet but she said it's a matter of time so i'm thinking just mask indoors kids are not vaccinated who knows where they've been over the summer it just seems proven no we're going back to two classrooms christine i just feel like we're into the history where
047that wasn't a concern last year it makes me more comfortable to think about our children being passed indoors with breaks and as you said i feel like we've been fortunate enough not to have a very clear but being masked to me makes us a little bit more proactive about keeping my kids and my staff safer how do you both feel about the mask to move concept meaning the basically if you're out of your chair as a student out of your like physical classroom chair you should have a mask on but if you're seated and there's space between you and your your classmates and like basically you're doing your classroom work i'm just curious lots of cost like what you both think about that for me if what i'm really thinking about is whether we start
048school very um like conservative and i'm can't think of a better term than like lockdown and tamp down or whether one of the things cindy said was almost like given current numbers where they are i share your feeling i actually have a good friend who has copic i don't know if it's delta or not she's fully vaccinated lives like i do doesn't do naughty things or anything like that and head breakthrough so i'm very aware that it's around and here um i'm just struggling between that feeling of like how i think in my adult mind and then trying to find um little ways to give mass breaks i know how a lot of elementary school students feel i think they're used to the math but i think they would also i don't know i think
049it would give them joy to be able to sit in their chair and as long and maybe it's an incentive to be still um and but i'm just that's kind of where my head is like struggling between the like really conservative camp down approach which i can understand or like where there might be a little room to start and see what happens because i feel that was part of our back and forth last year too is we were pretty conservative relative to um area schools just up the street and um we were lucky we got it worked for us meaning like we kept things really under control and until april like it all it worked for us we had a contrast a tough contest of the street of like five days in person doing their
050thing and they were also you know kind of okay so i'm in my mind i'm kind of back to where we were last august weighing those two approaches i do think too in terms of um and we'll probably look at this more well it's part of this conversation but we'll look to it when we talk about eating um you know the the yeah there is we sydney will talk about it you know as we move forward but the there is a recommendation to not have the face shields for eating so the kids will have they'll be in a full break when they're having their snack and when they're having lunch they won't have a mask or a shield on and the no outdoor masking you know unless that's something that the board wants to talk
051about they'll have any time their class is able to go outside for instruction or for a movement break or for recess they'll they'll be able to remove their masks for those outdoor times so i think in this move we already have some more mask breaks sort of built in um or there's opportunities for classroom teachers to find those um in terms of getting kids outside that kind of stuff um it isn't the there are already we've already pulled masks back in a couple of places i just have a picture in my mind that was driving by eastman lake uh within the past week and there were there was a group of little ones in the camp tripping along behind their counselor all i mean i think i would rather try to avoid the yo-yo of
052doing you know coming in and then having to ratchet it back a few weeks down the road or even a month down the road i'd much rather start conservative and then gently release things i mean i know well kids are nasty would like match brace breaks and stuff like that um i find the kids are a lot more compliant than most adults are it becomes some asking it doesn't seem to bother them nearly as much but honestly i sort of feel with the outdoor no masking the lunch breaks anytime outdoor i think it's a good step it'd be a little hesitant to go some more information just uh some additional parent feedback that i got that is that last year we were at six feet and now we are moving to three feet so you
053know and taking away those double layers is do you just want to take away one at a time that that concept plus we're adding the delta now yes some classes are smaller and have the opportunity to be sitting at the desk i can see how that would feel to a student in a larger classroom i think in support of those children for everyone even though they might not i i feel like we can always go back chris and i'm assuming sort of the same plans are in place this year with terms of classes doing as much stuff outdoors as possible um yeah i think that's the other piece of it would be good to see how the first couple months go and see just how much time the kids are actually wearing depending on how
054much time your outdoors are spent i think the other consideration too is it's the idea of of having more flexibility with masks is pretty dependent on us staying in that moderate or low transmission place and i think we are all we would sort of be really hedging our bets that we wouldn't be moving into a moderate or high transmission level even before september 1st um and that's the piece of sort of the yo-yoing that i was worried about ed was you know if is it going to be a situation where we're like you know it okay we've moved to substantial but now we've moved back and then two weeks later we move up and so i think any any um policy that or that we would put in here that would uh be linked to
055transmission levels we would have to be really careful that it would be sort of a sustained um you know that if it's if it moves to you know substantial transmission then we have masking and then that holds for a month and it's reevaluated so i think having those things in place could be really a lot trickier and there could be sort of like an if then flow chart that we i think we want to kind of avoid this year for the board and for families so they're not like having to log on and check the map to see what color the county is before they decide if they should be sending the mask to school if we can provide really clear guidance as a board that really i think would be beneficial to families and
056to kids to say like this is where we where we're starting this is what we anticipate we'll be able to do moving forward for as long as possible um i'm going um yeah that makes a lot of sense to me i'm going to ask a question that might not be very easy but um what do we have a plan for students who come off the bus or get out of a car and don't have a mask on and don't have one in their backpack we always have an arsenal of disposable masks and we stand outside a car rider or yeah okay i'll move forward to the next topic um screening we got a lot of feedback from um staff and the community about screening our recommendation uh for moving forward into this year is that
057we do not continue our temperature checks at drop off we looked at the data and it wasn't giving us kind of the the bang for our buck you know the the results that we might be looking for to you know possibly make sure a kid isn't coming in it wasn't happening there you know that wasn't the time that it was happening so we're recommending we just continue those um ed that will also help the car line go faster that's one thing at home we do have an expectation of a parent screening but we will not be using the app so we really expect parents to um you know we're going to send home a covered packet where they'll go through the new guidelines in terms of screening their children before they send them to school
058but what we had found is that unfortunately parents were still sending their kids to school sick sometimes and so the app wasn't actually preventing that um we did hear from some parents that the app helped remind them that oh yeah maybe i should check for this but i think those parents are probably going to do that anyway um so we are recommending that we just continue that screening app but we still have an expectation that parents think carefully about sending their children to school there's a voluntary self-checker widget that we put on our website from the cdc that i think is pretty cool if parents just want some if they do want to use a tool we put it up there and it um you can put in your specific information based on your demographics
059and your community transmission and that little widget will make some recommendations for you and then screening continued um we have talked a lot about this on the progress monitoring committee but our recommendation is that we use a screening sheet that requires two symptoms for parents to keep their kids home and this is modeled after the vermont algorithm which has been really successful and i can pull that whole screening tool up if you want to take a closer look at it but it was in the handbook but what it really looks at is you know that kids you know get sniffles and they have the other things but if you have a specific combination of two or more symptoms that's when we're going to trigger it for for covid school exclusion testing all those other kind
060of things that that parents would need to contact their provider on as of now new hampshire is not recommending any quarantine for close contacts within schools but household contacts will still need to quarantine i put in orange here based on the last state meeting that we had that dhhs has indicated that that guidance may change if we develop clusters or outbreaks in our school and community so the quarantine guidance may change if this delta variant really starts to spread but right now if um if i'm sitting next to kristen in a classroom and kristin tests positive for kovid right now the state is not expecting me to quarantine unless i become symptomatic one of the things that we'll be looking for in the progress monitoring committee this year moving forward will especially in those first
061couple of months will be how many kids are getting sent home so how many kids are getting to school having the fever getting sent home and so what's sort of been the like uptick in um kids that aren't getting screened at home before they come to school is there an uptick um and that'll be part of what the progress monitoring committee looks at to uh if we needed to adjust the use of like any other kind of screening tools um if it you know if it seems like there's a really sort of steady normal amount of kids getting sent home from school or is there all of a sudden a huge increase that karen's just has like a revolving door on her office um and having karen and kristen on that committee that's one of
062the measures that we'll look at for progress monitoring this year and then there's one more screening slide in terms of surveillance testing so this year we're going to be completing surveillance testing which is we're going to regularly screen our entire school population but this will be once per month and opt in this is not required this is only for staff and parents who opt in their children to be part of this so what's going to happen is a lab will come to our school once a month individuals in a classroom or in a staff pool will complete their own nose swab and i know a lot of you already do that like when you go to work and everything and um it's pool testing by classroom so basically all those nose swabs go into one
063vial and then they do that one test and if any covid does pop up or in that one staff pool that we do the positive result if there is any will trigger individual testing from there because we'll know that there's covidrevalent someplace and this will give us a really nice baseline and some periodic tracking of covid in the gbs community this is at absolutely no cost to the district um the state is picking up the cost of this and the lab that we're working with sends staff here to do it so it's not going to be taxing karen island or any of the staff members to do it so i thought maybe we would pause here and just talking about screening in general the screening information home screening school screening and surveillance screening i think
064everything you guys put together there makes a lot of sense um we're recommending that this year gvs is what we're calling a limited campus so visitors and volunteers will be permitted with a proof of vaccination and a scheduled appointment to come in and then once they're on campus they whoever is here will need to follow all other procedures um last year we didn't do any field trips with the exception of just nature's classroom we're working with eastman this year what we're proposing is that field trips are approved based on the current transmission status and the destination so with my picture of the beach here you know it would be perfectly acceptable probably to send a class to the beach if they're doing an ocean unit or something like that whereas we might not want to
065send somebody to the mfa in boston so not saying no to field trips but really carefully looking at where they're going what the transmission is in that area we're going to continue with no large gatherings um doing things outdoors where we can or inside with limited capacity but we're still not at the point where we can just be an open campus and have like a whole school assembly in here you know we can't so any questions about the limited campus proposals is there any discussion here or elsewhere about facilities yes we do have one group who has applied to do something in the afternoons with students and again as long as they are following all of our procedures we're going to try and allow those things okay snack and lunch the two most important part
066of every school day so eating is still recommended at six feet distancing and we will be able to do that at lunch where we can keep six feet but in orange i added we are two students away from our cafeteria max capacity at six feet so if we do have two students and those lunches we will set up um what mrs reed has called bistro seating outside the cafeteria and put some tables out there if we need to yes we have easter seating um the the trick for us is since we're going to be using the cafeteria again snack will have to be in the classrooms and we are three feet in the classrooms and there's really no way around that unless we give up the cafeteria again um or go to three classrooms for
067you know again and that's not something that we want to do and we recognize that this is a trade-off but that this is what we are recommending right now and again whenever possible classes will be encouraged to eat outside okay any questions about snack or lunch now if i if i can clarify the reason why we've been able to do snack and lunch in the cafeteria in the past is because you could fit more kids in the cafeteria we have to add a whole nother lunch period which elongates lunch time from 10 30 till i think 1 30 which means there's no time to fit snack in the cafeteria [Music] and they've been awake since yeah cleaning sanitizing and disinfecting we're going to continue our practice of routine high touch surface cleaning and disinfecting throughout
068the day so we we developed a mr taylor developed a pretty strict schedule of going around for doorknobs faucets light switches anything that are those high touch services we're going to continue that practice and we're going to switch to recommending that deep cleaning is still required but only if we have a positive case which would still be following the cdc guidelines any questions on that books and supplies last year we really did everything individualized based on a lot of research about fomite transmission we're recommending that we continue book exchange with physical and e-books both we're excited to see what mr pollard will have for us there and we believe that we can recommend shared supplies and equipment can be used with hand hygiene before and after so as long as everybody's washing sanitizing before and
069then immediately after we don't see any problem with those shared supplies and equipment i had some questions about the use of going back to cubbies and or the laundry baskets and that's just going to be up to the discretion of the classroom teacher we have some classroom teachers who can't wait to use the cubbies again and we have some who absolutely loved the laundry basket it just made the winter stuff and the unpacking and packing up a whole lot easier than having everybody cram into the cubbies so um that'll just be up to each individual classroom any questions there the library we get the library back the cafeteria back it's very exciting transportation we believe that we want buses to run at their usual capacity and that's what's recommended by first student uh research hasn't
070shown a lot of transmission on school buses however buses will be masked at all times that this is one of the musts from the cdc federally which is k-12 school buses are categorized as public transportation so there are masks required on all public transportation and we will need assigned seats at all time because if we do get into an event of contact tracing making sure we know who exact exactly is on the bus or not we're going to send a transportation form out after this approval i just want to encourage and urge parents who might we have a lot of parents who only need transportation between sports seasons up at the middle in high school if you could please remember to fill that form out that really helps us because then we can plan on
071maybe like rearranging buses during those times to make sure that we can maximize seating in terms of transportation for drop off and pick up parents and guardians will still need to remain in their cars to help us run the car line smoothly so we're asking parents not to go back to gathering and waiting for children and we just want to remind everybody please please remember to let your child exit only in the designated drop-off area because visibility especially in the winter with the snow banks is still frightening for all of us any questions on transportation so it's it will be two and sometimes even three to a seat so we talked about that at the progress monitoring committee and if you're talking about two kids sitting next to each other on a bus versus three
072it's negligible in terms of being close to somebody okay um before school program and after school program is something we've had a lot of feedback on we are recommending that the board approves reinstating before and after school program and we are excited about the design that we're putting forward for this so for the before school program um again we do need to have a cap on these so capacity is going to be important in terms of making sure that we can run these programs successfully so we believe in the before school program we can have a capacity of 30 students and everybody will need to sign up in advance through gvs admission to this part to before school priority is going to be given to students receiving free and reduced lunch and all others will
073be admitted through a lottery after completing the program application uh the days are monday through friday gvs school days only and the drop-off time would be 7 30. the cost is three dollars a day per student per day if the student is not in the free category and we want to make this free for students receiving free and or reduced lunch so one of the things that we talked about being in a recovery year is that we're really trying to see how we can maximize help for the students and the families who are going to need it the most and we can leverage some of our funding through the grant and through the after-school program surplus that we have to make sure that families who are eligible for this and are eligible for free like
074just don't have to pay anything and this will hopefully help a lot of people get back on track we are not recommending bringing back our morning recess program which was just sort of like the free-for-all drop-off in the morning um we just we're not there yet we just can't do it we can't have the staff supervision and make sure that everybody's safe in that environment going to after school program we believe we can and this is you know hopefully based on how we can staff it we believe we can have a capacity of 50 students the admission is that each family will complete an application priority will be given to students who are on iep's 504s free and reduced lunch and or recommended due to social emotional needs and again this is targeting who we
075believe the kids and the families are who need the most assistance in their recovery right now siblings of prioritized students once admitted will also be admitted to the program so we certainly know that we can't have a family where we say your one child is in but not the other two so if somebody's eligible for this then their siblings are are obviously also going to be part of the program all other spaces that are available will be granted by lottery similar to the before school program this would be monday through thursday on gvs school days which is what it was in the past snack and milk will be provided by gvs and the costs and pickup times that we're recommending for 2122 is free for all eligible students but if they have siblings go those
076siblings will still have to pay the fee um if somebody's picked up by four it's ten dollars a day and picked up by six it's fifteen dollars a day and those are the same rates that we had two years ago so we haven't increased anything and then i put some new information here and then where's that next slide based on some of the feedback that we got about before and after school there were questions about capacity and we had a question in public input so we recognized that before or after school program are a benefit to the community however our main priority always has to be excellent school programming so we have these limits because we are still stretched very thin in terms of staffing and hiring people and making sure that this doesn't over
077tax the the gbs day so our team worked on this to maximize what we believe the infrastructure can handle without risking a detriment to gps programming and operations and it's sort of like i was thinking of it as a balloon like we blew up the balloon as much as we could because we know that we can do some really great things for kids and families but we can't get it to the point where we think the balloon is going to pop okay so those numbers of 30 and 50 are where we really believe we can reasonably bring this program back successfully and you know this is it is a usual practice for child care centers to have a cap due to space and staffing and we're no different we really have to look at our
078space and staff and and and have a limit to how many kids we can take in and as since we are focusing as a recovery year we're prioritizing recovery for the students and families with the most need um i'm personally really proud of this design especially by having the social worker be able to take over this program and have oversight and eyes on the kids who we are right now the most worried about in our community and you know to be able to maybe leverage our own providers to work with those kids as much as we can in an additional way um i wanted to just give just some because we did get some feedback for the after school program i wanted to just give the board just some sort of like history of what
079this program has been at gvs and kind of what it looks like in terms of like the community and that kind of stuff um just because i think we're at an interesting point here where um we wouldn't have we would have been looking at after school program in 2019 as a board if covet hadn't happened um and so we're looking at it now under different circumstances and in a different way so years and years ago the after-school program at gbs was run by the child care center of the upper valley and that program um had some significant structural things that they ran into that didn't make it sustainable to have it run by the outside organization anymore and so heather had actually was instrumental in building the home based after school program and for a
080few years um it was you know a really successful program small and really successful and then there were a couple years that were some of my first years on the board where uh the the enrollment in that program was not actually sustainable so that for the perspective and the board knows this but for folks that are watching the after school program is a self-funding program it's not a budget item from in the the gvs budget in the school district's budget um it's not something that we put taxpayer or budgetary money towards uh the program is able to run an in a self-sustaining way and there were a few years where the board actually had to make the call of do we have to eliminate this program because we don't have enough students coming to it
081to be able to even pay for the staff we then had this sort of like meteoric rise in um interest and folks coming and enrolling in the program and it it sort of like gained momentum in a way that outpaced the staffing of it and so there were years where you know the two or three staff members were easily able to handle the 10 or 15 kids that came to after school program and then all of a sudden in 2018 2019 there was sort of this explosion and all of a sudden there were 70 kids showing up for after school program and there was still those three staff members um and there were a few times where it came very close to after school program having to be cancelled out of safety concerns that there
082were not going to be enough staff members to handle 75 80 kids of from kindergarten through sixth grade age range in several different rooms in the building um and so that was actually a conversation that sydney and i had started having and then covet happened so we were like is after school program starting to not like what's this is starting to feel like we're not able to sustain this program and then covid and we had to shift our focus to povid response no after school program last year and so i think we're simultaneously trying to do a couple things here we're trying to bring back an after-school program we're trying to enter into this recovery mode and we're also trying to grapple with the fact that the after-school program as we knew it was not
083sustainable and it was no longer safe and it was no longer something that um and that's not every day and they didn't the staff that was there did an incredible job but we were really asking them to do to take on a a task that was pretty insurmountable some days um and so we but we also have to remember historically that it was just a couple years ago where we didn't have the enrollment to meet that and so if we hire six seven eight people all of a sudden are we even able to hire that many people and historically we don't have sort of the support to show that the that there is that we don't have a historic need for this program to support that big of an increase yet um and so we're
084in this sort of transition year to say what can we offer and what can we do it within our the parameters of what we're able to do here and then the other piece that i would say just locally i think it's important to have the perspective that there are other districts around us that offer offer aftercare uh from what i was able to see them you know the most common that people probably know of are run by coniston their largest program the largest program they offer is 45 students they have a cap of one staff member for every 10 kids so if we looked at sustaining a 70 plus kid program we would be looking at seven seven to eight hires um which has been a challenge for us you know frankly um if we
085had if we were going to reflect that same type of of model that they've put forward so 45 is the largest program that they offer and then a lot of the other towns in our area aftercare is really truly a multi-pronged community approach so there are rec departments that offer aftercare in towns that also have the coniston program that also have several daycare facilities offering aftercare so um in terms of what the other thing that we also have going on is that we just happen to be in a town that doesn't have we don't have more than one day care we don't have a rec department that's currently offering an aftercare program we don't have another option and i just want to make sure that we're keeping that in mind as we look at this
086decision and and know that the the mission of the board the mission of the school is really as cindy said focused on the educational program and the before and after school programs are things that we absolutely see the value and that's why we're even having this conversation but we have to know what our parameters are for what we can work with so i just wanted to give kind of a little bit of that history and context of the the ups and downs of after school program as as it stands and the multiple factors that are that we're juggling as we make this decision um i really appreciate you sharing that background uh brittany i think it really helps parents who are concerned understand as with so many things i feel like in our society right
087now as a confluence of things that are creating pressure um i think i i think you've got you have done a really kristen and sydney particularly done a masterful job of trying to balance this all out um i feel a certain like obligation to air the voice of a family with two working parents who find out in early august and we're i'm a lucky one because barrett's old enough to get off the bus and be safe for a while at home but you know i have a lot of friends who aren't in that situation so it's very panicky it's very it's as with so many things with coved like getting the rug pulled out from under you and if you're a full-time working parent of any sort it's incredibly anxiety provoking and just for the
088reasons that you highlighted we're not in a super convenient area to just be able to find other options it's a lot of legwork it's probably a lot of transportation and time so um that is not really our responsibility as a board it's more our responsibilities like members people who live and grant them to care about each other um so i i think this is reasonable and um you know what i heard from mike was really um i mean his specific questions were about what are we going to do to address the capacity issues and to me after hearing what you just said it sounds like it's almost like a separate um i don't know if it's a committee or what it is um and whether it's board driven or school driven i also don't have
089an answer to that but it does it's a it's a much larger like conversation around the community what our current needs are i don't expect them to actually change very much i feel like even in my four years of league grantham the demographic has real there's been a ground swell and there are lots of families lots of working parents lots of little kids and people there's at least a demand for a period of time so anyway i appreciate all the work that's gone all the work and the thinking that's gone into it i've kind of swung back and forth on how i feel about it but i really appreciate all of that i'm not really giving any i'm just sharing airing it out for you but i think we all recognize that child care is
090an issue i mean it's not unique to grantham you know it's there have been a lot of articles in the upper valley news lately or you know it's a problem in the upper valley and it's a problem in our nation to be honest is that we have a we have a flaw in in child care um what i can tell you is that this plan represents what what we can do like this is our part that we can do and we do believe strongly in presenting this um and doing what we can for the most in need that's our that's our whole purpose in trying to bring back before and after school program and the side effect is that it makes the car lines better too so i mean this one on this one this
091one i struggled with didn't have the history before you mentioned that that being said we saw this huge swell in 18 and 19 of the 70 kids there were problems before if the program was sustainable with 15 kids from a financial perspective obviously i'm assuming that gets alleviated with the 70 kids piece um i'm not sure how we can not say we don't have a history of that because it's i don't see that going away it's only going to be confounded i mean we we increased our capacity we increased our school 50 something kids and we're dropping our capacity 20 something kids in our after school program so we've got a population that's going up and a capacity that's going down for after school care so i guess the question i have you know i
092know everyone's put a ton of work into this but i keep hearing this what we believe we can do what do you need to do what would be needed to increase that capacity up to at least the level where we were pre-code well i think that's something that we can look at possibly in future years but not for this year and i also have to say very honestly that i think it's a community conversation not a responsibility of the school district i get that but i mean the fact of the matter is we're we're dropping this on parents less than a month before school starts i agree with you hold on hardly this is a community issue but this is something that grantham has offered previous and then a month before we say you know
093we're ratcheting it down i i guess you obviously came up with what your capacity is based on however you guys did it um i'm sure there's great logic behind it i just i don't know is it a staffing issue is this instead of just saying can't do it can we look at ways to solve this problem and not wait an entire year to do it um yeah i don't think there's any reasons why we can't start looking at this now obviously we're not going to be in a position to do anything before the school starts but to say we'll look at it for future years seems it seems like kicking the can way down the road longer than we need to i i would just one other sort of piece of context that i left
094out of what i said um is that in the program as it stood previously there were some days where there were in in the 2018 2019 years there were some days where there were 25 kids at after school so that 70 number that was sort of the like most concerning days i would say the majority of days it was i didn't kristen and you or sydney you may know we were pretty steadily yeah around i would say probably 50 to 60. we had some really really concerning scrambling to grab people over 70 days so i think the ones that the days that concerned us were those sort of over 70 days the days that were more average were fewer than that they were closer to the 40 50 60 days and there were some days
095where it was 25 or 30 kids and that's one of those functions of not having a um you know not having folks commit to a spot in the program that that's what makes a drop in program when you have that swing from 30 to 70 that's what makes a drop-in program unsustainable is that you can't staff for it and you can't count on a budget for it so let me add to you as someone who um was here or like in the first couple years we were here i remember and when i was on the board i remember these conversations it's um it's a bunch of things there we struggled with um leadership of the program the way that it was staffed because it was once sort of teetering and then it like exploded we
096didn't really have what i would call like a director-level person with experience to really oversee and to say to come to heather at the time or sydney to say we need to probably have more consistent enrollment we need to have more of a program in place we need because some days it was really chaotic i mean there were like it was just because it had exploded we weren't able to as a board or as a school leadership group like really shepherd in a purposeful way and so what britney is trying to say is like in 1819 we're asking ourselves like what are we going to do with this thing it's gotten really popular i think because of people who are staffing it who are beloved and doing a great job but it kind of like
097was already kind of teetering some days out of out of our what we would want to be healthy and thoughtful so again with like so many things in cobid and the pandemic we were teetering and then it's like our energy has shifted away so that's really what sydney is saying like because of the pandemic this is the best this is what we can do because of staff shortages because of record enrollment because of some of these like leadership questions that we have that are bigger so even though some of my friends might not like me saying this i agree that i don't really think that it's totally it's not kristin and sydney's responsibility to like solve the problem i think it is a community thing because other communities this is what brittany's highlighting other communities
098have taken this like a wider approach of pulling in emily rin source and pulling in like other resources that we might have in grantham that might actually end up coming up with better solutions that are like more diverse that you can if you want to have like a really outdoorsy active boy who just wants to play versus like kids who need like maybe some enrichment i mean i can see how this can take a lot of um paths so there's the question of parents who are in the lurch of which i'm technically one a little bit um and then all the way through the spectrum to sydney and krista on this end saying like this is really what we can do thoughtfully and well and serve the kids that we really want to ease their
099transition i had one of my first feelings was like i felt a little like discriminated against because my kid didn't have special needs and i was like but he really loves after school and i really like swung back to um understanding like the multi-pronged uh problem that we have in front of us in in some ways i think it's more of a school board question than one that cindy and chris have that i've solved yeah let me be honest i'm not i'm not looking i'm not trying to criticize anybody all i'm saying is you know i hear this is what we can do this is what we can do fine this is what we'll do i think my bigger problem is while we're doing that we've got to think we go we got to work
100to address the problem and not just say this is what we can do and you know be done because it just given where we are and then i just i struggle with sort of the watch this is going to leave a lot of people in with not a whole lot of time left but did a lot of people i mean we didn't talk about even bringing this back until wednesday you know like we we didn't i mean we didn't have it all all year last year so three months now i have had more conversations and people come to me about this then they tend to return to school right i mean this was i think we have to wait i knew it was going to happen yeah i think people i mean rightfully just assumed
101that if we're going back five days things are going to be a little more normal this was going to shepherd in i think this is this is a shock to some people um and again the last thing in the world i want to be is i'm not trying to be critical i just there is a problem here it's debatable whether it's the school's responsibility for that problem historically the school has taken that role on at least with the programs they had before um so i i struggled with just sort of dropping it after saying you know we're at 50 and we're done um you know i would like to see some some effort put into problem solving whether that be you know a committee on the board or whoever that ends up being you know
102parent members however we want to do this i think it's a problem it needs to continue to be looked at i think one of the pieces of it is i think what we have in front of us is the problem solving of it like i think the the answer that we could give as a board to this because we are still in coped and because it could be that there's no after school this year you know i mean i think that that's that's sort of where we are is that we could we could be looking at a proposal for no after school and the the problem solving is to to push into to stretch us to bring this program forward um i think we the after school program just it was just in the last
103couple of years where it was seen as sort of that response to a daycare need previously it had been sort of a that was enrichment it was the hawks enrichment program um and so it's i think leslie really hit the nail on the head that we haven't had that opportunity to build out a an after-school program that addresses a community need outside of covet times and so we're we're dealing with you know the covet of it all as well as trying to bring back you know a program and i think right now for what i have seen and what i have heard is that this the program that's being proposed is not a sort of step-back program that we could stretch more and do more this is the stretch so is it is it um
104but i'm just a simple question is it um is it in the board's purview is a part of our partnership with um kristin and sydney to um talk about steps forward that are temporary what i'm thinking of is simple things like if we hire more staff um do do we need to be creative about space i mean are there any simple things that we can tackle relatively simple um objective maybe um as a temporary part and then also be at the same time having these larger strategic conversations which may you know we don't know what they'll look like because i do i mean as a full-time working parent with a like it's it's hard i understand both sides of this very much but it is very hard for parents in this community on in the
105first week of august to know they have to be working their full-time job and yet like we are stuck physically in a place where like people are researching like there are not options i don't know what people are going to do so it's just i'm only i know that especially brittany and cindy are both parents you get that it's just hard to hear that repeatedly like that's your responsibility when we're hearing it the first week of august um as opposed to like six months ago and you're right cindy there weren't any guarantees about anything that's technically true uh i do think ed's right though that a lot of parents um rightfully wrongfully assumed that we would have some after school program because it was in place when we were more normal i would be more
106than happy to be part of a committee looking at daycare in the community but i will not accept that it is solely the school's responsibility to solve the issue i'm not saying that is but what i am saying is the you talked about the stretch of up to that 50 and i'm i'm 100 on board with if that's what you say you can do right that's what we'll do i think what i'm asking is if we wanted to get to 70 what are the steps to do that to get there and that that's that's the i'm honestly really hoping that we can hire the four people that we need yeah i think around 50. i think part of it leslie is i think we'll be lucky i think if we can get that they'll like
107hire more staff pieces that we don't have staff to do a 50-person program um find more spaces we're we're pressed to find the space to put 50 and have good covert protocols so i think like those are some of the stretch pieces that i think we're not maybe we're not clearly articulating is that a 50 kid program is not going to be an easy stretch right now we don't have staff for it yet we have a director but we don't have staff for it yet the space available in the building extra custodial work that goes along with it you know there's there's a lot that goes into that yeah the offering the 50 the cap of 50 is is going to be a stretch on all of those resources to get there like we will
108be in a in a good place if we're able to push to that and so i think um looking to push beyond that when we haven't we don't have the infrastructure yet to to put that this is a this is a goal this is a goal for us to be able to offer the after school program but we know what the infrastructure is needed right we know what we need and who we need and we're hoping that we get them whether or not you know what you need i guess the question i'm asking here is what's the work to make it so you know what you need to get to set and then whether or not that's obtainable or not i think it's a separate question but i think telling parents that we're at 50
109we're done and we're not going to continue to look to expand that to get back given what we had in 18 and 19. i i i think that that's a that's a shortcoming we shouldn't do so i think pretty much everything you're saying goes back to that first question is it a space thing is there a staffing thing and the answer is yes okay um and a covet thing and it's right and all that connects to so this building is used after school like teachers stay teachers are working things are going on so the whole after school program has to start out in the in the cafeteria so and we are feeling hope until we're socially distant more than 50 kids they're gonna have to sit in the seat where we can fit 60 what
110did you just say 63. three in the in the cafeteria for lunch that's sitting not moving around so i'm not gonna ask kids to come to an after school program and sit on the red x and not move so that they're socially different it's quite a little bit of time into the evening or until late afternoon before we can have kids moving around sometimes the gym is available sometimes it's not depending on i don't know if we're gonna have breath using it we just things like that are still in question um in a good year and i've never worked the after school program in a good year it's hard to find staff for the after-school program and today i know i can drive down the road towards lebanon and every store has a health wanted
111sign um with signing bonuses the signing post is well we're still looking for not just great teacher we're looking for two staff members for the school year that we're not getting um application practice for and that's our priority for the school day and staffing isn't new actually because the reason the very reason we have a surplus of funds is because we had more kids coming than staff we were paying right you know so this we've always had trouble stopping this program and in fact the reason we went from monday to friday to monday to thursday is that we could get people to agree to work the program if they didn't work fridays when you think about the hours that we're trying to attract people it's probably not enough hours in the day for somebody to
112have this reliable income and if you have other children to care for at the same time unless they can participate in the program with the parent so part of the problem that a lot of people are having it's like we want to staff everything fully and yet like working like people who may want to work might be stuck with their kids because they don't have them it's like this covent leaf that's really hard um i just think saying that the unemployment rate's two percent hard to find people doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try um if it doesn't materialize it doesn't terrorize it yeah but but we are going to try and i feel like if we said the numbers were going to be higher we'd be leaving people at a lurch because we you
113tell them saying you take your kids and now we can't find stuff yeah and i'm not saying that we move to 50 now what i am saying is that you know we just we try to continue to explore ways to increase that throughout the year that that's what i'm saying get the 50 running you can staff that but then you know i just don't want to stop there and say okay it's running so i have a question for cindy and maybe brittany secondarily because you have more experience with school board and especially sydney superintendent ideally how it's a good way to move forward i appreciate you saying you're willing and i'm sure you are willing to be part of like solving this problem i'm sure kristen is too um i'm sitting here thinking like okay
114so how do we this group of people sitting here who are invested in it how do we move forward trying to give parents the feeling that as a community as a board as educational leaders we're trying to help solve a problem that's kind of unsolvable but we need to take at least some active coping steps you know so the parents feel like there's some way to channel their panic maybe we i mean this is grantham like we can rise to the occasion i'm just sitting here like how do we so i'm asking you know what are some good community models how do we maybe move forward is it as simple as you and me sydney and i and kristen like we're gonna form a group of concerned parents and i mean we have a lot
115on our plate but you know i'm just thinking of active steps i don't know what's appropriate as a board member sometimes i try to be sensitive to you know those sorts of boundary things so it's a question it's more like an advice question i can tell you that in the town where i live it was completely community and parent driven and they got a group together and reached out to all the resources in the town and developed their own child care system that's one example that we could look at i really do have to tell you that i hesitate to say that i'm going to take charge of this because then i know someone's a problem no i don't know that i believe we solved really well you know for what we can do right
116now um i only meant your active thinking and participation yeah not owning it yeah yeah but i know i know that um there are where there's a will there's a way and there's supply and demand and i know that if we can get a group together to really look at this and to look at it from a grantham community perspective not only the school that a lot of really good problem solving will likely happen do we know that 70 would be enough we don't know we don't we don't know we also don't even know yet if we're going to be turning people away right yeah you know yeah right yeah i mean and this is also we're also talking about uh this sort of recovery year program i mean the the position the the social
117worker position all of the like the the thrust of this program is is to be a recovery year based program this isn't the model that we're presenting to move forward with into infinity and beyond right so there absolutely will be work happening in the next year to look at what is this program going to be moving forward um it's sounding also like the after-school program is a more pressing question because if you're a full-time working parent with like for example a salary position you're usually expected to be working until four or five and most a lot of us people i know are expected to be in person five days a week yeah so that leads especially if you have young kids what are you supposed to do from 3 30 to 5 30. with with
118the people that are eligible to be well the i guess the students with needs that we're going to prioritize on this do we have a sense of is that more than like are we going to turn away people that we want to prioritize but there's no assumption that every student every parent of a student with an iep or 504 will want them in the after school program right so what we'll do is you know based on what you approve or don't approve tonight we'll be sending out an application that's ready to go um first thing tomorrow and we'll do a really quick turnaround and schedule a meeting next tuesday to inform people about where they are so we realized that this is something that people need to know about really quickly but we will not
119have any idea about you know where we are with our capacity until we get the applications in and and i don't this may not answer leslie for you i think um but i think it's gonna be it'll be tricky to to sort of parse out what level of responsibility or enrollment a board has because there are not a lot of local school boards that have any kind of a role right in their after-school program most school districts have it you know contracted with an outside organization or that it's run through the local wreck and the this isn't a i spent a whole lot of time in the last two days searching through the board the minutes of other school boards trying to find their conversations about after school program and they just don't happen because
120the school board's task is to you know oversee the school day you know the education piece of it um and so that may be a tricky thing to answer and something that we have to sort of wrestle with a little bit more as a board and as a district is what is the level of involvement that we want to have in this because i think you know it it is something that we have demonstrated we want to be involved in and we recognize the value of and we understand that there's this vacuum here um but it is it is hard because and sydney and him and i have had conversations about this because our charge as a public school is the public school day um and we don't have a charge to provide you know
121after school or before school care to every student and so that doesn't mean we shouldn't be a part of that process and it doesn't mean that we don't care about those things but in terms of board time and energy and resources we have to really think about that and know that there it really isn't a great model immediately around us for looking at that because there's not a lot of boards that oversee those programs i just like to add thank you for all the work that's gone into this because children with the highest need are going to get the most benefit from this program and i know we can't solve this whole issue tonight but i really want to thank you for this and recognize this and say this is one thing you can't do
122with my going discussion with where i will go here but i would hate to see something happen to this and to say it's just too here moving on to everything else in the family plan we talked a lot about snow days um we did have a lot of feedback not recently but during last winter about snow days um we're trying to come up with sort of a healthy compromise where the first three snow days are just snow days and we thought about this because this will give families the opportunity to make sure that their infrastructure is ready for snow clearing um that their you know their snow blowers are working they're shoveling you know they can they can kind of get their handle on it kids can enjoy those for snow days which are always
123exciting and then from the fourth snow day forward we're going to propose that we make the snow day call like we did last year which is by 1pm the day before we would say if there's a snow day we would move to remote instruction and that will give families time to plan it will just give us the opportunity to send technology home you know those kind of things and then it alleviates a lot of the dilemma that we have at the end of the year in june about how long do we go and how many days do we look at based on what we missed so we're hoping that this is a happy medium for everybody and i did want to emphasize since i hopefully have people's attention right now is that we are still
124looking for substitutes um food service staff which is three hours during the school day after school program staff a title one math para professional which is 18 to 20 hours a week during school time and now unfortunately a grade 5 teacher so we still are are looking for staff before we're completely ready to open and um just i have this a slide on there for when our board meetings are for the parent meeting and the follow-up discussion and questions so these are kind of the big things that we just went through for the family handbook and your if you have anything that you'd like to discuss in addition to this or any changes or revisions that you want to make before we go to the final vote on the family handbook we can kind of
125go through them one by one so is there anything that you want to change with not offering a remote academy for 2122. i'm assuming yeah they're a little i got an email from them last week they're a little behind schedule in looking at opening up and having registrations but i'm not sure exactly what their capacity is right now you know i'm i'm hoping they have a much easier time with enrollment and admitting everybody because the majority of kids will be going back to school um what do you want to do in terms of masking i feel like i heard and chime in the conversation uh was leaning more in the direction of universal masking from opening not linking it to transmission standards or anything like that yes okay um the home screening not the app
126and the new vermont style algorithm with two symptoms okay the surveillance testing the once a month okay the limited campus with vaccination and scheduled appointment for visitors and volunteers does that that doesn't apply to people performing services on site oh that no we have um any contractors who come in have to be masked and i don't think we legally can't ask all of them for their vaccination status so they have to be they have to be masked and away from other people so like if somebody comes in and they're working on the boiler you know so so what we're saying here is if they're wrong vaccination to do it yes classroom snack and lunch distancing that we went over cleaning and disinfecting books and shared supplies transportation before and after school programming any changes there
127besides the future conversations and snow days yeah there's um we're we have just a few students who catch their myfi spots um and those would be students who were doing like summer program with us and still needed tech access at home and i know that there are bigger conversations happening in town for the the bigger problem is the areas in grantham that actually don't have access at all um and i know that there are other like the grantham tech committee is working on trying to get um i think there are three kind of spots dead zones around grantham where it's really hard to get access like woodland heights and things like that so that is being worked on in other arenas and that's it it's a whopper of a family handbook yeah that's an incredible
128amount of work thank you we have a great team a lot of really good thinkers looking at this new families coming in it's so organized in the in the handbook um were some things were bold are those the new are those you're keeping the lights on for us if you walk okay so um we would need a motion to approve the 2021-2022 family handbook as amended so we have a motion from denise we have a second from christine if you're in favor please say i i and then any opposed say nay okay thank you and thank you thank you both thank you to the srs committee we're gonna have to come up with a new some new let's see how many things we can come up with that have the initials srs for you guys
129last year okay so our next agenda item is the 2021 2022 staff handcuff i have no presentation on that it says written it's just the bold and italics and your changes sheet to update everything learner attributes on pages 38 and 39 that function independently is repeated okay on page 39 are you in there right now okay kristen can make these live changes for us didn't matter how many times we read it i'm sorry what was in there it's on pages okay okay so we would need a motion to approve the 2021-2022 staff handbook as amended so moved so we have a motion from leslie and we need a second second from ed all those in favor please say i i and any opposed okay so our next item is the 2021-2022 preschool handbook not a
130lot of changes there but again just aligning everything and changing the model to our combined three and four classes and updating the tuition for pure models any questions or comments on that one i still find it delightful to read a preschool handbook i'm like so much all right so we need a motion to approve the 2021-2022 preschool handbook we have a motion from leslie we need a second second from ed and so if you're in favor please say i i and any opposed say nay okay so our next agenda item is the approval of the 2021-2022 bus routes that's in the board packet any information additional information there from sydney no questions from the board we love our bus drivers yes i don't know if you've been reading all of the bus driver shortages i
131just want to say how much we love our drivers and they're all sticking with us and this consistency has been absolutely incredible for gvs we would like the minutes of this board meeting to show that we love our bus drivers yes we value them and we thank them kind of good question i don't have the historical knowledge i certainly have the physical knowledge of uh summit slalom elimination of stop like i think i get that i'm just curious if that's something that's up for discussion like some of those i know it can be a hardship for those families like a mile to the bus stop so quite a while ago um if this is actually kind of a tricky area and tricky legal area because our school buses aren't supposed to travel on private roads
132oh it's the easement thing right and so we get special permission legally to go into eastman to be able to provide these bus routes for students so a study was done i think it must have been possibly eight years ago to and the state was brought in to do a complete safety study of the eastman roads because they're not they're not up to code roads you know their private roads to say which stops would be acceptable and which ones aren't so basically right now there won't be any changes in eastman unless something significant happens that's a change with eastman roads um they're not the standard width there's not the same visibility etc etc so you know there are a couple stops that i've investigated in eastman where they did actually add a turning lane or
133a stop sign and we have a safety officer go look and see if those changes actually warrant an exception um few do but the majority don't so it's a it's a much larger picture um then you know we're i think i think we're very lucky to be sending our buses into eastman yeah that sounds like it yeah um so if someone was interested in like pursuing getting a stop at you know whatever that change it would probably have to come from eastman would it we'd have to well i get stop change requests all the time um and we have a safety officer through the bus company who works with the transportation guides to do the assessment yeah um basically the bigger conversation is does eastman want to change its roads okay good to know thank
134you yeah but knock on wood we can legally keep doing this you know it's a good thing yeah for sure thank you okay so we need a motion to approve the 2021 2022 bus routes and was that denise perfect and we need a second and we have a second from christine so if you're in favor please say i i and any opposed say nay okay all right our next item is the rescheduling the board retreat we should have known that july was going to turn into a mess of times for people yeah um so i would love if we can try to get this in before uh before school starts um so i don't know what folks august schedules look like i'm gonna just throw it out there and start with um does anyone have
135an open tuesday since that's our normal uh board meeting time an open tuesday evening so we'd be looking at we could do like a 5 30 we could do a 6. so this would be like the 10th the 17th the 24th 31st anything in that i'll just throw that does work for you okay is there something else like would the 16th the 15th anything in there so the teachers the new teachers start the 26th sure so um is how does the 11th look for people yeah i can do that i'm not sure okay that's out for you is it could the 11th work what time are we talking like 5 30 6 somewhere in there kristen how's that for you yeah that looks okay for me too do you have movable things that i will
136see what i can accomplish okay let's let's say we're gonna do the 11th um just can folks do five is there a timing that would work better for you leslie no okay perfect um uh can we do 5 30 would that work for folks is that too probably about two i would say about two hours i've preferred it we can do it so okay so the 11th 6 30 to 8 30. you're getting to know me very well 6 30 to 8 30. okay let's do all the hard stuff at 6 30. all right okay and then we have the staff welcome back breakfast what what is that day looking like i know last year we did it a little differently than we had in the past right and you could do it either way
137so you know we can we can't do anything where people are going up and serving themselves still but you can do like sort of the brown bags that we did you know when people do grab and go and people bring things in so it's up to you okay and that's for the 27th 27th do we want to do similar to what we did last year with the we had a we had folks sign up ahead of time they could pick a bagel or a muffin and a fruit and a yogurt and then we had all of the supplies and we just pulled them together the day before yeah do you want to do that yeah okay all right um yes i don't remember how we i think usually brenda reaches out and has a sign
138up of what everybody can bring and then you sign up and then she does so okay you do it the day before and you come in and bring everything together if brenda is at home yelling at me right she probably is like i know what to do just if she was here she would be like i got it guys okay so we'll do the brown bag um again and then it'll be available for the teachers to pick up that morning okay all right okay so our next agenda item is the communications contract proposal and that is in the uh board packet so it's the proposal from the john guilfoyle public relations llc um so hopefully folks had a chance to read that through and sydney do you have any additional info to give us on
139that i do um so we were looking into the history this is the group that is working with the conval lawsuit and they did our first press release that we sent out about grantham joining and um they have submitted a proposal to do continued communications for us so this is something that i would not propose long term for gvs or for the grantham school district but in thinking about some of the things that are happening this year it might be there might be some really good reasons to do it um one would be just continued communications with families through um two would be um looking at the playground renovation so when we did the renovation back in 2008 of the building um the district did hire a communications company like so as we were getting
140for meetings and forums and before the bond came out like all of those things happened so we could think about doing it for that um you know uh i'm trying to think of a lot of the other things that are going on so it could be a really good year to access this type of additional help because um i know that at the school level we i know kristen and randy and i don't particularly have time in our day to be constantly pushing this information out and this group would also be a good segue into looking at um the website which is one of our targets this year and figuring out the best ways for us to communicate through our new website design so it's food for thought and i think if there's a year
141that we would do something like this this would be a good year to do it and it's worth entertaining by the website yeah that's part of it yeah yeah can you sign up for a minute i just got an email that you two are hard to hear so you guys can do so thank you um and i did a um the school board association hosted a um communications webinar for school boards like best practices and um you know heading it was this time last year so um looking at like how having a comprehensive communication plan and that kind of stuff for covid information and it was done by this firm and it was really helpful and really good information so if i'm reading this correctly they're looking for 500 a month for a full year
142to do a monthly press release no they do more than they do like the push out through social media um through anything that's going on and then if we have any kind of forums coming up they'll do those kind of announcements and then hopefully i don't know if we will have our new website by then but we could integrate it through sort of like a news log or or something like that a news feed i guess i'm a little confused the service is offered but then there's also yeah and i'm not interested in the 24 for them to do our web design so we would be looking at you know the other options above so it's everything is it everything under the scope of services right so everything from scope of services to web design
143yes um well just thinking about this web design and then doesn't each class have a facebook page that each class doesn't have the school has a facebook page each class has a website a website yeah no this would be really from school and district information pushing out so it wouldn't necessarily i mean if something significant happened in the classroom and we pushed that content out to them then they would work with us for those communications but they're not going to go you know design all this for each individual classroom it's really more of the big picture communications so right now with our we always have changes in people leaving and who we hire right now we have about thirty six thousand dollars in savings between the differences in salaries and insurance so this would come
144from that additional money if you choose to do it is there a time frame either that they have given us or that you think like is this something that you'd like us to make a decision on tonight is this something that you think we should i think you should i would like it if you could make a decision tonight because if we are going to do it it would be great to do this at the launch of the year yep uh i'm supportive of the monthly services offered and the website uh web design option two given that we have some savings we have a way to cover it i do think that there's a lot going on i think about just what the two of you and brittany have gone through in the year and
145trying to manage to just manage it all quite a bit and given the layering on of the conval lawsuit and people having questions about that and us wanting to be transparent but sensitive i mean there's just it's a lot to manage i think your judgment on this is probably quite wise and the fact that we do have the money i think it could probably really help parents feel uh more in the know about a lot of things and a lot of website design not the twenty four thousand dollars yeah those are out um no i mean they will um that if they do the web design so i'm not talking about the web design because we want to do something different but what they will do if they do those scope of services there is
146that while we're doing that they'll use they'll integrate with our website to do all of those things so that part of the website would be built through that contract and then we integrate this use of this kind of communications through that so basically there would be two different entities who would be one would be focused on the website redesign and how we're launching our new website this one would be saying here's your new website and this is what we're going to do through it and how we're going to do it so who's going to design the website we don't know yet okay our first step in that which will be coming later because it's not the right time to put that out our first step in the web design project for this year we'll just
147be putting out a community-wide survey about looking at our website and what people find is good access easy access what's missing what's been difficult to try and really get a handle on what we need and then we'll start going out to look for the contractor to do that i guess i'm wondering if we haven't made a decision on website design is this good timing they're very expensive for website design no no is it a good timing to bring them on before we make a decision about the website oh i believe it is because we can still get out a lot of communications through facebook for our existing website they'll use what we have yeah yeah just do it better yeah i mean if you're feeling like on these um things is kind of become a
148burden for the two of you i trust you if you need relief from that i'm okay it's for you too you know it really is for school board things and i'm thinking about budget season and thinking about a playground project and i think that the piece of it is that they would provide things that are beyond the scope of what sydney or can do so like doing things like the infographic development of uh for the for the playground project so like where we may default to you know slides on you know the screen with bullets they may be able to put together a dynamic presentation for us that talks you know that that's their expertise is how to how to how to best take things like a capital project or um you know a a
149upcoming you know warrant article vote and really deliver the information to the community in a way that's that has the clearest communication and reaches all of the avenues that we may not even know are our avenues for communication like i know in the webinar that i did with them he mentioned like avenues of communication and ways to reach out to families that i was like didn't even know that was a thing um and so really like leveraging their expertise as communication professionals and letting the education be with the education people um you know that it's more about like a whole different we wouldn't just be transferring the work that cindy or kristin does on to somebody else we would be asking them to do a whole new type of work and a good example is
150like you know i feel for sydney who and kristen who are so close to so much of this so often and i think there have been times um through this whole pandemic where cities like how could i be more clear and people are like but i'm still at you know like they're and it's a great example of sydney being like i'm too close to this stuff i don't even know what people are you know we're trying so hard to communicate and kristen even got to reading the family newsletter on fridays you know right like we're doing everything that we can to make sure the information's out there and you know i think this will help and this wouldn't it wouldn't replace communications from sydney from kristen so there would still be a principal newsletter there
151would still be communications from the superintendent but it would it would let some of those things that don't need to be in their wheelhouse be handled by someone else so rather than burying information about the playground project in a superintendent newsletter where everyone is reading about snow days like they're looking for the information about snow days so the information about the playground gets lost they'll be uh you know someone a group who's able to communicate some of those other school board level um things in a way that's you know meaningful and clear that takes it sort of outside of the day-to-day week-to-week stuff that families need directly from pristine or sydney the other thing sydney and i have talked about is that we're not communication experts so we think we're giving so much information but
152we learned this year from parents that we're not always giving the information they want so it will give us the opportunity to learn what these experts do and potentially take that forward with us and you know what what we should be sharing so would this be a one year community yeah i like what i'm seeing and i'm seeing something top of your favorite since 24 7 availability kristen and i are always that anyway could you give them some of your work i was seeing the all media inquiries compared to us for processing yeah let's just hope we don't need any of the crisis management crossovers i might pass on this business card to my husband's orthopedic surgeon who did not [Laughter] any other discussion on this so do you need us to approve the approve
153the contract the uh scope of services contract which is 4.99 a month with a 12-month commitment and then they do have the if we ask them nights weeks or holiday holidays that would be extra but um that initial first scope of services can i say so moved so we need a motion to approve the scope of services proposal uh for the 4.99 per month paid annually with a 12-month commitment um not to include any of the web design development options we need a motion so i have a motion from leslie and i would need a second a second from christine and if you're in favor please say aye aye and any opposed say nay okay all right our next agenda item is the uh policies so we have the second reading and adoption of the
154policies that we looked at in june and these are the policies that were needing to review and adopt because of changes to the law or other things that are being handed to us that we need to do um so any questions about that first batch so we're looking at the dga through ehac my only question was the second reading and adoption date is july 30th oh it says july 30th yeah on all of that first batch i have no idea okay sorry no it's august 3rd okay because all that first basically july 30th 31st um i can tell you that i probably wrote these on july today it's totally fine you were just dating totally my error they should be august 3rd i apologize i any other questions about these all right so uh we
155would need a motion to approve the second reading and adoption of policies d g a d k e b b b j l c e and e h c so moved so we have a motion from leslie and a second from denise and so all those in favor please say i i and any opposed say nay okay and then we're looking at first reading and of the um jca through jfaa-r which is change of school or assignment tuition payments for secondary peoples manifest education hardship enrollments title change this is changing so is this one changing from nothing in the policy itself changes um it was jf and it needs to be jeb okay so do we refer to it as jeb right now you have to refer to it as js okay to do the
156change to jb and then at the second reading we do jeb perfect admission of non-resident students and residency affidavit yeah and just to let you know why all of these are coming is that the state legislation and all of the laws changed for all of these in terms of what's happening with manifest education hardship best interest residency issues so that's why you're getting them kind of as a package deal and they all need to go through at least their first approval by august 17th because that's when the laws become active so i know that you had a heavy packet tonight but um there was no way to put these off and all of these changes that are reflected are mandatory um the only thing that is not mandatory is where it says right now this
157is the first time that we've put in a policy where it is uh admission of non-resident students in tuition where we're looking at jfab this is the first time that we would be as a district spelling out that the grantham school district will only accept non-resident students under an approved agreement due to best interest or manifest education hardship reassignment we've gone back and forth over previous years about whether grantham would consider taking tuition students for a revenue stream and right now with our population there's just absolutely no way we can do it so if that does become an option at some point we would go back to this policy um so everything else is adhering to the new legal guidelines that's the thing that would be new but i would not recommend in any way
158shape or form that we accept tuition students right now those conversations yeah i know i know it wasn't that long ago that we were talking about accepting tuition students because it would be additional revenue and when i joined the board it was 180 i think was our was that i remember the meeting when we when the number one the enrollment number went over 200 we're all like yeah wow okay any other questions on these statement policies policy um item two where it says assigned to a private school um what right now the law is allowing um this to go to a private to have a change go to a private school so that's the big change in um in where we can allow students to go but the tuition is still intuition and transportation are
159still the responsibility of the parent is that what you mean yeah yeah i was concerned about it well the law changed to allow private schools as part of this so that what what the law has not done has mandated the district to pay for that or to provide transportation and we were holding off on these policies until all of these laws were in place so these have been pending for a while too and i will say i don't know if any of these need to be changed once they figure out the voucher rules since that just passed but for right now i don't have any information specifically guiding us in any direction with the new voucher program it's in it's in the joint legislative review stage right another now is the spending district consuming responsibility
160or reliability for that that alternative it depends on the kind of assignment so if it is you know special education related then yes um if it is a parent choice or a best interest reassignment then likely the student is becomes the complete responsibility of that other district okay so we would need a motion for the first reading of policies j c a j c l f j e c j f j f a b and j f a a dash r i have a motion from leslie and a second from ed so all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay all right so we're moving on to our principal's report and we do have a principles report in our board packet um and since it's past your bedtime kristen i
161won't make you expand upon it too much if you don't want to but since we're coming up on the end of summer program any other news from the summer or information you'd like to add in addition to your report you know i would just say you know reiterating what i wrote in the report is summer program was amazing um kids adults everyone was really happy with it parents um we didn't get as much out time outside time as we would have white but i don't think any of us are right now but regardless it's it's been such a positive experience and there are a large group of kids that never really seem to love school that love coming here every day this summer and feel successful and feel like learners and i think that was
162our main mission and that's so exciting yeah i heard across the board different kids and families who are just like so so jazzed and positive and so kudos major kudos thanks and it's been it kind of has that camp vibe so it's so fun like every every drop-off and pick-up is like a celebration it's really kind of it's very cool so it's been a great summer program in the pictures i think speak volumes and hopefully you go into the link and see all the pictures we keep adding to it but other than that we've just been very busy in the building as you can tell by everything coming forward any questions for kristin thanks i like the update from mrs widman yes mrs whitman is on vacation all right and superintendents report uh mostly my
163report is everything that we went over tonight this is what we've been working on but i did want to just i was going to briefly update you that we don't have specific information about vouchers but i thought that you might be curious about that that's in gel car right now in the joint legislative review area um we are excited because we're moving forward with alma with our new student information system so everybody's going to be hearing more about that soon and we did just receive and i believe you received it through the school board association some guidance on the divisive concepts rule and i have to tell you i don't think the guidance really clears it up for me um so there will probably be more discussion about what really is going to take place
164or not take place in schools based on that guidance that was given out because it i know um quite a few especially high school social studies teachers who are extremely concerned right now and the guidance didn't give them the clarity that they were hoping for and that's pretty much it for me okay thank you so our next agenda item is the consent agenda any comments or questions on the consent agenda i just noticed that the middle and school tuition numbers we're going to be we estimate right now we're going to be um in the red six students one at the middle school and five at the high school that we know about um so it's it's beyond tight right now however it's still too early to call because throughout august we also have some students
165who may be moving or going someplace else we also could have new registrations but we're estimating right now that we will be over there i think we said like six students so possibly somewhere around the 80 to 90 000 area and again people are moving to grantham with their kids which is great it's just we we really are we need to more than ever kind of focus on our population surge right now all right we'll need a motion to approve the consent agenda we have a motion from leslie and we'll need a second okay i have a second from denise and all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed say nay okay and we do not need a second non-public session tonight correct nope all right uh our next meeting is scheduled for
166well we'll have the board retreat which is held in public but it has a specific and focused agenda of only we're going to be looking as a board at the social emotional learning and just generally what that looks like and why that's a topic of important conversation right now for schools and then specifically what that looks like within gvs so that's the scope of the board retreat uh which is scheduled for the 11th and but that is a public meeting of the board and then our next regular business meeting of the board will be september 7th and thank you to everyone for sticking with us tonight i think we're getting some feedback that we'll work on for our next meeting about just making sure that we can hear all of the speakers as they speak
167well we want to make sure everyone can hear folks and so we appreciate hearing the feedback about that from from people and we um we'll try to iron this out more as we move forward to be able to still continue to have these hybrid meetings so um anything else from the board before we adjourn tonight sure i can resend out the yeah yeah i'll resend yep yeah yeah absolutely yep all right okay then we need um thank you everyone this is a this is this meeting in the last two years has been a really big meeting to decide all of this stuff for opening the school year so i appreciate everyone's time on this and really thoughtful conversation and your work and all of that and wow i am out of time that's what your
168timer was like no you're out of time stop talking or i have to give the dog her medicine it's either probably you're out of time stop talking um so we need a motion to adjourn so moved all right i have a motion from leslie and i need a second second i have a second from ed uh elbows in favor please say i i and any opposed all right thank you everyone thanks for joining us thanks everybody we'll see you soon