February 9th 2023 VCS BOE Meeting

001[Music] foreign [Music] Falcons thank you stop [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] thank you okay hello everyone we are in session we just came from executive session uh so let's please stand for a moment of silence Dr Parks would you lead us tonight thank you greetings visitor where's my pencil hang on okay public participations persons wishing to address the board must sign up prior to the start of public participation speakers must register on the form provided by the district at the entrance of the boardroom to maintain a first come first serve process for the purposes of following up with speakers the speakers must provide their name address telephone number

002and or email address to limit comments to matters which may be properly discussed during public participation so the speakers will provide the topics any group or organization wishing to address the board must identify a single spokesperson thank you for that consideration so item 1D we're at it's reading of the fire evacuation procedure in case of a fire would everyone please follow the exit signs to the outside of the building please stay completely clear of the building to provide space for any fire department vehicles and also thank you for that consideration item two is approval of the agenda I need a motion to approve this evening's agenda please motion by Elizabeth second Trisha maybe yeah um any questions or comments on this evening's agenda seeing none all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed extensions

003motion carry thank you item three superintendent's update Dr terranova you're on thank you Mr DeLucia appreciate the opportunity so I want to start off tonight's update uh as many of you know about a situation that happened at a varsity basketball game last evening at Fairport I've been in frequent communication with the superintendent of Fairport as well as our administration at the high school and in our Athletics office and our students and parents as well so we sent out a joint letter myself at Mr provenzano earlier today as well as a preface by me to try to explain what was going on I'm going to kind of summarize that preface basically we know that an incident happened last night where students at a game said some things while a student was shooting a basketball that there

004was a strong feeling from people that attended that that the noises were both racially offensive and hurtful there is also a strong feeling by students from our district who were there and in that group that the noises were not meant in a racially offensive way and it wasn't something that was geared towards that type of message so I appreciate the honesty of our kids and our families and I appreciate the um the challenge of this context and the ability for us to try to work through it myself Mr Weimer Mr siesto will be meeting with parents over the next couple days as well as our students about the situation getting their perspective make sure we do some listening make sure they understand our perspective and learn together around this and we're very hopeful that we're

005going to continue that collaboration with the Fairport school district and also collaborate with them learn from them in the perspective that they have make sure that our kids are listened to as well and ultimately become stronger from this situation but we acknowledge the complexity of this we acknowledge the hurt that it caused people we also acknowledge that we have a great student body that is very reflective and will again grow from this and I have complete confidence in them that they are going to become the leaders that we know they're going to be so I just wanted to give the community a brief update on that certainly if anybody has any question please email me or give me a call but we'll be working through this situation as situations similar to this develop all over

006our country and work through it and become stronger and add a get a sense of perspective of everyone and really start to understand even at a higher level um you know what it takes to be inclusive and have Equity across our community so I wanted to mention that second good news uh I also sent a message out yesterday about a youngster from our Junior High who was unfortunately hit by a car as he was crossing the street he is fine he actually sent his uh School a very uplifting message this morning hoping to be back to school by Monday so we certainly were concerned about that particular incident but we're very glad that he's okay and we will continue to reflect on and I know our principals are doing a lot of work with their

007students and their parents just around the protocols of walking home for our Walkers as well as Crossing this Street and doing those types of things in a careful manner but really deeply appreciate our security staff Brittany Arnold our SRO and the First Responders from Victor and Farmington that got there right away including Administration from the high school and administration from to the junior high that did a lot of the communication just a great job by everybody to really wrap their arms around this particular young man and I'm just glad that he's great and doing better and he'll be back by Monday a couple other quick announcements I want to acknowledge this is a big week it's National School counseling week school counselors work with all students to remove barriers to learning by addressing students academic

008concerns social emotional skills and career options School counseling programs help to increase student achievement and provide a much needed resource for students parents teachers and administrators we can't thank our school counselors enough and we've been recognizing them all week and it goes Way Beyond a week of recognition they're a focal point of the support and help and the ability to get all our kids to be successful so just a big thank you to our school counselors as well as this month is mental health awareness month is it really every month should be I'm very excited about the fact that not only our school district but school districts around us and really the communities around us are focused on Mental Health which is as important as physical health so we acknowledge that this month is mental

009health awareness month and it's uh definitely an important piece to to our children's education which kind of leads quickly to just a very very brief summary of tonight's presentations I want to thank Jenner Davis from the Victor VCS Educational Foundation for being here Jenna is going to present in a few minutes around the amazing things that that organization does for the Victor School District that's an example of the school Community Partnership that we continue to develop and continue to emphasize as we move forward we couldn't do it without the Educational Foundation so we're thrilled to have Jenner here to talk a little bit about the great things that the foundation does you're going to hear a management Plan update last month was on the elementary area this month is on the secondary level where we're

010going to talk about three of our core areas and this is something that we're really I I believe is is to some degree Cutting Edge but also something that we need to focus on all the time and it's academic competencies equity and inclusion and social emotional learning and skills they all go together we cannot emphasize one or the other without all three so academic competencies are critical social emotional learning and skills are critical and equity and inclusion and the focus on diversity is critical and the way they mesh together is what our teaching staff and Leadership staff is doing over the next few months to see how we can really combine those in the most efficient way and really approach the teaching of our of our children holistically into supporting that so I'm thrilled to

011hear the secondary update you'll hear aspects of all three of those areas in that presentation and uh we got an amazing group that does work around that and lastly the budget vote I'll mention when we talk but a big thank you to Derek Felice not just the budget vote but the budget presentation obviously tonight I'll mention that a little bit at the beginning of that presentation but that's also a major Focus for this evening so having said all that that's my superintendent's update any questions from the board regarding it anything yeah thank you Dr Terra Nova item four is presentations recognitions we don't have any at this time I just want to take the opportunity to thank our administrators our teachers the entire staff here at Victor Central Schools for the work you do every

012day that supports our success thank you for that in addition uh thank the the entire Victor Central School community that also supports what we need to do and you know including PTSA Pi voice the Educational Foundation booster clubs parents I mean I could go on and on I hope I didn't leave anyone out but thank you to all um and these are the folks that need to be recognized and and honored also so thank you item five public participation do we have any no public participation this evening so we will go to item six acceptance of consent items we have six a through l so I'll first entertain a motion to accept these consent items a motion please Lisa second um Kristen Kristen senior moment sorry no problem it happens um any comments or questions

013other than my senior moment what it's might my job to really again month after month were um just so grateful for the support from our community continued support and from our PTSA a very large donation to The District in support of the square one art program which I honestly as a parent of kids that did Square One art it still hangs on our fridge that was 20 years ago I mean it really makes an impact great great opportunity for kids to express themselves other than academically but with a visual and arts and um the camera that went to the athletic department and thanks for that donation too thank you for that other comments yeah a couple quick comments uh and then I'm gonna ask Mr valise also to make a quick comment if that's okay

014Mr DeLucia um first uh recognize the Personnel agenda as we always do that's item C two people that I have to recognize on here in a good way and it's really sad uh first of all at the end of this year uh John Ryan uh School social worker who's been in our district for many many years is unfortunately for us retiring but great for him although we're still trying to talk him into doing some work for us he's an amazing amazing social worker who's helped thousands of kids and really has gone across buildings because it for a long period of time he's the only social worker in the district so John is retiring but I want to just say a huge thank you to him and and all his great work and tremendous effort for

015our kids and he's he's really literally saved countless lives in his work and although he's already retired then we brought back David Roderick who is an outstanding school counselor for the intermediate building who thankfully for us came back as a long-term substitute school psychologist at the high school and he's been doing a fantastic job and unfortunately he's leaving us now for a second retirement I guess he might be back we'd love it but he's done such an incredible job he basically shifted roles helped us out as a school psychologist he's got such knowledge around kids and the workings of students and teachers and parents it was amazing to have him as an interim and so I just want to send a big thank you to David I really appreciate that and his efforts and hopefully

016we'll get him back too and then real quick approval of the school calendar for 23-24 school year that's part of the consent agenda just to let everybody know our breaks are the same as Monroe County in fact all the BOCES have aligned their breaks so there's no issues around families from different counties and breaks so it's just something we're very happy about and I just want to Derek if you could just take Mr valise maybe 30 seconds to a minute and explain the uh the audit real quickly that'd be great yes so um we have several audits throughout the year and the one specifically we want to talk about today is the single audit that is a review of our special Aid fund which is our grants because of our volume of spending last year

017in the stimulus fund that was the grants that were selected not just as her gears they looked at every single one of our stimulus grants they had originally blocked off the business office calendar for two days thanks to the hard work of the business office Penny Johnson I treasure everything was documented in a folder when they came in we handed them the folder and they didn't even make it through a whole day and they were able to complete their whole audit and usually when they have an audit they usually find something to pick at and I'm happy to say that they left the audit of our stimulus grants with absolutely no comments they believe that we are doing exactly what we're supposed to or what we told the state we were going to do with

018the money and they were very happy with us great terrific thank you for that other comments seen none all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed abstentions motion carried thank you item 7A campus news please laughs good evening everybody my name is Ashley sokola principal of intermediate building our students have been working hard participating in the American Heart association's kids heart challenge students are learning about keeping their hearts and brains healthy and the importance of moving every day our students have already raised over five thousand dollars and that money goes to help people with special hearts but there is still time as we are working through the challenge until February 17th next week is friendship week PTSA ECS VPS and Vis are all partnering together to provide a friendship theme week students are encouraged

019to participate in the theme of the day to emphasize friendship caring and kindness the theme next week fits perfectly with the VIS character trade of the month kindness similar to our other character traits at Vis students have been learning about the trait in their homerooms and special areas and we'll celebrate soon with an upcoming student of the month assembly our music department completed the Winter concert season with an amazing chorus and band concert on January 17th and 18th the department continued right into all County for a wonderful weekend of music making last weekend our music department staff members are talented and skilled but also flexible and understanding as you know our Auditorium is under construction due to the renovation of the stage area connected to the project many of our morning music ensembles needed to

020relocate to the Senior High music rooms back in October this change affected over 300 students parents drop off routine and the entire musical Department staff at VIs the senior high teachers and administrators welcomed our ensembles to the building during their school day to ensure our groups had a rehearsal space each day department leaders Laura Brewer and Amy Oldfield as well as Ensemble teachers Anna Atwater Stacy Moore Alex Boucher Gretchen judge Dom Marini and Lauren spellery worked with administrators to ensure a smooth transition thank you to Karen finter Brian siesto Kelly Klink Rhonda Don said and Chris Marshall for their help in organizing and planning the transition I know that's a lot of names but I truly appreciate the team approach and collaboration problem solving to ensure that our students and staff continue to have the

021opportunity to make music when Karen Fender and I initially sat down to problem solve together we do not want any decision to negatively impact our students Music Experience this was successful largely due to this teacher's resilience passion patience and effort consequently our students continue learning and progressing as they work towards goals to perform at their concerts and most recently the all-county performance the good news is the construction team finished the stage area and then samples returned to Vis for rehearsals and our fingers are crossed that the rest of the construction project will be finished very shortly thank you thank you foreign principal at the senior high school a couple of the updates I was going to share are actually going to be in the presentation in a little bit but I do have a couple

022of others that I want to talk about a few months ago I think I updated the board on something that we call the Seal of by literacy uh for students this is something that um the state recognizes high school graduates who have attained a high level of proficiency in English and one or more World languages and the intent is to encourage not only the study of languages but to identify High School grad graduates with language and by literacy skills for employers to provide universities with additional information about applicants seeking admission and placement and to prepare students with 21st century skills to recognize the value of an additional language instruction and students they they earned this seal for their graduation status by completing a matrix of different activities over the course of their High School career

023uh including everything from both English and World Language scores on final exams and their coursework and various projects that can be completed during their High School career last year we had about seven or eight students I think are in the seal and this year we're looking at more than double that so we're really proud of the students who are pursuing this I also want to thank PTSA next week we're going to be hosting our annual books at breakfast this is something that PTSA has done in multiple buildings across the district where they literally will give away free books to students and it comes at the perfect time it's right before the break where you know usually the weather's not that great but lately it's been a little bit weird but in any event it's a

024great way to promote literacy in all of our schools I want to make sure I think btsa for for constantly doing this every year for us is a huge help to promote student literacy it gives students something to do during that break week I also want to um thank the students who are participating in the Dei District committee meetings I think between the high school and the junior high we have approximately nine or ten students these are students who are articulate they're passionate and they're eager to work with our staff and the community about this important subject so I want to thank them for their Devotion to this important topic for giving their time to this important work I think many of the times when we Implement something or take on an initiative the most

025important voices in the room are the students voices because this is about them and it's for them so I want to thank you to the entire committee and to our student reps thank you thank you foreign gee the principal of the junior high school and I'd like to open by echoing the same statements from Tim from earlier just very excited for our student Who's involved in the accident yesterday had a chance to talk with his mother this morning she sounded like she was in very good spirits and he wrote the greatest little note to us you know basically saying if you hadn't heard I had an accident yesterday but happily I'm recovering quickly and I should be back in a couple days so totally unprompted and when I talked to his mom she didn't even

026know that he had done that so she was also very proud of her son in that moment as well but again same thank you as it Tim said to the entire staff and also to Ashley's building as well there's a sibling in that building who they were able to catch and support because that that child's afternoon was also impacted quite a bit so I just did a great job all the way around for everyone involved I think as Tim Also may have mentioned this is counselor appreciation week and so we really appreciate the work that our counseling department does day in and day out to support not only the kids in our building but also the the adults in the building as well in the community at Large right now as we're talking about our

027counselors they are in the midst of program planning for our 809 transitions so this week they have a meeting with students to help do course selections for the beginning of their High School career I also want to thank Heidi Robb for bringing the spot to the Victor Central School District about a year and a half ago maybe it's a year ago she kind of brought this idea to us and we're excited that we're going to be having our ribbon cutting for our Junior High location February 14th at 2 20. so if anybody's interested come on over to the high school and now you can be a part of that ribbon cutting a lot of work goes into that parent volunteers the indoor track team just had a huge effort for us to gather supplies and

028Megan roehler our school social worker is instrumental in kind of being the liaison for the parent volunteers there today we had a refugee visit with all of our eighth grade students as part of the unit of study that they're doing in their English classrooms connected to a cortex also titled Refugee so they had a chance to hear a true life story of someone who came here at the age of 13 not knowing the language not having a place to live and who's really kind of been very successful so they get a nice behind the scenes approach there in our three eighth grade English teachers really drove that opportunity and along the idea of opportunities I'm happy to say that the JCC Survivors program is going to be returning this spring that's going to be an

029April 26th uh performance and again if it's something any of the board members would like to attend and you're available it's at 9am it's a fantastic program we will have the talk back with the character actors again this year as well and then lastly as Brian mentioned thank you to the PTSA for books at breakfast for us that's going to be on the 20 nope sorry that's going to be on the 16th next Thursday so getting books in the hands of kids just before the vacation is a great thing thank you very much is it foreign good evening I'm Rob DeRose the principal at the Early Childhood school since the last board meeting the Victor Early Childhood school has continued to be filled with joy in positive moments in late January rev theater visit our

030school putting on a performance for our students faculty and staff in the auditorium their show huff and puff a pig's tale engaged in entertained our audiences and shared an important message about working together to be sure that everyone is happy healthy and well taken care of additionally the Victor Early Childhood school positive behavior postcards have started being sent home to our families faculty and staff are sharing the great choices and positivity that's seen each day with our students and their fam and their families by writing out a message on a postcard and then placing it in the office this postcard is then sent through the mail to families to surprise them when they open the mailbox today actually we had a great kindness kickoff event in our Auditorium Mrs Foley one of our music teachers

031wrote a song to go along with a story that all of our students will be reading called try a little kindness by Henry Cole with the help from our general music teachers Mrs Foley Miss DC and Mr Boucher our Auditorium was filled with hundreds of students grades upk through two singing and signing the words to This original song in addition to the Mrs Foley original students enjoyed a teacher-led skit complete with props showing our students how kindness spreads from one person to another making our world a better place today's kickoff event was a result of the great work from our school Community team led by our assistant principal Mrs Reynolds leading up to February break our hallways are becoming decorated with pink red and white Hearts written on the hearts are many reasons that our

032students staff and faculty love the Victor Early Childhood school words and phrases like friends teachers learning new things the bus morning meeting and the word everything shows up over and over these reminders ground Us in the important work that we do each day fostering a joyful welcoming and inclusive School Community for our students families staff and faculty thank you hi Heidi Robb from the primary school I want to thank the board for visiting the primary school yesterday I hope you had a great time I know we did many of you had the chance to see a morning meeting and morning meetings are a powerful way to start each day they build a strong sense of community and set children up for Success both socially and emotionally each day at morning meetings students and teachers Gather

033in their classrooms to interact with one another during the four purposeful components of a morning meeting first is the greeting where students and teachers greet each other by name there's also time for sharing and this is a time where we help our listeners learn to offer empathetic comments or ask clarifying questions typically next is a group activity and this is a brief activity that Fosters group cohesion and helps students practice their social and academic skills and morning meeting typically ends with a morning message and this is a message that's written to the students by their teacher the message is crafted to help students focus on the work they'll do in school that day visiting classrooms during morning meeting is one of the highlights of my day and I hope you enjoyed it as much as

034I did I'd like to end my campus news with a thank you to Mr Mark selvic and his manufacturing class at the senior high Mr zelvic and his students use their woodworking skills to make wobble students wobble stools for students at the primary school some of the stools went to our music department for our young cello players and the rest of them ended up going to our occupational therapists some students learn better when they have that chance to move and wiggle while they're sitting so our occupational therapists will distribute those stools to students that benefit from that movement you've heard quite a few examples this year of the collaboration between the buildings and this is yet another example of that collaboration thank you okay that was campus news brought to you by the number five

035for our five buildings on BCS campus thank you all 7B Victor Central Schools Educational Foundation Jenner Davis a familiar face all right thank you nice to see you all um I see a lot of new faces around the room as well um I'm the current president of the VCS Educational Foundation and given the number of new faces that I see I'm going to assume that not everyone knows the history of the foundation um and take it back a little bit there was a principal in the Intermediate School many years ago back in my era Cheryl Dudley and when she left to take a position at another school district she left behind five hundred dollars that she thought should go she thought Victor should establish a foundation of some sort to help supplement what the budget

036the typical budget could not do in that time well that money sat there for I believe over 20 years um and it was safely tucked away by Mike vistoko and his colleagues and when Don marullo Santiago marulo was superintendent she was one of her goals to to set up the foundation and she did that and I believe it was 2014 when we had officially set things up and had a board in place so we've been operating now for this will be you know eight nine years now um and the first couple of years were largely administrative making sure we had things sorted out legally we work under um Canandaigua National Banks Finger Lakes Area Community endowment so all of our accounts are run under them our asset management is done through the bank as well

037and then we decide as a board everything else that's involved with that um I what do we have here so the idea of the foundation is that we're going to provide educational opportunities for staff and students that the budget would other not wise not provide for um Aaron maybe if you could go to the next slide I'll break out the is there another side thank you the idea is when we first were looking at this we have you know field trips um I sat up there where you guys are when we had to make the very difficult decisions of cutting field trips and other things back during the budget cut so the recession in 2008-9 and I know none of us envisioned that those things wouldn't already be back in the budget by now but

038we appreciate that they are not that's one area that's very important to people we are looking at things for technology the art of teaching which many of the teachers should be familiar with and the principles with the teacher grants that we've offered and then we have the general fund and there's also a marulo fund started in honor of Tom rulo's father for high risk students and that's largely dealing in with the high school and we have a lot of growth that we're still trying to do with the endowment we're not ideally where we would want to be to make sure that we have the funds to continually find all the projects that we hope to to provide to the school I'm trying to ignore the upper left-hand Corner that is a number that was much

039higher last year but as we all know with the markets and things our endowment has gone down a bit so we are right currently at 383 000. um we need probably double that to make sure that we could comfortably keep funding at the rate that we have been different projects so that's another thing that we need to be focusing on going forward is fundraising and that's something that will be a focus for us in the next year or so during covid it was difficult for us to carry on with some of our typical fundraising which was the devil Dash and we've had a lot of support I know from Administration and teachers and student participation that's something that we do in the fall we've done it both here on campus which we did again last

040year and we've also done it a couple of years in the town of Victor for 2023 town of Victor would like us to bring it back down into the village we'll see so we're still in discussions and planning on that but to give you an idea of um uh what the other thing I wanted to talk about the alumni speaker series um I'll jump back to that at the end but for now that was something that you'll see that's actually a picture of Seth Payne um who played for the Houston Texans and the Jacksonville Jaguars and as well as uh Cornell where he went to college um we've been trying to get Seth to be our inaugural uh speaker that hasn't worked yet but we'll get Seth here one of these days as a fundraising

041event and the idea is that we'll have high profile alumni that will come we can use that as a fundraising opportunity for the school um due to covid um some things were put on hold again in that area but many of you may be aware that Keith Partington and Bob dressy have started doing interviews on you know topics that are of interest to Alum it's a way for us to not necessarily raise money for the foundation but it is a way for us to get our raise our profile with the alumni community and the local community as well one of the first ones that was done was with Norma weisen regarding Title IX and the impact that that had on sports for young women in the district what it was like back then it's really

042if you haven't seen it let me know I can certainly get the link to everyone it's a really great listen Norma's very entertaining as well we also did a couple of calls with some of the coaches in section five and others that were involved in that and that were instrumental in making some of those changes and there was supposed to be recorded last week hopefully it's happening this this week the next one will be Tom Turner for those of you that don't know Tom I see Maureen shaking her head Tom was born with spina bifida he went through school during the era that I did at Victor before the Americans with Disabilities Act before a lot of mandates that we all operate under today were in place and he's going to talk about what it

043was like to come through school what the work his mother did addressing the school board to make changes so that you know Tom had the accessibility and opportunities that all of the other kids at Victor had as well so that'll be our next one we could jump back to the prior slide Erin thanks what we have done so far in terms of teacher grants there have been 22 of them and 11 of them have been in the last we did a few in 2021 everything was still undercovered that was a little bit modified but 11 of them happened in 2022. so that's a total of 33 000 that we've done and then that also includes I believe the 14 000 for the field trips but I just thought I'd read to you what we have

044done since 2016 in terms of school projects um I encourage the administration the teachers please reach out to us with ideas I know that there's another round of teacher grants coming up there was a time when there were several meetings I thought why is it so hard for us to give away money but that has changed we are getting a lot more interest now from the teachers the worst that's going to happen is we're going to say no if we don't have the money we might put it aside for a future time to find it and for future funding rounds but also there might be something that you think of that we haven't thought of that you're very interested in let us know you never know we can might be able to find a donor

045work with somebody if it's already outside our financial constraints so since 2016 some of the things that we have done and it's kind of broken out up here in music classroom technology Recreation stem accessibility library media we've done benches and Arbors for the primary Courtyard DVDs and breakout kits that were available for sign out through the various libraries Chromebooks for a particular second grade class microscopes 12 trapezoid tables for six classrooms in the fifth grade two standing desks for sixth grade classrooms portable for projector for the phys Ed Department morning tubs for stem-based materials in third grade VCS music department we purchased a a particular size string base that they needed Early Childhood library books and primary library books when covet had students working from home and and a lot of activity shut down that

046was a way for us to make sure we were getting resources into the school by way of donations a classroom set of 25 ukuleles in a rack to go with that future Doctors medical kits birdhouses and feeders we had a teacher who created some stem materials that can then be used and by all the teachers music rhythm blocks flexible seating the wobble stools which I know was just mentioned I'm not sure if those wobble stools are separate from what we funded or if that was in addition to also trapezoid tables for different teachers that were looking for alternatives for setting up their classrooms and then we did last year [Music] um the field trips so we did Seneca Park Zoo George Eastman house and the Sam patch cruise we plan to do that again this

047year we have the funds to do that again which is essentially one field trip per building for the lower grades ideally we do more um you know not to stoke any competitive juices that might be up at the table but Canandaigua is funding three to four or more field trips per grade I just spoke to a teacher tonight who I'm second grade teacher who will be taking her kids on five School funded field trips this year so it's you know we're there's a big disparity and what we'd love to see the kids do what we can do to help is great um but it would be great to see all of that that it's not something that we ever anticipated that we would have to do long term so if there's ways that we can

048work together or find alternative funding that would be great as well and we look forward to doing that again um and where else are we at here so then that um that's essentially what we were hoping to do this year we'll have the devil Dash again again the teacher grants round is coming up and then I will see you back here on Thursday May 11th introducing David wadwani who will be inducted into the graduates of Distinction it's been a few years coming due to covet and various delays but he will be here and I invite you all to attend the night before we will be having our inaugural speaker series highlighting David woodwani up at the senior high Auditorium on Wednesday May 10th and we will be using that as a fundraising event um for

049those of you who don't know I'll just briefly let you know David was in the class of 1989 after Victory attended Brown University had a degree in computer science and then he headed to Silicon Valley where he's had a very successful career with companies such as Adobe Greylock Partners app Dynamics which he took public went back to Adobe and he is currently the president of adobe so he will be here we will be looking to also do events within the high school the junior high if if some of the principals can think of things where he might add value in the lower buildings please let me know he will likely be here and available for two full days um please CB after tonight or Reach Out Liz Welch and I are working on organizing the

050in-school stuff it'll be great to have him here I think he'll be very inspiring to a lot of different groups of students he's involved in a variety of things not just computers and we look forward to that so I'll take any questions anybody might have and questions comments is there any limitation on how you can donate for example um I know that Estates in estate planning may want to do that type of thing but they contact you directly or would it be better to go through CNB no they can contact us and we can make the arrangements for them we have had for example when Claire Morrow a primary school teacher passed away her son Mike Morrow has been on the one of the trustees of the foundation since the Inception they directed Memorial gifts

051for their mom to the foundation that also happened somewhat with Ken wegert Don Santiago marullo for her retirement she directed any donations that people wanted to make to the foundation so yeah that's something we can easily handle yeah other questions very informative Jenner thank you very much thank you okay item 7c is our management plan the secondary update Karen Carey Kristen Brian Brian laughs good evening everyone back again this week to share an update on the work that's been happening in relation to the goals of the management plan this time from a perspective of the secondary levels grades 7 through 12 and so I'm joined by Brian gee principal of the junior high school Brian siesto principal of the high school Carrie Goodell who is the director of math and science and Kristen Williamson the

052director of humanities and professional development and so tonight we're going to share some information about all of the wonderful things that happen in two very busy buildings across our district and so we are thrilled to present to you and share with you how that convergence that Tim was talking about around those all-important components of culture and building a strong culture not just in relation to the warm and welcoming environment of our buildings but a community culture within it how that plays a role in helping to support our students development of their identity their individual identity so they can achieve the best positive outcome for themselves how we can work together to Foster that understanding of how our community comes together and what that looks like through a very diverse and inclusive lens and all important

053because the key to all of those Bright Futures is really around that academic competence and so how can we work together to really have all those those pieces come alive to support our students achieving all of the great things that they do so tonight you're going to hear a little bit about the progress of our our work to support that convergence and really we're going to focus again like we did last time on those two goals one around culture and all of the components within that and learning and instruction and all of the work that's happening with Administration and teachers working need any in that strong collaboration the professional development that's taking place and forecasting some of the work that's to come it's not to say that goal three is in an area of focus

054across our buildings and I know you heard from Karen Ryan Shannon Mark and McMurtry and Amanda Tripp a few months ago around some of the work that's happening around student supports and opportunities in those programs and you may hear bits and pieces of how that work is is really kind of feeding into goal one and two so with that I'm going to turn it over to Brian and Brian who's going to spend some time talking about the goal alignment and how their work around that first goal is really coming to fruition so if you take a look at this slide right here and you go if you take a look at the Victor junior high school goals in Victor senior high school goals they're almost identical and and that was not uh intentional in terms

055of trying to take an easy way out what we did this summer uh during our administrative Retreat is uh we spent three really intense days talking about data but also our Focus areas for this coming year and I think it was on a third day when we were off campus where we we decided that we really wanted to have some tight alignment we've never really had this before between our buildings and across the district last month you heard from the elementary buildings about some common themes and you're going to hear the same thing tonight with the junior high school and the high school so along with our goals being the same I think what you'll find is this Brian and I present tonight you'll see that the action plans and the steps that we're taking

056are going to be a little different right so the needs of our students the needs of our faculty and staff might be a little different so while our goals are directly aligned you'll see that some of the steps are a little bit different and we're going to talk Brian and I specifically around goal one primarily and then Kerry and Kristen will cover information from goal too so looking at goal one for us which is really around the the creating of that welcoming uh and safe environment what we really are talking a lot about here is around the concept of what is an inclusive environment and what does that mean and so really what that means is that students should feel free to express who they are their own opinions their own points of views and

057to fully participate in their learning and their social activities while being safe in their environment so as we talk about a focal point in our action plan it's really rooted in that core component around inclusivity and what does that look like for us so we have a series of action steps for goal one that we undertook this year and we're in the midst of one is really kind of creating that school-wide sense of values and having a system and structure that helps promote that communicate that and instill that for everyone we're talking about implementing some instructional strategies in the classroom at that tier one level to help teach our students the skills that they need in order to be able to have an inclusive environment not only for themselves but for others around them and

058then we're also going to talk a little bit about the multiple systems of support that students need in order to make sure that they can have that sense of safety in their environment so the first one is talking about clear expectations and so why would a you know clear expectations really mean that every member of the school Community will understand what's expected of them in particular with regards to how they interact with one another we form our expectations with input from all of our stakeholders within our building and we utilize several key resources in kind of helping frame these expectations our current code of conduct would be one of those the New York State benchmarks for social emotional learning and the associated skills with social emotional learning is going to be another component of that

059and then really looking at those intentional instructional strategies to make sure that we're doing more than just kind of saying that we're doing it but we're really working to embed it in practice so the importance of that is really to set the foundation for the shared experience we want everyone to have our development process started before the beginning of the school year meeting with groups of teachers faculty staff other stakeholders and really kind of outlining what we believe those values are we put together a graphic that we published and presented to the members of the school building in communities so they're all on the same page with that uh and then we are as an administrator trying to provide support for students and teachers around that along with that we talk about a communication plans

060like I said we've published our expectations if you walk around our building you'll see them on the walls in our cafeteria in our hallways and in our classrooms uh Laura and I do regular visits with classes and with students we're starting again tomorrow by pulling kids from lunches for a few minutes to kind of talk to them and reroute them and ground them in those expectations so it's something that's part of the Living Community within our building did we find every opportunity to kind of publicize and sort of reinstill and then in terms of measuring this we we want to look at relevant data that we would use in order how do we measure the success that we're having and if whether or not the approaches that we're taking um are working and so relevant

061data for us looks like engagement in school activities for students their academic performance their attendance and then some behavioral referral information as well as we look at our second action step and this is really kind of focused on building capacity for our students and this is the intentionality that we're talking about we're utilizing What's called the castle wheel and so the Kessel wheel really is a great graphic and a delivery system that outlines five core competencies for social emotional learning and skills those being self-awareness self-management responsible decision making relationship skills and so and social awareness and so what we're looking to do is have explicit instruction in these different core competencies delivered while teachers are delivering instruction that's not easy to do and it's definitely a different type of thinking that our teachers are having

062to undertake so we're moving slow and I'll talk to you a little bit about some of the professional development and the support plan that we have for our teachers and in trying to make this work move forward we've chosen to start with relationship skills and when we talked about this with faculty why we picked that section of the wheel to begin with research shows that if students or people have solid relationship skills literally the happiness of their life their life expectancy and their ability to form lasting relationships are that much more enhanced so as much as it's about learning content it's really about helping students and people learn to connect with other human beings so that they're going to have a higher quality of life so that's why we started with relationship skills we think

063that's probably one of the most important there and if you take a look at the bullets there that will kind of outline for you some of the areas teachers are starting to select maybe picking one a lesson every week or two they may work intentionally to embed something like practicing more intentional teamwork talking about how do we get students an opportunity to show leadership maybe talking about or demonstrating how students can stand up for the rights of each other or someone else and so we're not necessarily trying to hit every bullet every day and every teacher is not expected to embed one of these things into every lesson that they do it's where it makes sense for them where it makes sense in their curriculum but it's making sure that when we do do it

064we're doing it with a purpose the plan to support teachers around this work we began by introducing at the beginning of the year the SEL Benchmark document to teachers we began by going through and taking a look at our current code of conduct and our current behavior management systems in light of those benchmarks we've introduced the Kessel wheel only in terms of relationship skills we're not looking to kind of throw all of this at people at one time we started at a faculty meeting in a large group feedback from teachers suggested Laura and I would come and meet with small groups that they're choosing either through plc's their professional learning communities or their departments they gave us feedback on which they wanted and we've been meeting with teams and we're bringing specific resources to them

065to say here is a way that you might be able to take to Target collaborative problem solving skills and can you apply that activity to a learning Target that you have coming up and so we're not asking them to invent things we're trying to provide them with not necessarily plug and play but some ready-made Concepts and activities that they can then sort of use when it makes sense for them so that work again is it's a slow process in March we're going to do an activity where we model each faculty meeting another sort of inclusive instructional practice and in our faculty meeting in March we're going to create an opportunity for teachers to hear from one another what have you tried what's worked in that what would you adjust and would you recommend this to

066a friend and so they're going to have an opportunity to talk with four or five colleagues they normally don't work with or interact with uh to be able to hear from one another again that's feedback from teachers on how they feel like they learn best is from their colleagues so the professional development opportunity is uh you know again like I said it's layered uh it's tailored to hopefully what the teachers feel is valuable to them and when we decide that as a building we're ready then we will introduce another part of the wheel and we'll spend as much time as it takes to get that piece in place before we move on to the other we don't have a set timeline you know we haven't said by June we have to get through all five

067that's not really where we are the other piece that we're talking about in terms of how do we make sure that we have a structure for students to feel welcome and have welcoming environments is by looking at a multiple tiered system of support you've probably heard of mtss before in its core mtss is really about instruction but what it really does is it allows for a framework to exist to be able to review data to review review process and progress bring adults together so that we can make thoughtful decisions on what our kids need or perhaps what our building needs is a more Universal support so in that diagram we've been adding each month at a faculty meeting another component to our system of support at the junior high and then educating all of our

068faculty and staff of the function of each of those different groups so our instructional support team for example is a key group of people who meet once a week during our activity period with a goal to look at referrals that come from classroom teachers or teams of teachers to try to help create plans individualized plans for students who've been referred for academic interventions they might need that might go back to the classroom team to say here are a couple things to try let's take a look at the student again and say five weeks it may look like this student may qualify for more intensive services that maybe we can deliver in the classroom or perhaps we have to look at a program like an AIS math lab or a literacy lab for example we also

069have a Special Education team called SCT set also meets on a weekly basis they perform almost the same function as IST only with students who are currently classified with an IEP and then we have an AIS intensive support the other side of that sort of line there the behavioral supports these really work in tandem although the graphic doesn't really like to show that we have other groups of people who come together and review data and make different types of decisions so our PPS is really your counseling department including social workers and psychologists and administrators we have an SEL team they sometimes come in ahead or after if we have a behavioral issue with a student to work on mediation skills to work on restorative practice skills with our kids and they're also there to help

070support classroom teachers as they're looking to embed social emotional learning in their classrooms and so we have a whole variety of different structures there with the idea that if a student is going to truly be successful they need multiple supports around them and a lot of these supports are designed to make sure that when they come to school they feel supported they feel valued and they feel like they have an opportunity to access their learning so that's the work that we've been doing around goal one I'll turn this over to Brian unless there are any questions on this section for us the junior high all right and Brian's going to take us through the work that's happening at the high school okay so our goal one action steps as you can see here a little

071bit different uh but with the goal of achieving uh similar results across the buildings um you're going to hear a little bit that should be one two and three uh clear behavioral expectations uh cultivation of Dei awareness and supporting our teachers and students with that SEL School relationship one of the things that was extremely important as high school administrators this this summer was for us to openly discuss and be very transparent that last year especially was somewhat of a difficult year when it came to student Behavior so one of the things that we were very very conscious of in the opening days you see that graphic to the right we wanted to explain to our faculty and staff what our Behavior expectation pyramid looks like and we share this with our students as well in

072our opening day meetings with the students you'll see at the bottom of that Foundation of that pyramid is that the teacher relationship classroom management plan we did we asked every teacher to vocalize or to write down what is their behavior expectation plan for their students in their classrooms so that not only the students understand but we as administrators could support them as well this was also the first time in three years where we we were able to have class us meetings at the beginning of the year because of covid that I can't tell you what a huge kickoff that is to establishing a good solid foundation for the school year we've seen the number of our major incidences when it comes to behavior and discipline referrals drastically drop from where it was especially last year

073but also the last couple of years our absenteeism group they meet every other week to discuss absentee data we want to make sure that we're tracking students who are who are not in school we do send the the absentee letters out to parents and I'm grateful that they will call me to discuss those situations with their students and and we understand that every student has a certain circumstance that they might be working through but we also do track that data we've re-implemented our tardy policy we weren't really able to enforce that much during covid but now that we are back in and up in full you know sometimes the students might groan a little bit if they get a detention from being at school on time but I I'm happy to say that we've noticed

074especially this month a drastic reduction the number of students who are to school and we've been sharing our tier one behavioral supports for for teachers we did it in the beginning of the year in our faculty meetings and I'm also going to discuss in a couple of minutes the Snapback strategies that are our guidance counselors did during our social studies classes this year I know that I think you get the presentations a day or two ahead of time so some of the um succeeding slides here are just images of some of the work that we have done these are some of the resources that we've shared with teachers if you take a look look at these lists of ways that people can create a positive culture and environment in their school if you read down

075through it it's nothing that's anything really revolutionary however when we give it to our staff and you actually take time to read it there could be one or two things in there that you that might just jump out at you from the page thinking hey you know what this is something I can actually do in my classroom that maybe I never really thought of before so again it's not anything that's revolutionary it's just strategies for us for our teachers to create in their classrooms to create that that good solid foundation for instruction as well as behavior management this is something that I'm really really proud of um fitting that we're honoring our school counselors this week this was called a snap it should say a stop name and process presentation that they did earlier this

076year in all Social Studies classes what the idea here was that we we want to build students resiliency when it comes to figuring out what are the emotions that they're feeling and why do they feel them you can't see it there but it says during the past 30 days how clearly were you able to describe your feelings and 64 percent of students identified this as an area for growth so what we saw in the last few years was an increase in the number of students who thought that they might be in crisis and they would come down to the office and we would help them process through those situations and we still do that now as a result of this presentation what we've done is we've asked students when they feel that they're in crisis

077to stop for a moment to try to name what they're feeling and then we gave them some strategies and how they could work through those feelings before they hit the point where they felt that they needed direct intervention Without Really Trying to either fight through it or to name that emotion on their own and that so far we we've seen fantastic results with that and there's there's the quote so part of this was asking them to stop uh and to name their emotion uh to to quote-unquote uh tame it and then we did provide them with strategies that they could use uh to help them snap back um and try to help deal with some of their emotions so this has been really really helpful when we meet with our students we will bring this

078up this is part of our vernacular now when it comes to helping them understand what their emotions are and how we can help them process through it okay here's our second um action step uh relates to cultivation of diversity equity and inclusion our Dei initiative we have a few examples of what we've done this year so far as we work with students to help respect our other cultures identities and creative inclusive inclusive environments Scott Fitch came in this year and he presented to our to our students at the bidding beginning of the school year he does a pause before you post in the junior high school but as he comes to the high school and he works with our students he kind of brings it up to the next level about how the decisions that

079students make can have lasting impact and he doesn't do it in a way that's meant to to berate or have kids feel bad about themselves it truly is a moment for them to be able to pause and to think about the impact that they have that they might now not know that they have when they make a certain decision last month we we had our our medical explorers host something called an imals presentation for for students who are interested in coming to that this is an organization that discusses um the the dreaded disease ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease we were able to zoom with not only care providers but people who are going through that awful Affliction as well as those family members who lost someone to ALS it was a great example of having

080students come in and get get a better understanding of something that they might not know much about that they might hear about but they can actually see and almost feel how it impacts other people and we've used that as a launching PAD as one example of how to create empathy and to put yourself in other people's shoes this coming week I am very very excited we are going to be doing a holocaust Remembrance Day on February 15th Jen case has been working with our social studies Department we are going to be bringing in a survivor of the Holocaust who is going to tell her story she was born in 1939 and she just reading her biography was was pretty impactful so we're going to be doing that this week and we of course have been

081partnering with Keisha James for the last two years in doing diversity Equity inclusion work with our building leaders as we did this summer in August but also with our teacher leaders and our entire staff during the course of the school year so this is a just a promo of the the website from the imals website and I also want to highlight if you'll notice that our school slogan there we've had that slogan now for six years uh respecting diversity and cultivating kindness uh before the you used to be striving for excellence but we a few years ago recognized our increasing diversity in our student population in our community population and that was something that we shifted to and that is something that you can find all over our building it's something that we hold very

082dear to us and finally our action step three which is understanding of the relationship between SEL and school relationship you'll notice on the right you'll see a warm welcome a little slide there we start every single one of our faculty meetings with like kind of a goofy warm welcome where we ask our staff to kind of just take a moment to take a look and respond they scan a QR code that's something that we're committed to because we want our staff to embrace this type of thinking in their classrooms it's important for them to make connections with students it goes a long way when it comes to social emotional learning and mental health so we try to give these examples every month with our faculty and let's before we jump into the business of the

083day let's just take a pause and maybe either get to know each other or have a little reflection on something that's kind of light and something that we can talk about um so we're gonna I'm gonna talk a little bit about the castle wheel uh presentations that we've been doing um as well as a few other uh examples of the SEL School relationship work that we're doing so similar to Brian um in the high school we are also using the castle wheel as a way of introducing SEL work into our classrooms we want to make sure that this is not something that's just a two-minute Standalone activity which which is easy to kind of think about we want this to be a structured way of implementing into teaching so that connections are made with students

084not just at the beginning of a lesson or at the end of a lesson or just short conversation with how was your weekend we want to really start to infuse that as teachers are lesson planning and thinking about how they're going to approach the work for that day so what we do is this last month we started we started with the self-management component and we had a great faculty meeting and the reason why we started with this component is for us we wanted to make sure that uh we could help students be ready to learn that day and you can see the descriptors there of self-management uh managing one's emotions down to sending personal Collective goals if you walk into a room or into a sighting you are just not mentally ready for the work

085that you have in front of you you have to figure out a way to kind of Center yourself and our teachers we want to empower them for that for that ability to help our students be ready for the learning that they that they're going to undertake so what we did is we did a little teach piece we we had our faculty meeting in the gymnasium we every single time uh for every staff member who walked in we gave them a random card they had a number on it it was one through 25 and we created 25 random groups of five faculty members about five about 125 faculty members in our building and after we did our little teach piece we had them break off into the smaller groups where they did some poster reflection work

086on what this competency means to them but also how do they Infuse it in their lessons and what we really liked about this is by scattering the staff we had people from different departments who were able to hear and understand how do you do SEL work in your lessons it's pretty easy to talk about that when you're in your core department but when you scatter you get different perspectives so we were able to create a really long list I think it was like seven pages long of the strategies that people are using in their classrooms to help address this this competency in their in their lesson planning this is a snapshot of some of the data that we're using from Panorama Panorama is a is a platform that communicates with school tool I think it's

087every single night it's been a wealth of information we're just starting to learn how to use it where it gives us all kinds of information on student academics attendance behavior and and their SEL Reflections and some of the surveys that they do you can break it down into subgroups you can break it down by all different types of uh different data points and it really almost takes like a week to figure out how to use it but so far it's been a great tool for us this is one example of how we're using data to inform us about our SEL instruction okay this is part of the uh the list that uh I just shared uh explained to you about the self-management strategies uh that our our teachers compiled well we generated this list we're

088going to be sharing with them at the faculty meeting on Monday um we've also done some work for tiered support for students I mentioned this I think in one of my earlier uh updates to the board a few months ago about the tiered interventions that we want to provide students Jim Morrow one of our assistant uh principals as well as Jessica Palmer who's one of our Math teachers I did a presentation on how to recommend students for a different tier of support tier one is intended for all students tier two is is maybe for a smaller group of students who might need an additional uh sort of support in order to help with their schooling and then tier three is that probably that top five percent who needs that more intensive care so we've created

089a student report uh referral you can see here where if a teacher has a concern about a student and they want to make a referral to the mtss team for consideration for a different tier of support they fill out this form and that team meets every other week for consideration in looking at students schedules we also are going to be implementing in the next couple of weeks a sign-in form from when students come down into the office or want to see the counselor if they don't have an appointment but they need to see somebody we want to start getting some data in terms of what they're coming down for what the reason is you know the different categories is the academic is it social emotional um did you have an argument with somebody so that's

090some information that we haven't really tracked until this point and we actually got the idea from our librarian Danielle Westbrook uh when students go to the library she has them sign in uh on on a like a an iPad and so far this year up until I think yesterday she said 30 000 visitors to the library um over the course of the year and that's great information for us to show not only that they're utilizing the library but we also um she's able to figure out you know what are the reasons are they coming here is it is it to read is it to just relax does it do some research so that's the type of data that we're trying to use in order to help us inform our SEL practices uh this is great

091information I just want to be cognizant of the time we have a couple minutes left thank you so I'm going to Dazzle you with how fast I can talk about our instruction and curriculum at Victor here at the Victor secondary level um so the office of instruction was um happy to collaborate with Brian and Brian as we work really closely just to make sure we're focusing um on our instructional momentum forward and and some changes that are happening so Kristen and I are going to talk with you a little bit tonight around two areas of focus related to goal two um which is specifically around some projects that have been occurring within the realm of curriculum and instructional supports so Kristin and I have been working with a multitude of groups um in departments and

092plc's at the um at grade 7 through 12 really working to now take that consistent curriculum Writing Practice um and have groups start to engage in that writing you know gone are the days where curriculum is a list of topics on paper where somebody's implementing on their own and just with a simple set of Standards now you have content standards you have application pieces you have practices you have models and cross-cutting Concepts you have the SEL competencies we're working to infuse in so there's a lot of different factors that go into curriculum writing we're completing that work either in a release day format or after school options depending on the number of Staff participating and each of those processes to make sure our curriculum stays guaranteed and viable there's a reflection piece built in so

093that groups are then reflecting on that curriculum that they've written and identifying areas that need further attention going forward so I'm going to talk to you just about a few of the projects happening within Math and Science um so at the junior high level we have our seventh and 8th grade math teams wrote an amazing amount of curriculum this summer really unpacked those Next Generation learning standards and wrote some amazing curriculum this summer and have been spending the fall really reflecting on that work and identifying what adjustments or changes they feel like they need to make based on some of that student performance data and how they're responding to those changes in the realm of Junior High science our teachers have been working furiously over the past few months New York State released new science

094investigations for the elementary and intermediate grades these are required mandatory Hands-On kind of lab experiences for students to engage in before they will take that 8th grade science test and so we've had to spend a lot of time figuring out where those investigations are going to live per grade level and how we're going to have them make sense with our curriculum so that they just don't feel isolated and outside of what teachers are teaching so a lot of great quality work there at the senior high level our math team has been working really hard to look at our programming all the way from AP precalc that you heard about last month all the way down to some of our programming for our ninth graders in algebra there's going to be a significant amount of writing

095this summer in algebra and really looking at how we're mirroring expectations and course rigor for our general education students and our special education students so looking at that range of programming and how they can provide opportunities for students our senior high science department is going to begin curriculum writing in March in the new living environment course they actually have another year to do that writing to align it with the Next Generation standards but they're excited to get um get to work on that development early because they want the opportunity to implement these units and then reflect and modify them before it's actually connected to the assessment probably one of the biggest lifts we've had this year at the senior high is in our business department we're all aware of the tremendous kind of growth and

096participation in our business program and you know it was it was jarring and I think overwhelming for those teachers to to recognize how outdated um and in need of improvement their curriculum was so they have been really working kind of from ground zero and building up to develop curriculum for all of their courses and this work will be important as they're really committed to continuing that growth in their department and looking for ways to um strengthen that programming because they'd like to look towards applying for a CTE approval program so it's exciting work there but really want to get our curriculum in a good place and they're committed to that work so a lot of exciting work within the realm of math and science I think Kristen's going to give you an update on humanities

097hello um well really I just want to say thank you to our Educators who are engaging in this work as Carrie mentioned they're either taking release time which means they're writing subplans or they're coming after they teach all day to come and write this curriculum we do pay them but still that's a big ask so thank you um the teams that I get to support include at the junior high and Senior High English social studies and World Language World Language is on a little break because they are implementing new standards and they're already a year ahead so they'll write this summer but every single um the other departments at the social studies Junior High Senior High Level and English Junior High Senior High Level have all written within the last two weeks alone so when

098I say we have committed Educators it's pretty profound I will highlight one recent project from our English 11 team they recently came together and wrote a unit on identity of course incorporating our next Generation Ela standards so they were really looking at literary analysis which makes sense with our English region students but a big premise they were they were discovering this in this unit was really ensuring that we are not in our identities identified by a single story and so really combating stereotypes so they're doing some incredible work and I thank those teams for continuing to come again after a busy work day um from an instructional lens we're continuing our focus on learning targets much mostly through the observation process so we're taking that opportunity as we observe Educators to talk about Clarity of

099the learning for our students so our students clear on what they're learning versus what they're doing that day and are we clear with them on how their success will be measured in addition we've been having a lot of conversations through that feedback process the observation process on student engagement which we know is critical to their learning I'll just mention Keisha James and Shane wagon again they've been coming to in particular the humanities departments to really talk about because their curriculum can sometimes lend itself to some complex conversations they've been doing a series of professional learning opportunities on how to navigate those complex conversations so how we help our Scholars speak up and how we as teachers can even be better equipped to to have those conversations so a huge thank you to that partnership as

100well um and I just have to say thank you so much for Jen case she is our secondary instructional specialist in the area of humanities and she has just been a gift um she recently provided a PD on strong core instruction which um you know focused on learning targets focused on engagement focused on feedback what are the real key components of our instruction that has a high impact on student learning so thank you to her um and I know Brian both Brian's talked about mtss on the SEL side I'll briefly mention just the work that the buildings are doing on the academic side we have really clear criteria for when students need additional academic support we have clear criteria for when they no longer need it because we want to make sure we create independent

101Learners and again I have to say our academic intervention Specialists are just phenomenal at the secondary level and have really been instrumental in all of that that work I will quickly turn it over to Brian to talk a little bit more about student centered instruction doing a great job we're almost there thank you for your attention to this it's a lot of work right there's a lot going on so we want to share a lot of details um very quickly about student-centered learning we talk about student-centered learning it's really about student agency and their own learning which is their sense of ownership uh through learning activities which are meaningful and relevant to who they are as people hopefully driven by their interests and then initiated and guided well by their instructors so what that looks

102like at the junior high school in our tech ed music family consumer science there are a lot of choice based activities for students to engage in so they all have you know the similar outcomes but they have choice in the type of product they want to do to want to create and that occurs in really multiple units of study in those areas in the area of English language arts we have independent reading programs we have Choice based core reading so if you walked into a classroom not every student necessarily is always reading the same text they're going to be making choices based on a selection that the teacher provides them but they're all producing the same skills and the same learning out comes using a different text and overall we're really looking to do some

103enhancements in our project-based learning again where students have an opportunity to come together to collaborate have the sense of ownership and agency and the work that they do and then produce a product that can be unique to them as either an individual or the small group that they're working with right and finally at the high school what we're really focusing on is the observation process this year with the learning targets wanting to make sure um asking teachers where are students supposed to learn and be able to do what's it going to look like and how we know that it's achieved and also that culture of learning that's one of those parts of the rubric that sometimes is overlooked but that really emphasizes the importance of Why students are learning what they're learning so we're looking

104for things like this is important because or I want to emphasize Etc so we're having those conversations in our pre and post meetings with with teachers questions questions anyone well that that was a great deal of information significant amount of work that you folks are doing we appreciate that great job and I feel as though I even learned something how about that so thank you yeah so thank you very much appreciate it okay we're at 7D the budget status update Dr terranova and Derek glace Mr valise will do the bulk of this uh but we wanted I just want to talk a little bit about our financial history you know this district for many years has spent a lot of time growing building facilities hiring trying to keep up with staff uh trying to keep

105up with the financial just the expectations of the community and then of course in 2008 they froze the state aid formula on Victor and was one of the only districts that well probably the district that suffered the most in terms of financial damage because of that because the students grew but we didn't get more money from the state at a level that was anywhere close to it so um two quick things about the financial history uh and it really is summarized by that paragraph Thanks to this community in 2020 June of 2020 they passed a uh a tax cap that was exceeded the cap by a significant amount and that allowed us to build a structure of um of revenue from taxes that has exponentially supported us over the next few years and years to

106come so that was a huge move by this community and thanks to the leadership of this board of education and the Board of Education that uh was there that at that time to really get an amazing experience where this community supported the schools to break the tax cap which is unheard of in in most places and then secondly because of this board this board's work in previous boards work the advocacy of groups like the PTSA the VTA and other organizations we were able to really Advocate to unfreeze the state aid formula which now has allowed many more millions of dollars to come to us that was that's actually appropriate for in terms of funding from the state so the combination of breaking the tax cap the one time uh and the state aid formula being

107unfrozen to where now we're getting close to 100 percent of the formula that we're supposed to get now we lost over 100 million dollars in the last 15 years so we don't get that back but the good news is we're getting the money that is close to what we deserve because of that we've been able to add a significant number of staff to many many understaffed areas we've been able to solidify our Reserves and we've been able to do that while our actual true tax rate between 19 and 20 and this school year school year decreased slightly over time so just wanted to show you that graph which illustrates it as you see the yellow line is the additional Personnel that we added each year uh which has been a significant amount you have to

108understand that again in 1920 and for years before that we were significantly understaffed in many many different areas we went over that uh over and over again and it created tremendous stress on our staff and our faculty and we're not there yet but we have made significant progress with that you'll see the percent of reserves compared to the budget has exceeded uh has significantly increased that allows us a to be available to have have money available for emergency situations and B to put money away for longer term projects such as capital reserves and bus purchases that then don't have to come out of the general fund and we can get aided by a significant amount over time from the state and again that blue line really shows the tax rates so the whole time that

109this has occurred we've been able to stabilize our tax rate increases each year to where it's actually decreased slightly between the start of this this whole process where we exceeded the tax cap and now which is amazing and speaks to again the work of this board speaks to the community and and the vibrant nature of this community and certainly the leadership of Derek and our business office so just to review quickly that I'm going to turn over to Derek these are our continued goals for next year you've seen these every month again continue that comprehensive education that we're known for at Victor Focus the alignment of resources on our strategic plan you heard that wonderful presentation which had significant amount of information in it tied to the secondary level that's where our resources need to

110go and the same thing at the elementary level and special education and culture and climate and those types of things maintain that stabilization of reserves continue to add money the more money we can put in the in the capital reserve in an appropriate manner the less impact it will have on taxpayers when we have to do capital projects like the one that's coming over coming out this spring and in the summer certainly that helps us maximize every dollar spent and we want to generate Aid at the highest rates possible so that again that takes the onus off of the taxpayer and really gets us the money that we need and certainly as always we will operate with transparency so that's the that was the easy part of the presentation I'm going to turn over to

111Derek to do the specifics and all the work that he's been building on around revenues uh so before we get into revenues just give you an a reminder of where we have come so far in the budget development process so the last several meetings we have talked about expenses and other revenues um so overall these are our transportation o m is operation of Maintenance and security our combined presentations on these departments overall our largest increases are salaries and equipment and overall there's a 24.59 percent increase and this makes up the smallest part of our budget uh for this school year we're in 89 million dollar school so we're talking about less than 10 percent so when you see 24.59 increases remember that's of the smallest part of the budget so not the entire budget will

112be going up 24.59 percent so revenues it's really hard to see the white at the top but the it is a three color pyramid so we have three main sources of revenue these are not to scale our federal revenue is actually 0.1 percent uh our state revenue varies between 35 and 40 percent uh I'm giving you a range because it's gonna it's flipping a little bit this year and then our local which is uh mostly made from taxes the interest of our money that's in accounts facilities rental and miscellaneous other fees makes up roughly 60 to 65 percent of our budget so just to give you an idea of where the money comes from are federal sources our big 0.1 percent is Medicaid so uh as you can see this is a chart of our

113Medicaid revenues for the last several years so when we're looking to do the budget we're looking at historical information to try to figure out what our revenues are you could see the lull during covid and then you see a little uptick in 2122 we believe a lot of that is due to the side effects of covid in compensatory services to students but right now we are projecting for this school year uh to have a hundred thousand dollars in revenues So based off of this trend line uh we are going to be using a hundred thousand dollars for the 2324 school year uh because it feels like that's going to be about where we're looking to see so our state sources uh estate sources so last week the governor has released her budget proposal and we

114are giving you our projected budget because right now these are not hard fast numbers the the state doesn't adopt the budget until around April 1st but this is what we received uh in last week's state aid run all of these are actually all state aid so when we say stated on the top we're talking about our big Aid categories which is foundation Aid building Aid Transportation Aid and high cost student aid our foundation Aid as Dr Terra Nova mentioned is up 38 which is a significant increase makes up almost all of that 7.4 million dollars I believe it was around 7.1 7.2 million dollars there's an asterisk because of course now that we got the money there's a little bit of strings attached to that money and we will talk about that in the coming

115slides uh BOCES Aid we saw a slight increase and again I want to speak to that a little bit more on the next slide and then there was no change in the state aid formula for the what is referred to as a structural material AIDS which is our textbook computer software hardware and Library Aid so they maintain the same formula but fortunately those are make up the smallest amount of our state aid so our big chunk of foundation Aid had the most significant increase so overall from our state sources we are seeing a huge 25 increase which is great for this community and great for this District so the state aid the strings that was attached to the foundation Aid was uh 670 dollars for what is referred to as high impact tutoring set aside

116about five six years ago the state did something similar um to called a community set aside they're doing something similar this year so we'll talk about that in the next two slides uh and BOCES Aid so last year we budgeted roughly about two and a half million dollars because there was some issues with the reporting of the state aid numbers for BOCES Services unfortunately that wasn't corrected until after the budget was adopted so we actually did see an increase of about a half a million dollars that we will be receiving this year unfortunately it wasn't budgeted so we weren't able to spend that money good news is that will come out at the end of the year and we'll be able to fund reserves with that money because it will be a surplus and then

117this we believe the same thing is happening again this year we have increased our dependency on uh BOCES we have been making a lot of Technology purchases through BOCES so we believe that the same thing happens again this year roughly 500 to 700 000 so as we get closer towards that second uh a budget presentation in March hopefully we get a new state aid run report that reflects this number and then we can add it back to our budget and start trying to spend it what are the concerns of not put putting or one of the concerns of putting that in the budget right now is that it doesn't get corrected and we end up spending that money but we never receive the revenue we're on the hook so right now we're not taking that

118into consideration Wayne Finger Lakes BOCES is currently working diligently with the state of New York and sending updated revised reports trying to figure out where it is in jiving because waiting for your legs BOCES they sent them the report and for some reason it's not jiving so uh Wayne Finger Lakes and uh is working with the districts and the state trying to correct that number so we're hoping they got it fixed last year we're hoping again they can pull through for us I just need to stop you there Eric this bothers me the fact that I don't know if it's a BOCES problem or if it's um Ed problem but we're wrapped around the axle on this one and I don't like it I I agree yes I'm not sure whose fault it is um

119you will get finger pointings depending on who you ask so it's somewhere there's two sides of every story and the answer somewhere in the middle so uh fortunately this year they got it corrected but again that happened after the April one so we're hoping that they can figure it out again this year they got it corrected from last year's budget so we got to wait again um based on incompetence is that you know the best way to say it and I can say that you probably can't you're worse than mine I'll say it again yes okay and all right push as hard as you can because that's that's not acceptable not acceptable at all so tomorrow I actually have a wing Finger Lakes uh business official meeting at Newark so this will be a topic

120of discussion with the business officials as well so to help to figure out how we can support BOCES to get the proper Aid numbers you don't want me with you I'm sure of that so the other districts in Wing Finger Lakes BOCES is having the opposite problem where their numbers are being over reported so they're dealing with a tying to tell their board the numbers wrong on the other end so where it appears that we are the only districts that is the state aid run is underestimating our Revenue all the other Wing Finger Lakes component districts are over reporting I think Bloomfield went from 1.1 million dollars this year to 2.2 and they didn't increase their spending so something's happening there okay my question would be if the states Cruise it up and they don't

121correct it we should have some course of action within our Realm of conviction to to pursue that because I mean that's like borderline theft I'm sorry to speak that strongly but if it's not corrected and it is owed to The District in this community then I think just we as a board need to discuss and not necessarily at this moment but we'd have to research into that but discuss what is our course of action at I mean to the full measure of authority and and power that we would have as a school board absolutely and if there are other districts not I mean Finger Lakes obviously but I would imagine that we're not the only one in the state if there's a way to find out who else may be in a similar or parallel

122situation and kind of be ready with a a joint uh action based on that hopefully wholeheartedly that we would never have to use is that something for us to discuss at a future board like s the superintendents and business office is that I I have some thoughts but I'm not going to say it yet okay right all right so the high high impact tutoring set aside this is the excerpt from the state aid run reports and the high impact tutoring set aside is a new set-aside included in the 2324 Foundation Aid this high impact tutoring set-aside requires districts with a foundation Aid increase above a certain level to utilize a defined subset of the of that increase to support new small or individual tutoring sessions in reading and math to students in grades three through

123eight at risk of falling below state standards the districts whose Foundation AIDS increased at least a hundred thousand dollars greater than three percent so 38 percent is definitely we're in that bucket uh are subject to the set-aside the amount of the set-aside is equal to the greater of a hundred thousand or 11.77 of the foundation Aid increase in Access of three percent of 2223 Foundation Aid that set aside applies to the 23-24 school year only that was a lot so what's the 978 000. real okay yes so again I saw this terminology from the instructional folk I never heard of unpacking things before coming to Victor so I I stole their terminology so let's unpack what that is who districts who receive a hundred thousand dollars above three percent increase we are significantly above that

124so what increased tutoring for students below State Standards makes all the sense in the world when only the 23-24 school year so we're going to fix it all next school year uh why because the state was underfunding these districts because that's why we got the big increase we were underfunded for all these years so we're fixing it how uh that's a good question tutors are really hard to find right now so just to give you uh example yep you any reasoning why they chose this particular part of Education I mean I mean there I mean there could be so many different things that the money could be earmarked for and they choose tutoring which goes back to tutors are hard to find I mean and there's so the specificity it's it's like well do they

125believe that that's like the cure-all right and also we've been using a lot of the stimulus money to address these needs we were waiting for the state to come through this community has supported tax levies to address these needs when the state wasn't supporting us for all this year we weren't going to neglect the students up until now so we've been using stimulus money we've had great success last year we had uh targeted tutoring in the Junior High Senior High in the last couple Summers we had Summer Academy summer enrichment we have used that for a cat at Summer Academy some of this that's what I was going you still have stimulus money we still got to spend down but yes technically we can but I have two the stimulus money that was already slotted

126to be spent during the summer and then this additional money here so we just worked uh as a device Academy now yes but then there's also these questions that some of the business officials have like does the money go away after 23-24 or just the red tape to it and then what happens to all these tutors that we're going to hire for 23 24 school year it's you were going to hire people for short-term assignments exactly so um before I get off the soapbox my recommendation is that we should Advocate to remove the red tape to allow individual districts to assess their own needs such as social emotional health and security so there's more advocacy for it sounds like a carnival deal where you spin the thing and see what number comes up right overwhelmingly

127at the legislative breakfast those two topics social emotional health and security were like at the top of we need more funding for these right areas and it's not that we don't believe in tutoring it's just the number is astronomical that equates over fifteen thousand five hundred hours of tutoring and it's only for third through eighth grade so if you were to take our student population all of them not just that are in risk of falling below that's every student getting seven hours of tutoring during the year it's like the Oprah Christmas like you get a tutor but you have to be following be close to falling behind standards so once we start looking at the subset of students that are in that that wheelhouse it's talking about a lot of strain to the students under

128the staff and it the number is twice as double of what Canandaigua had for theirs because Canandaigua wasn't as far behind in the foundation Aid so this is twice and we're not twice the size of Canandaigua so you said only third through eighth grade correct so it's reading and math in students and third through eighth I see it okay Derek is there reporting that the district would have to do yeah is there an audience right like for those two countries yes so uh in my prior District we had the community set aside so when you fill out your state aid reports at the end of the year you do put the money into you have an additional form that you get to fill out and talk about what buckets and categories such as salaries and

129how you were spending the money and then as part of our external audit when manglemaster buyer comes they will have that as an additional Focus area to look at it so it's not a full-blown additional audit it is uh part of our external audit and then our reporting is just simply another form on what is roughly already about 120 forms of reporting my question was more along the lines of do we like what do we have to show that these students in grades three through eight got out of that oh for that one they have never actually looked at that it was more of a kind of an honesty thing so I they haven't actually this is a preliminary idea we'll see if they start kind of drawing up a framework of what that looks

130like so their definition of tutoring would not include enrichment like developing innovative programs that experiential like field trips like for example you could do a special reading program then in encompassed a field trip an experiential and that I mean is it is it flexible or is it very traditional I mean is there any guideline to that it might be the last person on the room and ask them that one sorry we're not sure what it looks like I know right now Wayne freaking likes BOCES has been implementing or rolling out what is it like I believe it's called an I tutor program for students that can't come in the district we might be able to use some of the money for that so I'm not sure what the tutoring looks like that's all I got

131and and why three through eight why not I have more questions than answers no I I it just seems strangely dude behind and they're seeing through testing that that's where the specific needs are you would think that but not every school had it so I I can't say that's true only the schools that had a significant increase in Foundation Aid has that so I don't believe so and is this during the school day or after school because when I think every summer too I a lot of the school business officials are trying to do it during the day so maybe a pull out push and model okay is it the increase in Foundation Aid because they were adjusting it because it was so incorrectly they have they're correcting the formula yes right so is that

132why our percentage is so high and that's why we qualify for it so there's really very few districts across the state because a lot of the districts the foundation Aid was the opposite way yeah we're gonna we're gonna take this money obviously and use it of course but we're going to have more information on that in future months around around ideas around it yeah as I say In fairness to Mr release our questions who should have to answer them yeah please leave the man alone maybe I I mean I appreciate Derek that you were the one that fielded field the questions the questions are listed and now we can unpack All Those Questions we're all on the same page yeah I mean it's kind of this brainstorming session hopefully we'll get all those questions answered

133so thank you for being the stimulus not the target yes right so moving on our last form of Revenue is our local source which is also our largest source um so on the screen right there is a screenshot of the New York state comptroller's report so we have entered in all of the information uh I do have a caveat that there is an updated number for BOCES they were still at the time when this was created was still working out the capital component from BOCES so this will change by roughly thirteen thousand dollars so instead of a 2.2 maybe a 2.21 increase I'm not sure if the 13 000 quite moves it up uh that 1 100th of a percent but overall because we're the biggest difference between this tax cap calculation and last year's

134was one the the text-based growth factor which is the fourth line down last year you heard Dr terranova and I tell you about how we had the sixth largest tax-based growth factor um that wasn't the case this year so it is significantly lower I believe it was 1.06 last year now we're in the thousands place and then additionally there is a an in and out of Pilots which is payment in lieu of taxes these are for commercial properties that promote and create jobs a lot of our pilot programs seem to be on the same schedule that they were paying zero percent on the property improvements but a lot of them are now falling into the 20 so you see uh I believe it's a little over a million dollar increase in the pilots which takes

135away from the tax cap calculations so if we were to go to the cap we were looking at an increase in the tax levy of 1.2 million dollars which is roughly 2.2 percent um and I fill it in ahead of times but we're going to have a discussion uh I'm just going to give you the recommendation that based off of those day-date numbers I am sitting here not recommending that we break the tax cap this year so is Derek is this the report that you needed to provide by a certain date so this actually this is a preliminary tax cap calculation we file it on March 1st okay and then it kind of tells the state where we're kind of going and then once you adopt the budget in April we have to go in

136again I Believe by April 15th and submit it as the final final version of what our tax cap calculation will be okay so March 1st is that date yes and you mentioned BOCES again that they're still providing numbers are they going to hit this March 1st or yes they just received I received it between when I did the screenshot to today so I have the number and it looks it's a 13 000 increase they have that number to us and is that in your opinion accurate to date it seems reasonable that because I use for this calculation last year's number so I would expect that number to go up so 13 000 does seem like a reasonable number yes okay thank you thoughts feelings about going to the cap going below going over I I

137agree great recommendation thank you all right so over the years as you can see we've had some substantial increases of the tax levy you can see from the 1920 to the 2021 where the the board and the community supported that 10 increase and some increases and then as you can see we're kind of plateauing with this calculation so again our our projection for the tax cap calculation or our local taxes is 56 million 255 352. this is obviously the largest portion of our local local taxes so just to give the community and the board a kind of a mindset of what that 2.2 percent increases uh so we in the business office we re-ran this year's tax rate calculation and we adjusted the assessed values based off of New York State's growth factor and then

138we changed the um the levy amount so if we were to just make these very very conservative changes it appears that the tax rate will just break sixteen dollars per thousand which is a 1.19 percent but historically every time we've come out with a projection by the time we calculate it in July and August it it historically has been less than that so right now based off of conservative estimates we're looking at even though the levy would be going up 2.2 percent the tax rate would be going up 1.19 and possibly less mm-hmm so local sources uh penalties and inch penalties on taxes was a slight increase this year you see that big increase in the payment in lieu of taxes sales tax is coming back this is for our Monroe and Wayne County communities

139our residents tuition that would be for our Nas prep program so we recently had an inquiry for another student so we're budgeting for the revenue interest rate is up significantly um and again because we're all about transparency it is very very realistic that that number is low but in order to stop the the Peaks and valleys of Interest we kind of we looked at again a five-year history like we did with Medicaid and found a reusable number so that we don't have to keep adjusting or making Cuts based off interest rates so uh we did recognize an increase in interest our Bose's refund when we looked at the historical data seem to be historically low so we have adjusted to be a little bit more accurate along with refund to Prior year expenses and other

140miscellaneous expenses so again in 23 22 23 this represented about 65 percent of our revenues because of the big increase in our state aid it now only represents about 60 percent of our budget um so our even though it's one of the our largest one it's going up 3.8 percent which is a pretty significant increase too and again these are projected numbers based off of tax cap calculations and whether or not the board is willing to go to the cap so total revenues uh as you can see we are also eliminating the use of reserves uh Mr Eckert made the point last year and he's a hundred percent correct when you are using reserves you're actually working in a deficit you are using your savings money to kind of put use for future expenses so

141you're actually operating a deficit your revenues are less than your expenses because of the significant increase the current recommendation is to not use our reserves this has a significant uh impact on our future planning because right now we are using 880 000 of the prior Year's unused money for this year's budget which we can use to fund right into our capital reserve so we can propose a capital project this summer which will have less impact to the community and we're grateful for that the state aid increase so we're able to do it the timing works very well for this District that we're able to get that additional money right before a capital project vote um overall we are seeing a 9.75 increase in revenues and that is again with that million dollars coming out from

142our savings that we're no longer using that is uh a lot of exciting opportunity for us for next year is that's where we were talking about the capital outlay and some of the things that we want to do next week when we do some presentations on the buildings we got some other exciting things to share about what we're hoping to do for next year as well any questions on our Revenue all right so uh just an update on our budget calendar next week we are going to be talking about the buildings we're also going to talk about uh two other categories which in your budget book is referred to district office and District instruction uh and and then on March 1st we will file that preliminary tax cap on March March 9th Mrs D'Angelo is

143going to take the wheel and start giving you an update on our personnel and then March 23rd hopefully we get a little bit more clarity and any changes to revenues and expenses finally on April 13th the Board of Education will adopt the budget any interested candidate who would like to run for the Board of Education their petition will be due on April 14th and that on the 17th in the business office Maureen will be in the business office to draw the order in which the candidates will appear on the ballot then on April 24th we will file the property tax report card followed by our budget hearing on May 2nd followed by the meet the candidate sponsored by PTSA and Pi May 9th is voter registration in the district office conference room conference room and

144then Tuesday May 16th is our budget vote any questions thank you for your time thank you I think we made them sweat this time yeah okay where am I what's my name um we are at 7e approved the following field trip Deca to attend the DECA International Career Development conference in Orlando Florida from April 22nd through the 26th of this year I need a motion to approve this trip please Patricia Trisha second by Elizabeth any comments or questions on this trip you all saw the information on it yes yeah okay all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed extensions motion carried thank you item 7f is policy review the first reading on General gender neutral single occupancy bathrooms policy 7600 you received a copy of that any comments or questions at this point this

145is just the first reading seeing none we are at seven eight uh meeting reports Monroe County School boards Association committee reports anyone like to begin he the education Exchange was yesterday and um what I'll do is I'll get copies to the Marine to send out to all of us it was a present and also for Dewey and for Dr turnover is a presentation on Esports as far as nationally and what's what's going on with that and interesting which I did not realize is actually the national Esports Association is based in Rochester so they presented out and it was really informative very good so I'll pass that information along great yeah I I attended it uh via Zoom uh very interesting I know uh that BOCES had talked about it in the past and there's you

146know competitions it's like uh it is Esports and and students compete with other teams it looks very cool very very cool I would be no good at it but it looks very nice um other actually sorry one of the and it's also misleading the moniker of Esports because it's not just athletic gaming it runs the gamut and actually Minecraft is the basic easy one that they draw across a lot of the curricula too as far as using it in math using in science using the English and Center so yeah my grandchildren used that and I got to figure out how that works right over my head um anything else uh Trisha Debbie myself and Dr terranova attended the legislative breakfast on Saturday at the DoubleTree and it was um a really great opportunity to meet

147with our local lawmakers there are some people from the federal government there as well Representatives um really good I thought really productive morning and good information it was it was really interesting to hear you know a lot of our areas of advocacy were similar to neighboring districts so I think a continual consistent message from many districts for our Representatives was really good for them to hear so yep and prior to that many of us attended the information exchange committee which talked about effective advocacy and helped us to frame how to approach and speak to our representatives and we thought that was very useful I'm sorry I couldn't have been there with you unfortunately things happen and on the personal side I needed to attend to something else that morning also on Wednesday January 18th I

148attended the Labor Relations Committee and the um subject was contract negotiations in a high inflation environment my reaction to that is I'm confident that our negotiation team has a handle on the issues that need to be discussed and specific information about this particular information can be found on the on Leonard County school board's website for members so I encourage you all to take a look at that okay graduates of Distinction and actually thank you to Jenner who had mentioned about Mr wadwani so being honored in May and some more to come on that but also thank you to Jennifer making mention that in your presentation tonight was unable unable scheduling conflict but I did attend the tech committee meeting and the group is continuing to discuss how Tech can further support scl initiatives within the

149district that was a main focus that we had throughout the conversation I attended a Visual and Performing Arts Hall of Fame meeting um as you see on the saw on the agenda we updated the bylaws we were looking at our nominees and we've reached back out to some of the people who nominated to gather more information because we had a few candidates that were close to our rigorous standard but wanted a little bit more information and they've been very kind to get back to us so in our next meeting we're going to review the additional information but that's a very exciting committee it's a really really great alumni doing some neat things so we're excited to uh to put that forward we had our second Dei committee meeting as well this week we have set

150our charge we have identified our steering committee and we have a strong set of students community members teachers staff and board members sitting on this committee that are all very excited to get to work on on these activities and we are positioned well to do so and another thank you to the Victor primary school that was a really just um we look forward to them and really really engaged with the kids and they were incredibly welcoming I was just so humbled to be part of their morning meetings and they wanted us to engage with them they came up and asked could you we did a little yoga thing you know they came off can you be our partner and it's like it's very moving you know so um it was great and we just are

151thankful that we had that opportunity so yeah Heidi hit the nail on the head that everyone should start their day with a morning meeting and we would all uh have much better and more productive days if we started out that way it was great it was great and it had a had a really nice opportunity to to meet and greet with quite a number of Staff members before the school they started which is just a great opportunity to speak freely and to you know get to know one another and the library oh my gosh at the primary if you haven't been at the library you've got to visit the quilt walk was fantastic and um I dare say it Rivals our Public Library that primary library is fantastic so [Music] engaging and current they do

152they have a big display about the Super Bowl and trivia and as soon as the students came in I was so impressed with the piles of books that they were returning I mean they're the circulation of texts coming in and out of that library is unbelievable so I mean and happy happy kids I mean just and good to one another you know and saying goodbye and have a great day and I mean it was just so delightful yeah great what a great day it was it was fun and I would and I love being in an environment where I was taller than many um and I know that um Tim earlier you recognized pie and voice and the larger PTSA and um as a parent I got to attend the lucky to be loved dance

153at BPS last weekend and it was just such an awesome event and it was so fun to see the kids just so excited over um an event that was so carefully planned and um just really inviting and engaging for everybody so to see okay anything else well it looks like we're at uh item nine the upcoming events budget Workshop February 16th 6 30. next regular board meeting will be March 9th Thursday 7 15 and then a budget workshop on Thursday March 23rd at 6 30. so mark your calendars item 10 anyone want to make a motion to adjourn anyone wish anyone Lisa second by Kristen yes indeed all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed we did it thank you all thanks everybody