001religions superintendent's report i would like to defer to lisa marie druitt for an award presentation lisa marie lisa you want to use the mic perfect who's that big handsome guy that's right okay first thing i would like to say about matt is he's extremely humble before i talk about his sports i'm going to tell you that his gpa was 88.67 he graduated 18th in his class the last two years he's taken 12 sullivan county credits for his junior year senior year he did honors english a2 trig which i could never do chemistry ap environmental science he graduated with an advanced designated diploma with masters in science then he did sports soccer football and luckily for me excelled in indoor and outdoor track shot put in disc or his majors he mentored his fellow student athletes
002luckily our program our mentor mentees work closely together and matt has never denied anyone any time any suggestions spent multiple hours with our seventh and eighth graders which seems like yesterday you work the last two years sullivan county championed for shot put in 2020 took sections uh second in section nine unfortunately due to covid spring was cancelled or we would have been on our way to states and then we came in this year breaking the school record for indoor it was originally 2003 42 inches for shot put he broke it with 42 feet 2 inches we went on to spring sections he won he was undefeated took all-star first team shot and disc he threw 44 feet three and a quarter per shot and 125 feet per desk so i am pleased and honored to
003present to you our school record for shot put 42 feet 2 inches to matt dutcher congratulations man that shopper didn't go through the wall did it well congratulations you you make us proud should be proud of your own accomplishments too you'll do well in the future next up i'd like to defer to the principles to let them introduce their new staff where are they well first i'll start with introduction of andrew latini mr luttini is our new art teacher he comes to us from chester with 13 years of experience he is going to be instrumental in helping me develop a more robust art program we're going to incorporate the graphic design and steam classes and we're working towards the fact of we're utilizing that third floor graphics room i'm so excited and i'm very fortunate
004to have him on my team and i'm just i want to welcome you to eldridge the second introduction i have is jordan lepis she is an eldridge grab so she will be one of our district-wide substitutes and she's also jj's already picked her she's already coaching so she will be very middle very busy this year and we look forward to having you as well jordan welcome to the team so i have a few new hires as well here at mckenzie elementary school um i'd like to start with aaron startup she's not here tonight she had been teaching summer school for the last six weeks planned her vacation to start today so she's actually probably right around virginia on her way to north carolina right now so she's there but we all know erin she's an
005eldridge graduate she was our building substitute last year and she's a great asset that we have here she comes for us through suny new pulse and currently working on her master's degree in childhood special education she's going to be our new kindergarten teacher here at mckenzie elementary school we also have mary kate paulus here with her mom lori she's here she comes from us from washington high school through st thomas aquinas college she's going to be our new 5th grade teacher here at mckenzie elementary school she's uh super excited to be here we're super excited to have her as well and welcome to the team here at mckenzie i also have uh casey wiese did i say that correctly all right because i've been messing up with your brother here all during summer school she
006is an onion grad certified birth through sixth grade she's going to be one of our district subs as well uh we'll utilize here at mckenzie i hope to use her in some of my steam lessons in the new maker space that we're going to create here at mckenzie elementary school and i just found this out she is absolute best friends with jordan so uh it's good to be a part of that you know they have two elders graduates here as well as mary kate but these are the type of students that we produce here in eldridge and i think it's great to have him here on the team here at both mackenzie and at the junior senior high school so that's uh everybody i have here that the introduction and they're not from chester right
007yeah orange county's in beaten we'll take them good welcome aboard next i have a covert response we're prepared for september i issued a letter to the parents the teachers and it's on our website we're going to require mass for everyone we will continue to follow the procedure of taking temperatures in the morning we will follow the cdc guidelines regarding social distancing of three feet whenever possible we are not offering remote instruction in-person learning only and we will continue to practice of spraying the buses every night to disinfect them and to deep clean the classrooms every night i think that's an adequate response we have the stata department said they're going to issue guidelines later in the month but i needed to get something out to parents if there's anything that the state recommends that we
008haven't done we'll do it the board have any questions about that next item is salary adjustment for substitute teachers i'm recommending the 110 per day increase to 115 for the no degree associates and bachelor's for teachers certified the 110 will move to 130 the 120 to 140 and 130 to 150 in order to be competitive with our substitutes and to provide a commensurate increase to the substitutes that we did for our non-teaching staff would have any questions about that no we're seal coding the parking lots in both buildings we were supposed to do it last year or the year before but we were fiscally unprepared for that we have received 1.8 million dollars from the federal government to as a response to covert and we're using it if we spend it all in one year
009so be it it's a three-year grant the one thing that we will do is save money for summer school next year summer school will be increased beyond what this year provided the little ones need more than two weeks and everyone should be invited not just a select few speaking of summer school our kids did very well the the senior kids uh but one passed and will receive credit and be able to move on in their academic pursuits we focus on reading and math with their little ones and i think we'll see good results from that attendance was remarkably good our music teacher sarah schilt has left us and we will have interviews for that and we will involve community members and parents as well as teachers and related service personnel that position we expect not
010only to be teaching music but to do productions of plays to do demonstrations and concerts so the community should have a say critical race theory there's been a lot of talk about it the principles will respond in greater detail but we teach the new york state curriculum and we stick to the curriculum regardless of any group democrat republican conservative or liberal we don't bend to anyone we follow the new york state curriculum and we go beyond it with our jedi initiative and you want to talk a little bit about that tracy the jedi initiative is where again i'm thinking of star wars and that's just comes from my childhood but it also represents jedi is justice equality diversity and inclusion so we're really going to push that with the staff with the students the fact
011of you know that's how i'm looking at it and we will follow the new york state standards and everything their curriculum entails and the jedi framework is just looking at again justice equality diversity inclusion when you come into either building you'll probably start to see posters saying be a jedi knight be a jedi warrior things to that nature so the kids can start getting used to the an acronym also thank you we have new signs that will be going up in front of both buildings we have approval at the town of highland and we're getting approval at the town along the one there will be digital signs that can also be instrumental in posting emergency information to the community but our signs are old and they're 20th century science and it's time to move into
012the 21st century we have free lunch this year for all students of the district regardless of income and that's caleb working his magic we have superintendent's conference saying on september 1st and 2nd mr krebs would you like to speak about it yes i i can give you an overview of our conference day we've been extremely busy this summer offering a lot of opportunities for our staff we've offered over 20 different professional development opportunities that we brought in this summer to eldridge so it wasn't that our staff had to go out and get the professional development from outside sources we offered them here some of those have been handled with care we've done inclusion training with our staff we've had hmh our new math program we've offered trainings here so they've been very well received by
013a number of staff we have some upcoming days coming up also our superintendent's conference day well we'll see scott and john there and anybody else here is welcome to show up also for our new staff introductions and are welcome to start on september 1st and then we have a presentation as tracy uh briefly mentioned on jedi we have dr eileen peters weinberg coming in to address all of our staff everyone from our bus drivers to our faculty to our aides everybody that participates in our opening day conference day we'll be there for that a couple years ago we had a outside presenter brandon lee white speak to our staff at an opening day conference he was very well received we're bringing them back again this year for our conference day and then thereafter we have
014other events and activities that will take place you should have copies of that for our opening conference day both on september 1st and the second day september 2nd our second day focuses a lot on our faculty meetings that take place and then some trainings that are taking place considering benchmarking and how we use data to better inform instruction and two of our trainers for handle with care will give an overview on verbal de-escalation techniques for our junior senior high school staff so that's what i have for you on our conference days if you don't mind i'll kind of i had two other things we're kicking off this year units of study which is a writing workshop for all of our staff in kindergarten through eighth grade so our students learn learn the steps of writing
015similar whether they're in kindergarten in third grade or in eighth grade what we did find out is that there was no specific program that was being used to teach writing so teachers were just utilizing their own methods of teaching writing so we went out we provided training this past year for all of our staff so starting in september they'll have some of the background and resources that are ready to go for kicking off our writers workshop thank you you're welcome we'll have brandon lee white come back even though he said after scott presented and i started presenting that scott got them all riled and worked up and i calmed him down which means i was born that concludes my report any questions for dr mcgannon from the board no summer school principals report i would
016also like to introduce ryan ward brian ward will be our social studies substitute for the fall he comes to us from teaching summer school at fort jervis so i want to welcome you to our team thank you for coming and dr margano talked a little bit about this you know we're hoping my plan is for next year with summer school is to not only do recovery credit but also increase offerings we covered ela 708 math 7 and eight ela nine and ten ela eleven we also did algebra one geometry global history ten us history and biology so we covered a lot of classes for my middle school and high school students i'm hoping next year that not only can we do credit recovery but we also include enrichment and remediation and again have a more
017robust summer school program but i have enjoyed it this summer i've definitely enjoyed working with michael we've been together in this building for you know six weeks it was fun um even the kids today when they left they thanked all the teachers they got on the buses we waved to them they you know they hung in there with us even on the very hot days so it was definitely rewarding um a couple of changes for the jshs um we have created a collaborative workspace on the first floor is a or was a computer lab now it will be more of a collaborative workspace with tables and a couple of desktops but they also have their one-to-one devices so it's an area for students to work with their groups in a less structured place and then
018my third floor graphics room andrew is going to help me create this program and we that'll be ready to use for our eighth grade tech classes our art classes yearbook staff everything will be ready to go updated labs i'm looking forward to that just some upcoming dates so everybody knows august 17th senior portraits at jshs we also have on on wednesday august 25th i have seventh grade and new student orientation from 8 30 in the morning till 10 a.m and then looking forward to the superintendent's conference days at the elementary level for summer school our attendance was good but wasn't as great as the high school and i think part of that was um the way we broke it up in the two week sessions for different grade levels um we saw our best attendance
019during our middle session our middle two weeks in the middle of july we had about 95 attendance for the entire time i think next year we can open it up for the full six weeks for every student that wants to come to mackenzie for summer school i think we'll have a better chance of seeing our attendance rise you know if a family needs to go on vacation if they miss a week out of six it's a lot different than missing a week out of two and so i think that's really really important i'd like to see a really really big focus on literacy and math next year during summer school and again to dr morgano's comments to opening up to every student here at mckenzie to give them every opportunity possible to close the gap
020that we know have been created through the pandemic class lists and teacher assignments will be sent out to parents next week the teachers in the building and the aides in the building have gotten their assignments they should have them the teachers now have their class list as well we only expect minor changes going forward but parents will have their lists next week we had to wait for everything to be uploaded in the school tool that happened today there has to be a little bit of a migration so they'll get them next week i was going to adjust the pickup and drop off locations as you see here on my board report with the buses on the side but i was able to run the buses through multiple uh scenarios and we were able to line
021them up single file in the front of the building my concern was they had been staggered in front of the building and we had children walking in between buses and i didn't feel that that was safe or appropriate for especially a child who may not even be the size of the tire of the bus and so we're going to run those buses single file we're going to close the gate in the afternoon so no car can get through and all the pickups will be now on the side lot parents will not come out of their vehicles they will each uh when a car is at the appropriate spot i'll have someone on bus duty radio them back into the school to release that family or that child they'll go to their car they'll get in
022and they'll drive off we'll also be able to do if we need to simultaneously have the buses boarded as well i think it's the safest and the most productive way possible an efficient way possible to load everybody in the afternoon as well as drop off in the morning we have about 70 of our classrooms have been cleaned and floors waxed next week is going to be very heavy in this school now that summer school is no longer here we're going to wax the hallways we should have almost every classroom done next week i'm asking teachers after this meeting i'm going to send a note to if they can hold off coming back into the building until the 23rd that following monday it gives us an opportunity to get everything done so we're ready to go
023when they want to come in and fix their classrooms playground installation i met with the playground installer lior today as well as the paver paul we are painting um our courtyard in the back where we're going to install our playground that's going to allow for outdoor recess in the winter for multiple grade levels which is very important my students if the windshield provides it we're going to have our kids outside for recess in the winter and so it was really important just to make sure we deconflict any issues that may arise with both paving as well as the installation of the new playground that's coming in here at mckenzie we are converting our computer lab as we have one-to-one chromebooks now from from chromebook to student we're now going to convert our computer lab to
024a makerspace dual purpose room it's a room that i expect to have the 3d printer in it's a room that i expect to have steam and stem lessons run through it's going to have flexible seating for pre-k through 6th grade students it's going to be a place where i can have the pta meet it's going to be a place where if the board needs to can meet um and it's just going to be a it's going to be a room where i can have entire grade levels come as well right now we don't have a lot of spaces like that where an entire grade level can come except for the gym and then this is almost too big for that i think it's going to be a great asset here at mackenzie again also the
025upcoming dates for myself we have pre-k and kindergarten orientation on august 31st i'm looking forward to superintendent's conference days on september 1st and 2nd and then of course i'm super excited about the first day of school september 7th we will have students in desks here at mckenzie and i'm excited about that i think the students are excited i think the families are excited and i'm excited and september 21st is our open house and as of right now i plan on having parents in here in the gym uh meeting the staff and myself as well in person which i think is a great change to what we're used to um and that concludes my report dr morgan on the board well michael we made a great choice thank you i would say so even though i
026have to say no something any questions for michael or tracy on our reports very good sounds like we're making some changes it sounds like it's good stuff all right district caleb you're up i thought it was uh scott krabs next no i think he said what he had to say right scott yeah you're all set okay all right so i'll start off with the tax rates i have the tax rates calculated uh if you recall we said we were going to try to keep it below 1 and then we changed it to below point eight percent but the good news is that in deer park and tustin uh taxes went down five and four percent respectively uh and in highland and lumberland they went up by 0.1 and point zero one percent which means that
027in the worst case scenario if you owned a one million dollar house in highland you would see a ten dollar tax increase um if you're anywhere else uh you're gonna see a tax decrease or you're not going to notice it that's what we strive for um so the the we had strong growth which was good um in the end the assessment the the net effect of the assessment was only around eight million dollars so they got their assessment reduced by 20 million but the growth in all of the areas around here meaning deer park tustin highland and lumberland combined offset that number significantly so that's good news i wanted to touch on some of the summer projects but uh the principals and the superintendent touched on most of them uh that 1.8 million dollars a
028lot of what it's going to is in effect right now it's a playground system which is going to be at a cost of 186 thousand dollars we've started a blacktopping project which is going to be not just um sealcoating but we're going to be restriping and repairing areas that have been damaged that have been put off for a number of years and then we're going to be paving that courtyard to make a play area for the kids they're adding a basketball court to the elementary school this is all grant funded the playground the basketball court and the courtyard we're also going to be updating all of our wireless access ports which jed has been working on jet has been working on a server update project he has also found us a 40 to 60 thousand
029dollar grant called the ecf fund which jed was just working on with me today hopefully it'll come in closer to 60 grand but i think we'll get at least 40 thousand dollars for new chromebooks laptops things like that jed told me one of his goals when he got here was to pay for his salary this year uh he's already working on that he got us that grant money and then he's also saving us some money on our telephone project um which is we've got a number of phone lines i mean 50 phone lines on there and he's consolidating them all and using some blocks that we've already got we pay for for a number of them so like dr margano's got a new direct line and that's saving us money it's a direct line that
030we've already got so in the cafeteria dr morgan already touched on that we're going to have all free lunch this year and that's going to continue at the higher rate which is uh you know these are all these acronyms the government likes to use there's the sso and sfsp but long story short the sfsp which is the summer food service program which is only usually available to low income areas in the summer gives you the highest reimbursement which is like four dollars and 32 cents a meal they're going to allow us to do both schools on that program for the entire year so everybody will get free lunch and it'll get reimbursed at a higher rate than we would even normally get and this year we should have some good attendance last year uh because
031we were remote and then we were hybrid and there wasn't a lot of participation and lunch especially in the high school this year i would expect that to change a little bit uh another couple of projects one thing that you might have seen over here is that we're updating our security and fire system that won't be complete until mid-september they have to rewire the whole building yeah that's something this fire system has been on end of life for a number of years as well and one of the benefits of us now being fiscally stable is that we can start doing all these projects to update our buildings and to bring them you know i don't want to say into the 21st century like we're not in the 21st century but just bring them up to
032more state-of-the-art technology which is nice the rest of the money now all of these projects which are wonderful um only add up to about 750 000 of this grant so there's still 1.1 million dollars left on this grant and those are going to be focused on doing summer school for the next two years and educational initiatives that um like the makerspace that tracy and michael are going to be working on so um all of michael's projects yup i'll say no and i'll fight and dr morgana will that's right you say no i i say yes that's right but you know no it's all for the kids and we're updating these buildings there's a lot of exciting projects going on right now and it's a good time to be in eldridge i mean you don't have
033to worry about the finances as much anymore and the government is uh going to help us get get this building up to uh up to speed we just have to be careful that we spend the money on one time things correct we do it on reoccurring expenses we have to come up with the money after the third year so that is what i have got for you any questions from caleb from the board yes so that grant money that 1.1 caleb that you said that we're going to be putting towards funding summer school for the next two years we do have the ability to stretch that out over the two-year time frame yep so it goes all the way to september 2023 okay so we'll be able to do 2023 and 2022 summer school on
034it okay thank you and an expanded summer school any other questions from the board okay where's that when's that bond come to so the bond it's funny okay so i wasn't sure um if i was going to bring it up at this meeting but since you asked i have contacted our bond council and asked them what they think the best timeline for coming up with that is and they think that in the next year we should start on it comes due 23 24 but with nice ed new york state education department they have to approve any kind of major project and he said they're not the fastest moving organization in the world so um it would be good to start soon this year we should start planning do we have an idea what we might
035want to use that bond for we have just started i mean i i think dr morgan i mean this is timely it's funny that you bring it up i think i came and talked to you about two days ago about it my only concern about is the track up you know up up up on top of the field that's my concern okay that's falling off that that was a great facility for somehow our intent is to move the track and the football field to the upper level where the baseball field is because we have greater depth up there it drops off to the creek but it drops off to the creek after a significant more land i don't know why it was put down below but if you run on that track on the outer
036track you may disappear it wasn't quite that bad well somebody fell through it i ran on that track the business person from southern west fell through it yeah it wasn't our finest moment we needed a new roof on this building i thought there was some work that's at least i thought there was some work to be done here too okay just curious i just wanted to see where we were at with that we want to outfit stem and steam classes with equipment because tracy and i are still determined to have engineering for wood and there's some some discussion but again this is all very preliminary of hvac stuff here if they're going to be doing summer school they're going to need to be we're going to have to air condition a lot more rooms and
037the problem with this building is the wiring may not handle it so we need an engineer to tell us if we're good to go any other questions for kale yeah caleb uh how much do we save on the phone system on the phone system i don't have a number for that yet but it's going to be thousands a year when we do annually every year when we do the bond we'll have a committee of community members parents teachers to give us input into what they think we should be using the money for so rest assured the community will have input okay anything else for the seventh grade um orientation due to orientation it is wednesday august 25th from 8 30 a.m until 10 a.m because there were some questions on facebook yeah the printed calendar
038was off the day in august and that's after four of us improved it so well the one thing we have to adjust is the date for the high school orientation okay the other months are fine okay i'd like to welcome all the newcomers i think you'll be happy to work here it's a pretty good team and we've come a long way in three years if you've heard about the papers and stuff like that but it's it's a good place to work now it's it's very sound so with that being said uh as you heard the numbers caleb's numbers last year the board had said that we were looking to do 12 and then when we were gonna lose money through the state we said well maybe we need to take the extra two or three
039quarters or three percent don't hold me to the exact figures uh we did that and this board at that point had said if we don't use that we will make sure we reflect on the tax base the next year and as you can see in caleb's numbers we've done that we didn't what was our cap for this year caleb our cap this year was 1.33 and we went negative 1.93 and that was that was the board's motive to do that since we didn't lose the money through the state we were able to keep it we were able to hold to our word about not raising taxes and as you heard say a million dollar house is ten dollars that's an island everywhere else it goes there you go the danger goes down i just want
040to make a point of the boards told into their word and we are all trying to work together to make this place a better place and when the newborn took over to now it's been it's a better place and it's not because of the board it's because everybody doing their job chipping in coming in every day when the chips were down and it's it's a it's a great thing so i just wanted to make a point of that okay thank you any questions for me from the board public comment on the consent agenda item only no comment being said i will entertain a motion to approve 4.01 through 7.03 i'll make the motion i need a second second motion by stacy second by amador i think nancy made a second at first so i could
041hear any discussion on the consent agenda on the items from the board any any discussion at all no well good need a vote nancy stacy commodore yes yes all eyes okay old business to come before the board any old business all good any new business to come before the board all good uh okay hold on oh wait two off yeah i got two walk-ons i'm sorry i forgot them i got two walk-ins i gotta back up here sorry be resolved that the party recommendation of superintendent schools the board of education hereby accepts a letter of resignation of sarah simon schultz elementary music teacher effective august 11th 2021. i need a motion i'll make the motion who made it i'm sorry stacey stacey second nancy second it nancy yes stacy yes commodore yes yes all eyes
042we wish her well we do we definitely do what was the other walk i wanted uh the tax warrant if you want me to read it i can read it yeah you can read that caleb you go for it okay sorry about this whereas the board of education of the eldred central school district has been authorized by the voters at the annual meeting held on may 18 2021 to raise for the current budget of the 2021-22 school year a sum not to exceed 11 million 945 973 and real property taxes which includes 15 800 for the sunshine hall free library therefore be it resolved that the board of education fixed the equalized tax rate by towns and confirm the extension of the taxes as they appear on the following described tax roll and be it
043hereby directed that the tax warrant of the board duly signed shall be affixed to the above described tax rules authorizing the collection of said taxes to begin september first 1st 2021 and end november 23rd 2021 giving the tax warrant an effective period of 84 days at the expiration of which time the tax collector shall make an accounting and writing for the board of education and it is further directed that the liquid delinquent tax penalty shall be fixed as follows for the first 30 days is the free period the second 31 days a two percent penalty added and the third that's 25 that's a typo should be 23 days 3 penalty added do you have to i don't know what happens after that you make a motion i need a motion i'll make the motion motion
044by stacy second say goodbye nancy nancy stacy yes commodore yes yes all right back to new business any new business i kind of cut that short any new businesses coming for the board okay second public comment on whatever anybody wants to talk about any questions anybody has for the district all good i need a motion to go into executive session for personnel two positions that we need to talk about should be short and sweet and there'll be no business afterwards i don't intend to be any business correct correct make the motion i make a motion make motion second second well good enjoy the rest of your summer everybody we'll see you in september