FCSD Board Meeting June 7 2022

001good evening and welcome to the columbia central school district board of education meeting for tuesday june 7th 2022. we start every meeting with a pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty thank so we you a consent agenda tonight the adoption of the consent agenda upon a motion and a second an affirmative vote by members present approves each and every item so designated however prior to the adoption of the consent agenda any board member may remove any item from the consent agenda this item will then come up for discussion as part of the regular agenda the person the purpose of the consent event is to expedite routine matters so board has more time to deal

002with subsequent matters so if i could uh let's get the agenda consent agenda on the floor okay so uh with that uh all those in favor of adopting the consent agenda you would signify by saying aye okay opposed great so the board is reserved this time to hear comments from the audience those wishing to address the board are asked to stand give their name and address and limit their comments to five minutes or less per individual or group concerns and comments during this session should be directed related directly related to items listed on the proposed agenda for this meeting audience members seeking a response should complete a board correspondency and return it to our district clerk christine sligo who is not here but we have dr wright over here who is filling in so if

003anybody has any concerns they can fill out a form get it to dr wright and he will we will provide an answer for you does anybody want to address the board tonight on anything all right i would i would like to just kind of interject this piece this evening due to our consent agenda take the time to ask the question as far as what is on our agenda for executive session this evening and have a few of those things brought into the open meeting one of them being wheelock and school safety as far as discussion yeah both of those are in the superintendence report and as always you'll have a chance to share any information you'd like from the board perspective okay no i know you have a presentation from john coming at the executive

004but he uh eliminate any sensitive material and give that presentation in the open meeting um we don't have a presentation he's just uh was invited to participate in the discussion okay so we'll be able to reference john as you would then yeah absolutely okay so our uh we now have a special presentation um on the fast bridge pedals update uh ms piper hopefully you can get us on the screen i just wanted to re-enter this paper real quick i just want to remind everybody and for it's good to see so many students here tonight thanks for coming you guys might not realize but each year the board in the district has different goals that we work on and one of the goals that we worked on this year was learning more as a board and

005as an administrative team about the instructional program at other schools or other buildings in this case at willa um and also at the elementary building later on tonight so um we're really just trying to to share information that helps us all more understand what's happening in each building in terms of instruction and in terms of student learning in terms of growth and this is actually our last presentation of the school year presentations this of this this year on this note so we appreciate everybody who's come to participate and those we have here uh tonight so sorry i just wanted to kind of refocus actually everybody on why we're doing it i think all of the seniors you were in kindergarten first grade did you have second grade at wheelock as well or did we move

006prior to that just kindergarten i knew this group was the group i started at wheelock as principal in kindergarten so you're seniors awesome awesome fun i need name tags though because you're all like sorry nick like six i don't know but yeah all right so we're going to talk a little bit about early early childhood center yeah i'm sorry okay so i just wanted to go through a couple of the highlights that are happening at pre-k in kindergarten at lilac i spoke last time a little bit about our petals grant that we're doing we were in the second year of petals and all parents completed what we call the deborah rating scale at the beginning of the school year this year and it's a reading scan that looks at how children are doing social emotionally

007behaviorally so they filled that out when they came in for visitation and met with with the teachers all teachers also after they got to know the students for about 30 days filled out the same scale so they could look at how the children are doing at school compared to how parents might see them at home the teachers also completed weekly behavioral data for pedals and submitted it to their behavioral coach i have that data but unfortunately it didn't get submitted because of that christine not being here so i do have that i will share with the board so you can see the growth that the students made based on the pedals interventions or the behavioral approach and the interventions that we did with the parents so if you want to look at that oh it

008is there okay it is there it's a new one hey so you can see these are the social emotional skills um this this is from the teacher so i decided to get a little closer to the blind the behavioral coach would come in and observe every couple of weeks and talk with the teachers spend time in the classrooms with the kids and really collected and take a look at how the students were doing the social emotional behaviors so you can see from october to april the students they had a little bit of a dip but they have improved how the teachers interact and correspond with the students on their social emotional skills so this is looking at the teachers how are they doing with the students and the skills so let me go over the

009next one actually i have specific data that they sent me to this so this social emotional skills for children looks at children's unprompted use of social emotional skills throughout the day so an example is use the listening rules and identify emotions of self and or others each classroom receives a score averaged over items of between one not using the strategies at all and five that they always use the strategies each month and the data is collected by the coach that comes in to observe in the classrooms so you can see the scale going up that the students are really able to gain some of these skills between that just the coach being there working with the teachers the teachers being more cognizant of what they're doing to the students but also the second step curriculum

010that they're implementing so you can see the disruptive behaviors and again this was taken weekly the teacher submitted this data to the coaches to the coach every week taking a look at what really disruptive behaviors every week they answer the question over the week how often do disruptive behaviors impact your classroom to where classroom staff had to stop what they were doing to deal with the behaviors so this shows you how the students did in september the middle of the year and where they are now so the demo i spoke about this was the scale that was filled out by the parents at the beginning of the year and it's also being completed most of the parents have completed it now and returned it to us for the end of the year taking a look

011at their growth the daca is called is the short name for it it looks at developing healthy relationships it looks at learning to regulate emotions and it looks at showing initiative it's aligned to the second step curriculum and that's why petals chose that and that's why we really liked the deca because the questions that we're being asked to look at for the students really aligns to that curriculum and what the students are being taught social emotionally behaviorally so part of that title's grant that's a sample of the deca part of the petals grant did provide the second step kits for all of our pre-k teachers it provided professional development not just for our teachers but for our classroom aides and it provided that again this summer for any aides that weren't there for part of

012the initial training or if there was questions or things that came up after implementing the program for a year so it was really it was really good and again the coach is there every other week so it's nice so you can see some simple questions so part of this is just they don't want to come in do two years and then leave and be and be done with this so sustainability action plan i actually just got in the mail today it's about four pages long i met with the director of petals and i met with the coach and the teachers and we talked about what are we doing now that we could sustain now we have the second step kids the teachers are trained they are actually providing training again this summer for anyone that's

013new to the system that wants a refresher they're providing that free of charge to our school so we can sustain a second step curriculum and its implementation and other things that i picked up and started doing administratively some of the things that the teachers have implemented in their classroom that we know that we can sustain over time and just continue to improve really the behavioral data we talked about all right where are students really kind of falling short maybe where's the second step lesson that we need to revisit maybe a couple of times with that language we need to make sure it's happening not just in the classroom but in the gym the cafeteria across the board so that is just quick overview of what happened with petals and some of our data that we're

014collecting for our students yeah sorry do you want questions at the end or if you want to add something about pre-k or whatever you want to do i'm just curious what the pedals data um you know the graphs are a little bit all over the board and you would expect maybe for that age group but i wonder if there is any analysis on potential correlation for different events i mean just in that quick look post winter break post a two week april do we use that to inform calendaring it's something that was gratifying as a teaching staff like yeah we know that things are a little bit rough those times to actually see the data support that like yeah you know those are times that like you said the dips didn't break but that was

015what was nice about that data is that we could see the ups and downs a bit and things that we knew all right where we might have to do a little bit more implementation as far as behavioral support or some of our expectations might need to be a little bit different for transitions and whatnot during those times because some transitions are hard for any of us um so it's especially hard for our four-year-olds do we think about that though even in discussion with structure of our calendar and some of those types of things which we actually was part of our discussion we talked about our calendar um some of that came up yeah yeah so to clarify you're seeing dips at the end of a break it was restarting school for breaks for some of

016the kids not for everybody but for some of the kids and for different reasons some of the kids are really excited they have a different kind of break and again it goes back to some of some of the the trauma some of our kids are going through and then some of the things that are happening at home but yeah you can see right here it's a good that's it was very interesting to look at that after the kids have been here you know the destructive behaviors we have a continuous amount of time in school without a break you know the legs um that was part of the conversation at willow but different district-wide when we started talking about the february break this spring break and divided two week break and one of the things i

017didn't really anticipate and i don't know if i looked at it like this from a secondary teacher point of view but a lot of people really reference that that long haul from right after winter break the beginning of january all the way to spring break and they've been feeling like that is really the time of year where they make the most progress where it's really uninterrupted most part few days here and there but uninterrupted instructional time that they really feel like um sort of the transition in the school year from um still kind of getting up to speed in that grade level to really starting to make progress and move forward as a student so so our kindergarten collection of data we use fast bridge we use the early literacy benchmark screening we look at

018the letter sounds some blending some word segmentation and sight words it is a one-on-one authentic assessment of skills which is why we like this early literacy assessment we didn't have an rti provider this year so i actually did the assessments and got to sit one-on-one with each of the students and the nice thing about this is again they have to show the skill it's you know they have to be able to send out the words they have to be able to identify the letters so we really know which ones they know what they don't know and the errors are almost just as important as what they do know so we know where to intervene a way to teach the kids so we have that early literacy information the teachers also do what we call the

019sabres and i mentioned that in my last presentation which is a teacher checklist again they don't fill this out until after they know the kids for about a month they do it again in january to see how they're doing and they're doing it again about right where they are now you can see there it's done literacy is done three times a year and this aligns very well with the ckla reading curriculum because we know that ckla is is really backs the science of reading that fondest instruction from the mechanical phonological awareness and when we also use the engaged networking after them so i got a question in regards to the teachers filling out the understanding to a child's ability at the first part of the school year and then at the middle part of the

020school year we have a chart on that so when they feel do we have a chart on that yeah i think it's coming up yeah yep it's coming so this is some of the early reading data so this is where i wish i could say everything's rosy and and things are great but i i really felt like it was important to be real in this presentation and really give you a glimpse of what we feel the pandemic impact had on our students early learning because not only the kids in kindergarten had a half day ubk so they were in school about two hours a day so you can imagine four-year-olds getting there having breakfast going outside to play having a little calendar snack and going home so there really was an opportunity to do a

021lot of early literacy early learning we also all had masks on we had the age of quarantines so the students all know you know how many times your kid sent home for 10 days because you know they had me they were sick or what was happening so you know what we really saw in this you can see 82 percent of our kids word segmenting really looks at an early literacy of phonological awareness and pulling awareness our kids are getting there they're really mastering that skill the next level skill and i'm sorry missy as a first grade teacher what we really are seeing is that they're struggling with that the phonics you know they weren't they aren't quite ready to get there yet they've got the behaviors down we spent a lot of time on social

022emotional learning we spent a lot of time really making kids feel safe we'd spend a lot of time teaching them how to be a student to be in school all day and we were able to spend the time on rhyming on syllables and words and wrote a word made of sounds like what so those you know cool things that we all take for granted but four-year-olds and five-year-olds don't know they have to be taught so what we saw was only about 35 percent of our students really mastered phonics and we really want to see that that also above 80 percent so it's good to know and good to have so we know we're going to intervene this is all right this really helps us know this is where we need to start you know finish

023the year kindergarten but start in first grade really looking at the phonics what our hope is that most of the kids are ready to read by the time we leave kindergarten it's it's some are and some are reading but a lot of our kids are going to need that bionics instruction so you can see yeah i mean obviously this has to be happening everywhere everywhere everywhere so i mean what what are kind of from a research perspective or from that academic perspective is you know how do we make that handoff to first grade and elementary and you know that's right actually it's a perfect timing i think our presentation is perfect and easy that's what i'm glad that that happens because that's why the data is so important because it's not a gut feeling that

024any paper had it's not a good feeling that mark has it's really sean right this is what the kids can do this is what they can do this is where we have to swoop in and really keep those specific skills the nice thing too is that this is also individual we can see for each particular student where is their skill set so i deleted the student names obviously for confidentiality that you can see each kindergarten teacher which then goes to the first grade teachers can see all right this student has mastered phonemic awareness hormonal logical awareness is reading they can really see differentiated where their skills are and how to do this longer construction will that change classroom how we're putting kids together and using this data yeah it is a big piece of that

025really looking to make sure that we have kids that are grouped together you know for teachers and for kids you know they want to be together with somebody else that they can you know align and collaborate with the next one so again individual student reports for each teacher they can see specifically what skills they have what they know what they struggled so what does this mean the fast bridge screening quarterly ckla la assessments really are indicating skills of phonological awareness and phoenic awareness but improvement is needed in basic phonics on the need for reading intervention we were unable to have reading intervention this year at kindergarten because the need to add a teacher because of code and class size so it's like oh my gosh the time where you really needed him the hardest we

026just weren't able to so they didn't receive that reading intervention this year in the library access instruction reading curriculum is taught with fidelity at tier one we know that that's happening we know across the board that's happening but we need to do some more for some of these kids that need that special instruction yes how with regard to library access how do the kids that we lock access a lot here so right now the teachers all have their own little personal libraries in their classrooms erica d'angelos is our teacher assistant for library she comes down once a week and reads books to the kids but we're working on that with our admin team to hopefully get a library in place for the kids for next year is there any uh possibility of having uh boces

027be a part of that by bringing books down because they transport things constantly i'm glad you said that i met with liz gruber last week about that possibility and she said there's actually kids like literacy kids that could be ordered from boces that she's going to meet with the kindergarten team and access as part of the library that's down there because you know obviously i'm going to be able to build a library like this in one year but she thought that boces would really be able to supplement it well i mean their books and and what they're going to be you know referring to is going to be a smaller group yeah it's the primary reading right so so that would really encompass a need of a room not necessarily this size so do you

028see a room there at all we're hoping that one of the classrooms because we're going down the kindergarten section can be used for that that's the plan right now is that one of the all right and what do you need as far as this intervention piece for the reading that's the other piece that we've been talking about as an administrative team is is looking at replacing um too many calendars retiring and taking that and hiring a reading teacher in that place so we'd be able to provide those services for those students is there anybody available at the elementary that could be yeah possibly yeah we haven't posted that yet so as soon as we're able to you can journal and be posted and externally so then we will know if anybody's interested in that one

029fewer kindergarten yeah at this point it looks like their numbers kindergarten um but yeah when i first so these guys were all in kindergarten so the next is sabres data for kindergarten and that i think is what you were asking about tom was looking at the growth of students for their social emotional behavior checklist and this is what was filled out by the teachers so i'll give you an example that in just a second but you can see the growth that the students made the first chart is district so it's really the second chart how to profit really looks at we like in kindergarten and shows you the numbers from this is 28 to 33 kids went from at risk or some risk to low risk so this is what it looks like for an

030individual student report the teachers are able to get back and be able to see exactly where the areas are that the kids might be having some difficulty but we also can then measure growth to the winter and then to the spring to see if they're making some progress do you have currently or are you in need of personnel down there right this year we've got because we were able to hire the school social worker cassie farrell has been coming down on fridays which is great and then judith isabella our counselor was able to increase today so we have somebody there monday wednesday and fridays okay because as a school we're really not privileged to do the administrative team discussions so you're bringing this here and it's kind of raising questions in my thought process as

031to why haven't we implemented some of these pieces so you know i guess more so the question would be is what do you need yeah having paddles was great having that behavioral profession was great because she was able to be in the classroom she actually knew the students she was able to have that one-on-one attention having cassie joined our staff has been great because she knows the resources across the county and she's been able to answer some of that so i feel like at this point we're pretty good knowing next year and i have it on what are we doing we're adding that school psychic intern that will be at wheelock a couple of days a week as well so i feel like every day we'll have somebody with social emotional background to be able

032to support our students and our families so so this is identifying the pieces yes okay and so now you've put in the request for what's needed to address how can we meet the needs then also the parents as teachers and i have it on a slide coming up program as ellison willardo go to school every day she's not there all day but she's then able to connect with families that really are going through trauma and need the support at home and she has an opposite we lack so she's a great liaison to be able to say the parents will call and say we're having this crisis as minimal as it may sound as a painting of car seat or or as big as needing housing allison can come in let us know what's happening and

033it's been able to build that bridge between school and home and that trust factor that we're all on the same page that we're all in this together and we're here to support you so alison's been great so a couple of those pieces we've been able to put in place so again the second step curriculum is another big piece that we've been able to implement and we're really taking a look at the kids coming in at the fall and the fact that they've been wearing masks they've been through a pandemic we saw how much they really needed the social emotional behavioral focus and we spent a lot of time on it because a child can't learn if they're not if they're worried if they're going through trauma if they're sick if they're not they don't know

034what's expected of them and so we took the time to really make sure that they had those behaviors under control before we started really into the academics and it was worth that it was really worth it so what does this data tell us in a trauma is impacting our students you know we have a substantial need for social emotional behavioral interventions i don't know if you've heard of aces the adverse child experience get it's significant for many many children they can't focus on academics until their they're basically doing that so what is our plan so then hopefully this answers your question just ask we have a school psych intern next year that's coming at a phd level school sec intern we have appearances teachers program continuing we have a school counselor coming down twice a

035week now our social worker is there one day a week we have a second step curriculum that we're doing with fidelity and pre-paying pay reading intervention we have planned for those tier two and tier three kids that really need that significant help and remember it's a lot easier to help a five-year-old whose gap is this big versus when they're at powell or darren's level and the gap is this big so to really be able to come in and help as many kids and feels fabulous and then the mtss process will continue so we can continue to analyze the student data and the teachers can use it for interventions so all of those items are in progress happening with the just needing to confirm the the reading intervention resource as you know how we're going to

036use that that fte associated okay and also groups is there anything that that would go back to a parent to say your individual student may need help with this and and along with that is there anything that would go back home to say you know as a group uh realizing that there's a lot of stressors on kids these are suggestions of how how we can generally address this so that the parents are aware because we have so much data but we only see the kids from you know nine to three right and yeah so the teachers do fill out practice reports for the kids and they send them home and meet with the parents one-on-one for parent-teacher conferences and go through those okay if those skilled checklists and then they do it again every quarter

037that they have those exact skills to take a look and see the growth that they've made and it's that specific for letters do they know what letters don't they know what site where it's getting you know what site words do you work on at home so yeah they do get all that information and i do a parent newsletter quarterly that also gives suggestions gives community resources thanks mrs piper we're also very happy to have mr jollinger here tonight as usual but also is carmelo we appreciate your time and energy and being willing to come share some ideas and uh you know for us as administrators on the board there's nothing better than hearing from a practitioner in the trenches every day with the students so we appreciate it and we'll turn it over to you

038guys yes [Applause] thank you nothing to worry about thanks guys yeah thanks for watching um so earlier in the year we we did a brief introduction to the board about our i ready program that was in a pilot last year and this year we rolled out into full implementation we didn't have a lot of data at the point it was early in the school year and now we've had um three rounds of data collection and i want to i'm excited to share the results because it shows some significant growth um building wide and then i brought missy here she's um an expert i've been here a couple years what makes missy so great is she continues to grow she's attended a few professional development sessions this year and she continues to um improve her practice

039when it comes to reading instruction and then we'll drill down and look at her classroom and look at some individual student data and she can talk more about what it looks like at uh elementary school so um real quick the overview of what my writing was was an online reading program that first determines the student's need personalizes the learning and then monitors the progress of all the students and it's broken down into two parts there's the diagnostic test which students take three times a year and then it takes the information that it learns from that and personalizes the instruction um and there's it addresses different domains that missy can talk about so um earlier in the year i didn't have the data to show you but i do now so at the front elementary school

040all of our students take this online diagnostic assessment at the beginning middle and end of the year so our fall diagnostic for the entire building um is displayed on the screen right here what you see is the the heavy shaded green and then the bright green is where we want our kids the yellow it means they're one or two grades below and red is significantly below where they should be so this is where our students were when they entered the year then our teachers take information that they've learned from this diagnostic and they personalize their instruction missy makes small groups that she'll talk about and she delivers instructions at the kids level and helps them to grow this was in september early october then in the middle of winter in january we took the diagnostic

041again and what we like to see there is the increase in the amount of green from the fall and we're shrinking our reds and we're also shrinking our yellows so this is showing that our students are growing because of the instruction that we're giving them and then i'm very thrilled to show the spring assessment which we just took this past week which shows a significant increase in where our kids should be so when you put all of these things next to each other the top one is what our students walked in at in the middle of the year and where we are now so i think that is missy deserves a runner [Applause] so as a principal this is good to see because it shows that our instruction is meeting kids where they're at we're

042delivering it with fidelity and we see the growth results right here so um i'm not the expert at reading teaching but unless he is so what i want to do next is is overall our summaries we we've seen measurable growth and students are there are more students now that are at or above grade level than where they were at the beginning of the year so that makes that's pretty happy right yeah so now is the classroom um missy can kind of drill down and see her students individually where they are and then she can talk more about these things called different domains that um she'll teach and kind of things like that so do you want to put through do you want it no yeah yeah yeah so this is my in individual class this

043is your beginning the beginning of the year so for it's literacy night i guess tonight at the boardview so there are six components that you need for any effective reading program you need to have phonemic awareness in your program you need to have phonics you need to have fluency you need to have text comprehension you need to have vocabulary and you need to have written expression it doesn't matter what program that research based you have to have those six things in your reading program so i ready i've you i've taught different grades the majority of my career of these few years that i've been here has been in teaching first grade but i've taught other grades and in the past fredonia has had i ready to support our reading program but we only offered it

044for tier three kids and sometimes tier two kids and so i'm thrilled and excited because it's for all of the students and i think and i have one student here that i do have permission that i'm going to share that is a top student and why we need it for all the students not just the lower students so i ready the domains and i ready support all but two of the components for a good research-based reading program the only thing that iready doesn't have is fluency and written expression which fluency i don't really know you can monitor fluency on programs and we do that with our fast bridge but there's not really a program per se that helps teach fluency and then written expression you know it does not you know um you know deal

045with that so what i have found is that having all those components and especially because first grade is such a unique age is that so many computer programs don't support because the kids don't can't read and so the program reads to them until they as they work through the program and as they become readers then it st then it takes that part away and then they're reading on their own and you all you know when the kids get to that because they'll be like my volume's not working because you know you know you're at the point now where you have to read it's not reading it to you and like i said i use this for many years in different ways this year is the first year that we've had it for all of the

046students which i'm very appreciative of the board putting that money towards that because it is expensive and mark will show you how the kids have improved in my class as the year has gone so it allows me to then assess what i teach in my classroom because i can go ahead with my reading program and think i'm doing great and assessing the kids but what you have to know is can they apply that you know i can tell you hey i'm great look at you know they're learning everything that i'm teaching them but if then they can't go out and apply that knowledge then you know have i really taught them so this program i ready gives you that feedback it tells you okay is my instruction in my reading groups is it effective because

047can they now apply this you know in my writing and it's not easy it's challenging and this is missy's beginning of the year results she had you know a lot of students below grade level and her middle of the year so she showed significant growth um in a short period of time and then her spring assessment was you know just outstanding so i mean all of her students are at or above grade level and that like missy's hit on there this is a good self-check for a teacher to say hey and what i is it working what i'm doing in my classroom my small group of kiddos is it working and when she pushes the kids to the computers to apply the work that they just did in small group this is a check for

048missy and she can drill down and look at those domains and say oh maybe this kid needs a little bit more instruction on this and that'll help her form her groups so that's an impressive amount of growth there and then even more um and this is her you know beginning middle and end of the year so it shows her growth as a teacher too and then she can drill down and we can look at individual students um so as a classroom teacher you can take a look at one student and you can look at their assessment data and this was the beginning of the year for one particular kiddo in her class who came in um at the kindergarten level right yeah for four domains she was at the k level and as the instruction

049throughout the year um progressed she showed significant gains and this is the middle of the year assessment so she started the year kindergarten level although she was sitting in a first-rate classroom and now at the end of the year she is in a couple of those things she's in the grade two level and grade three level for comprehension of literature so this is a significant amount of growth for one student who now entered the year below but is now above grade level and we can support that with the students so but some of the kids like to write about already too so yeah one other thing is is that what's really important is that i ready should not replace a reading program it clearly should be used as a support and can in my opinion

050can be used very effectively as a support so you've heard from me so i asked my kids you know tell you tell me what do you think about ireti so i brought a few journal entries and one student said i really like i ready because it's very educational and teaches us the true meaning of reading it teaches us chapter books in word and words and their meanings and other things too then i had another student say i love ireti it makes me smart it makes me think about reading which is key thinking about reading i'm thinking about where you're reading and science and it makes me feel happy because another um plus about ireti is that the literature is fiction and non-fiction so that's very important too and one more i love doing i ready

051in first grade because i like how i learn so much and i like when we do the i ready test when we do word journal so one of the things in first grade is a little word journal so you've heard from the principal to teach with the students um and that's just like our brief uh end of the year summary to irati and we thank the board for your support of this program and we're looking forward to next year for expanding this into the math as well so there's a math uh part of this which will support our students who um you know need a little bit of extra help or who need to grow and be pushed so that's all we have for you tonight unless you have questions for us you know first

052of all um it's great because it's individually tailored that they're pacing which kids don't get lost when they get lost when they're in a group situation what percentage have i ready are they like out of your reading program what percentage are they on i-ready versus doing other things well we have a minimum minute that that the program has recommended that the kids spend on it so our bill and my expectations here is that all students work in i ready for 40 minutes a week um and then they're with the teacher in a small group setting for um significantly more than that but um so that's it just four minutes a week but it you know it helps us in a lot of ways so what's that like it's 50 so all of our students so

053100 of the students get 40 minutes a week every student how many minutes they get oh for total for ela well if you teach 90 minutes a day so in general a classroom teacher could teach around 90 minutes a day of ela instructions so we're just 40 minutes a week so it's not a large percentage but um so they're they're getting this much gain out of just 40 minutes yeah and and like we said it's it's a blend of the teacher you know what i mean providing the vast majority of the instruction of the instruction and the program just kind of helping us um in different ways to apply the knowledge and get practice with key key components of an effective reading program because that's a challenge at first grade is what is the rest

054of the class doing while you're working with you know a group of small children as you can see from the previous presentation that you know social and emotional you know you're dealing you know with all of that so you know some teachers implement the 40 minutes at different times i have two days in particular where i divide it up and so they spend two dedicated days a time on doing their already but some other teachers could do it like when they're finished with their independent work then maybe they would go on and do some i ready that would be like teacher decision but we're you know trying to hit that 40 minute actually i think it's 40 to 60 minutes the program even wants to push it out to for the kids to to do

055it so when did you start using it now it's it's you know grade grade grade level wide but i started years ago yeah i would say when i was teaching third grade which has been what 10 years or 10 years i think it's about 10 years ago was the first time um i used it we had an rti person that was working in the middle school that came to our building and she had had an experience with it and so she introduced it um to us and at that time that's when we were only servicing really tier three kids unless we could steal some slots from the middle school you know put some other kids you know on it and it i was impressed with it then and then when i learned that it was

056available for first grade we were still using it but still just on that limited basis to just try and give those low kids the push and but it really is good because you can see the the student that i brought as an example she's a top student but started at a kindergarten level but look at how far that that program was able to assist her she's like grade three and one um in one domain and maxed out in others so you know it's it allows to hit for that population too that i think sometimes is kind of you know forgotten well thank you for pioneering oh wow that's great good i really appreciate that we have these two presentations together because i think what it really you know all is not lost right if you

057can see these games that were made um and so those kindergarten students they'll come in in the fall they'll do this i ready as a first grader i guess you know it is there targeting like you know how much gap could be closed in first grade you know what are we closing in first versus like you know this is a multi-year year step and maybe we're not there yet but i mean this data is fantastic the key is the yellow and the red you do not want kids and it's research it's not just you know myself just teaching all these years it's research you don't want them to hit two years behind once they hit two years behind it becomes almost impossible to catch them off okay so now is the time that we have

058to hit all of this and you have to spend a lot of time on literacy you know i mean one of my favorite people that i follow that i call my best friend anita archer she says cut the flop you know you if you want kids to read you have to spend time on reading you have to and you know i don't even know how many minutes i actually spend on literacy but i think that my data then says to me it's not too much because i've made this progress with koben and with these kids coming in with you know the gaps that they do i mean we're still you know dealing with that so you know i think we you know we're talking about needing the reading intervention at wheelock for kindergarten but those

059kindergarteners are becoming first graders so do we have the the resources that will be able to support that gap moving to the elementary school we talked about that so what we we are shifting our roles we're gonna um because of cold way we did what our district did and told some of our intervention specialists to have classrooms to lower uh class sizes um we're gonna make a shift next year and we're going to pull some people back into the the support role of an interventionist and our bill is going to have two people as dedicated reading um specialists and they'll pull our tier three kids um every single day for some more direct individualized instruction and at our elementary level we do um place an emphasis on grades one and two because we really like

060missy said we have to hit them early to get them by third grade yes the majority of our time spent at that that great level where we don't forget about our third and fourth grade kiddos um we really try and hit our younger readers hard and early great great it's really exciting so so your results um very impressive okay i'm very pleased with that do you ever get concerns or do you ever have a student that may show they're lacking and and teach yourself no this kid has had an off day or something else where um the results aren't appropriate for that student meaning they did better or possibly worse well it it goes kind of with like what dr zelias was saying like you know the vacations and the you know the different times

061that you might have off say you know same thing there depending on when you're doing your assessment you know maybe you might see a dip if you see like several kids in your class that are taking that dip then maybe you say hey okay this isn't a good time because it's right back from from break but like fluency for example that's something you're going to see you know uh they're going to do really they're going to read a lot of words per minute one you know one benchmark that you're doing then the next one oh you're going to see them dip a little bit there are certain areas in reading where you're going to see that we're looking for kids that aren't making that progress or that are continuing to go down because you'll you'll

062see like if i had a student that took a test for example too quickly and i ready they're flagged and so that tells me so then i can go in and ask the powers to be hey can we you know reset this can they take it over they they went through it too quickly or maybe i want to you know just monitor that next time or whatnot so there are certain things but kids aren't always going to go like this reading there's so many moving parts in reading math is much more you know black and white and whatever but reading there's a lot of moving parts we're looking for those trends if the kids are but yeah they're going to have bad days for sure you know and i'm sorry sorry um is do you

063create a culture of reading a defined you know determined saying this is how we're going to create a culture where our students uh are have a desire to read when you're providing a time you're providing incentives you're saying that you know it's cool that you're reading when when students see you do you create that culture there's yes there's my students for i ready they have a card and every time they pass a test they put a sticker on their card so their big thing is is that they have all these cards stapled together for all these tests that they passed but just in general as teachers you have to create that culture and no matter what you're doing and it's really important with early literacy you know i mean i do a lot of other

064things that's that aren't related to this that you know emphasizes the importance of literacy and why it's important you know we talk about why it's important a lot of teachers do things in the classroom and then as a building we do things as well we we celebrate our millionaire milestones if you read a million words uh you get your name on the announcements and things like that in march we did the picture book the march madness book challenge we select the book of the year each year for the past three years we've done that um you know we have other building white incentives when kids go on spring break we throw out an incentive if they read so many books you're eligible for an additional recess with uh snacks provided and things like that so

065we do try and celebrate reading in general does does it go to the teachers and the administrator where the kids see you read yeah yeah we've read a few books on the video announcements dr zillax has been in reading books this year and things like that as well yeah he's he's very good at reading the students too he gets them participating yeah i was wondering mrs piper talked about the parents and their role at the early childhood level and you know they always say parents read to kids at home that they'll be have better literacy and i'm wondering if you kind of try to assess that with the kids and if there's any role that the community could be playing because we certainly have people who could form groups like big brother boys and girls

066club style things yes um another program that i really like that supports the parent um you know a child role in reading together which in the middle school the kids groan about it because i had middle school students here too is ar but which is the accelerated reader program i mean they don't want to see it in the middle school but in the elementary they they love it they can't that's part of the the goal that we set in our building is that we have a grade level goal 100 000 for first grade 200 000 per second 300 000 for third grade and the goals are lofty lofty to reach that we just ended june 3rd was our cutoff i mean the goals to read that many words for young kids is lofty for a

067reason because you know they need to be engaged in reading as much as much as they can so that's something that the parents participate in because at our level we i have a group like you know mrs pepper talked about the teachers have their own little library well everyone has a library and i sent home level books you know at their levels close to their level and their parents read with them read to them and then they take an ar test going towards you know working towards our building goal for ar so another important program at the primary level because it gets them reading you know you they have to have accountability ar is accountability for the parents because they know what the goal is and it's accountability for the students too because then that's

068their beginning of understanding comprehension they start to make that connection that oh i'm reading this for a reason i have to remember something thanks are there some families though that that can't give that support um there are some families that maybe that don't give that support that the kids don't make that goal but we have aids that sit and read with the kids and then now at this point in the year when they're reading on their own one of the choices in the classroom can be independent reading with the book at their level and so then they can take those ar tests even in first grade independently now you know once once we get them you know reading that's you know that's the key so thanks it's great to have these presentations and i can

069tell that you're excited about this very exciting miss piper i can tell you're excited about this this is a great night i think that's critical for our students growth money well spent thank you you okay so we have the approval minutes from the last meeting and that was uh actually a couple meetings here the may 3rd meeting the district vote for may 17 in a special meeting before may 31st can i have a motion to bring all three of those um any questions concerns edits yeah the tuesday may 17th under section six where it says board member's presence listed just i would suggest that we uh table this one okay i'll print the other two correct this but thank you for texting them um so um i think that what we're going to do this

070time uh are we okay to modify your motion to take off the may 17th minutes and miss powell fourteen are you okay in your second so we're gonna modify that just for the time being and then we're going to just and i know nothing about robert's rules in order but i believe that that's the correct way to deal with that well i noticed something on these minutes too that i really didn't want to draw any attention to but it made it look like i had more votes than mr johnston in an election when we all know that's not true [Laughter] well well actually that is okay because that was preliminary okay um and then we're doing the official in i'm going to say 10 minutes so we'll yes but thank you for that also uh

071i'm also just going to assume which i don't know um that since there was no resolution attached to that meeting maybe the attendance is not required but we would better be safe than sorry we'll accept that make sure it's right okay so i'm going to ask um if there are no other issues that the all those in favor of approving the may 3rd and may 31st meeting signify by saying i i all opposed and then if i could have a motion to table the meeting from may 17th until we're served okay and and that was um mr marshall and ms gola okay okay all those in favor of tabling the may 17 signify by saying aye aye opposed wonderful great thank you next we have financial treasures report and a review of the budget status

072report for april so this time of year april may and june you begin to track and the budget staff support the areas of concern and areas were doing good so i just randomly picked a few things out so for example legal we budgeted 35 000 we're tracking at 11. so that's good uh electric services where's that that's a page two uh okay so that's not part of the dashboard it's part of the report this is a bunch of statutes yes okay so so that area we're good take a look at electric bearing in mind that this is through the end of april so we haven't paid the april bill yet we're already tracking it 223 000 and we budgeted 220. so that's obviously a concern it probably is not unexpected you take a look at

073also at areas like high cost special ed out of district placement we're well in the hole on that one we budgeted a hundred thousand there that would be page nine we've budgeted a hundred thousand dollars and we've already spent 2018 through the end of april so that's a concern but the good part is that we do get uh impact on those students which we've been accounted for in the excess costly projections in the state game because they didn't know the students were attending it for our district so you look at those different kinds of fees and then farther on page 12 about two thirds of the way down you have transportation about 55 10 which is fuel so through the end of april we budgeted 71 000 and as you would expect we're already over

074so those are the things that i take a look at this report as things progress and and as far as the uh special education going from 100 000 bucks to 218 i'm assuming that for the last three weeks of the school year that that will well it's more than that actually because this is as of april so you've got all of may out of june it's going to be significantly higher than the 218. yeah you'll be over 300. okay and okay and you um i guess that's why we had done the dashboard and you're kind of making a estimation for the last two months based off this report you're feeling pretty you're feeling okay i won't say pretty good i'll say you know you don't want to be in the hole so there's there's like

075i said there's causes there we had extra students move in and be back on this. so it's not horrible okay you would hope that all the codes aren't tracking that way which they're not sorry correct any concerns questions i sense you're you're not mashing the panic button so i'm not um okay in the revenue status report the revenue status report we got the final payment of our taxes from the county which typically happens in uh late march early april that's the unpaid balance we get made so there's about eight hundred thousand taxes that they get with the businesses collecting that part of that also includes the counties interest that we get off of that so you can see fourth point down we got 28 000 interesting this one and then two thirds of the way

076down the page at three quarters basic formula we got 137 000 of general any questions on that john in regards to indeed we've got an update on our email on the third of june from danielle graciel as far as a conclusion to the legislators and it states that we get the state funded an extra 2.1 billion dollar increase in paid can you speak for that that wasn't anything in addition to what we already knew that was what they did when they approved the budget and so that's what we had the three percent increase in foundation so there's other pieces that are falling underneath this 2.1 billion dollars is there anything you know there's facilities transportation government relations you know what are you looking at trying to secure an additional tool that funded us well the

077aid package that we get is based on how we spend categorically so things like the transportation and debt service is already in place it's going to be based on the actual payments that we make and they'll just calculate out through their formula there's no real revenue that i'm aware of there so we can't formally uh make any requests for this we can't reach out to our legislators and ask but you can always ask but they're going to base it on what we categorically completely understand that but you know additional aid to show a deficit that's compared to other districts and the amount of age we're receiving again in deficit per student compared to other districts so you know i mean is that worth an effort it wouldn't hurt i'm sure just to put that out

078there yeah we do this part of our superintendent group is a legislative committee and a legislative initiative we do two different things one of the things that we do is draft letters as a group instead other times depending on your district and level of need sometimes that goes from individual districts we've had less i think areas where we could maybe demonstrate that we're either in need and especially compared to some other districts in the area that we have been neglected as a district but we're always looking for ways to make that connection number one build those relationships there's also been several legislative dinners lunches that i've attended and other board members have been part of um to try to make that connection but i think any time that we can make a reasonable um argument

079we're willing to do so okay so as far as you're concerned i think it would be tough to to make a strong case as we look at some of our information compared to other districts okay any other questions okay uh then the uh if i could have a motion to bring the uh treasures report for april [Applause] um mr forbes any comments on that nope everything balanced again so good the left and the right are equal huh very shaky okay any questions on that okay i guess you can't argue with that mr force all those in favor signify by saying aye hi all opposed thank you uh next we have the approve uh the approval of the release of the 2022-2023 purchase orders um can i have a motion to bring that to the floor

080please as well um you know this is an annual resolution and really what this begins is the process for looking at next school year knowing that we're about a month away and beginning that paperwork process puts us in a position to be ready to go to move forward in july so this is a little bit of a proactive move on the part of districts to gear up for the next school year which is already on our minds although some students might not be thinking about it and might most likely be somewhere else for their education next year but anything you want to add to that mr phil any questions concerns all those in favor signify by saying aye aye all opposed thank you next we have um the approval of a resolution to accept the

081official vote can i have a motion to bring that to the floor please mr talk in a second um any questions comments i did uh if if my math is correct uh this was a 78 approval on the bug yes versus now any other questions has it ever been that night it probably was one or two along the way you think so i don't know if we had it that high then yeah because the numbers were so low i think that's part of it now i'm going to have to look i need to hold you to that okay um all those in favor of accepting uh the official budget vote and election results signify by saying aye aye uh next we have uh the appointment of personnel on a long-term continuing temporary or per diem

082substitute basis i have a motion to bring these five individuals the approval of these five images any questions on that if not all those in favor signify by sinai paul opposed thank you we have a uh approval of a letter of resignation [Music] so yeah again when you look down uh through our agenda we have roughly 60 or so years of experience amongst the group here that is leaving the district and or retiring we certainly want to recognize that i don't know if our principals wanted to chime in with anything um in particular at this point but technically we're talking about sharon right now i can just say this is such a huge loss to the district she is incredible i actually spoke to a parent sharon and kristen can try to speak to this

083too i had the unique opportunity to be a one-on-one aide with many of our primary students who have autism and she's changed the lives of so many of these kids i actually had a conversation with one of the moms whose child is now in college taking college classes and we were talking about sharon and the impact that sharon had on her son and as a primary and elementary student and how she just knew exactly how to push him how to support him and really changed his life and she did that for so many of our students with autism so we are going to miss her we are really special people uh all those in favor signify dice by saying aye all opposed thank you we have a letter of resignation from john elliott a cleaner

084uh who's been with us 13 years could i have a motion with regret for yeah i've got to know john a little bit over the last year and a half and you know john's a good example of slow and steady wins the race appreciated all his hard work as one of our cleaners and mr forbes get up there a little bit well i'm i'm sure his services from from a board standpoint the services were very uh we appreciated those services over the past two two and a half years when cleaning is so critical so that will be nice all those in favor signify by saying aye thank you next we have a uh letter of resignation from corey engel uh food service helper do i have a motion to approve that especially with a passive

085pandemic really making some adjustments to make it work and we appreciate corey that absolutely i'm sorry to see our relationship okay all those in favor signify by saying aye aye all opposed thank you so then we have a another letter of resignation for the purpose of retirement from julianne ryan uh [Applause] 15 years yeah again teachers aides often the unsung heroes and really make those connections um with students certainly we appreciate everything joanne has done for us and principles anything we want to chime in now sure i think i can speak for kristin and i we're going to miss joanne she's worked with our special ed kids over the years and she's the most kind and caring woman she's irreplaceable all those in favor signify by saying aye all opposed then we have a letter

086of resignation for the purpose of the appointment teacher's aide with six years service to the district can i have a motion to bring back any questions comments on that i've enjoyed getting to know uh virginia she's kind of on my morning lap and see her in the middle school hallway quite a bit and absolutely want to thank her paulo virginia as well uh you see here often with joanne they work with our special ed students and um they're just they have a tough job every single day but they come in and they smile and they love our kids and we are going to miss her you know it's just i heard about joanne and then virginia said and by the way i'm turning 62 and i'm like no i mean i got emotional i have

087to say i you know kind of got choked up because you know they're just two people that serve such an integral piece of what we do and uh all those in favor signify by saying aye aye all opposed thank you um next we have the appointment of cindy lebaron uh okay any questions on that edge is that we're happy to have cindy on board again this is replacement not a new position always good to have a new employee with industry yes klinger all those in favor signify by thank you um so that's where we're at now it's the superintendent's report uh mr zoliak you have a couple pieces of information um in the s'more that went out earlier today we had a letter from me regarding school state safety and i just wanted to not

088necessarily read the entire thing but just kind of summarize some of the things and you know it's addressed to the entire fredonia community and as as we're all aware there's been a series of events over the last few weeks that certainly has brought school safety back to the forefront of conversations and discussions and not that it ever goes too far from our administrative team or the board of education because absolutely the safety of fredonia student staff and the community in general is a paramount concern to all of us all of us and for these reasons we put a lot of time into our plan and our training to make sure that we are prepared to respond to a variety of situations i'm in a calm and deliberate manner i we thank everybody in advance for

089being fully aware of those safety procedures practicing our drills with fidelity and being ready to take action as needed although we update these plans yearly and you know we also revisit them intermittently throughout any given school year and this allows us to really take the lessons that are learned in a variety of scenarios and apply them to our specific set of circumstances in the district and we also are open to thoughts from our stakeholders questions concerns and ideas that might come forward in terms of safety and preparedness we thank those individuals who have reached out over the past several weeks we're really showing a level of concern not only for our students but just our entire school community and based on that feedback from a variety of sources we revisit and have revisited a variety

090of security topics and made some adjustments as needed whether they're they're small and we're also open to some larger ideas that we might not be able to take action on right now but we're certainly processing those and keeping those on a list of concepts that we're taking a look at in the bigger picture in the back room tonight we have our school safety advisor tim kappelmeyer who has been extremely helpful in this review process and is more than willing to sit down with our faculty and staff have discussions about state safety visit um faculty meetings or respond to surveys that we send out like mr drown did recently with the elementary school and with his military background as well as his background as a new year state trooper he is really an invaluable resource to

091us although i didn't want to share tonight any specific areas that have come forward fearing that that might be perceived as a point of weakness or maybe get people thinking about certain parts of our procedures or protocols i did want to make everyone aware that this is a process we typically go through and this is true of this year as well and especially over the last couple weeks additionally mr cavanaugh and i met with doug essex our mayor david price our police chief and also our new fire chief josh myers yesterday and just sat down to have a conversation about let's review the plan the policies procedures but let's also think about how we can collaborate how we can work together how we can be on the same page and what might be some next

092steps that we can do together as a team to make sure that we're keeping everybody as safe as possible we certainly appreciate their attendance their concern their responsiveness and their team approach we also continue to focus on mental health as a district we heard some examples of that tonight but also pre-k 12. we also continue to remind everybody of our c something say something campaign and again if something doesn't seem right something doesn't sound right you hear something you see something that just doesn't sit well please reach out to any adult any administrator anyone attached to the district that begins a process of review and investigation and really trying to understand what's happening and again we are more than willing to take action as needed so at the end we really thank everyone for their

093support and the steps that we continue to take to handle emergencies effectively and efficiently we also thank our faculty staff as well as local law enforcement for their diligence in this effort and uh doing everything we can to keep everyone as safe as possible again please don't hesitate to reach out to me directly with emails which i have received and again i thank those people or a phone call or any other format if you'd like to have a discussion i'm more than willing to participate and be part of addressing and having some dialogue about whatever might be out there is a concern so having said that i didn't know if there were comments from the board of education and this with this topic tonight as far as i hear you have these meetings in an

094office we've laid boots on the ground with these people to look for deficiencies in the buildings with their expertise you know i know there was a building survey at one point that was part of the county school board association seven years ago fbi agents that actually talked about all the things that different uh schools needed to look at so i wonder how that's being addressed yeah a couple different ways um one of the things that we're just starting to get more information about is that we are part of a grant through boces that's all about needs assessment and threat assessment and we're going to be engaging in that process a little bit differently than we have in the past although again i think tim brings this to the table and he is all over the

095campus on a daily basis and has that lens of those areas of deficit or gap so he's certainly been helpful to that but also engaging in a larger process that involves feedback from other districts as well i think will be helpful the other thing that we talked about is really especially with the new people that are on board at those various agencies getting them into our building familiarizing ourselves with ourselves with our building should they need to enter under a more stressful situation and i think that would naturally lend to a dialogue about what they're seeing and what they're perceiving and tim is coordinating with those groups to make that happen as soon as possible so i think both those elements will be really helpful in moving forward and again being as thorough as possible

096can you speak to what our plans are with that yeah a couple of things um one of the things that we're looking to do at wheelock is do some work on the office in the front of the building and we're looking at ways to do that sooner than later um the process doesn't lend itself to that but mr ford said has reached out to young and right for any way that we might be able to speed up that process right in the moment probably the biggest barrier is the approval process through new york state education department and obviously before we do any work that needs to be approved and settled and we're exploring ways that we might be able to speed up that process that typically doesn't move as quickly as we would like it's

097your anticipation as far as time so in the past you know approval hasn't been to the early part of the school year for an outlay project which this is then we go through the bid process again not necessarily helping us on moving forward sooner than later and then the work has started well into the school year and we're just trying to see if there's any way to speed that up and it was early into the school year or as late in the summer as possible so so to that piece that would be part of our hundred thousand dollar capital fund project and the reason that we go through those processes mostly is for the funding and for the approval are we allowed to make adjustments to the building like segregating off hallways with doors bringing

098in contractors to do something that shows a little bit more of an urgency after this yeah i i believe in john i'll let you chime in here that any of the work that we would do in the building needs to be approved at the sed level yeah so i think that regardless is going to be in the mix whether we are paying for it up front or pain is uh outright okay i think we're still we're still in this process we would also have to have the architect which they did here at one point you need to call that evaluate like where you can quit doing when you can't look at me because you just can't say so to that i mean with a hundred thousand dollars that really with the cost of materials you

099know to work on a grander scale of scope of work but to sort of segment it out into different phases whether we use our money or food is that part of what we're looking at in our school safety uh yeah and i think the first thing we're trying to establish i think this was part of the conversation too that we have a few different things happening at wheelock and would it can we and when can we shift um to a more unified effort that doesn't kind of divide the different purposes of the building and maybe muddy up the waters a little bit from you know a place of adult learning and a place of student learning so i'm in communications with boces right now first of all trying to establish what are we going to

100be using the building for and i think once we have a clear picture of when that transition can happen then we'll be able to put a plan in place that that will be a little more efficient and not have us adjust some things that might not match the eventual use of the building so so to that hearing you say that wouldn't we set priority as a district as to what our needs are before we uh allocate what's available for policies sure we're in a dialogue right now and did give them a chance to explore options and see what it is that they can do before we made a definite decision about where we were what um the final decision is okay so i'm sure you're working with the administrative team to develop the needs of

101that particular building much to what we heard today about the need for a room for a library is there other needs down there that you're working on that you know is part of change that's going to take place in using that we were just thrusted into that relocating and to that thrust there was quite a bit of change that took place in this main campus as far as safety and and coordinating things off that we're never done with that building so you know it's kind of important that that takes place basically sooner than later as far as i need if we're going to start looking at a hundred thousand dollar project that's just going to change one entrance and we saw that we're using a good part of that building as the needs of the

102additional so you know i i just the big big plan is when would when would you say that you're going to have a thought process on that to present to the board um that's that's a good question i don't think we're quite there yet um you know i would like to kind of follow up with boces and understand what their options are and although i'm not implying that we would do something that wouldn't meet a priority of ours i think that's a decision that we don't want to take like lightly we want to understand the implications on what's been a good neighbor for a period of time and i think once that's established that puts the ball on our court of okay knowing that what's the decision that we want to make and how quickly

103can we move to have anything in place that might be possible for september i mean right now we have some organizations reaching out to us looking for classroom space a lot of the boces space is not classroom space it's more geared for that professional development piece not that there couldn't be a transition there or even maybe just being flexible in dealing with a ring that's not solely outfitted as a classroom right now but i think that would be part of the discussion too of is is what the request is do we have those spaces available on that we need there's some work to do there so am i hearing you say that we really can't move forward with a 100 000 capital project until we really have that plan in place i don't think so

104i think regardless of what the plan looks like we are we still need that office and that will be an important piece moving forward in whatever configuration um i think having that office at that main entrance at the main focal point of the building is going to be essential regardless okay and will that be used as a bus the main entrance and i think i think i think right now that's primarily what happens i don't know about the entrance that's further down so yeah i usually use door three um yeah just because it's convenient right there but door five is used for visitors solely right now we have someone sitting at a desk there throughout the day and checking people in when we visited i felt a little uncomfortable with how open the building was

105and you seem to agree yeah which we were able to move thankfully we were able to work with dr zilliax and move so we were able to hire someone to sit at that door door five and have the raptor system there for visitors to come through so it felt like we had a better idea of who was in the building but it is i'm glad that the capital project was approved and very grateful to voters because that definitely is going to help our security and would that be basically a hallway away from a secure set of doors close to your office how does that pose any issues that's a good question um we've talked about i've talked to the sylvia best secretary there about how we might be able to manage some of that because

106if she's over there and i'm down the hallway how could we do that so that's a good question i don't know i don't have an answer for that we really haven't talked about that piece yet not really knowing when we could get started on the work and whatnot so we definitely did think about that mr cacklemer anything from a larger safety point of view just wanted to we did move the door from where it was originally to the new place that it is and there there is eyes on that door all the time now where before there was not eyes on that door and people were buzzed in from the office and got in and got to walk through the building before they were greeted sometimes so that's a big thing right there is there

107is a locked door there it is man you can see the person with direct eye contact with without a camera being used and the door has to be opened by somebody in order for the person to gain access to the building and having the raptor system right there too it gives us an opportunity to to scan a person's id to make sure they're okay to be in the building it's it's better than what it was thank you um also just want to mention as part of this more um we have been additional half day at the elementary school which will be on june 23rd i know mr jollinger is sending that out directly to the families to school messenger again half day dismissal is at 11 30. the reason for this is that there's been

108a number of days throughout the school year and this is no fault of anybody i think first student has been done an awesome job this year really figuring out how to deliver and get our students home each day in a time where we know that the bus driver shortage is real but there has been moments that our elementary teachers have spent time beyond the contract day helping students get to buses and making sure that everything is settled so this half day kind of allows them to recoup on that lost time due to these efforts so we are communicating now to families i also wanted to mention that we had another great experience and paul i'm sorry if i steal a little thunder from the your middle school comments today with quest this year and we

109certainly thank all involved and there's some people in particular we want to thank first of all the program leaders at fredonia are steven sukhov and certainly i think everybody knows both and the commitment that they have made over time to this program is amazing and we 100 thank them for their efforts we also have students participate from cassadaga so kelly schrantz and reggie cole at casadega head up that effort and also silver creek chris private so thanks to all of the building leaders we also had a number of adults involved from food truck to the water truck to the mobile medical units um karen goldman's daryl wagg wesleyan chrisley bartow melissa and aj balsh jake proper aaron hellwig rachel and susan spangler bethany bush and skip gustafson we also had a number of adults at

110russell joy park helping out doug and tess corral carly and jared koopman also chris anderson we also had about 25 private landowners giving us permission to be on the land at some point over the course of the hike we had administrators teachers nurses kitchen staff the print shop all here at fredonia helping out as well as at cassadaga and silver creek we also had some organizations involved the bethany baptist camp uh fredonia department of produce and recreation fredonia pd fredonia fire department fredonia dpw fredonia police benevolent oh benevolent association of the new york state forest rangers chautauqua county sheriff's department the southpaw signs tops market and also roger gloss there was also another 30 adults who i'm not going to take the time to read who actually participated in the hikes themselves from all three

111of the school districts mostly faculty and staff but also some community members so great job by all involved so as we know this is an important and a valuable program here to us and we are looking forward to moving forward to keeping this tradition going which is certainly supported by the district we are looking at next steps for next year based on feedback we have received we will be reaching out to those involved with more information later in the next week so thank you to everybody involved in quest it was a great experience for our middle school students once again this year i participated briefly not for the whole four days but i got a sense of what this is all about and also had a chance to interact with some of the adults that

112continue to come back each year to help out and support the cause and it was really great to hear their experience as students here at fredonia and then how this has stayed with them over time any comments from the board so to the future will there be any type of special meeting yeah well i think we've had an open dialogue with the cops who again are the point person for all this they are the champions of quest i think they've provided some really good feedback about things that they believe can be helpful or would be helpful um not only to the individuals involved but just to the overall experience and i think we're taking a moment to consider those things try to make the best decisions we can about what we're able to do and

113that's some process right now okay so when you say what you're able to do that's without the cops not necessarily what i'm more talking about is uh financially part of their feedback was there's a need to support quests in a to a greater extent that we have it in the past as a district financial point of view um although there might have been some miscommunication somewhere along the line um the cobs are fully committed to continuing on next year as they have in the past and uh had noted with me that they are rejuvenated by this year's experience and that you know in the midst of covid they started to question whether this is something they could do long term but they seem excited and plan to continue in the same role that they have

114in the past so um how does the board stay connected to these processes that take place in the leading up to the discussion and so forth that's why i asked if there was a public meeting or something of that sort not something that's going to happen in a closed meeting as a forum so you know to that i really think that the investment that people have made just as you spoke and helping and their willingness to give up their time for better than two and a half decades longer really shows that this is a successful group of people and you know how do we have a succession plan moving forward you know money is always a barrier but john always seems to fight we're not talking 100 000 here and you know to that we

115would we would definitely want to make because this is sure public this is a community piece an event that you know all parents all kids teachers everybody from the community gets involved in this in some way somehow and it would be no different than losing our school music i think it's that important are we into the impression that there's any thought well i know there's been a little bit of confrontation back and forth via emails and it was put on the slate for executive session tonight and i would just assume discuss anything because it is definitely a community project discussed in the open session as opposed to uh in closed doors well what would you like to see happen i would like to see the cobbs asked as to what it is so to that

116you know if there's a money issue which i would assume you know bringing john and tonight the executive part that we were going to discuss finance but you know i don't know what kind of money we're talking about but we're talking about taxpayers and sure you know it should be done in an open meeting because we're not really talking about an individual or talking about a group and you know to that group it's the community and everybody wants to pay the taxes they give you the money to spend well you know i think there's an argument to be made there and i understand what you're saying you want to have conversation an open session absolutely and you know i think there's a moment where we do regroup as a board and do have some conversations

117offline before we bring them forward so i i don't know what do you think would be the amount of money that you would be comfortable i don't know what's been spent to be honest with you yeah and money really wasn't the topic you know at the point i mean i just saw hundreds of dollars they didn't see thousands of dollars and i've seen a lot of uh a lot of people stepping up in the community to donate and keep this going so that just tells me how important it is and and if there's any chance of um feels like you have the impression that there's some thought that we wouldn't continue to move forward with questions and i'm not sure why you feel that way well you know i just have a feeling that there

118is a communication gap of some sort and you know to that i just felt that this needed to be said and but even with the communication gap why would you think that somebody here is not supporting quest certainly i have communicated nothing but my full support our middle school administration and faculty and staff has had nothing but great things to say about so despite maybe there was a communication gap that is possible what is making you think and you know to that speaking of worst case scenario i just don't want to see that worst case scenario that's what i'm saying it's a frequent practice after events like this um and nothing bad about why you know i'm very supportive of class but there needs to be a meeting of hospitals administrators along with the cops

119along with volunteers to sit down and say what can we do to make this better what can we do to make sure there's a succession what are some of the financial issues what are some of the infrastructure issues that need to be done leadership succession but i don't think that the board should be involved in that at the beginning i think that's much later on in the process but i'd like to see i'd like to see the people who know what's going on with quest to sit down and okay sure but it's but it's really going through with the people who know what's going on with the program and to say how can we make this better now you know as far as quest is concerned i know i sound like a broken record and

120you talk about what is it that we want from our seniors when they walk across the stage picking up their deployments and i you know at your interview you said we shouldn't you know academics is important but but you can google anything you can google any answer what we really need to help and develop within the district is those soft skills it's the communications it's the teamwork it's the dedication determination um i didn't say leadership skills and that's something that quest does and it's it's a program i don't want to lose um and that's why i would support it but i think that the organs come in later okay fair enough any other thoughts i agree you know i i think you know they get together and then we come in at a later point

121and again hustle is a fantastic i mean what school has this program i'm certainly going to continue with absolutely certainly but we do want to see that they're fully supported and i think that starts with doctors only likes admin team and then you know then we then we a couple of the things one just a quick thank you to the student athletes and the coaches from the spring season well done great job a lot of positives from this spring season we appreciate all the hard work i'm also looking forward to the end of the year events um including those attached to our high school seniors i want to thank everybody in advance for the prep and planning that goes into all of these events as we come down the home stretch of the school year

122we also want to note that for any of the upcoming events especially art shows concerts other things that are happening in the building we will be utilizing our one point exit and entry and that will be at the event entrance this may cause a little extra walking um here and there but certainly we see it as another measure to keep everyone as safe as possible so if you are coming to the building for anything over the next uh well there's something every night this week um but into next week uh please use the event entrance um as you're you're attending we appreciate you being here um we had a special meeting with some new employees and again the only reason for that is that we want to move forward as quickly as possible there's a

123lot of competition in the marketplace right now as well as just a lot of processes in motion so we wanted to secure people that we've extended employment to and one of them is here tonight michelle dolly is with us tonight she is going to be our new high school business teacher next year she has a bachelor's of science in business studies from ub as well as a master's of science in business and marketing from the same school she has a permanent certification in business and distributive education she currently works in a neighboring district as a business teacher she brings 16 years of teaching experience to the table and is already approved to teach all of several more gcc college courses which is uh difficult to find um in the current market and she has also

124worked at jcc jamestown public schools as well as the cat allegheny proceeds i wanted to take a moment to welcome michelle to the team we are excited to have her on board and also give you a quick minute to say anything you might want to share with us tonight so um i actually live in silver creek with my husband and three college kids right now um and like dr zelia i've said i've been teaching for 16 years i've been friends with all the business teachers that teach here for the last 15 so i've worked with them very closely too this would be a very easy transition for me to come here and i'm really excited so thank you [Applause] we also have a middle school business teacher that we approved her name is madeline maddie

125webb she is currently traveling extensively with her family in africa right now so she is not here this evening but she is certified in business education as well as marketing she has a bad choice in accounting and business information systems from messiah college she did her student teaching at west seneca east and with seneca west she has prior exterior experience as a staff accountant and is currently in progress with her master's hours completed and this will be her first full-time probationary position as a teacher in new york state schools so we are excited to have her on board and look forward to having natalie madeline begin her transition with our current business department although she was on the zoom last week again michelle russ will be joining us in our music department as a replacement

126for mike mallory and again she went here in suny fredoni got her master's from ub certified in music also has 16 years of teaching experience currently an instrumental teacher for the paul afman music organization that delivers instruction in both parochial and charter schools she currently teaches about 200 students in grades one through eight in woodwinds brass and percussion and violin and she also performs herself in several orchestras and ensembles so again welcome to michelle but also to maddie and then michelle russ our music teacher [Applause] and if there are any other questions i think that wraps up the superintendent's report thank you um and since i do most of this yeah i'll take care of that but but since i do most of all the talking here michelle business it's a great place and holds

127a very special place in what i do so good at thank you uh with that uh thank you mr johnson i assume i assume that you're going to make a motion to accept the calendar so so that's we we have the second reading of the 2223 school calendar and uh just to bring that to the floor for discussion uh thank you mr johnson for the motion and we need a second socket mr pock um okay any questions comments no no no adjustments from the calendar that you've seen and we will have that out to uh our employees tomorrow um soon assuming it is approved and we appreciate people's patience in this process any questions comments from the board i love the mural we're not done yet you get your own type of thoughts all those

128in favor of approving the 2223 school calendar uh signify by saying aye are opposed to past that great um we have a ceremony next year we do yeah any and uh participants to stop by our event entrance again into the cafeteria eventually into the hallway down in between the gym and the auditorium we have the wall of honor ceremony at that time again that's june 21 just before our regularly scheduled meeting here at six the ceremony will begin at 5 00 p.m um and again we'll be in that auditorium lobby area we'll be honoring uh mr lenimento as well as mr tom maurici for their dedication hard work um and overall fantastic leadership to the district at that time we're going to have a lot of family and friends on hand we look forward to

129that we'll have their plaques up joining a couple other former employees actually on the wall of honor we'll say a few words and then just have some some chance to mingle and share some refreshments and it should be an enjoyable evening so i know some of the people from wheelock were very interested in this event as well as other people from across the district so we look forward to that and hope uh um so the board is reserved this time you hear comments from the audience those wishing to address the board or as a stand give their name and address to comments five minutes anyone like to address the board on any issue i think there's a table in the back that's playing tic-tac-toe and i'm not sure what uh who's winning that tic-tac-toe game

130but yeah maybe they're listening okay okay so um again the next regular board of education meeting is uh tuesday june 21st 6 pm right here in the school library after the wall of honor ceremony [Music] if i could you know i say thank you so many times and i know that it's never enough and after the events that we've seen over the past couple weeks i i would be disappointed by myself i didn't continue to thank mr tacklemyer thank you to the administration the staff the teachers everyone involved in keeping our students safe it's it's you know education is important but safety is premier so thank you very much to everybody thank you okay with that mr hawk do you have anything to add other than the mural and the artwork in the back i

131thought we might have like some comments on you know a little bit more of a explanation could someone speak i don't know i think that might be part of the round the round table especially no uh other than the mural it's been a great year i'm glad to see the kids uh you know made it through and didn't have masks back on with all the i'm going to be really brief i had about seven specific things to mention but so many awesome activities year-end great things happening so um i'm sure that they'll get touched on but very much appreciated senior activities field trips band trips all of those things so thank you to everybody that's involved in supporting those things is this what normal feels like maybe all good things happening looking forward to the

132end of the year uh senior things which are exciting and back to normal um and then i just really enjoyed the two presentations today um um looking forward to seeing where it goes next year as always and enjoy the presentations i think it's been a great element i had this year and i enjoyed both of them with that being said mr drowning here he would just make sure that melissa is just tell her the board truly appreciates her coming in tonight her enthusiasm was wonderful yeah that's great thank you mr marshall uh not much other than the presentation side yeah all three of my children had uh most size instructors so yes ms karma i love reading this hand well i want to say all happy things but i've been it's been hard for me

133to focus to sleep to just do normal things since the events that took place in buffalo and then texas as a school board we can we're at the local level so all we can do is deal with what we spoke about tonight and that is building safety mr kappelmeyer and and the roles of individuals and we're not permitted to get political and i'm not interested in getting political it is not a political issue that our country permits troubled 18 year olds to purchase weapons of war arm themselves up with body armor and go out and kill multiple children um the weapons are being used for what they were made for so i don't know why we have to pretend to be surprised when this happens and i apologize to all of you students because we

134as adults have found you and i just want you to know we're not going to give up and despair we're going to work with you to change this world so we're with you and we support you going forward thank you mr paske anything happen in the high school next couple weeks nothing to report actually before i get into the multitude of things that i wanted to share it's not often that we get asked thank you mr hawk for what kind of things you need and i don't want to step on any toes but i think that in both the presentations which were excellent you know there's a huge focus on literacy and great games going on in the primary and the elementary you know i i would love to see that continue into the middle

135school we've talked about this i think for years but the addition of reading instruction returning that to the middle school we have no reading teachers in the middle school i think that that's something that the board needs to consider also would talk about the counselors and the social emotional needs of our kids um we added a counselor to the middle school this year amazing but we have one counselor that's shared between wheelock and the elementary school and travels between the two buildings for six grade levels not enough um our counselors even with two at the middle school and two of the high school are overwhelmed we need to put more focus on that at the earlier grades as well so i just i wanted to get that kind of out there because it was awesome

136i think that's something that i feel very passionate about and i i think sometimes we don't share things with the board that we need to share and that's something that i think is important that would be the fun stuff all right softball team had a great season they finished off just a game shy of going to states they they were outstanding this year our seniors had their their senior trip last week um the lightning shut down a lot of the rides but we had a great time uh anyway so i wanted to thank the student council putting that trip together i wanted to congratulate and thank dan bettinger for putting together the darien lake trip for physics day and what's really cool is that the seniors who are on the softball team who gave up

137their senior trip to play softball but their game was rained out they didn't get to go we got them to go on the physics trip even though they weren't physics but so they got to go and have a little fun at darien lake which was good i want to say congratulations to our music students who attended the all county music festival at chautauqua institution last saturday uh congratulations to our unified basketball team thank you to the board for supporting unified sports i think it's amazing kristin tom chesky shared an awesome picture from their playoff game last week and they did a fantastic job i want to thank mr haas and the fort in the family the big 2022 that we have out in the events entrance the fort has brought that to us in 2020

138and last year we had to make the extra digit for the one for 2021 and this year we got bold and we did 20 22 and we made the three for next year so we're ready to go but that's a great opportunity for kids and they do they do use it a lot to come and take pictures even after graduation they stop by and take pictures in their caps and gowns so it's a really great addition so thank you guys for for doing that um sectional champions and a couple of these guys might be here tonight alex field matt linder miracle and velez almo first in the 4x400 relay and they're heading to states so we're having to clap out for them at school on thursday later also took first in the 400 meter we

139participated in the state championships matt lotter i think matt's here he took second in the shot put at that meet and missed a trip to states by two inches so congratulations to all of you um we had academic awards tonight last night that was amazing it was a very long ceremony and it's cool it it was long but boy there was a lot of cool stuff going on there and our kids were fantastic just a lot of accolades to our students and the community who's very supportive of our school and our students well over 500 000 in scholarships given away last night just just incredible coming up thursday we have art show for all grades which is why there's some stuff in the library at least in the back that's for the senior art show

140the senior art show will be featured in the library and the other grades are going to be in the art hallways i'll leave that for paula we also have on friday the senior banquet at the beaver club which is now free which is awesome so we got pretty much the whole senior class to attend that and senior class night is here in the auditorium at 7 45 i wanted to hit obviously we have the the class clap out parade which is going to be the last friday before graduation that's the lineup is at 9 15 where cars line about by the tennis courts and then they will drive through our bus loops head up to wheelock go through their bus loop and then right to graduation rehearsal at suny fredonia back at king concert hall

141and then graduation will be on that sunday so i'm looking forward to having everyone there for that so there that uh clap out and parade will be the 24. that is a friday the 24th correct okay yup 9 15. line up 9 30. mind us hit the next meeting yes it's the 21st right yep yes yep i will remind you at the next meeting just so that you guys know if the board members are attending we have a place reserve view right out front of the entrance here at the main entrance on the sidewalk so when the cars drive by we kind of have spaces for each one of the buildings and the board members where everyone's going to stand the driver's education is up and running i was really concerned because today is the

142due date for all of the applications and just let at the end of last week i think we only had nine registrants uh we have 32 slots open but now i believe all of them are full so you know kind of last minute like some of our seniors who are here for the last meeting before the end of school get that requirement i know that's good um and then lastly i just wanted to hit just look so the board is aware the regents exam expectations have changed for this year through next the end of next school year that they are going to allow a 50 to a 64 to be considered passing for regents exams and that's open to all students and they give what's called a special appeal the parents do have a choice

143not to allow their kids to get that if they want to sign a waiver on that but that is open to all students they have until they graduate to decide whether or not to make their 50 to 64 a passing grade so they have to go through a process where there's like a little bit of an appeal process but it's relatively guaranteed so that that is something new in lieu of that change you know i'm a little bit concerned as a principal that a student could get a 50 on this exam which is technically passing now but that could bring down their average to below passing if it's figured into their overall grade so to fix that the way we're going to proceed this year is to only count the regents exam if it is

144equal to or greater than their current average it's still reported on their transcript but it's not going to lower their average from what it was from their classes i just don't want to do something that's going to hurt our kids so we we put that announcement out to our teachers this week thanks to brad margie for your consultation on that so thank you for agreeing to letting us do that and so i think it's obviously good for kids and that's what we had in mind when we made that decision done and now i have to buy lunch because they said whoever speaks the longest has to be not done yet okay so you just make sure you're done in less than nine and a half minutes um we have our eighth graders um all going

145to allegheny state park on friday so they're very excited you know keeping our fingers crossed for good weather they have a lot of activities scheduled for once they get there so the kids are really excited about that our fifth graders on friday are going to the dunford lighthouse and so again it's a real cool it's right in our backyard real nice trip we just finished our eighth grade science assessment so they're all packed up and done and so that went really well and everyone is kind of preparing for our final exams um our art show as darren said will be this thursday from 5 30 to 6 30. it's in our hallways so families will come in through the events and friends and they can walk down there and check out all the amazing artwork

146we have tomorrow night at six o'clock in the odds we will have our eighth grade celebration it's when we take a little time just to celebrate our eighth graders who will be leading us for the high school so we always look forward to that thursday we have our spring concert our fifth graders start to perform at six o'clock they'll finish up and our sixth seventh and eighth graders will start at about 7 so it's going to be a great night of music and then please take a look at our mural we are so excited mackenzie and our art club and our suny fredonia partners they finished it it looks amazing we do have to do a top coat on it to kind of protect it so that it doesn't get damaged but we are so

147excited that this is our first one and this is a partnership we're going to continue on for next year so that eventually our hallways will just be you know a place where we're all so proud of and it represents who we are as a school so i just want to say thank you to the cops and all their hard work you know every year they put in endless hours to make the trip a good one for me it is so cool to see kids who do not have confidence that they can even finish the trip and you know i had a young lady say put me in iss so i don't have to go she's like the pack is too heavy i just you know and when i saw her you know at russell joy

148and i said how was it and she said oh my gosh it was amazing you know that that really you know tells you how important that is so thank you i can't thank them enough for all their dedication to the program thank you mister mr jerome thank you um i just want to thank mr kepler-meyer because a few weeks ago he organized a car seat safety check at wheelock for elementary and we like kiddos through the state troopers and that's a great thing that we can throw out to the community because they also gave away car seats to those families who needed a car seat and next monday tim organized a bike safety event that's going to take place from five o'clock to six o'clock in the parking lot back here um you're encouraged to

149ride your bicycle to the parking lot we're gonna practice um effectively you know going through a crosswalk opening traffic signs uh we're gonna have some food for the kids it's just a nice little community event one hour drive your bike there and you're done so thanks for tim for organizing those events um and this past sunday we had the color run that's the pto's largest fundraiser it was well attended a lot of fun got a little color in the air and that's always a good event a lot of field trips literally every single day uh today's was rained out the the bisons game but the students still get the ticket and then they get to go um on their own time but we're going to give the kids some pizza later in the week to

150kind of soften the blow we have our art show as well on thursday um reminding the community to use the events entrance same thing five o'clock is the start time of ours and um april cartoon did a great job we had our first chorus concert in in person since i've been here and it was a really cool event we did like uh three concerts in one night and they rotated the the audience members through so everybody could come we didn't have to limit it and it was a full house for all three of our shows so able to now say outstanding job so thank you thank you so um mr paschke mentioned this just briefly but unified sports has wrapped up an amazing year this year that program is growing and mrs tomaszewski has really

151taken a lot of that on herself independently so just excuse me i wanted to thank her for that some of the kids from her class actually participated in the torch run for a very scaled-down special olympics event that took place this year so that was exciting you know we talked a lot about safety tonight i think i mentioned at the last board meeting that we had 19 staff members go through a training here that we brought to the district called cpi crisis prevention so that we are able to be proactive and respond to student needs just this week yesterday today and tomorrow i also have two staff members who are going to a train the trainer event for another program called safety care so they'll be able to come back to the district and train

152staff in-house to be preventative and proactive when dealing with student crises so that's that's pretty exciting um and just you know kind of in my world we're prepping for the end of the year reporting planning for summer school which is you know a big endeavor and um hiring and planning for next school year while we're really examining a lot of ever-changing programming options and the disappearance of some programs that we knew and kind of figure out how to make things work as we move forward so that's it i'd say the unified program has done so well yeah when we approved that i didn't know what to think it would do and i've just been so overwhelmingly we also went to the stadium this weekend with the unified team and we got to play at uh

153new york whatever it's called i'm right now they got to go into bill's locker room run out the tunnel get introduced we played three games did win but we had a lot of fun and it was a great experience for everybody that took part in there wow that's great yeah thank you for adding that this is piper let's get out of here um so i just i want to say thank you to sheila for your words because i think that those really hit home to all of us and the students especially the teachers that really had a hard time and parents and about those events that have happened so i just want to thank you for for sharing those sentiments because we're all we're really feeling that pretty deeply um i also want to thank

154darren and the board for this very real conversation tonight um when i prepared this presentation i knew that i had to present some hard data and some some facts that might not be so rosy and so i appreciate the conversation that we were able to have around that and the honesty that we could have so i want to thank you for that um nicholls city reptiles was that we like today and um the kids were super excited you could hear the the screams throughout the building and we had alligators and snakes and all sorts of reptiles that our pto sponsor bringing in for us so we were super excited about that um i want to put a shout out to our some of our classrooms with cards for a cause for elder abuse and they

155created some carpets they were picked up today and distributed to some of our elders that are are driven with some things barca library we have been making some trips to barker library we had a presentation here a month or so ago and the kindergarten classes are taking trips walking down to barker library and getting their library cards and experiencing that with their kindergarten teachers and so we're excited about that it's water days we've been having a lot of water days that we like and gifty pools and the outdoor classroom and having some fun with water days we're also approaching june fun days for example one of our first days is camp day and the teachers actually set up tents in the classrooms and they spend a lot of time reading a lot of these these

156events are focused around reading and the love and joy of reading that being a particular one um i would be remiss without putting a shout out again to sharon krazal who is just one of those people that's the heart and soul of fredonia where she is going to be so missed and i just personally thank her for all her years at fredonia um and one other plug on bike safety with mark we're excited to be doing this with our pto and child safety village is coming and partnering with us as well and doing some presentations so we want to thank them okay thank you mr forbes nothing no few things side of the job here we've been working on the hiring for summer programs um you know really looking at meeting student needs looking at

157how we can be flexible with that you know not just sticking to a traditional summer program because that's maybe what is always you know when people think of summer school it's like this great this great history but what are our needs and and it's been wonderful having conversations with mr johns or looking at the data to see you know okay just because a child is in third grade maybe if they're reading above maybe they're reading far below so do we have a flexible approach to our summer school programming working on skills which is what um you know ultimately was the decision and i love having those collegial conversations and the input and being able to have that hard data to drive those conversations and say we have these columns of students with you know perhaps

158these needs with skills and they might be in you know first grade second grade and third grade so let's make up you know a primary reading you know primary skills base and then maybe more advanced based and then same thing with math and be able to flex and do that so we're offering summer support where it's actually targeted and needed in ways that students can work together and be engaged you know and and feel that they can help one another and that teachers can target those needs in a really flexible multi-age way so it's been really exciting um so i just you know shout out to mr jollinger for his open mind with that and for the teachers who really have received it well and to look at things you know perhaps a bit differently

159and by that same vein i want to shout out to both mrs troutman and mr jollinger because one of my requests was could we push summer school back a week to the start date of the 11th which is what you know they agreed to and i said here's my why um i think that it's really really professional learning is so crucial and i think that we're very fortunate to have a board that supports that so much and we have we've worked together as an administrative team talking about a lot of those needs particularly around literacy and math and so we've been working with an outside consultant coming in and so we've designed a summer professional learning series and so in doing that again using our data as our start point um and a lot of

160what missy carmella was talking about those domains and so what are our needs in those domains and making sure that who we have coming in meets that need um too and it it's the kind of thing that when you talk about professional learning i don't i'm not a big fan of the term professional development i think our professionals are very well developed i think that as new research comes out it's very hard to stay current and to stay on top of those things when you're addressing many social emotional needs when you're trying to communicate with parents when you're trying to love on those kids and do all of those things to also read professional articles the latest research and how to implement those things and you know that's where my office comes in you know

161so thank you for that you know so in doing that you know i'm pulling in um people who have those things and can say here's the latest research here's how to best support i ready here are things about already in what's called a teacher tool box so when you see those results um and i know dr zillion spoke to this much earlier in board presentations about ira the first one mr johnson did you know um often times you're like okay great i have this data but what do i do with it how do i do this and the beauty of iready is you go into the teacher toolbox and you look at each child to decide to read that data it's like do this this this provides that for you um but there's always you

162know again that time to sit there and do all those things in the midst of life so we're offering a professional summer series with um that is very flexible it's a very boutique type model well there'll be three sessions offered um and there will be two trainers one focusing on i already mapping la and one focusing on foundational literacy so that that can happen prior to the start of summer school so that our teachers will then have a chance to use that new knowledge and new learning while they're working you know with the summer school population to kind of get their feet wet and test it out and try it out pilot some things without the high stakes and pressure of a september rollout so that's really exciting and then um those same consultants will

163come back in august some said april august that's the month that comes after july um to then do a next part of that and that's going to focus on the next section so you have the primary now more of those elementary foundational deep comprehension how to respond to literature along with middle school and high school and so we have a focus on secondary reading and secondary writing and expression and communication and when i put the summer learning series out there in a survey to see who would be interested to garner that we had 65 people respond and we made it very clear this is open to all instructional staff and so it was really exciting to see for that secondary literacy piece tech teachers art teachers you know people because there's writing in all of

164those you know content areas but oftentimes the professional learning may not necessarily meet their need so that was just been really exciting you know when i get to kind of get my my nerd on with curriculum and do all those and have those discussions and then be able to use creativity and designing it so it's been exciting to see the excitement with that um being generated to talk to curriculum council about that today as a curriculum council we did a survey to set priorities with literacy being the number one priority area that you know instructional leaders really want to focus on for next year we also have our secondary um was second priority was identified as social emotional learning and then the third priority as the next year the next three year iteration of the

165pd plan that has to go to the state has to be formulated and that has to be done through a committee model so that will be the other thing that we do so that was exciting to do that we're gonna do summer summit number two for curriculum council next year in august that date was set along with new teacher orientation and new staff orientation we're adding that to kind of just aggregate that so that our orientations are specific to the populations that we have and of course i'll remind you but we want to continue that tradition that we started last year of inviting board members to breakfast with our new teachers so we will have that we're looking at thursday august 17th from 8 to 8 30. our new teacher orientation will be wednesday tuesday

166yeah tuesday wednesday thursday so those are the dates that we're looking at for new teacher orientation and that's been really exciting and i'm just appreciate the collaborative model with the administrative team and designing and looking at how we can best serve our population of students and teachers in a way that's flexible and responsive and that looks at where some of the you know the data is pointing us to and then respond type so so with that um board uh anticipates the need to enter the executive session to discuss matters of bargaining negotiations and particular personnel if i could have a monsoon turned into executive session all those in favor signify by saying that all right thank you everyone