October 7, 2021 KLSD Board of Education Meeting

001good evening everybody welcome it's so nice to see you all thank you so much for being here with us in person it has been a long time since we've seen some of you in person and we are thrilled to have you with us it's thursday october 7th uh it's my pleasure to make a motion to go back into public session if i could have a second thank you ilana all in favor please say aye aye wonderful would everybody please join us in the pledge of allegiance [Music] indivisible with liberty and justice thank you so much this is an eagerly anticipated meeting and we thank you for your patience i'm sorry we were starting a few minutes late we are so looking forward to hearing from our building principals about the opening of our schools and

002welcoming students back to school in person five days a week um i think we have just a few short items of business before we turn our attention to the presentation i think i will suggest that we postpone our board committee reports to the end of the meeting but if we could please invite our student board member welcome back it's wonderful to see you abigail and we're ready for your report if you are over the first few weeks of school students are enjoying being back in the classroom full time even after the past year of half online and hybrid learning students are adjusting very well kindergarteners 6th graders 9th graders are all experiencing a smooth transition into their new schools in campus congress we had our first meeting on wednesday september 29th and the campus congress

003executive board including myself introduced ourselves and shared a few goals we have for this school year our main goal is to encourage members to share as many proposals as possible so we can really make change this school year at the meeting we have three new proposals our first being a winter pep rally for athletes who play a winter sport second of all we proposed students to do the morning announcements and announce jv and varsity sports games as a way to add more school spirit and this proposal has been approved and we had our first student announcements this past monday our third proposal was changing the first spell in the morning from trumpets as many students um felt this was not the best way to start there um so that has also gone into motion and

004now we have different spells in the morning we also brainstormed ideas for committees covering topics such as sustainability and school events in the high school on wednesday september 22nd a virtual campus night was held where parents could watch videos from their students teachers the week of september 20th was spirit week for the high school and some themes included usa day western day and school spirit day the pep rally was held the following friday where varsity sports introduced themselves and there was a performance by dance team saturday september 25th was the homecoming football against yorktown and we won [Laughter] on september 23rd jose antonio vargas author of dear america which was the community read this year held a webinar that all students watched in their 9th period classes students could ask mr vargas any questions about

005him and his writing which was very unique and exciting experience lastly on september 27th groups of 11th and 12th grade leaders and the freshman class participated in an all-day retreat the groups participated in activities to get to know each other better we also spoke about high school life to help them with any questions they may have coming into a new school in the middle school the annual book fair was held from september 27th to the 30th and on september 29th curriculum night was held for 6th graders and on september 30th 7th and 8th graders had their curriculum night the middle school also had a spirit week the week of september 20th with themes such as sports teams and school spirit day eighth grade home-based leaders also got together outside in the first week of school

006in meadow pond elementary school there was a welcome back picnic held on september 17th well picture day was on september 28th and today was harvest day and soup day will follow tomorrow at increase miller elementary school there was a welcome back picnic on september 10th and school picture day was held on september 23rd at katona elementary school the welcome back picnic was held on september 17th the 5th grade car wash was held on the 18th and school picture day was on the 27th in all amen elementary schools curriculum night was for grades kindergarten to second grade on september 21st and grades 3 through 5 on september 22nd 27th thank you that was fantastic we so appreciate your enthusiasm your comprehensiveness and the opportunity to just hear in your voice the joy and the exuberance for

007all that's going on at the beginning of school and we really thank you for that we we we needed it that was true efficiency they got all this stuff done we're still amazing amazing people must have had a lot of bottled up energy abigail has successfully shortened some of our principles fabulous thank you so much did anybody have any questions or comments before we go on terrific thank you so much that was great that brings us to board announcements if there are any i'll pause how do you follow that well said and then perhaps we'll turn our attention to you andrew i'm happy to postpone also if we to just go away okay terrific yes please let's do that so we are ready to turn our attention to our visitors our principals welcome nope i'm

008so sorry our external audit pardon me i completely forgot welcome to the auditors welcome to our external internal auditor oh i totally forgot yeah we're going to be here a while thank you do you want to introduce yourself so before we start tonight we have both our external and internal auditors presenting uh bonodillo group will be our first presenters um and they will give an overview of our fiscal year end uh findings and then a queue audit will be the next presenters and they will present their budgeting financial accounting and reporting audit um before i turn it over to tim doyle and adam i'm gonna mess with nick kozil i just want to thank everybody who was involved in the audit um by by way of background the external audit begins in in april and

009may where they meet with the audit committee um they do some field work in may and then they come back for some intense work in august uh that primarily falls on the business office staff so um i'd like to thank my team members lisa hurlihi kim parks the district treasurer margaret taylor payroll and benefits coordinator karen carroll the purchasing agent and chris todd and accounts payable also the internal audit takes place as well we um the audit committee met with them in april or may as well they also met with a key personnel principals and directors afterwards acumen presented their findings to the audit committee and it was decided to determine budgeting financial accounting and assessment would be the area focus um once again a queue returned for some in-depth work in late august and

010the business team i'm my gratitude for that work as well uh once in draft form both audits went before the audit committee um the audit committee is comprised of board trustees julia bill and alana and then we also have community members joseph garifolo danielle imacelli michael looper michelle mew havana behalf and david proskin the members of the committee reviewed both audit repo reports on september 29th and with that i will turn it over to tim and adam thank you thank you and welcome thank you thank you thank you i do want to uh echo two comments that have been made so far first of all it is great to be back live we love being in front of you and seeing all your faces so uh thank you thank you for inviting us this evening

011um additionally i want to just echo your team did a great job it was very challenging i i mentioned to them as well as some other audit committees it is has been the most challenging year in terms of audits for our school districts for many reasons one of which we'll talk a little bit about you did implement a new standard that took a lot of work on your your crew's uh behalf as well as ours so we appreciate all the efforts but thank you thank you you should have uh three audit reports with you and also a required communication letter the required communication letter is required on all audits or all financial statement audits i should say um and it requires us to put certain things in writing and some of the things that and

012i won't go through the entire letter but i will highlight some things first of all we're required to note whether there were any difficulties encountered in performing the audit we're happy to say that there were not um well it was challenging audit certainly no difficulties nothing that we didn't expect we're also required to note if we had any disagreements with management as to accounting matters reporting matters or auditing matters again we're happy to note that there were no such items and then the other thing i would just highlight from the letter it does talk about you implementing the new standard of gatsby 84 which related to fiduciary reporting and we work with your your management as well as your audit committee sort of talk them through certain items that have previously been reported as fiduciary

013had to move to other funds okay and i'll highlight there's a footnote that that talks about that that i'll just point your attention to when we get um i'll take you through the basic financial statement audit and then adam's going to take us through the the single audit and the extra classroom audits so uh in a summary fashion we'll go over the results of our audit certainly open opened any questions and as mentioned we did meet with the audit committee went through pretty thoroughly with so from the audit of the basic financial statements there are two auditors reports in that packet the first one um that is uh i believe pages one through three is our auditor pin that's the opinion on your financial statements which includes both the statements and the footnotes and we

014issued an unmodified opinion which is the highest level of assurance an auditor can give you it means that we are able to obtain sufficient audit evidence to support both the statements and the underlying footprints it's consistent with what you've received in past years so no change there but that is again the highest level of assurance you can get the second report in that packet is the governmental auditing standards report and that requires us to report on two things first is your internal controls over financial reporting those are the controls that if not in place or not operating effectively would not allow you in a timely fashion to detect or correct a material error or fraud we noted no issues there no material weaknesses or significant deficiencies again very consistent with what you've had in the

015past and the second part of that report is your compliance with laws regulations and grant contracts that could have a material effect on your state we noted no such matters no non-compliance again very consistent with what you've had in the past in terms of the report those are the auditors reports very clean um the one thing i did want to know is you do have a footnote on it's foot note number 13 that is the change in accounting principle and so as mentioned this shows you this footnote shows you what the balances were in each of the funds the prior year and what had to be adjusted in order for you to start out the year under the new standard so uh that that's something we did go over with the audit committee i just

016wanted to point you in that direction because it is a pretty significant change for you and all the other uh school districts this year any questions on the basic financial statement all right i'll let adam take over for the other two thank you thank you everybody for having me having us um so the next area is the extra classroom financial statements so the state requires you to have separate financial statements and audit report related to the extra classroom activities which is like the student clubs and activities this report is required to be presented on a cash basis our independent auditor's opinion on the extra classroom activities was qualified and we generally have qualified opinions for extra classroom activities just based on the nature of the activities and not being able to verify the completeness of

017the cash being received at the student level so it's in line with you know almost all school districts as well as past results here um do you have any questions on the extra classroom activity report i i just have a quick question it's an obvious question is there anything we should be doing to give you more visibility into the extra classroom financials or is this commonplace throughout every common place almost 100 across the board it's just the nature of the activities the students are receiving the cash there's not really any control at that level to make sure all that cash is getting transferred on to the uh to the books and it's relatively immaterial i presume and you're comfortable that that's relatively uncontrolled yes can i can i just add some color to that so

018like if students have a bake sale they don't have like a starting inventory of we have 100 sets of cookies we're going to sell them for 50 cents each and then at the end so like if it was to meet the standard they would sort of have to do that and then at the end say oh we have 20 left so we sold 80. so we should have 40 dollars and they would have that written up all of our student treasurers go through training so they do receive training on how to keep financial records so to keep track of how much money came in and what their expenses are so that piece of it is like we do that very well it's more that the collection of cash and the reconciliation with the cash in

019terms of what was sold is just it's not really feasible thank you thank you for the explanation um so there's no other questions more questions there i'll move on to the next area okay so the next area is the uniform guidance audit of federal awards so a uniform guidance audit is generally required when the school district would expend over 750 000 in federal aid during the course of the fiscal year this school district spent the uh expended about 1.4 million dollars for the fiscal year so there was a requirement for an audit this year um this district does qualify as a low-risk auditee just based on favorable audits in the past and no real issues in the past the program that we audited this year was a child nutrition cluster and based on our audit

020we noted no material weaknesses with regards to the compliance requirements of the program and we noted no significant deficiencies either so we did issue an unmodified opinion again which tim mentioned is the highest level of assurance that we can provide are there any questions on the single audit report okay no thank you includes our report i don't know if there are any other questions from the board otherwise that's that's the end of our report thank you very much we really appreciate you being with us and taking the time to be with us physically in person thank you it's great to see you and to have you and thank you to the audit committee for your deliberations on the 29th which made our job very easy tonight i think we're in great shape thank you congratulations

021thank you great thank you and so next up we have from acume audit is uh bill croft and sharon eason good evening everybody uh i echo everybody else's sentiments nice to be here in person um the last time that i presented in front of the board was not in person was over zoom and we discussed at that point the risk assessment that was completed and as a result of that risk assessment it was determined that we would be doing a budget financial accounting and reporting and cash internal audit and so that is what we are here to present tonight uh the audit was completed in late august early september thanks to danelle and her team for all the help that they gave sharon um right off the bat i will just say that uh it

022was a clean audit we had a satisfactory ranking which is the highest of all the rankings of an audit um we found a few little uh suggestions on how to clean a couple things up a little bit but other than that it was a clean on it and uh again we presented then in front of the audit committee a couple weeks ago and uh i'm gonna pass the mic to sharon at this point to discuss the audit in a little bit more detail wonderful thank you i believe your clicker is right there if you need to click through the slide thank you thank you bail good evening everyone good evening um i'll go into the details now of the audit procedures that we entailed our responsibility was to assess the adequacy and effectiveness of internal

023controls over the budget the financial accounting and reporting operations in the district and we reviewed the period from january 1st 2020 through june 30th 2021 july 1 [Music] i'm starting at the beginning fiscal year not calendar year our audit procedures were performed in accordance with the internal standards for the professional practice of internal auditing promulgated by the institute of internal auditors some of the procedures performed were we reviewed the district's board policies and the business office regulations uh we reviewed that the district is in compliance with the established policies and regulatory requirements we also reviewed and assessed the budget development the preparation the approval and the adoption and implementation processes and we also reviewed and tested a sample of journal entries and a sample of bank reconciliations and cash accounts um we continued um in

024our audit procedures we reviewed and tested a sample of cash receipts and deposits to ensure that there's proper segregation of duties we inquired which building departments have board approved petty cash funds and we also evaluated the adequacy of management's oversight to prevent inadequate reserves of excessive idle funds and last but not least we looked also at how the district monitors the adequacy of the securities pledged that said um we have three ratings and internal auditing satisfactory is the desirable audit for um every school district and katona is no different and then you know knees improvement just means that there are certain areas of weakness that needs to be improved and of course unsatisfactory means that there are significant deficiencies in the internal control processes i'm happy to say that as bill has um alluded to

025in the beginning that we um the katona school district the audit over the financial accounting reporting and cash received a satisfactory rating with some recommendations and the recommendations are is that as it relates to journal entry approval that we recommend that the business office follow the journal entry review and approval process established by the school district and also as it relates to the process of outstanding checks we recommend that the business office develop a clear process procedure to identify any financial assets that has been unclaimed or abandoned after a period of specified time and that specified time is generally a year any questions and i'll also note that as part of man a part of the audit management has responded and has given us their plans to ensure that the journal entries uh review process

026is better established and that the cash processing right and we've already started implementing an automated system for journal entry reviews um we started that at the beginning of this month uh based on your recommendations and then as far as outstanding checks we are working with the state comptroller's office and following the procedure set and outlined by them right so i was just going to ask that question so when you refer to financial assets that have been unclaimed is that essentially uncashed checks that we've issued yeah correct thank you any other questions thank you very much for having us thank you thank you thank you for being here great to see you both thank you thank you thank you thank you and danelle thank you and your team for two clean audits it's terrific and this

027cannot have been an easy year to provide our auditors with all that was required to reach these findings so we really thank you and your team i'm sure this represents a tremendous amount of work on your part and congratulations so thank you it really is a team effort thank you so many moving parts thank you so much okay then let me look at the agenda and be sure i'm in the right place but i think this brings us to our opportunity to hear about the first month of school i think we're going to have some shifting of chairs quickly and we invite our five principals to come up and join us wonderful a brief commercial break very brief for the auditors their highest is satisfactory or on my channel they must be tough parents imagine

028your book report was satisfactory maybe they should have that can't you oh okay welcome everybody it's so nice to have you here and welcome to ashland and i'm not sure you've even had the opportunity to meet every member of the board but it's wonderful to have you welcome hello thank you welcome welcome to katona lewisborough so thank you very much marjorie thank you to all of our principals for being with us tonight we're going to take you through a little bit of an overview of how this yet another somewhat unusual school year is uh working although we're very very very happy that in many ways some things are returning somewhat to normal everything has a caveat around it but there are many very positive things so i think tonight we're going to start with our

029elementary principles we're going to work up to the middle school and then work from there to the high school strictly in chronological order i will be in charge of the slides hi everybody nice to see all of you christy harris abigail we're going to just kind of take off where you left us with this wonderful intro to the beginning of the school year focusing on the elementary and carry and ashley and i are very appreciative to have this um opportunity to share um what's been going on so welcoming back students five days a week in person has been incredibly exciting and we've tried to make things as normal as possible within our restrictions of you know our health and safety protocols and as you would expect we place a great emphasis on our students overall

030well-being and this year as in years past it's always a focus at the beginning of the year around getting to know our students and and making sure that they feel safe in school physically emotionally socially um and this year more so than ever really with this transition back from hybrid and remote some of our students haven't been in the building for um a year we have um you know second graders potentially who were had half a year in kindergarten and then were remote in first grade or hybrid and you're coming back to like their first traditional school year so we really took some extra care and thought and planning for the opening of schools um so first and foremost our our emphasis has been on creating a welcoming and inclusive environment for our students so

031that all of our students feel that they belong in our school where they where they do so much you'll see from this slide with just a varied pictures um the messaging you know that was posted in our hallways and out front and in doorways of classrooms and above lockers and cubbies and whatnot i'm just sending the message you know all are welcome we're the i and kind you're welcome in this classroom and our schools are a place where diversity and uniqueness are celebrated where differences and similarities are explored it helps us to connect with each other and build caring and respectful relationships so in the classroom once they get through that door [Music] teachers use a variety we just have the one slide it's okay um teachers use a variety of approaches and strategies that

032they've um collected uh through professional professional development opportunities and whatnot and um into supporting the social emotional wellness of our students um this is done both explicitly like freestanding lessons we're modeling and we're talking through the actual skills and how to come about to be an active listener et cetera and then it's integrated into our academic program throughout the year so and where these skills are then practiced and um and uh throughout academic subjects it could be ela math wherever it might um be appropriate so what is this you know trying to i want to give you a little bit of a picture or sound of like what does this actually look like what are the students actually experiencing so read alouds is a very popular and well-used strategy and i actually went around and

033just collected some some books from my colleagues at kes and i'm sure many of them are also titles that are shared in the other classroom what did you use over the course of the couple you know first weeks of school like the magical yet as it relates to the growth mindset um a letter from your teacher on the first day of school all are welcome our class is a family my first day so just the titles in itself kind of lends itself to the kinds of messages and discussions that were initiated at the beginning of the school year morning meetings or class meetings were taking place in different ways throughout the elementary classrooms but essentially what you would typically see is when you walk around in the morning first thing um often this class will

034be standing in a circle with each other or some um standing up you know in some formation where they're greeting each other whether it's with different languages or they're sharing something during that greeting personal about themselves and it's a time when students are allowed to share feelings and thoughts and stories and memories and sometimes um the old-fashioned show-and-tell might be like a show and share and even things that are relevant to their own interests and talents and family traditions can be shared it's all about you know developing the relationships and getting to know each other and those skills that are so important active listening asking questions learning how to give constructive feedback something else you might see are things like charades around feelings and can you guess my feeling and becoming more self-aware and and

035leads to more self-regulation as those skills and lessons develop across the course of the year and at the beginning of the year something that you would see probably in almost all the classrooms is the class working together and creating the class promise or the class constitution something where like the class norms and the expectations um not so much through routines and structures that's built in there as well but something that everyone can agree to that this is a classroom where i feel safe where i can ask questions where i can be myself um and the code of conduct you know just kind of lends itself to like the rules in which we're all going to interact and be responsible for while we're in school so um i could go on with the videos and the

036characters and stories that we have come alive and we put ourselves in the shoes of characters that we read about and see but basically it's really just spending really dedicated time getting to know our students and we're all really excited about our students and we look forward to getting to know them even more and developing those strong relationships that we know are so important um so that we can get to some of the other stuff like curriculum and other kind of ways in which we have experiences planned for them so thank you is that me it's still me so you know this is just a slide that kind of shows over the course of the opening of school year we felt it was so important to get um that in-person experience with some of our

037with our families and we we knew that it couldn't be everybody um in and out because of the restrictions that we have but we placed priority and making sure our kindergartners came in with their kindergartner families kindergarten students came in but the families kind of met with the administration outside and got a very warm welcome from us the new families met with us and the students got to see their classrooms and meet their teachers before school opened and then curriculum night we last year we did a lot of recording this year we went live and the teachers put an emphasis on showing what the classroom environment looked like because some of our parents have never been in our schools if they have either new or younger so we asked our teachers to like take pictures

038and take little videos and make it seem like the parents sort of walking in and feeling what the what the students are experiencing um we are looking forward to having some parent volunteers back in our libraries we're talking about field trips those that might be outdoors and enhance the experience for students and we're looking forward to our parent-teacher conferences where for those families who choose to they're invited to come in to meet uh in person with with the teachers we'll make accommodations through zoom for those who aren't as comfortable or aren't able thank you hi good evening everybody i'm kerry ford and the principal of increase miller good to see everybody again so i'm going to talk about briefly about curriculum instruction and assessment so as christie was saying we're really excited to be back

039in person and um first of all for relationships and building all those relationships with the teacher as well as with students among each other but also if you look through a curriculum instruction lens one of the the disadvantages of last year in the hybrid model or remote model is that really we couldn't see children kind of growing and learning and practicing skills and strategies in real time and so now that we're back all together in person it's really great to see the children responding reacting they're not on zoom and they're all together they're interacting among each other interacting directly with the teacher and they can really we can really see you know their independence their stamina their learning behaviors their routines really um right there in person and the feedback and the coaching that the

040teacher can give to the students in real time is very valuable because really that timely feedback in the classroom with the children really helps them grow and learn and develop so that in person experience is very very much important to us and we're so happy to be with them and quite frankly it's you know to hear their laughter in the classroom and to see their energy and come alive it just makes it all the more exciting for the teachers and myself and and for the kids to be together so purposeful use of technology tools a csun schoology during our remote experience um those are our primary learning platforms that the child we use with the children um um and seesaw is mostly focused on the primary grades like k to three or so and even

041in fourth grade too um so we still need to introduce those platforms to the children and and teach them how to use them you know in case we have a situation where a child is quarantined or we're out for a short period of time um and really what we've learned is that some of those um you know platforms in and of itself are helpful in terms of posting assignments for you know especially for visual learners they need to see the assignment using a graphic organizer um you know again i mentioned the quarantine a communication with families we also learned that this is a great way to take pictures of children in the classroom and post the assignments or post things for the families to see and communicate with us um so there's certainly some benefits

042to that but of course we're prioritizing the in-person experience and in-person learning but still introducing those tools to children in case we have situations such as we've had return to our full rti model so last year we had a limited rti model experience some of our interventionists i'm not sure you're aware but they were actually assigned to be remote teachers um or assigned to classrooms sometimes in terms of subbing because we had teachers who were out for various reasons um so this year we have our interventionists back in their roles um so that we're able to provide the full range of services that we're providing this year in reading and in mathematics and that would be k to five so we're very excited in addition to that they also um support our benchmarking three times

043a year and um our assessments um that they give and they monitor student progress um you know using the intervention services as well so we're very excited to have that back in full swing in terms of services for students who need it it's the science pilots in grades three four and five so we are piloting um these two different resources it's science 21 and amplify and we need to align our science curriculum with the next generation science standards um so we're piloting those programs and most recently our third and fourth grade teachers have had some professional development and they've been involved in learning about the units of study there's about i think there's four units for third grade four units for fourth grade we're fortunate to have staff developers to help to also provide support

044in those areas this year for the piloting unfortunately the piloting got suspended during um covet and during our hybrid model so we're resuming the pilots that we had had prior to covid um and so um we're providing training for that this year as well and then teachers college partnership that will contin it's continuing um we did have the support last year during the hybrid model as well as remote um but what's nice now is that we're returning to the in person um so you might have might recall from our previous presentations in the past that we've had lab sites where the professional developer would go into classrooms and model lessons with teachers and there would be real time learning with the teachers as well side by side and that has now resumed and so we're

045continuing with the in person and the focus um this year is um with their k-2 teachers is very much on word work which is supporting the phonics and phonological development of children and in small group instruction is also another focus 8-5 across the board so we're excited to resume that in-person learning experience for our teachers as well so special area and enrichment programs so last year i'm not sure if you're aware but we had our art teachers music teachers and pe teachers actually art music primarily they were traveling to the classrooms to provide instruction and that was due to many of the cool big guy lines that we had children were in fixed cohorts this year we're excited to have on the music and our teachers back in their classrooms and so the children are

046traveling to their rooms and the benefit one of the many benefits of that is that the access to the resources and materials that are in those classrooms whether they're painting using the ukulele and the music classroom um but really and you know having being in that environment um and and and really the children traveling to the classrooms in and of itself is a very um you know logical or very uh time for them to move you know oftentimes the children would be in the same classroom all day um i remember going into a couple classrooms and they say oh mrs ford borrow me borrow me so now this is their chance to really get out into a different classroom environment um and to be in in those environments and learn from the teachers there so

047we're really excited that they were able to do that and have some movement during the day and transition time which you know especially our little ones need that movement during the day pe um again last year we prioritized the p e taking place outside um you know even in the cold months they were outside as long as the weather permitted um and they were terrific and so this year again pe is taking place primarily outside sometimes you know during inclement weather days or if the fields are wet they take place inside in the gym um and i would say the benefit of that too is that their masks don't have to be on um when they go outside so that's like another mask break if you will for that period of time whereas last year

048they were still wearing their masks outside when they were playing the use of the library and book selection um so again our library media specialists were traveling to the children the access to books was was limited you know they were traveling with a cart of books they were also reading books on their ipads epic as an example um and so their book selection this year going to the library seeing the range of titles the different levels um and the choices that they get are are back to what they really should be so we're really excited about that um into the library and actually today christie mentioned about parent volunteers we actually had some parent volunteers today when the children weren't in the library to actually help us now start to put away books and and

049and be a part of the library program if you will as a parent um instrumental music we're very excited that is just about up and running by the end of the week they'll be teaching uh in in fourth and fifth grade classrooms teaching small group music instruction um the children have pretty much had an opportunity to audition using an instrument and they have access to their instrument and so we're going to be up and running um so again we did not have that last year up until the spring we reinstated fifth grade instrumental music but now fourth and fifth grade is going to be up and running so we're excited about that and then special events um like at increased miller today we had the fire department come the whole program was outside um we

050had the children were very excited they all walked away with fire hats k to five field trips we actually at an increase specifically but i know the other schools are planning field trips as well we had a fifth grade field trip everybody followed all the safety and health and safety regulations um in terms of wearing masks and that trip was half happened to be outside which we're really trying to focus on many outside activities and i know that we all have fall celebrations um you know planned for the fall whether it's a harvest day or soup day and um you know the pumpkin patch for the little ones the halloween parade for kindergarten um outside you know we're really planning some fun activities and enriching exteriors for the children so that it feels a little

051bit more normalized if you will so speaking of health and safety um thank you again for welcoming me to the district i'm ashlyn so i'm here to speak a little bit about our health and safety measures uh first is we all of our students wear masks if you've ever seen little kids wear masks they're actually incredibly good at it and it's just become part of the norm we actually don't have to remind students very often sometimes to lift it above the nose we off we offer a lot of mass breaks throughout the day anytime a student needs a mass break we always give them a mass break we're always maintaining three feet of distance between the students and we're reminding teachers whether it's i know at ks they do a nice little bell tone to

052remind the teachers um and this and the students remember we need to be three feet apart because little kids scooch and they try to get next to one another so we're constantly reminding them that we're also maintaining seating charts in all areas just in case we have to contact trace and that includes the buses we are always washing hands and hand sanitizing which the little kids call hannitizer always using hannitizer and monitoring student health um our nurses are incredible uh and they are at the front line every day checking to see symptoms and it's you know calling families checking to see if it's just a belly ache checking to see if it's something more and so we're really thankful that we have them every day uh so something that is different from last year that

053we do or you did last year and i heard was new um is a little bit of our lunch and recess is a little different um and so in each scenario there's like an indoor outdoor plan so for lunch outdoors we were very excited to start the year we all of us at the elementary schools bought new picnic tables had planned to have lunch outside we were super excited about this plan until the bees came um and i think the last straw was when i was outside for lunch and a kindergartener was like help and she had three bees swimming in her ranch dressing and she was like save them save them but i was like trying to kick a carrot and get the bees out and we're like okay we need to move inside

054uh so we moved inside and as you can see from the picture uh we've set up desks and tables in our cafeterias the students are still together but they're safely six feet apart because that's a time where you do need to take off your mask um so we're shifting back outdoors um now that the weather is getting a little bit cooler but we have a plan with it's six feet apart either way and then recess we always do outdoors it's the one time that our grades mix so third grade all the third grade classes can play together so um when we were saying before that they only get to spend time with their class this is a time where they get to spend all together which is really important for the social emotional um support

055and togetherness so um so that's indoor and indoor recess we have set up in different locations um making sure that they're they're always three feet apart with their masks on so then learning at home we have a lot of safety measures in place but there's always students who are going to be on quarantine as we have learned and so we made sure that each child has an ipad with their own zoom account some students are taking them home daily some of the younger students leave it in school and we collect it if they need it as carrie was saying before we have access to seesaw and to schoology so teachers can post assignments on these pages and then they can do it when they're out we have quarantine support the teachers the classroom teachers are

056signing up to support them after the school day so they're giving instruction on what they've been teaching during the day the district has also hired um two quarantine teachers that are starting this week next week and uh yep and and two weeks from from them so we're excited about having teachers that are specifically supporting students with their quarantine work because it is hard for a classroom teacher to then end their day and then start their whole next day of being a quarantine teacher so we actually had a meeting about them today to see like what's the best use of their schedule thinking about working in three schools and how can we get them to support the students as much as possible and then um finally thinking about our students with special needs thinking about the

057above and beyond what we're offering here students are getting their their speech ot pt resource rooms and extra support with a special education teacher on top of what we're already providing a little bit about our health and safety and i think that ends our our elementary reasoning yes wonderful thank you so much so thank you very much for having us everybody really appreciate you having us here i want to echo something that ashlyn said earlier just about our nurses they have been at the front lines whether they are at home um whether they're in school it's just a it's a just a constant flow into that office all day long um and they stay late and they come early and um they meet each child with a smile even though it's behind a mask so

058students are always first but you know it's um it's just i think good to remember how hard their jobs are during this entire pandemic so um so at the middle school uh this is the was the view um but once you get in our building you'll see that hopefully if you have children there you're hearing that we really focus on social and emotional wellness at the beginning of this year that was very very important to us to make sure that students especially adolescents felt connected to each other friends friends that they had to reconnect with and their teachers i know actually in abigail's speech she talked about sixth graders and ninth graders and students new to the school and that is always a focus for us but even more intentionality around that this year so

059just a couple of um just kind of go through some of the pictures that you see up here uh on the left are kind of inspirational posters that were created by our sixth grade students last year and they came back and it was like we have to get those up on the wall um good reminders for our students just as they come in those are right on the wall as you can students come in from the buses each day next to that we have just a classroom contract so very similar to what we're doing in the elementary schools but middle schoolers need that as well they need to understand the rules and define kind of the parameters of expectations of them during the classroom i'll jump over to the far one that is our track

060so i'll talk a little bit more about lunch and recess in a little while but we want to make sure the students do have the opportunity to be outside get a nice breath of fresh air and it is their option to take their mask off when they are outside um and then the um again well said in abigail's report the middle school and high school had a similar spirit week this this year there were some there were a little more high school focused um topics so we kind of toned it down brought me to it was it white lie wednesday into teams team spirit wednesday i think we had so um you know but but i think that that connection on our campus is important to both stephen and i i think it's important that

061when one student on the campus is getting dressed to go to the high school that the middle school student is as well so we're all the wolves so i think that that's it's part of the social emotional wellness feeling part of the community again similar to the elementary school um really a focus on in-person instruction this year really having students i think last year since no no teacher had ever taught to a computer before um that really the technology became the focus of a lot of instruction and one of the major intentional pieces this year was to make sure that we are reminded to teach the students that are in our classrooms so what you'll see is in part of the curriculum here is the intentional nature with which we are doing that so much

062like what they're doing at the elementary school the bottom two pictures here are of a seventh grade classroom uh involved in the tc readers and writers uh workshop model so it's something you wouldn't have seen if you were in our buildings a couple of years ago now we have students both reading and writing their own individual books at their own level of challenge in the middle school level so that is we've put a lot of professional development into that the last couple of years and so i just wanted to make sure that since you haven't been in our buildings that that is something that you would see because i'm sure you have reports from mary talking about the curriculum and instruction etc i'm in our top left corner that is our kitchen space our family

063consumer science space um you can see how well it is spaced out how we purchase some new furniture to allow a little more mobility in our classrooms so we're very excited about that bottom left-hand corner is a sixth grade classroom we are really really excited that students can group up and still be three feet apart and again it's that it's that conversation that they probably have missed so many times even in a breakout room it's just so different you're learning how to read body language you're making eye contact with people even though there's still this barrier of a mask and then on the right side of the screen you'll see it's one of our technology classes so i know a a concern of hours coming into this year was will students be back on technology

064even though they're in the building and so in technology class yes so you'll see students we've totally revamped our technology space we're really excited about it the students here are working in small groups on something called scratch which is the beginning of coding at the middle school level something we are really excited about this year is we're starting we did some curriculum work over the summer and we're doing what's called a level up program so in that picture if you were to look uh more intently you may see that there are students of multiple grades multiple grades in the same area so we really are looking at the students and what they can do and then grouping accordingly specifically in our technology classrooms schoology is still our driver it's the way that we stay organized

065from last year to this year uh so if students are ever out for sickness they can always check their schoology page so that is something that um we are making um making sure that we are doing uh last piece on there uh facing history in ourselves um that is the work that we are doing to make sure that you know history does have a different view than probably when many of us went through school and saying that there are multiple perspectives to history as it was written there were there were many different people living living a different experience than we all learned about so um that is our work in um diversity equity and inclusion one of them one of the things that we are doing at the middle school um this is our uh

066just page to say let's stay connected uh when we went fully virtual last year there were a lot of questions um you know uh parents were probably spending more times with with their adolescent children than they ever had um in previous generations um so we really we took the time and i said to our school psychologist like what are some of the hints that we can give to our parents so we wanted to share that on our web page we have created what's called the jjms video library if anybody has a better more inventive name please share it with us but there's a spot there for both students and for parents so if you look at the the parents page and you click on that there are little videos little tutorials for parents so that

067you can stay connected and help help your child set up a home workspace reminders about how and when to contact a teacher etc so we wanted to make sure that that was highlighted for our community we already went over the schoology piece but the other real kind of silent partner at the middle school is our pto uh they are helping us with our field trips that have already occurred for sixth grade and then our upcoming seventh and eighth grade field trips as well to help us with that financially but really kind of a silent partner you don't see as many parents in the library as you may or helping out with events as you may at the elementary school but we know parents still want to be involved in our pto is really fantastic uh

068so for health and safety again very similar to the elementary school we are providing mask breaks for our students we generally do that for lunch and recess uh students do need to step out in the hallway they absolutely can students may you know go get a drink just so they can take their mask off get a drink quickly and return to class i've been maintaining the three feet of distance between students unlike probably our my elementary counterparts we put some of that responsibility on the students as well desks shift and so our reminders to students are not only you know make sure that you sit in the desk that is three feet away but also you know you shouldn't be shoulder to shoulder now i think middle school students are probably magnetic again if you

069have any of them at all it's very hard for them to remember that but we you know remind them early and often um and that's probably why they enjoy being outside walking the track like you saw earlier and again like our like we said our nurses monitor student health um again students may feel anxious on the pandemic so allowing them to go and check in and you know sit down and take a mass break in the nurses office is also part of our practice and we still have the signage i thought that was important to show that's that that hasn't gone away that we are still independent so lunch and recess has been a big topic at our school this year um and so i just wanted to take a little bit of time and

070kind of share why so our academic day allows for 40-minute classes at the middle school we do have a period called called home base we can get into in a little while if you would like but it is home bases are grounding for students each day they come in they have a daily planner they sit down with it they look at their schedule for the week so that that's the beginning of our day so that is about 20 minutes each morning for our students so that's our grounding adolescents connect with each other it's a sixth through eighth grade process again i can answer questions when we get to the question piece um but that allows 40-minute classes 42-minute classes for the remainder of the day so i have had some questions from families can we

071can we lengthen the time of lunch lunch and if we were to do that it would shorten the rest of our academic classes and we would get off in our curriculum area from you know early classes to mid-day classes so our lunch and recess we have to serve 255 6th graders in 40 minutes including both a lunch and a recess when we are indoors we are confined to six foot spacing last year we were able to use an entire gymnasium this year there are actually too many students to use the gymnasium in the hallway that we did last year so we decided to break that group we decided to break lunch into two so you can eat first and have recess second or you can have recess first and eat second we continue to refine

072we just made another move the other day trying to you know move students from recess down a little bit early to maximize that time but if any of you have ever had a sixth seventh or eighth grader it usually does not take them 20 minutes to eat their food um there's usually a lot more time socializing etc but now when we are actually in that process we have both an indoor and an outdoor plant every day whether we are indoors or outdoors there is a recess and a lunch if we are outdoors for recess um the options are to walk up to the track um to and then we actually have some spaces open indoors as well if you look in the bottom left hand corner that is our makerspace brand new to our building

073this year again supported by the pto and people who want to get rid of things like cardboard etc so that's also a plug if any of you are looking to do that um but our makerspace for that 20 minutes we have a challenge of the day so and on the day that i took this picture was the airplane tower challenge students have glue guns they have a bunch of different things and those are some of the examples of what students created so different challenges each day you don't want to participate in the challenge there are plenty of other things that you can build or or be involved with in our maker space so we're super excited about that students can also go to the library whether it's indoors or outdoors when we are fully indoors

074we also open up our um our gymnasiums so the students can run around if they would like to we know how important it is for students to kind of get some energy out again especially at the middle school level um and when we are outdoors we sit in the front circle so kind of a mid picture above the planes we spread out on our front circle up reading and then you can see the indoor space we do not have um desks we have a very quick changeover and there is no opportunity for us to wipe down all the desks before the next students come in as we've decided to stay with chairs for this year we felt it was the most sanitary way to get so many students fed uh we're in when we're in

075an indoor environment and again similar to our um our elementary counterparts i think the biggest difference for between middle school and elementary school is that we have counselors at the middle school who are really managing student absences if students have to uh you know if they're quarantined for any reason so there is a solution to them being supported after school hours by a professional but the number one priority is making sure they are following along on the microsoft suite making sure they are following along with schoology they can follow along with throughout the day and then connect with their after-school person and like was that before our specialized services um there may be an option of coming in during the day a mix of day time kind of like zooming into classes and also an

076afternoon connection with a support provider etc i think that's it all right good job thank you thank you yeah good evening see you this is good to see you all again appreciate you having us here tonight welcome steven i think we need to get you a microphone so the camera captures thank you much of what you'll hear abigail has covered but i can assure you i did my own homework uh i just want to take a moment to say that this is my 18th year as a principal my ninth as a high school principal and i can't express how different the beginning of this year has been for the 18 years i'm doing this there has just been such a positive energy a positive vibe i think everyone is just so aware even if we're

077not articulating it all the time we're just aware of what was lost and so now coming back has been just so invigorating and some of the best parts of my day start in the beginning of the day when i'm out at the main doors and i'm greeting students and parents who are coming in via their cars and it's just a great way to start so again i thank the board and i thank the superintendent and the cabinet just for all the support and and parents and students so with that being said we can move into our first slide and based on what i just said i thought that you know restoration and renewal i think were appropriate uh subtitles and as we learned is just that social piece is what has been missing uh even

078in the research that we're reading about the effects of the pandemic uh really no one is saying the answer is remediation let's go from 11 to 14 hours in front of the screen to 11 to 14 hours in a book no one is saying that they're all saying the same things connection restoring as much as we can and that's really our goal and that's what we're hoping to do and so renewal also means let's add some new things that we haven't done before and so our senior class advocated for and that is senior sunrise and it was fun being on the contest field at 6am so it did double as pajama day for some of the students but hey it's uh it was fun and it was just one more opportunity to put this back

079together i think about 60 of our seniors showed up so that's not a bad showing i think that was good spirit week that abigail touched on i didn't realize how many john jay students had western gear so that was a lot of fun and it was there was great participation and administration got these big tacky sheriff badges but you know it worked out it was a lot of fun and white lie wednesday we yes we had some concerns but ultimately we said no we're going to trust them and they came through as we knew they would so that that was a lot of fun uh we all got involved with that too and my white lie of the day was i am a real doctor so yeah we had fun we go to the next

080slide so again we're talking about bringing new things in one of the commitments that we were working through over the summer and this is probably going to be a multi-year project at the high school was that we really want to increase student leadership increase their footprint in the building and so one of the things that we did with the help of tom rizzotti and the teachers was to develop a freshman retreat and we recognized too that our ninth and our tenth graders really have not had the transition experiences that normally our students received so we felt that this was an important addition it's a work in progress i know mary ford and i have been speaking about finding a facilitator to help us think this through so it may be about a three-year process where

081we would hope to even include some targeted leadership curriculum so right now is that we have our student leaders we have about 120 of them uh so they have been connected with freshmen they're going to be the check-in in prior years we would be pulling freshmen out of lunches and as we learned over the years about up to a third of them really didn't like that anymore so uh so we're just changing that up so we gave them the freshman retreat where it was a full day of bonding activities so they were divided into their packs and just it was a good day and i know uh lenore person did a wonderful job of covering that and that is on the district's website i invite everyone to please take a look when you can uh

082so that was a wonderful day uh homecoming again it was like everything came together beautifully it was a great game it was a nail biter it was great attendance great energy uh you win it's it's beautiful weather it's like wow just bottleless and it's wonderful sophomores for the first time and i can't remember when won the homecoming uh floats they they really stepped up their game and good for them so that was a lot of fun and also we returned the club fair and we had about 35 clubs all out there trying to solicit students to join them get involved get connected great turnout and as i'm walking around i'm seeing a lot of names on the rosters so and that's really been our message try it you know you may not know what you

083want to do between the years of 14 to 18. welcome to the world but you may find something that grabs you and so that's why these clubs are so important and as always we're trying to increase uh the participation increase the amount of fun so we're already thinking about next year that perhaps it goes on the lawn we get the smell of funnel cake in the air i guess we'll be talking about food trucks again eventually but but not tonight we can continue please we had an outdoor pep rally uh we wanted to have it the the day of homecoming but we had torrential rain on thursday and it rained again on friday morning so out of a concern about safety we did postpone it and again i've never called a snow day before but

084by 11 o'clock it was beautiful outside and kids wanted to know what's going on here so uh but again a pep rally delayed was not denied so we just did it the following week we attached it to another home football game and i gotta tell you it was fun and but it's a different energy outside you don't have the thunder that you have inside the gym so that's something that we're gonna look at for the for the spring or maybe the winter as uh abby's abigail has uh made me aware of uh we could talk about that maybe the phys ed teacher's in a rap battle why don't we we'll start off with something fun right so we do have like a minute clip that i'd like to share with you and let you take

085a look and this this video produced by students at the high school yes from our video club seneca schwartz um thanks to the john jay videography club that was a good time as you can see we have a new pep band they are in the process of still rehearsing i'm amazed at how many songs they learned so quickly they had a repertoire of like seven to eight i was just so impressed with that that was wonderful they're in the process of finding a name just like you know stephen colbert has his band's name and so they're thinking of some things and try to build an identity for them so that's that's been great some of the nuts and bolts uh some of the things just the the day-to-day workings of the high school morning arrival

086has been interesting uh even though we are still beginning at eight o'clock uh the last buses are coming in and the last cars are pulling up around 803 804 805. however i think it's best to just leave it alone because we do have a longer first period we build in an extra six minutes for announcements so we get that time back and there's just wondering that if we moved back to 810 would everything just kind of move along with it and then we would be losing class time so i think we're in a good place there uh there in the cafeteria uh you see that we have increased the amount of seating so inside the main cafeteria what you're seeing there on the left hand side that is the hallway in front of the auditorium

087so we do have desks that are out there just so we can have the spacing that we need i think we've done a good job and also the 10th graders can now leave campus for lunch for the first time so that has also helped disperse and my poll numbers i guess are pretty good with the 10th grade right now so but it's a long year um so that's working out pretty well and then as you see here the library you know the you know the furniture is a great help in terms of being able to distance and we do have the room in the back that is amply used and so again library is back to normal kids are coming in it's it's working pretty well classrooms you know again the instruction has just been

088fantastic and teachers just continue to say the same things that they're just so glad that kids are back and i'll talk a little bit more uh about that about what what teaching looks like for this year and where we want to go with it that'll be in just a minute but we've also been trying to have some fun with the bells our music tech uh students have created new chimes for us so we've replaced the uh the factory bells with something that of their creation eight o'clock yes we've had some experimentation with uh i think reveille is underrated um but when you work for uncle sam it uh it stays with you uh we've had the theme from rocky we've had miley cyrus now we also have on ninth periods on fridays at 2 38

089you hear the whistle and then yabba-dabba-doo and it was great to see kids saying what is that so it was an opportunity for culture i hope that's working out well so we're going to continue to have some fun with that too and that's really what we're trying to do i mean you want to walk into a hug as much as you can and then yes there's time to get down and to bear down and to get to work and i think our students are definitely doing that as well so i think if we move along i think we're in very much the same boat as the the rest of the district i think an advantage at the high school level is that because of the age of our students the rates of vaccination have helped

090tremendously i have had very limited uh need to do contact tracing and the ones that i've personally been involved with just about every phone call was a sigh of relief yes vaccinated they will send in their materials so that is working well and like the middle school the counselors are taking care of those students who do require uh that piece also something that we have never done before we have never had a virtual uh webinar we have never had a an assembly program online so this was a great victory for technology i want to thank vicki weiss in our english department uh so through a friend of a friend she was able to get a hold of jose antonio vargas this was our summer read and i think in terms of the equity work i'm

091very proud to say that our english department has kind of been ahead of the curve where they have been looking at this topic for a number of years and having that guide the summer read and it's been said that the reason we read is that because we just can't meet everyone and you're not going to really learn about anyone else's experience unless you dive into it and you make it a priority and so i think the english department has done very good work there and so it was it was very interesting i think it was a great webinar i think the speaker was very engaging our students had made some questions that they had pre-submitted and then they were able to free associate and ask any questions that came up afterwards i think he shared

092his email and so i think some kids will be making some connections with him and you know part of his message beyond his his own issues was that look you know you you can be what you want to be in this life and you find the mentors and you believe in yourself and you work and those things will happen there's another piece of it that i think was important in terms of our work is that he also brings up the reality of immigration and so seeing as our high school students are going to be voters very soon voting on this very emotionally charged issue they need to have a perspective and so with that i'm also proud to say that the league of women voters was here today to register our students to vote so

093again it's all working hand in hand so this was a very good experience and again we thank vicky weiss for that very much this piece uh we subscribe to what's called the marshall memo and so administrators we get this and it kind of gives us up-to-date uh research in the field as to what's happening and i came across a quick one-page synopsis of the work of justin reich and john meda from mit and harvard about what are the lessons of covid what's happening uh nationwide how are schools responding to this because even though february of 2019 we were still a very strong institution there's always things that we can do better and we also know that there are always some populations of kids we have to do a better job with so i think with

094that as a frame that kind of turned me on to reading the entire document and i came across a frame that now i'm working through with my staff so the lessons of covid so we just don't revert back to february 2019 by default what do we want to amplify what have we learned that works what did kids tell us that i really learned even during covid when you did this so that's important it also gives the language of what to hospice are there some practices that we do that it's just time to let them go and therefore what do we have to recreate in order to do that and as easy as that may sound it's it's difficult you know i've lost 20 pounds in my life and i found them you know it's going

095to be ongoing work but i we've started this conversation in september we just did another one in the last faculty meeting where it's breaking them up into smaller groups and really hammering this out and really thinking about their experience and what to what to include in the last uh faculty meeting we had i now ask them to start prioritizing so i just borrowed from stephen covey what do you think is urgent and important not urgent but important you know and so on and so forth and just a way to get us to think about this i'm going to continue that process with students and then i'm going to continue that process with parents and so once i have like a final blueprint of at least here's the consensus of what people are saying and then

096i share it with uh with the district and we make plans from there there's what the teachers were doing at the last faculty meeting and again very very good discussions and i'm very happy to see some of the things that they put as may not be urgent because the school year has started but it's important especially when it comes to student autonomy student stress mental health how do we grade and assess so some very very important items that i was like all right good very very pleased to take any questions as well thank you thank you so much we really cannot express how refreshing and heartening it is to hear your enthusiastic report from the field and also just to hear the way in which you speak with such dedication and commitment to students and

097to providing them with a quality welcoming um supportive environment after what was just incredibly challenging year for children and for each of you and you're doing a great job of not emphasizing how challenging this must be every single day we really appreciate the shout out to the nurses thank you very much and um for that reminder but also please allow us to thank each of you for what we know you're doing above and beyond every day at home and on the weekends and that you know your jobs are just beyond recognition from free pandemic so please know that we do we can't pretend to really understand it the way you understand it and live it every day but we do see it and we we thank you and we're very grateful i'm sure people have

098some questions and comments but really thank you for coming tonight and for being here for developing slides on top of everything else and for sharing these reflections on how you've approached and structured the beginning of school to make sure that our students felt supported with that i'll turn it over to board colleagues for some comments and questions please i think that it was a very interesting in in this presentation how all of you really um as compared to last year where we were you know kind of mired down with obstacles um but all of those have kind of turned into opportunities and that optimism and then you know just the consistent learning across the district in administration for teachers and even for students about how things are are going to work now and and just

099the happiness of being back together i think i just want to say thank you to all of you it's been an amazing start to the year my students are very happy happy happy to be in school and um really having a good time so thank you all so much for all your hard work because i know it's been a lot for the last year and a half years yeah phil please wonderful summary always wants me to go back and i don't want to be a teacher anymore but be a student seems seems to be a good idea so i had there were two two mentions one somebody mentioned the new science curriculum um and then there was something about a new uh facing history in ourselves i'd like to hear a little bit if if

100somebody is aware of the details of remember when we changed the math curriculum it was sort of a big deal there was sort of a a lot of things that had to change and new books and stuff like that what's the science curriculum like is it this is from the state um well it's basically um science 21 and amplify are two of the um the resources that have been identified for to pilot and so we have to align um with basically the new york state next generation science standards um and so we're starting with third fourth and fifth but eventually we'll have to shift to k one and two so there's we're we haven't selected one yet so you and you might recall like we went through an adoption process when we selected the curriculum

101um but we have not done that right now we're just piloting and evaluating different programs and um to see you know what are the benefits what are the you know what they can offer um you know inquiry-based experiential like hands-on like those are the things that we're looking for um different different topics but different modes of different topics yeah so under life science physical science or science so they're still falling under those categories if you will um and primarily ford could probably talk more in depth about some of them um but we have to you know there's cross-cutting concepts embedded in each of the units so the teachers just had some recent training in third and fourth grade um with the first units and they have eight sessions um in each grade level grade three

102and then grade four um and so again we did pilot some resources prior to coded um but we never fully got it off the ground so that's what we're we just started um yeah yeah so we're curious to see how the children respond to the experiences as well right and then the the one with the facing history and ourselves somebody mentioned that in in regards to diversity equity inclusion and it's different than what we learned what would be some examples is i remember somehow all of my history classes stopped at world war ii like history stopped after that the rest was up to you to figure out right um i would imagine some areas of the things i learned in american history are taught a little differently or different emphasis you talk about different voices

103are included i think the biggest thing is the change of history the biggest difference is just going from the single story to multiple perspectives on on on the story right so um i think it facing history in ourselves has been around for a while i think it probably started at the high school it's worked its way down through so all of our social studies teachers at this point have had the training um yeah it's in some of our english classes people that kind of preceded my time here so it's really a lens that you overlay on the curriculum uh kind of like a process a way to process with students so not necessarily a new curriculum but kind of just a different lens to look at our curriculum through i think this is the type

104of thing um where people who can misunderstand it and it can be a contentious discussion about this um have you found that this has raised any of that or when people get to know it or say well yeah this is just it's more facets to history than we used to think at the high school level there was some questions about the use of the 1619 project that came up a couple of times last year so it was important for us just to help the the parent understand is that this is not the curriculum this is just a selection that we would take in any ap class to augment and just as jeff has been saying it's just it's giving a larger platform and a different voice to those who tend not to be hurt and

105as somebody again i taught us history when i was in the classroom so much of what we've been discussing has been in the curriculum for 25 years so it's it's not new it's just how much emphasis is it getting versus prior years and i think it's given a more rich experience and again it's leading to um i guess nuts and bolts conversations of what should for example what should immigration policy be that's an appropriate question for our students thank you sounds good i also want to say thank you um i know how we all know how hard it has been for you guys for the last two years and listening to you guys in your optimism um as leaders of your building and knowing how difficult it's been for our teachers seeing your optimism and

106your encouragement is so nice for us to see because i know that it's been so difficult for them so i'm so glad that you guys are being so supportive which then trickles down to our students which is really the most important thing um i do have two questions that i don't mean to put the middle school in the high school in a spot the things um one thing that i hear do you guys have any idea when you're gonna allow students to get back into the locker rooms to change before gym classes it's hard for the students to have first period gym and then have to stay on their clothes the whole day i just i know that that's been a topic of conversation among our teenagers any idea when that might happen the middle

107of the high school yeah yeah so um we actually changed our practice a couple of years ago with our sixth graders they said our sixth graders don't need they haven't really gone through a full puberty yet etc so that was kind of off the table i think the i think that's a driving force for us is that 15 total minutes over a 24 hour period and not being able to like there's language in the um in some of the guidance that talks about not being able to monitor or maintain mask wearing right and so when you have students over the course of a day during the hallways together there are a lot of different places and when you add locker rooms and students could come out late because the teacher's already begun the class it's

108kind of like an unknown entity that we weren't willing to take the risk for our students um for the for the total time period we do understand we ask kids to wear sneakers on pe day et cetera um just wondering if you had no no on the high school side i think the the concern is the probably no way to do any sort of social distancing uh while students are in there and not being able to get the area cleaned uh rapidly so that has been kind of the driver i think some of the ways that the phys ed departments tried to mitigate it is by being outside as much as possible but also modifying activities where we don't think that kids are working up that much of a sweat that now hygiene could become

109an issue um but i i'm i'm not unsympathetic to the concern and i think we'll keep talking thank you for everything it's everybody's so happy to be back thank you yeah please rory um i mean thank you all we're we're so indebted to you and i i really appreciate the uh emphasis and the focus on the students and and you helping us understand just how well the students are doing and i do have a question i'll get to about how the teachers are doing but i'd just like to say that we feel really fortunate that that you guys are all at the helm of your respective buildings and uh that the the leadership examples that you guys said is clearly trickling down and the energy and the positivity is on display tonight but it has

110been on display since the very beginning of the school year and i think that's that's really a testament to how engaged and dedicated and committed to our students that each of you is so a big appreciation for that thank you um as i was going through listening tentatively i attentively i was highlighting things that i thought wow that's positive that's so positive i want to make a little note of that but um i've highlights all over my notes here so i don't i don't want to maybe reiterate what's there and i did come up with a couple of questions and i thought rather than ask four or five questions i i really think i owe it to the district to just ask how are the teachers doing how are the teachers do and so you

111know they're really at the forefront of all of this the the um special ed teachers the standard teachers how how does it feel for them to be back and are they fully re-engaged is there still some trepidation on their part about coming into the buildings and i mean i you don't all need to answer but just sort of a general feel or our staff members feeling good about it i mean i'll just speak in general at the elementary i mean i think i mean the last year and a half as you can imagine if you thank you so much for thanking all of us because it as challenging as it was for you as parents to have the children home and dealing with the pandemic um it was equally challenging to be in the schools

112um i think last year was very challenging in the beginning and um you know it was it was scary quite frankly for a lot of the professionals to come in and with the unknown um and then over time we became more comfortable and to be honest i think the children really helped to make it comfortable um you know once when you're in a classroom and you're teaching you often just forget um the outside world around you if you will and that you kind of get absorbed in the moment with the children and responding to them and and teaching them and so but i think you know over time it became um you know they became more accustomed but there were bumps in the road you know with quarantines or remote instruction last year um and

113so there was a lot of you know support i think from all of us um with the staff and and kind of helping them you know move through it and and some people were in different places on the continuum and i think now you know i think with the vaccines um i think people are definitely had a sense of relief um and felt more comfortable and secure but they're still like you know a natural cautiousness um and we're you know our little ones our kiddos at the elementary level aren't vaccinated so we're very cognizant of that um and so i think there's definitely like an enthusiasm and positivity this year and excitement um to have the children back in front of us and it and really it's the preference um you know because you get

114such a good connection with the children and the positive feedback but i think it's evolved you know over the time um and so i but i think definitely they're they're in a different place in terms of you know feeling a little bit more comfortable and secure and again you just you forget you're all wearing masks but you just forget because they're children and you know really helpful just maybe to follow up on on that since we're on the elementary school so we've added two teachers for quarantine uh which we're delighted that we're able to do that do you feel like it's enough and obviously we can't we don't have a crystal ball we don't know how many kids are going to be quarantined but are there additional resources like where are you guys on the

115elementary school level where are you thinking about that given that none of the kids are vaccinated yes yes i feel like i should take this one since meadow pond got hit hard in the beginning um we it's really hard because we had so many students right away who were quarantined but now have one um so there is that natural ebb and flow that we were trying to figure out today like is there a consistent number of students who are going to be out but um you know we're trying to figure out the best way for us to kind of attack like okay when a student is on quarantine what are the different things that we have to do like what is the protocol what should we you know who do we have to reach out

116to how are we checking their ieps how are we checking to make sure that we have everything and we're supporting them the best way we can and so you know i think the two quarantine teachers are a really great start we also have the teachers who are volunteering to tutor um and so that's helpful to have in case you know we we need them and it's been really amazing to see all the teachers work together i think currently i have a middle school teacher teaching um some of my students who are out on quarantine and so we really just kind of pulled together and said who's interested who can do it who can take the student um and and so that's been really great that's amazing that's great that's amazing if you if you don't

117mind i'd just like to come back to original question as soon as i stopped talking i thought to myself oh my god i didn't say the like i feel like i didn't say enough positive about our teachers um the fact that they're there every day um really just i think that they're so excited we had a teacher we do a good news as part of our beginning of our faculty meeting each month and she said thank god it's october 2021 and not october 2020 it is that optimism that i think so many of our teachers walk through the door with this year that they're they're just so excited to and not be tethered to a device um because i think that that just changes the feel of a classroom and be working with students sidle

118up to them see what's going on be able to assess and kind of access those skills that they honed over years and years and now all of a sudden they're like oh my god this is what it's supposed to feel like again so that's i think the overall feeling in our building just how excited people ought to be back seeing seeing their colleagues and um i think that they've just done an awesome job throughout the last 19 months to land where we are now i think it's a testament to all of their mental health what they're saying there's also the other side of it too is that we've had teachers again who are human beings and they have suffered loss and who has had to say goodbye to relatives and parents and and some are

119suffering through that and we're trying to help them through and it was brought to our attention again about you know what job the nurses are doing right now so i think they need a little more of our personalized attention take the lunch order on tuesday all that kind of good stuff it's uh so there's still there's still some recovery happening and that's true of kids too i think i've been informed by by my clinicians that the amount of kids who required hospitalization uh has been higher than what they have seen in past years so there's still a lot of work to be done this is great optimism we need it we celebrate it and yet we're still keeping our eye on the ball thank you all so much thank you ilana please thank you i

120wanted to also echo what everybody said i really appreciated hearing about the threads through all levels of school around the social emotional learning around sort of the attention to recovery and restoration and really seizing the opportunities and also i'm really excited about the voter registration drive doing for high school students um and i i really appreciate the reflection on what's been learned from covid and the kind of where we go from here and that framing that you offered um and and also heard the challenge religious the real logistical challenges of kind of opening up with still restrictions and and that and and going through that um i did want to just follow up a little bit on rory's question about at the elementary school level if you have ideas yet on what the quarantine learning

121might look like i know the teachers are being hired but do you have any more sort of what that and any more framing around it yet or is that still kind of in development yeah so um what like one of the teachers i think is starting just next week so we need to get them on board but there's been you know conversation about having a morning meeting online and and focusing on ela and mathematics um you know because the duration of time that they're out we want to just kind of maintain some of those you know skills especially with math because everything builds upon each other like if they're missing certain lessons um but the teachers will still be like involved in terms of telling us like where they're at and like what they're working

122on the strategies and the skills so i think we're basically just building you know a schedule um together with like how to you know manage it because if if a child is quarantined for 10 days they might be out of school for you know about seven or ish or so so those are the things that we're thinking through like how can we also not have a child be alone as part of it as like a social experience too so how can we basically across all three schools have the children together on zoom for a period of time so synchronous asynchronous we're trying to balance that out i don't want to not say thank you it would make me feel bad but um i think one of the things that's really interesting about coming back after

123clovid and that i hope we can reflect on in future years you know i know as a district social emotional wellness has been something that we really have focused on with our therapeutic support program that we started at the high school moved to the middle school and now have you know elements of it in the elementary so i don't think it's new for us to focus on this but i think the impact of the last 18 months on our students has really made this a really explicit focus for us and i really think it will be interesting to see how much that impacts learning um with that is sort of the foundation of which the year is built and so you know i think it's something we're focusing on in this post covered period but

124i i hope and imagine that maybe this becomes sort of a standard practice of how we always come back to school and how we always think about students i i think um my ninth grade son said like my you know middle school was three years and i lost half of it and he said that to me the other day and i thought wow like that's like that's real and so i think you know really the fact that we're thinking so much about sort of helping the kids get get back into sort of a new routine and opportunities for them to really be heard and seen i think is really great so thank you for doing that and i look forward to hearing about it in future years because i think it's really an interesting approach

125to helping our students be successful so thank you any other comments or questions thank you again we don't want to keep you even a minute longer it's already going on 9 20. we're so grateful that you could be with us here tonight in person it's great to see you we so appreciate your leadership and your buildings and your hopefulness and thank you be well and we look forward to hearing how the year progresses thank you very much terrific welcome back okay thank you again that was really terrific and we appreciate hearing from building leaders at every level um tonight we have just two more i think relatively brief conversations we're going to revisit our board goals and tonight we have the opportunity to vote on a resolution to adopt the board goals for the school

126year and then thereafter we'll revisit our finance committee charge and have the opportunity to vote on that i'm not sure whether we have any further discussion around the board goals at both the last meeting and the meeting prior we discussed the framework that the board of education has utilized over the past couple of years and we have a goal centered around leadership and a goal centered around fiscal stewardship we updated the leadership goal um somewhat in response to changing circumstances and things we've been hearing from our community and if anybody would like to say anything about the goals we can pause for brief discussion and otherwise i'm happy to take a motion to adopt the goals would somebody like to move the board goals thank you rory seconded by liz thank you any further discussion

127comment okay if not thank you so very much let's vote all in favor please say aye aye aye 7-0 terrific and item 9.05 i'm happy to turn it over to rory or danelle if anybody would like to just provide a brief recap of where we are and then we can go ahead and vote on the charge for the finance committee uh thanks marjorie yeah just briefly um so we typically before now in a given year we um would uh pass a a charge for the finance committee for the year finance committee has not yet been met although we are scheduled to meet next tuesday um this year you know typically what we've done in years past since years 2017 2018 is uh we looked at a report that was generated then and we tried to

128identify areas where either we were out of alignment with our peers or there was some other anomaly with the way in which we were handling our finances and we used that to develop the charge for the finance committee uh this year we felt that there were really none remaining since our analysis our thorough analysis in 2017 and so um with the guidance of of the board and the administration we decided that we would re-up and and re-run the 2017-2018 um analysis so and then based on the outcome of that analysis uh direct the the finance committee to essentially identify and analyze any anomalies that we may identify so it's a little bit vague but it's going to be very helpful not just for this year but also for years to come so in essence that's

129what the i don't know if you want me to read it to you i don't think it's necessary it's in public content i think it's in public content so i think that's essentially um what we're um resolving to do here and terrific very comfortable with it great thank you would somebody like to move the resolution george thank you catherine seconded by liz thank you any further comment or discussion okay we can vote all in favor please say aye this brings us to our public forum welcome to members of our community and thank you for your patience thank you for joining us in person i think a couple of people have signed up just a reminder we ask that you please try to keep your remarks to about three minutes and please don't be disappointed that

130we aren't going to engage in back and forth this is really our opportunity to listen attentively to comments and concerns shared by members of the community we will have a brief opportunity at the end of the meeting for some board dialogue and then we can always also revisit topics at future meetings or for future follow-up by the administration as appropriate i think the first person who's waiting to speak is erica glick please good evening if you are not aware it's dyslexia awareness month aside from the fact that dyslexia affects one in five individuals this topic is near and dear to my heart dyslexia awareness month isn't only october for me it's actually 12 months of the year as you know i have been advocating for years regarding our district's reading program or lack thereof and

131i won't give up i've been doing a lot of research watching board of ed meetings in area districts and beyond the other night i happen to watch a few board of ed meetings in chappaqua a similar district in many ways affluent high performing educated parents children who are afforded many many opportunities as i watch these parents with tears in their eyes begging and pleading with their district to consider an improved literacy program describing years of failure trauma private tutoring i thought about the similarities to many of our own struggles here in catona lewisborough and chappaqua's refusal to do anything different again it was so similar and then i saw miss ford sitting on their panel at the time as their director of literacy and their chairperson of the reading department and now here she sits

132as our superintendent of curriculum instruction listening to our stories almost identical and doing nothing about it a failed reading program innocent students children traumatized made to feel stupid made to feel lazy children blamed for the ineffective teaching of balanced literacy as though trying harder would magically solve everything leaving the district in droves when all the while there is a better way but we as a district refuse to see it let alone talk about it reading is the only field yet the most important one where it is deemed okay to have a philosophy that flies in the face of science would our district be okay if our social studies teachers thought that the earth was flat probably not would they be okay if our music teachers just had students listen to music and explore instruments through

133exposure with the expectation that they'd be able to play an instrument proficiently of course not these children are the innocent casualties of our curriculum our outdated disproven antiquated unscientific curriculum how many curriculum casualties must we have how many children must leave this district how many lawsuits must we have how many children must get up as my daughter did last month to bravely say to the board of education enough we deserve more i'm here again tonight to ask for a literacy committee or at the very least a meaningful conversation we must do better why aren't we thank you and i think next is oksana aranoff good evening everyone um we're here tonight um just several of us here but um with us in spirit are set 173 members of the klsd special education advocacy group so

134we're here tonight on their behalf as you know since may we have attended boe meetings to share our stories to work in good faith with the board and school administration we've recently had two meetings for the superintendent andrew celeznik including one this afternoon out of respect for that process we will not divulge what has transpired so far but we do absolutely hope that he will share and give you a status update during board dialogue today over the past several months we've repeatedly asked to have a collaborative dialogue with you the board however since you have not been able to host us we are planning to host a town hall that we will be live streaming for the community and we absolutely hope that you will all attend and join us in conversation we will follow

135open meeting laws so that you can be active participants in this event thank you is anybody else waiting to speak who didn't sign up and i think we're ready to close the public forum thank you again for speaking with us and this brings us to the consent agenda where i'm not aware of any items that we want to vote on separately but i know we do want to have some discussion around at least one item was anybody in need or planning to vote separately on any items if not then would somebody like to move the consent agenda please julia thank you bill thank you for seconding and then i'm going to pause at least to invite andrew to say a few words about our resolution 12.03 which is an opportunity also for an update on

136the partnership through westchester county to administer povid testing for students thank you thank you very much marjorie i'm happy to speak to that a little bit um tonight the board is being asked to approve a memorandum of agreement between the school district and westchester county department of health and its partners that it's using to help school districts throughout the county administer weekly global testing this is uh coming through orders up from new york state to maintain public health and safety in all of our school districts and we're really happy that westchester county was able to secure a grant from the federal government that allows them to provide free of any charge to the districts not free of complications i should say but free of charge uh weekly testing and assuming all goes forward tonight we

137hope that by the end of the day tomorrow we will be communicating with all of our families uh it's a it's a at least a two-step process for families to consent for their children to be involved in the weekly testing they would first fill out a consent form through a digital form that will be provided online that the district will maintain once that consent form is completed they'll be provided a link to a lab whose name is quadrant biosciences and that's one of the vendors that the county has secured for many school districts in the county the families would then go onto that website and complete a registration form for each of their children through that website and at that point then their children would be ready for testing which would happen in the schools

138if all should go well knock on wood we would hope possibly to begin testing as early as the week of not next week but the following i forget forgiving losing the date of that week 18th thank you rory the week of the 18th is when we're hoping the testing might begin the testing is intended to capture up to 20 percent of the student population depending on what percentage consents to the testing so that's the optimistic outlook each week each cycle 20 percent each cycle correct but again depending on how many consent forms we actually have back we will certainly encourage families to consent um but of course it's up to each individ individual family to make that decision for themselves additionally the same program will be administering the now required testing for any school staff

139who are not vaccinated and we ha in the same way that we recently put out the survey to our middle school and high school students asking for vaccination prior to that we had put out a similar survey to our staff we're happy to report we do have a very high percentage of vaccinated staff we won't be needing to test such a large number on a weekly basis but staff know and and entirely understand that if they haven't shown us evidence of vaccination it's required of them that they be tested through this weekly program and they would be tested every week i think it's not just 20 if i'm remembering right they're every weekly it's weekly testing for anyone who's not vaccinated so again communication will start to come out about that tomorrow we hope by

140the end of the day uh if not by tomorrow very shortly after that uh there's quite a bit of documentation we'll have a website there'll be translations in english and spanish and digital forms available for families to fill out and and i think phone numbers available or ways for them to contact the vendors themselves if they have questions about the process it'll we appreciate all the thanks that went out to the principals uh this this will certainly become another task in the buildings that has to be managed we're very appreciative of the county they're going to provide the staff that actually conducts the testing we will still have to have some of our own staff help to manage the students and get them from class to the location get them back again um we are

141told and we've been in communication with some other schools that have begun more recently uh that when you're doing the 20 per week it can it can happen fairly efficiently there will necessarily be some brief missing of class time to be able to go down and have it done and go back but that's the sacrifice for trying to maintain the public health uh that we all want to work through so are there any questions about that that we could try to answer i have a couple um first off what kind of response or do you know what kind of like how much response you've gotten from students about their vaccination i don't yes neil do we have anything on that yeah uh so far with about 250 uh positive responses of proof of vaccination status

142and out of how many because obviously we can't include any of the elementary students no no so it was really sent to parents with the help of the tech department uh with help of chris nelson to all six to 12th grade parents uh so i think we're thinking around yeah that's a low number out i think about yeah yeah i will say it was complicated um i i don't i only have a middle school and a high schooler so i don't use schoology i don't go on there so when i got the email it was very i had to just go to my kids and say i need i had to sit with them and i just wonder if it doesn't have to be more than one step if we can make it a little

143bit less complicated if we can get a link i thought that that was difficult for me i don't know if that's possible certainly something i could talk to uh the it department about and try to make it a little more streamlined thank you yeah catherine i did look up the number so between 6 6 through 12 we have 16 uh 1 668 students so that's great and then i also wanted to add to what andrew was saying that the test is a non-invasive uh uh self-administered saliva test it's a lot of a test okay i i do know for my college students that the saliva test is is um you gotta get used to it because you really gotta get saliva but we'll figure it out i'm sure um if i give consent for my

144students and we only get that means that presumably my children who i've said yes to will get tested every week i don't i don't think that's necessarily the case i think i think one of the things we still have to work out is how we're going to sort out the groups that are going to get tested each week it might be alphabetical of the 20 we might do at the high school a through h one week and then other parts of the alphabet and other weeks but that's still being worked out with the council i'm still confusing because don't we have to get 20 of the student population i'm not i'm not entirely sure i know that the goal is to get to that 20 but again it depends i think it's tied to what

145percentage actually consent to having us do it okay and i'm sure we can't do this but will you be testing elementary school students more because it sounds like they're you know they're nobody's vaccinated in the elementary school i don't know i don't think so that will be the same similar process okay all right those are my questions thank you i understand that there's 200 some odd students out of 1600 are vaccinated who have responded responded we suspect based on some other information we think it's probably much higher than that my god i think so do we plan to resurvey periodically we will yeah we'll see well i think with the feedback i think we'll have to reconvene about maybe the process and making a little less friction for people to upload can we ask students

146to fill it out themselves or are they not like are they old enough that if that email had gone directly to my 16 year old can't he submit that information himself we did contemplate that i think we were thinking that it might be good for parents to know that there's we're asking for this proof from from their children i just wonder if that's why there's such a low percentage because it just a lot of middle school and high school parents just don't go on school they schooled you to check their children's accounts right right now i just i never do i don't need to do that yeah it might be multiple tracks might be informing parents that we're going to send communication out to students and that's that way so we'll have to reconvene and

147think about making a little bit easier for people so i'm hopeful that it's a lot higher than two hours i know i think we're confident that it is i think but like you said that maybe the survey is getting in the way of that so we'll certainly look into it thank you now no no my pleasure can i just ask a couple clarifying questions um the intent would be to test all school all buildings right it's not just limited to middle school and high school would be correct all building including staff including in the district office there if there are any unvaccinated stuff including the transportation department if there are unvaccinated staff there right right across the district so if we got to the 20 that would be somewhere around 600 per week am i

148thinking about that right 120 a day across the district you're you're right i'm not sure where you're talking i'm sorry one time um again depending on how many are being tested in that particular building the the vendor might be able to go to two different elementary schools on the same day and do one in the morning and one in the afternoon or something like that we don't know these details yet yeah yeah um and then we're asking for consent but i i'm just assuming that there's no sort of automatically opted in and you can opt out we must receive consent and then you mentioned right out of the gate it's not without its complications and to me that sounds like we need to allocate resources to doing this and so as we allocate resources across

149the buildings are we going to leave other areas short how do we intend to feel like that and i know it's complicated yeah i mean this is uh unfortunately a little bit of life in schools um is that the more tasks for us to do the more we do yeah with the staff that we have and it's been this way for quite a long time we talk about unfunded mandates that come from the state and we try to figure out best how to do them we again we've we have spoken to districts where the testing is in place and it sounds like once it gets off the ground it's not too burdensome but it's going to be it's going to feel um probably a little bit inefficient to students at first it's going to be

150uh it's going to be a an inconvenience at first but we're going to stick with it we think it's obviously the whole state field is very important as do we and we're going to it'll get smoother with time oh yeah i couldn't agree about its importance more but then is there an inconvenience i i don't i don't like the term learning loss but are we going to be pulling students out of classes or are we going to have to find ways to have a period or do it during recess or have we thought through yet the timing and the potential impact on academics again we don't have as many of the details as we'd like to have um but i just know how other schools are doing it one thing we've been told and we're

151hoping this is accurate is that the test itself is very fast so that the time out of class should be brief if we can orchestrate that okay well the result is not immediate no it's fairly quick i believe it's around about a day and through the through the software that the family is registered through they'll get an audit we'll we'll get notification families will get notification automatically through that software automatic quarantine and isolation and so forth i presume again they're a positive test that's necessary um for the best any other questions or comments yes ilana this this seems like an exciting part of sort of another mitigation and tool that we now will have in the district um and i just a couple of questions one i i think a saliva test is probably new

152to a lot of us so my understanding from just looking at that memorandum of understanding is that it is a pcr test even though it's a saliva test so it's sort of that gold standard of the the most accurate test available um will we be doing an initial screening of everybody i know that have been talked about the early at the beginning we're gonna start immediately twenty percent of students to this was this was a discussion among districts that had been the talk early on when it was hoped that it could really get started either as school was starting yeah but at this point most places have decided you know everyone's been in school already doesn't and it's it's so burdensome to try to test everybody yeah you're going to go straight to the 20

153and then um i was just wondering if it's possible to share the vaccination rate for the staff at some point yeah i think we're getting we're getting close to that i think we're we're just finalizing it particularly now around having to notify those who are not who haven't shared with us that's probably going to firm up the numbers more than anything else so i think we will be able to share that soon i do want to just speak to the saliva test again because something catherine said earlier i i don't i think there are different types of saliva tests i think there are swab types you may swab the inside of the cheek as well as as well you have to produce but i'm not i think this might be the easier type so i

154just don't want to scare people off but even even the bringing up too like we're getting really gross but it is i mean i know my son does it three days a week for college and it it is like 30 seconds like they figure it out quickly and he drops it in a bucket and he's on his way like it's very quick and just to sort of reiterate that the intention of doing this is to make sure that we can keep schools open as much as possible and keep sort of the virus contained as much as possible and stop spread so even though when we start i mean i think the other the reality like when we start testing we're going to get some positives and that means some people are going to have to

155quarantine and hopefully they're not sick but that will stop that ultimately is a better public good in stopping the spread and knowing that but i think all of us have experienced also just i mean every time you sort of get a covid scare or a coveted quarantine it's it's inconvenient it's scary and we don't want that but it doesn't mean that we shouldn't test probably i mean you know it's actually better to know than not now can i just clarify one other question when we say 20 of the population we're talking about 20 of transportation staff students everybody the staff everyone has to do it if you're not vaccinated 20 percent okay if they're not vaccinated unvaccinated but must be tested weekly okay okay so when rory said it's about 600 it's about 600 students

156would be 20 percent of our population just to add this i know you said it's probably the easier of the of the swabs but just last year in my former district it was the knot of the easier i was using um the the you know having the saliva come up and we were able to do it in the elementary school a couple times and it it worked and and there were a lot of questions beforehand but then after it was done a couple times everyone got used to it and it was it was fine yeah yeah i think i saw in the contract also that this is just until december 31st and then we have the opportunity to renew it again correct yeah that's what they've promised us through december and then they'll be further

157discussion at that point are all districts on that same timeline i believe i believe so yes certainly all districts that are working through the county okay that seems actually kind of good in a way right to be able to regroup and reflect on how it's gone and then and we'll have some data you have some data right so we'll know what the yeah yeah okay thank you this is really enormous and terrific that it's coming together we really appreciate the update and it does sound like the next time we meet you know we perhaps will have already implemented so we really appreciate the opportunity to hear about it and for our community to be aware thank you you plan to um notify the community more broadly yeah tomorrow okay great that's great thank you okay

158if there's no further discussion i think we can vote on the consent agenda all in favor please say hi great thank you 7-0 and i think we should just quickly go back up to board subcommittee reports before we look ahead because we postponed them at the beginning of the meeting i know tonight we heard from audit and i'm not sure if there's anything else you already thanked the audit committee thank you to you julia for chairing the audit committee and thank you again demel for those clean audits um anything you mentioned finance committee is going to be meeting next week is there anything else we've adopted think so we're excited at least i'm excited that we now have a challenge and we can move forward with uh getting the community involved on tuesday um so

159no we haven't aside from coming up with the charge and thinking that through we haven't done anything else we'll kick it off for tuesday wonderful thank you ilana any updates from parent council we had a really good meeting with everybody it's nice to see everybody on zoom but we sort of discussed what had been you know sort of the opening of school and parent concerns around what had happened and we talked about some of the quarantine and feedback on how that had gone at meadow pond but overall it was nice to see everybody in here from the different schools and i think it reflected a lot of what was said tonight also that's great it's always very helpful to hear questions through parent counsel because they ask a lot of things that give us feedback

160and help us think about how things are going and if there are things that we might do differently great wonderful thank you and i think policy committee met um there's no third reads for today there's a uh part of the consent agenda was removing a policy it was just it's a duplicate it's covered somewhere else now no other exciting news great thank you and sustainability also has met we met last friday and we had the opportunity to hear an update on sustainability in our schools and some new work that i'm sure we'll be hearing about in more detail at an upcoming board meeting um we heard some updates on infrastructure and some work that has been done over the summer and some studies that have been done we've taken advantage of some resources that were

161free and made available to school districts to do some benchmarking and we just kicked off the next iteration of our cameron cole data collection cycle which is our opportunity to capture information about how we're doing through the lens of energy efficiencies and the work of our energy performance contract um and we touched briefly on an upcoming meeting i think it's next week when the new york state school board association will turn its attention to advocacy resolutions two of which pertain to sustainability and opportunities for schools to develop metrics or to advocate for additional funding for measures that help our schools take initiative to mitigate climate change essentially i think that's it from sustainability um okay thank you and then i think we can go back down to recognition of donation did i miss something i'm

162sorry please oh yes um so hopefully in addition to the communications going out tomorrow about the kova testing i'm hoping that we'll also be sending out our invitation to our first learning cafe of the year uh which we are scheduled for on the evening of october 19th those who don't know a learning cafe is an opportunity for community members as well as staff to come together in conversation we typically try to pick topics that are relatively complicated we always want people to know in advance you're not coming to listen to a lecture you're coming to participate in a conversation in the dialogue and as in the spirit of the evening and all of the principal comments about in-person learning we want this to be an in-person event necessarily for the regulations that means we have

163to tap the number of people who can come to this first cafe um be told we haven't had enormous numbers wanting to come to the cafes in the past so if it stays relatively consistent we should be able to welcome all who want to come but if we have such an enthusiastic response then we'll have to cap it so that we can maintain distancing we hold these in the dining room at the middle school and we'll be back there and the topic of the first cafe uh was given a very nice lead in tonight by dr cecilia when he spoke about his work with the faculty and that is really the same focus for this conversation what are the what have we learned through the pandemic experience about learning in schools and what um what

164sorts of things do we want to think about differently as we move forward what do we want to hold on to what do we want to let go of so we're very much looking forward to inviting community so tomorrow there'll be an email invitation with a link an opportunity for people to sign up and then we'll be in touch depending on whether we exceed that cap or not great that's exciting thank you then the only other thing is a point of clarification this is a question i've had a few times now so i wanted to uh try to clear up uh possibly a fault in my own writing and it has to do with those daily covet updates that i've said i've had a number of people ask what does it mean when i say

165that either contact tracing was necessary and it's been completed or no contact tracing was necessary essentially what that means is if it was contact tracing and it was completed it means that in addition to the covet positive case there were some others individuals in the building who were identified as close contacts and then were needed to be contacted so that they could begin the quarantine process and when no contact tracing occurred that's the part where i'm i think i might revise the language because actually we do sort of contact trace and what it results in is we don't find any closed contacts not when there's a available case in school there's a number of different reasons for that the vaccine can be a case now fortunately sometimes it's the case that this person simply hasn't

166been in school during the period that they were um infectious and now with some of the new rules uh depending on how a person gets to school they could actually go through the school day and if we're all wearing the masks properly they could maintain the at least the three foot distance thing and if that's all happened then there's also no quarantining necessary and we've had quite a number of cases this year where there was either very very little or no quarantining around a positive case and that's a very significant difference from last year that's where the game is right now yeah correct yeah wonderful thank you very much okay then we're going to move down to 16.01 where we have an opportunity to accept a generous donation from paddy turbul tur wil triwilliger and

167this is for a snare drum kit and music stand you're marked for the john jay middle school would somebody like to move the resolution to accept the gift please thank you liz seconded by youna thank you thank you very much for this generous gift all in favor please say aye great 7-0 and that brings us to 17.01 which is our opportunity for some board dialogue and discussion not sure whether board members had any new topics or new items they wanted to bring up or any comments if not then i'm going to look ahead to future meetings thank you as was mentioned the finance committee is going to meet tuesday october 12th the board will next meet on thursday october 21st 7 30 pm and policy will meet friday october 29th at nine o'clock in the

168morning i'm sorry the finance committee's meeting at 7 pm i'm not sure i said the time am i missing any meetings no all righty then i think we're ready for a motion to adjourn and i'm going to make a motion to adjourn back into public i'm sorry pardon me back into executive session or um employment history of an individual if i could please have a second thank you julia all in favor please say aye aye thank you thank you so much everybody good night see you next time do this