September 23, 2021 KLSD Board of Education Meeting

001good evening everyone welcome to this meeting of the board of education it's thursday september 23rd and it's my pleasure to make a motion for the board to return to public session thank you catherine for seconding we're really looking forward to tonight's opportunity to hear about the learning commitment to resume some conversation about board goals to look ahead to the finance committee charge and also we have the opportunity to publicly acknowledge our gratitude for 19 staff members with 25 years of service in the district so um before we turn our attention to all of that if everybody would please join us as is our custom in the pledge of allegiance oh and we need to vote to go into executive to public session all in favor aye aye thank you 6-0 i pledge allegiance [Music] wonderful

002thank you so much we have an opportunity tonight to pause briefly for board announcements and i know all of us wish to congratulate our administrative team and our staff members on the successful opening of school our last board meeting was at the very tail end of summer and we are thrilled to have students and staff back in the building every day riding the buses out on the sports fields it's been a pleasure to see the energy and positivity in all of the buildings and we know that this is the result of a tremendous collaborative partnership and amount of work and we really thank you for bringing us here almost all the way to the end of september and it feels great that we're going to revisit the learning commitment and we're looking forward to the

003conversation tonight i'll pause if other board members have announcements and if not and we are looking forward to hearing from you andrew thank you marjorie very happy to be here tonight on what is the tenth day of school in this school year uh i'm very very happy continuing to see all of our students back in school on all of these days it has been a great pleasure to visit our schools again in the morning to get back into that routine of actually being physically present well during the school day and some of the events after school um it's been really really lovely and already we're into the swing of curriculum nights this week at the elementary schools as well as the campus night here at the high school we'll continue again next week with the

0043-5 curriculum nights at the elementary schools and then the curriculum night at the middle school also next week so we're already very busy with lots of things going on this week has been spirit week in the middle school in the high school leading up to the homecoming games this weekend we're very excited about those about uh getting back to the lots and lots of things that once upon a time were kind of the normal routines of school and now feel very very special indeed today speaking of things that felt special here at the high school we had a seminar that the entire school was able to participate in with jose antonio vargas the author of dear america which was the community read at the high school our administrators from across the district actually had the

005chance to sit in on that webinar i have to say it was a really phenomenal experience um many students had the opportunity to ask questions which were channeled through the presenter to mr vargas who was speaking to us from his home in northern california i think and he's a very thoughtful person uh with and and honestly a very wide-ranging talk on lots of different topics today uh although a lot of the focus of the book obviously is immigration his experiences with immigration immigration he just has lots of thoughts on many different topics he was a very kind of real well-rounded human being and i hope and think that our students probably saw it that way you know if nothing else this experience brings an author to life for them so that the person behind the

006book becomes a three-dimensional character who they come to know and have a chance to interact with so it was a really really nice experience and hopefully the first of many such experiences in school this year the rest of my report is a little bit more informational and covid related i'm afraid i wanted to give an update we've had some questions about understandably about the testing program which i've mentioned previously in our reopening we we are continuing to work through with westchester county uh and as well as the vendor the many details that go along with bringing a program like this into school i think both the county and the schools are learning that there's a lot to sort out it might sound relatively easy for new york state to say there's going to be weekly

007testing in all schools but when you get down to the details of the fact that this means bringing in people who are not school employees to work with our children who have to go through processes that we all go through in order to work in schools on a regular basis and when you think about the collecting of um medical data that companies will be collecting on these weekly tests there's a lot of detail and and legal contracts to be worked out like i do want to assure the community we do continue to think that it's very important to get this weekly testing in place we're working on it as fast as we can it's just complicated but we look forward and we hope to get that up to speed soon i have had a few

008questions from community members about how they either opt in or opt out of such a program please just sit tight you haven't opted in or out yet you'll be getting information about it and i hope the near future and at that time you'll have the opportunity to either give consent or not give consent nobody's done that yet so there's still time for that to happen speaking still of covid uh we've had eight cases so far since the year began in our schools i don't know if that will sound like a large number or a small number to people um unfortunately of the eight five have all been at one elementary school at meadow pond elementary school so they have been a little bit more hard hit we've had just a single case each at increase

009miller at the middle school and at john jay high school and in those schools as we had hoped when the year began while of course we wish all of those most immediately impacted well in a fast and speedy recovery there's been very little impact in those other schools for anybody else thanks to the wearing of the masks some of the other new quarantine procedures but at meadow pond and just in the last couple of days the impact has been a little bit more significant and so that's just uh reminds us of how important it is for everybody to do their best to follow all the health and safety procedures that we've been following for such a long time because we really do i mean this year perhaps more than ever in a long time we

010see the value of all of our students being back in school and we want that experience for everybody that we hope we can continue knock on wood to have things go very very well and then one last match on that we learned uh this week and i'll put more information about this probably in the coming days we learned this week that westchester county made a slight adjustment in one of the quarantining procedures relating to buses the distance around if there's a covet positive case on the bus the distance around that case has increased slightly for now in terms of who would quarantine as a result of that when we do have positive cases on the bus we'll see a little bit more quarantining but i will also say that's under discussion with the county and

011we're hoping that there might be an adjustment that brings it back closer to what's happening in the classroom for any clover cases that have been in classrooms and where exposures really haven't happened there i'm happy to report there's been virtually no quarantining because of in school cases it's happened on buses where there's had to be quarantining but very very little in school itself so that's a good thing and that's it for my update marjorie thank you thank you we really appreciate the update on what's happening in schools and related to covet testing and how things are evolving are there any questions or comments about andrew's update before we move on not then i think we're ready to turn our attention to 7.01 which is our opportunity to refocus on the learning commitment and points of

012focus for the upcoming school year and i'll turn it back over to you thank you andrew sure thank you marjorie and very happy to give this report tonight on our learning commitment and points of focus um very excited to talk about the the relevance of the land commitment in this year in particular and then also to just actually take us back in time a little bit to um one of one of the very first reports i gave upon arriving in the district back in 2015 it felt kind of relevant to bring back this context and to provide some context for this evening's report so i'm actually going to begin let's see if this move there we go uh by going back to a report from 2015 in september which was at that time called a

013context for thinking about public education in 2015 also we called it 135 years of sometimes seemingly contradictory forces acting upon our public schools so i start here by just naming some of and there are many more but some of the very contradictory forces at work around our schools and again some of these go back a very long time that very first one for example when we think about traditionalists versus progressives in school the progressive era in terms of american public education really began back in the 1880s and that was the transition from a time period when education used to be very kind of backward looking and the idea was we want to teach students everything that has happened in the past we want them to recite certain classic texts at this time there was a

014much smaller segment of the population being educated and then there was a transition to a much more progressive movement it was called a more progressive movement that's where you associate the name john dewey with this movement it started to be more forward-looking more focused around children as individuals more understanding of the idea that not everybody perhaps is going to learn exactly the same things at exactly the same rate exactly the same ways and that in fact we're trying to prepare each individual child to be their best selves and to be future citizens of our country and this was thought of as regression so and and this this uh pair of forces like many of the others on the screen really continues to this day we might name it something different but this tension between wanting

015to look backwards at the past and what we've learned in the lessons of the past versus wanting to look forward continues you you'll see it maybe even in the very next one and i won't spend this much time on all of these but standard the idea of standards and standardization versus the concept of more individualization and personalization in schools you'll see more about that and and lots of others up here on the screen uh cultural literacy versus personal passion cultural literacy being the idea that we should all there should be certain things that we all know that's very important versus the idea that actually more important that individuals learn to develop their own passions and you can see others there and the reason that we put these up back in 2015 was to say they've

016always been these tensions and they can tend to have people thinking it should be one or the other and this is something that i think is very relevant today when we live in an increasingly polarized time where we tend to have these somewhat pitted battles with one group saying it should be this way and another group saying no it should be that way the the lesson that we feel that we've learned over the years in schools is that generally the either or mindset is not most helpful or productive to us and that typically it's an typically there's value in one of the forces and there's value in one of the other forces and finding the intersection of those two and where they overlap is often what's most valuable so that takes us that takes us

017to this so get that just the right touch it's too rich i might need some help there we go okay so that takes us to this timeline that we presented back in 2015 which lays out some of the same things that i said so this this was took us up to the new millennium starting with progressive education education in this country was moving in a certain direction for a fairly long period of time with those more progressive ideas that i talked about and then sputnik happened and sputnik was not just an event that's up there in the world and on the screen it led to some fairly significant federal acts related to federal education acts related to the teaching of science and there was a feeling that as a country we had fallen behind in

018the teaching of science and suddenly the federal government became more involved set some other some new standards and said this country needs to move forward in a different way around the teaching of science at this fairly similar time the civil rights movement of course happened and again more federal legislation came about as a result of the civil rights movement in that case more focused on equity and issues of equity around the country it was one of the first times actually the federal government became more significantly involved in public education in this country it hadn't been terribly involved up until that point continue moving forward to a nation at risk a report that was published in the 1980s and was really the beginning of what became known as the standards movement uh with a lot of

019focus on testing and standardized test scores and results and measurement and a lot of that work which begins in the 1980s took us out to the new millennium at which time if you remember back in the year 2000 there was a lot of concern about what the world was going to be at the turn of the millennium again what who are the students that we needed to prepare that was when we first started to hear phrases like 21st century education and critical thinking and creative thought and those things now having much more so some of these things might be shifts back and forth some of them might seem to be opposed with one another generally speaking though we keep moving forward but what we wanted to point out tonight is that since this presentation in

0202015 we've continued to have new forces come to to be at play with us and you see up here that not long after that presentation effect in 2015 the united nations published its sustainable development goals around issues of climate and the urge sense of urgency and growing urgency around the world in how we should all be thinking about sustainable development in many different ways and those have started to find their way into schools in terms of how we're hoping to educate our students to be ready for issues of climate crisis and other issues in the world around us moving forward to 2018 our own new york state education department published first social emotional learning benchmarks and then not long after that the culturally responsive sustaining education framework we've been talking about sel and equity quite

021a bit in the last couple of years and the some of that conversation stems from what's been going on in the world around us we obviously respond and react importantly to what's happening all around us but some of it also stems from frameworks and benchmarks set for us by a new york state education department so again more influences upon us and then of course we arrive at the global covert pandemic and all of the force exerted upon schools by that the point being i think here is to say with each one of these things that becomes added along the timeline they never really go away we keep adding to and we learn more and we try to embrace what's meaningful and valuable to us and then we keep moving forward and another way i think

022the next visuals are just another way of perhaps contemplating the same thing this slide is again back in 2015 the time we thought of all of these different forces acting upon our schools and which ones do we need to pay attention to and which ones do we not i'll just jump ahead to the next slide now we've added additional forces here in 2021 where we are now and all of these things whether it's the increasing polarization that i mentioned whether it's important issues of diversity equity and inclusion whether it's climate crisis social emotional learning all of these things are at work on our schools at all time and as a result as a district we are trying to think of all these thoughts as we sort out which are most meaningful for our district and

023in what proportion because i i would i believe very strongly that a single force no single force on this page or these pages has ever been the one right answer for education even though in the moment sometimes the people who are uh most advocating for that particular force might think this is going to be the thing that really gets us to that place that we want to be time goes by something else will come along that tells us that generally speaking over responding to any one force is typically unwise and in education circles people do talk about this pendulum swinging back and forth and sometimes people become a little impatient that we were on this one initiative for a period of time then we swung all the way back to this other initiative so hopefully

024that provides some context for why tonight we come back to talking about our own learning commitment here in klsd this is where we think we we take in all those different forces around us we think they're very important we don't dismiss any of them but we try to put them into the appropriate proportion for our students and our staff and we still think and in fact maybe even more than ever i think that this learning commitment that talks about striving to create experiences that are intellectually engaging and relevant and take place in an active learning environment actually tie together many of those forces we think in a useful way and help us to move forward and create classroom spaces that are the best they can be for our students um the learning commitment is supported

025by these questions which i realize are in a font that's very hard to read on this slide but what i really want to mention tonight is why they're in the form of questions rather than in statements and that is because as i said a minute ago we don't necessarily think there's a single answer or a single way to do any of these things rather we want our staff and our students to always be contemplating a variety of possible answers to how they move forward and in each successive year in each successive lesson or unit to be thinking further about how to create that intellectually engaging environment that relevant environment that active environment for our students so that's why we leave these things in the form of questions because we think the process of education is

026one of asking questions and always seeking new and ever richer answers not one in which there is a single answer that will move us forward i wanted to make mention the fact that the learning commitment doesn't speak directly to standards content or assessment and very quickly say the reason for that is there are plenty of other forces that are pushing those things always so we would never for a moment want anyone to think those things are not important to us they're very important to us but we have as you see report cards and state assessments and reports and college applications and public outcomes all of those things demand that we have standards and content and assessment so we don't need necessarily to have a learning commitment that's going to speak to those things the purpose

027of our learning commitment we hope is to take us beyond what's what's up here not in any way to ignore it to remember this is very important and then to go beyond it also now for the last two years and now we're into a third year of pandemic we've had less face-to-face interaction we've had less small group instruction fewer opportunities for project-based work and more time on zoom to some degree these things are antithetical some of the ideas that we've been trying to move forward in the learning commitment so this is a big reason why for us it's so important to re-dedicate ourselves to knight to the learning commitment and to continue our work moving it forward and with that i'm going to turn over to mary who's going to speak now to the points

028of focus in the coming year i really have trouble with this sensitivity okay so you know as andrew mentioned our learning commitment has been a continual focus it was a focus even during cove but it was harder and harder during covid to ensure that all students were engaged that we created those active learning environments and that we're always trying to think about instruction that is relevant and make learning relevant for our students because we think that's the most engaging so this recommitment to the learning commitment is what we really want to focus on this evening and so we have we've come up with this graphic and you see those three areas well the learning commitment you see is in the center and it is the center of what we do it has been for years

029but as i said we're recommitting to that but then we have some big things that we've been working on so our diversity equity and inclusion work is very important to us that's one of our big focus areas social emotional learning or social emotional wellness that's another piece that we've been working on for several years and also sustainability and i'd add to sustainability it's also the notion of global citizenship being a responsible citizen in the world thinking about a sustainable future for ourselves and others and you'll notice that those areas blend into one another on this graphic i believe when we first conceptualized it was a venn diagram but the idea is that each of those areas really blends into and supports another so diversity equity inclusion really you know speak to the language of the

030culturally responsive sustaining framework it says every student needs to be welcomed affirmed and supported in the achievement of their greatest potential every student and every staff member dei and sustainability speak to the engagement and relevance of active learning so you know the real authentic problems that exist in the world for our students to learn about them grapple with them think about solutions become more aware those are really relevant opportunities social emotional learning and dei that health and well-being of our students both now and in the future you know during covid we thought a lot about social emotional wellness of our students and certainly that was something that was a major concern and continues to be but it's something we think about a lot we know that cognition and emotion are very closely linked so the

031way we feel if we come to school feeling good um we're more likely to be able to commit ourselves to learning and learning deeply so that's important as well but all of these areas help us to really think about and contribute to solutions for authentic real world challenge you'll also notice that they all sit on this plate in the background that includes professional learning pedagogy and technology so you know when we think about all of these things we think about our instructional practices that are engaging and helps students learn you know about relevant topics that are promote independent learning uh promote perseverance a lot of the dispositions that we think are really important in the world collaboration things like that technology obviously you know our learning curve with technology was very steep in the past

032year and a half and that's been really helpful in some ways and we also worry about overuse of technology but our technology commitment which is a separate commitment talks about the judicious use of technology to really enhance the learning environment so we're always thinking about that as well and always ongoing continual professional learning so as educators we have to commit to constantly revising our practices learning staying in touch with current research all important pieces of being an educator and so it doesn't mean that we give up on some of the things that we've always worked on so you know the knowledge skills the habits of mind the sense of self and agency and that love of learning that's always been there and will continue to be there but in addition there are these dispositions that

033are prompted by the learning commitment that are also important i've seen them referred to as 21st century skills at times but things like curiosity creativity this critical thinking and collaboration if you know those are things that are important no matter what career is chosen no matter what path is chosen within your school years beyond in college these things promote deep learning and a love of learning i think they go hand in hand with some of the things on the left hand side as well so with that we're rededicating ourselves to the learning commitment and these points of focus that we think will really enhance the learning commitment and bring it to life thanks mary and i just i want to also just kind of wrap up by saying i don't i don't think we can

034overstate how challenging the last two years have been obviously it goes without saying how challenging they've been for the world and continue to be in very in many parts of the world and they're very challenging here at home too and those challenges have impacted schools very very significantly as we know uh and and our students and our staff and our families are all we'd like to say emerging from the pandemic but i think we also have to recognize we're still in the pandemic and those things have been enormously draining draining on our resources draining on our social emotional health as human beings um and so i i don't want to be pie in the sky about this and say gee everything's wonderful and here we go with the learning commitment you know we see this

035is really important to be talking to with our staff and our students about on a very regular basis in order to help one another work ourselves forward from where we've been the last couple years and i really think we can't it it could be easy i think or maybe not hopefully not too easy to think okay school's back everything's kind of back to normal but it's it's it's hard work it's a lot of hard work uh to keep this moving forward and obviously we've pledged to do that we commit to doing that and we think it's good to have this continual reminder in front of us of what it is that we're striving towards and we'll we'll continue talking to our staff about it how staff had workshops in the first two days of school

036in these areas and we're going to continue doing that work as we move forward and with that i think we do come to end of the presentation whoops and an opportunity to say thank you and to ask if there are any questions thank you both we really appreciate um hearing a little bit about the lens through which you are rededicating the learning commitment and also just the opportunity to reflect back historically on some of the other forces that have long been at work with respect to forces that come into play in the public school arena and how we emerge after reconciling the more recent circumstances that we're living through so thank you for synthesizing all of that and for helping us to understand the focus areas we really appreciate that update and i'll turn it

037over to my board colleagues for any comments or questions rory yeah please thank you thank you andrew thank you mary i really enjoyed it i i was i mean i was interested in the district in 2015 but i certainly wasn't on the board and it's really good to have that refresher um and to to learn about our recommitment to the commitment which is great um and in sort of re-reading and taking on board the learning commitment again obviously i looked at it when we when i first joined the board um it reminded me that at the time when i think still i feel like it's kind of intentionally vague it's kind of a it's a it's a mission statement that allows allows it to stand the test of time really right so that it can

038adapt and when things like code would come along we can say yeah it fits in right it's it's you know we may need to change because something is now more relevant or whatever um but i also kind of feel like that that vagueness could give us leeway to not be so adaptive and nimble in in in um what's the word i'm looking for um i i don't know we need to change with time right so it can't be such that we have this vague mission statement that allows us to say oh okay well we're still living within the commitment we actually need to understand the changing times and what is changing in our environment and how do we adapt to that and so i just wonder within the school district and maybe mary it's it's

039for you under professional development are there forums that allow our staff to sort of engage come up with new ideas say hey look this is what we learned coming out of cove and maybe we could do this maybe we could uh instill more curiosity in the students by doing this or critical thinking by doing that or whatever are there forums that were our staff is actively engaged in um that will allow them then to sort of feed that back into our learning commitment and maybe build more arrows we're running out of space on that diagram you know what i mean yeah so it's interesting last year um when we had our asynchronous wednesdays and our faculty did participate in a lot of professional learning some of the sessions were focused on reimagining education and i

040think you know we were at this crossroads where this is so different from anything we've ever experienced before what does it mean you know what are the silver linings and then what are the things that we'd like to say goodbye to um so we've had those in an ongoing way over the summer we had teachers talking about in different ways i think our innovation group is a group that's we had our first after school meeting this afternoon we had a summer retreat they're a group who's definitely thinking about that i know at the high school faculty meeting i believe it was this past week that was the topic of conversation so what do we want to hold on to what would we like to let go of we're also going to continue working with challenge

041success so stephen and i had a conversation with them the other day moving forward and they're prompting us to think about some of these things as well so in some smaller ways and in some larger ways conversations are occurring but i think it's you know it's the kind of conversation that you hear in the hallway or um you know just walking around teachers are saying well right this was really good i kind of wish we could hold on to this or i'm so glad what i have heard a lot of is i'm really glad we're not zooming right now i was sick of zooming um and zooming was hard i think it was it was more the concurrent piece that was really difficult trying to do two things well was really difficult so complete remote

042teaching that was one piece in class teaching that's another piece either one could be done really well but it was really hard to feel like you were paying enough attention to students in both arenas so you know there there's a lot to be learned i mean it's a national and international conversation about what we want to let go of in education you know can you think about you think about education or innovation rather you think about those three buckets of time space and technology and the technology and the time and space kind of go hand in hand because as we've seen there's more learning outside of school and outside of the classroom that happens at all hours of the day and night so how do we capitalize on the precious time we have students together

043with us in school and make the most of that time but also acknowledge that there's lots of learning happening outside the classroom as well and how do we set students up for that so that they can learn independently and you know have a sense of agency around their own learning wonderful do you feel like you feel like the staff knows how to escalate an idea or how to bring that to the attention of the administration if they say hey you know what we did this last year and while it didn't work great last year if we took this little piece of it and applied it over here you feel like there's avenues for the staff to to bring that appropriately to the inlet yeah i think there's lots of avenues for conversation you know our

044staff developers through our administrators through the observation process it's when an idea takes hold and goes beyond the walls of one teacher's classroom and starts to really impact a department or a grade level that's a little different so i think we're still at a place where we're kind of studying all of that and trying to see you know what's really worthwhile as a faculty and there are you know some ideas it's interesting you know when you think about new york state and their regulations so we've always had uh seat time requirements right so the whole notion of seat time feels antiquated all of a sudden right and um but yet we also know the importance of being in school and being with others and how those connections like when you think about the dispositions like

045collaboration that was harder to do in some cases you know when we're not actually together um although with the technology it's certainly possible but you know i think a lot of what i'm hearing from teachers is um this balance right we don't want to always be a part um but there are some things that were okay done separately and so how do we make the most of our time together when we're in classroom thank you mary yeah can i can you just speak a little bit you mentioned something about an innovation meeting yes can you explain a little bit more what that is sure so we're just starting our third innovation cohort so we have uh teachers who are part of it we i believe it's 14 teachers this year who have applied and become

046part of an innovation cohort so they are part of an action research cycle so it's an inquiry cycle that they're really looking at their own practice so we spent two days in the summer there's always a summer retreat that first summer and it's a k-12 group and the nice part about it is they come from all different grade levels disciplines subject areas so you know having the opportunity to speak to someone who's you know a kindergarten teacher to speak to a high school teacher and say wow we're working on the same thing it just seems very different um that's really nice and actually unusual you know i think teachers always comment that that's one of the things they value most seeing those k-12 connections but this is our third two-year cohort that's just beginning now

047so we had our summer retreat at the very end of august we had our first after-school meeting today so they've developed inquiry questions that will guide the way for their action research and now they're developing plans they collect data in their own classrooms start to really study their own practice and it's really one of i think the highest forms of professional development that you can participate in because you really deeply study your practice reflect upon it get feedback from colleagues so it's it's a great experience we're very fortunate and thank you to the board for supporting that because that's it's a wonderful experience for our teachers thank you yes phil so rory asked a little bit about the how the from the teachers angle one of the things i think about is this past year

048and a half or certainly last school year of disruption probably affected different students differently different grades differently different disciplines differently and then we're back and i wonder is there a need maybe you guys are all over this uh to sort of sort of assess where everybody is right now you know while over here might have been doing a lot of reading on their own and that's just their style this one has really not been doing it and there's there are different levels now and now we're going to learn algebra and now we're going to you know read a more advanced book is there a need to sort of rebalance where people are yeah so every year in at this time of year we have our benchmarking periods where we do assessments for all students and

049we try to identify any students for whom there may be some learning gaps or some reason to even take a closer look so we have some universal screenings that we do for all students and then when warranted we take a closer look with some additional assessments for others so that's always in place as part of our rti process and that's ongoing what i think is a little bit different this year is i think it probably less uneven right so there may be certain concepts for example you know you mentioned algebra there may be one thing that some students just didn't get the prior year um but it may not be everyone and i guess it's always the case really but i think it's really taking the time to get to know your students well which

050is always really important but more important than ever and then does that impact the curriculum how do you respond to the students in front of you so you know andrew mentioned on one of the slides we had less opportunity for small group instruction at least close proximity small group but i think that's more important than ever because there was are some students who'll need that or some students will need something else other students want to move ahead so that small group allows that but within the framework of curriculum so i think it is this resetting if you will of or how quickly we can go and when we have to stop um and every group of students is a little bit different yeah i imagine different disciplines you know maybe chemistry lends itself to zooming

051more than you know another history class or something yeah and so they'll be uneven you know so you were in the ninth grade last year now you're in the 10th grade but you might not really be the 10th grade level in some of the some of the subjects it sounds like there's a process to sort of detect that deal with it and then right okay it's not just the content it's those skills right so in a discipline like mathematics where those prerequisite skills are necessary to go on to the next level that's you know you'll see it most there and i think that's where we're most sensitive to it in other areas where you're learning different content in different social studies classes it's maybe not necessary to learn the next piece of content although we

052want we don't want our students to have missed anything important so it's constantly taking the temperature and responding to the group of students in front of you right thank you yeah yolanna thank you for all of that i i just want to say that i think the experience of kovan might be one of those outside forces that we didn't want to respond to but have had to respond to probably more so than any other force in the last several years and i think the it's really i really appreciate bringing the learning commitment up because i think having a north star and a vision at particularly difficult times is so essential and can kind of help to guide us and i love that it's being [Music] just reiterated and seeing how much it's going through the

053curriculum and with the staff and being brought up because i think that really helps to buoy people when everything else has become ungrounded right in so many ways and i think you know in the same way that my colleagues are speaking about disruption it also creates an opportunity to really recommit maybe even in a deeper way and i really love hearing about the innovators cohort which we spoke about when i first before i joined the board it's just this really amazing way to develop teachers and to sort of roll out a more in-depth commitment among teachers looking at their own practice and then bringing that into classroom and then sharing it among their colleagues so it's not it doesn't just stay with the people there but it also becomes something and i love that that's

054happening here um and and then today's author visit seems like a wonderful example of the creative use of technology and not sort of relying on technology but how it can be additive to a classroom and not not kind of taking away from it um and then i just sort of along those lines of how do we know or address when we fall out of line with that commitment and you know whether that's because of circumstances outside of our control or you know so i think it's nice to hear this report but wondering again kind of as warrior is bringing up like are there forums or opportunities um to gather administrators and teachers and community members together to sort of ask those questions of where where is where are we working well on this commitment and

055where could we do better and learn about that and i think in particular like it's so amazing to hear the teachers reflecting on what the silver linings of kovid were about really getting around innovative teaching practice but are there opportunities for us to maybe broaden the discussion with community members also and parents to hear about what they observed with their children at home and what could be kind of brought into it too from that perspective of what worked and you know like i had two children who took different paths last year one was remote for almost the entire year and one was at school and so sort of witnessing how different things worked for each of those kids in those environments um and so maybe we can broaden the discussion to bring teachers and community

056members and mysteries into a little discussion around that and then another just a question for out there around this is um kind of on what bill was saying just wondering as i know assessments are happening now kind of benchmarking just curious is there is there a question from the state or from higher ups around learning deficits that have happened and kind of like looking at what happened over the last year more broadly and is that something that might be reported to us later just to see where you know i mean maybe maybe it's not across any sectors or any any patterns but i just be curious about that um because i know there's a lot of hypothesis about that right well we have our upcoming school report card that we always do in a few

057months it will be interesting we haven't yet received our state test scores they're always late they're a little bit later than usual they'll be difficult to interpret this year because um some students didn't take them they you know didn't have to it was just very different kind of year so i'm not sure what we'll make of those but alongside our internal assessments um that we're always doing and you know looking for evidence of the learning commitment i think is really important and also you know when you read a statement like that different people interpret it in different ways so what does it mean um in a high school social studies class versus a fifth grade math class versus a seventh grade science classroom how do you really make it come alive and i think we

058might all have some different visions of that but i think our work is ongoing work to create a similar vision of you know an active learning environment um but always open for revision as well just to speak a little bit to your second question then come back to your first question even even within the educational community there you see different interpretations around this phrase learning loss which i think speaks to your question about it are there going to be state reports that help us to understand it and there are some people who think that really shouldn't be the focus and that instead we should be thinking about how do we advance ahead and that the focus on what quote unquote was lost there were lots of things different things gained in the past year can

059we leverage those and keep moving forward to come back to the first part of your question uh we hope very much to return to our learning cafes this year we're still thinking through whether in person or this uh benefit of technology in some way but those were terrific opportunities for us that we had a learning cafe or maybe more than one on the learning commitment several years ago when we were first rolling it out and so to revisit that and to think about with the community about what we've learned from the last year together that's absolutely a goal uh in the near future that we are just thinking through now what's the best way to do it another opportunity that occurs to me and it might be a conversation you could facilitate at parent council

060would be um to talk about whether at some of the principal coffees that are being held over zoom now whether there might be opportunity for breakout rooms where parents could talk with one another or could generate conversation around a particular topic related to some learning topic you know i'm not sure what the structure would be but um i think our principals are working really hard on those principal coffees to um respond to a lot of logistic questions that people have at the beginning of the year about the return to school and i think that makes a lot of sense but then i think as time goes on you know maybe there would be opportunity for more yeah substantive conceptual conversations about learning and school and routines and things we've learned and then it would be

061at individual building levels which might be even more meaningful for community members who you know just really want to talk about what's happening in the elementary level or who really want to talk about the middle school so maybe that would be something that our parent leaders might be interested in thinking a little bit about with building leaders thanks for that any other comments or questions thank you we really appreciate the presentation and the conversation and the opportunity to refocus on the learning commitment and some of these points of focus within it so thank you both i think this brings us to 7.02 where we have an opportunity to just pick up where we left off at our last board meeting we had some preliminary discussion around board goals and we talked a little bit about

062the structure of our goals and that for a couple of years now we've maintained one goal with respect to leadership and one board goal with respect to fiscal stewardship i think as a result of the conversation at the last board meeting there was general agreement that we were going to strive for again two goals one in each category and that conceptually the goals were serving the district well i don't know whether board members have had additional time and opportunity to think about how the goals potentially could evolve but in thinking just about even the presentation that we heard tonight um i thought there might be an opportunity in the leadership goal to slightly expand some of the language that we had had in previous years we talked about how each year ever so slightly the

063language evolves based on what the district's focus seems to be and maybe as a result of what we're thinking about here even tonight um we could talk about the board supporting the superintendent's focus on a learning commitment that strives to foster um and here there's three things just bear with me for one second so intellectually engaging relevant learning experiences in an active learning environment thoughtful decision making to provide the best possible educational experience to all klsd students in response to new challenges and opportunities and then a culture of shared commitment whereby conditions and practices in our schools are examined to ensure positive school culture equity and justice in preparing all klsd students for our democracy so that would be just a slight reframing of one aspect of the commitment that we could consider we don't

064have to modify the goal board members might have other ideas about language that they might want to suggest so i'll just kind of pause there to see how people are feeling about goal number one i like the the the new um a culture of shared commitment not sure what all the words i have questions about that but the idea that part of any profession any expert is assessment of your performance and you know and then redirection so i i actually like that as a specific item in terms of we're doing this we're doing this reexamination to promote positive school climate equity and justice well and let me back up there if you don't mind because i kind of hear a question forming i'm sorry i'm interrupting you but last year we had added some language

065around um a commitment to promoting equity and justice in preparation for democracy keeping in mind you know purpose of a public school is to produce citizens for the next generation etc um and here i guess you know it's just it's it's a suggestion to think a little bit more concretely about rather than just fostering equity and justice in a somewhat more nebulous manner but rather to foster a culture of shared commitment whereby conditions and practices in our schools are being examined to specifically promote positive school climate and this comes in part out of that book unconscious bias in our schools that i know our district administrators and board members had the opportunity to read where there really is emphasis on the importance of promoting positive school climate for every child and so i thought maybe

066this might be a time to really illuminate that we're sh we're in a shared commitment to examine conditions and practices to promote positive school climate uh equity and justice in preparing students so that's really where the idea originated from doesn't mean people you know i like it i i guess i'm being too concrete so it's um we want to promote a school climate such that we create equity injustice or that our students learn to appreciate acknowledge desire foster put you know some other verbs in there actually i think it's three specific it's three different things that it's to examine that the practices are examined to promote three different things promoting positive school climate that would be one thing promoting equity promoting justice so these would be three discrete things maybe that's the clarification you're looking

067for it's not that one would result in the other but that they would just be three discrete things but if that's not clear then no no it is it's more we want to make the schools just or do we want to make the students love justice and seek justice and want to promote equity maybe it's both i mean it's a good question i think that part of how you create students who value and strive to promote justice is by having an environment that reinforces that so i think that's i think we're trying to figure out how do you get at by creating environment where those things are valued and that that the environment meaning like what types of texts are available what what are the visual images that the kids are seeing what is the

068language that the teachers are using what is the culture of the school that environment then seats them in a way that they can think about those things in a meaningful way so i think it's both and so maybe we just have to figure out how to create the language so that that's reflected in that bullet and then i'll be done in a second i like the humility of the promote we may or may not succeed we may or not we're unlikely to succeed perfectly but the idea that this is our we're striving towards is what we can promise we can't necessarily promise where we're going to end up but the idea that we are we're promoting xyz i like that that language i think i've been on the policy committee too long with bill then

069because i think i'm a little literal too then a little bit right here but in response to new challenges and opportunities i look at pandemic as being old challenges so not just looking at new challenges but all challenges i think that's great i mean honestly last year it said new risks and opportunities because we had all these new risks and i thought maybe we were at a point where we could agree they aren't risks their challenges but i think that you're right to make the point that it's all not just the news because we're still dealing with you know the challenges of covet and probably will be for yeah absolutely probably not that long if there aren't any other comments i mean i i think i have one more question about the this the last

070point that bill was speaking about um and this is earlier but i wonder if we might want to include inclusion specifically in that last part around creating whereby conditions and practices in our schools are examined to promote positive school climate equity justice and inclusion you know um [Music] and i noticed that we also took out welcoming earlier and i just want to make sure that they sort of preamble the event yeah i think i've replaced welcoming with respectful just again looking at you know do we have to use the exact same words or no i mean i refresh the language i think respectful at this time in uh public discourse not in our district but elsewhere is certainly an important one to just reiterate and obviously i agree with what julia was saying that in

071any work that you're trying to do when you model the behavior that you want to see it's more effective than just saying the words and so but i think the words are also really important to help us have that standard to keep to we can keep all three words if people don't feel that's too long of a list it can say fostering and inclusive respectful and welcoming yeah i mean yeah we don't pay by the word right and then so then down below in the third sub bullet adding promote positive school climate equity justice i'm sorry was there another adding of the word inclusion conclusion yeah inclusive i mean inclusion in front of equity first or after equity and inclusion usually kind of go together so climate positive school climate equity inclusion and justice or

072inclusion equity and justice okay do we need to parse out that language to sort of solve the is it the school climate is it the student question or are we i mean it seems like the thing that we're acting on in this sentence is the the conditions and practices like that's where the action is taking place and then hopefully it results in those things yeah i agree but maybe it would be more clear if the list was reordered so that it's um a shared a culture of shared commitment whereby conditions and practices in our schools are examined to promote or to foster to foster equity inclusion and justice and to promote positive school climate what do you think about that yeah yeah okay so you're keeping it in preparing our students yes yep foster equity

073inclusion and justice and to promote positive school climate in preparing all klsc students for our democracy so then do we take out the foster and the strives to or we leave it there in the in the first line of that bullet drives to just moving cluster into that specific bullet right where is it this phosphor applies to all three okay okay so we just have double plus it's okay okay um i think i've captured that um i would would we like to talk for a moment about the second goal at the last meeting my takeaway was that the second goal related to fiscal stewardship was okay and i didn't hear a lot of feedback on that i just have a question and thinking about that i mean i know we have additional sort of federal

074funds that are available just wondering if they're if in this year there might be more of a financial need for some reason given sort of again extraordinary circumstances where we don't want to be i mean ideally we can do all this within the tax cap but just wondering if that might not if there's any indication that might not be realistic for the coming year i think that's the presumption that this is a guidance for the superintendent and definitely extraordinary things happen and then the budget that comes back it might be look let me explain why i think we do need to go over the tax cap because something terrible happened that's absolutely fine it's not a promise it's sort of a when they make the budget they have a sense of where we're what are

075we looking for so that what you're not surprised and you're not surprised and i just also like we do have the budget conditions meeting which happens where they sort of talk about like these are some of the things that are specific to this year so that we have some opportunity to give them feedback if in fact like they said we're going to be really tight and we need this then we have that conversation earlier during like a specific meeting so i think this is sort of our goal and then if there's a reason that we would you know kind of need to think about it differently i think i think there's opportunities do that any further discussion okay i think we're in good shape then for goals and we'll bring it back next week we'll

076bring it back next time to adopt yeah okay i'll bring back the we'll bring back the language that we agreed to today for goal 1 we've got goal 2 and we'll be ready for adoption all right thank you very much and this brings us to 7.03 where we're going to hear a little bit about possible charge for the finance committee this year thanks thank you marjorie yeah so so the finance committee is scheduled to kick off shortly and typically perhaps at tonight's meeting or maybe the next meeting we'll propose a charge for the finance committee and normally the process we follow to establish that charge is we look at a report that that sort of stacks klsd against other peer schools in terms of our expenses and we do a comparative analysis and we identify

077areas where we may be either overspending or underspending in certain areas compared to peer districts around here and based on that we try to identify where we're off by some margin plus or minus 10 let's say and we typically then look at that category and say hey perhaps the finance committee could do a little bit of investigative work here to determine you know why are we out of whack and is there something we can do about it uh the two most recent areas we looked at were transportation which i'm happy to report that we're significantly lower than we were and also we looked at healthcare costs for the district i took a look back at that report and was kind of unable to establish any really substantial outliers if you follow me based on at

078least the high level codes that we budget on and that we we apply our expenses to um so i i thought that probably the best way and i'd like to propose to the board that first of all i do not have a charge for the finance committee tonight but i think probably what we could charge the finance committee with is doing a new investigative piece of work to look at the high-level expense categories and maybe drill down one level on the expense codes to get the data and denial if the with the board's permission i'd like to ask if if we could get a new set of data of our peer school districts and the expenses against those high level and maybe one level down line items and then ask the finance committee to actually

079do the analysis um and perhaps then halfway through the year the finance committee can report back or maybe a couple of months in uh report back and determine you know what their findings are and if something is standing out that we that we ought to jump on i think that's probably the best proposal i mean um otherwise i feel like i may be unilaterally saying let's do this or let's do that and i don't think that's quite appropriate so with the board's permission i would like to ask danelle if she can um regather that information that we looked at a couple of years back and then allowed the finance committee to evaluate that thank you for bringing that tonight uh are there questions comments sounds reasonable that sounds good yeah that sounds great thank you

080wonderful thank you okay thank you very much i appreciate that all right great thank you um okay this brings us to our opportunity for public forum thank you for your patience members of the community thank you for joining us um just a couple of reminders this is our opportunity to go into listening mode we appreciate that members of the community are going to speak with us please don't feel disappointed when we don't engage in back and forth it's not intended to be discussion but we are listening and we look forward to hearing from you we request that you please introduce yourselves and limit your remarks to three minutes um and i know a few people have signed up so at this time i would invite mark abrams to please come to the podium thank you

081good evening i'm mark abrams and i'm here again i would like to personally thank marjorie and rory for taking the time to listen to my wife and i outline the history of successes and failures in the evaluative processes and implementation of services and accommodations to meet my stepson's identified needs this has been going on from kindergarten all the way up through his current placement in the fifth grade at kes the new york state board association's handbook given to new board members states in section 1.3 what exactly do school boards do a school board sets the district's direction with performance-based goals ensures alignment of strategies resources including the approved budget policies programs and processes with the district's goals assesses and accounts for student achievement using comprehensive data through deliberation and open communication conducts performance evaluations of

082the superintendent to continuously set standards of improvement leads the districts accentuating and reinforcing the positive while correcting the negatives the boe has direct oversight of the superintendent and has not seen to it that substantial shortcomings in the special education components have been fixed in a timely manner by him the boe in my opinion has not lived up to this responsibility these failures negatively impact the children and families that all of you are responsible for for board members the events shared by families in our community may just sound like words to you to the family members and children affected it is so much more than that the sheer agony and pain of watching a child emotionally devastated by these identified problem areas is what you do not have to deal with on a daily basis the

083sheer agony and pain of seeing bruises and scratches on your nonverbal child after physical contact occurred between a school official and your child is something that does not torture your minds the board is talking about nice sounding words tonight for the aspirational goals until the neglectful at times abusive practices taking place with children in the special education system stop your words do nothing to ease the suffering of the families and the children those lofty words stand in stark contrast with our realities thank you thank you gia miller hi my name is gia miller i have a child at kes and another at john jay middle school when you were all first elected to the board you probably had a million questions swimming around in your head well i like my new colleagues will they actually

084like me what should i wear to my first meeting what's andrew seleznick really like when he's not calling my house at 5am on a snow day and most importantly what actually are my responsibilities luckily you likely read new york state's new school board member handbook which answered most of your questions tonight i'm going to give you a bit of a refresher i'll skip the part about getting along with your colleagues because i'm not here to give that kind of advice and you've clearly all figured out the dress code so let's move right on to your responsibilities on the very first page of this handbook are the list of specific responsibilities which include conducts performance evaluations of the superintendent to continuously set standards of improvement a little bit later in that chapter it states the only

085employee who answers directly to the school board is the superintendent yet when i look at your website and the responsibilities you list in your mission statement there is nothing that talks about setting standards for the superintendent regular evaluations of the superintendent or that he answers to you in fact i found the opposite and as you spoke about your 2021 goals a little earlier you once again focused on supporting the superintendent and offering him guidance and instead of an annual review as per new york state the 2021 goals on your site states that you will receive an end of your update from the superintendent but i didn't need tonight's discussion or the documents on your website to know that instead of viewing your role as a group that holds the person you've hired accountable you view

086your role as someone who supports them i recently had the pleasure of sitting down and meeting with two of the board members before the meeting i was told that the only thing we could discuss is my child's experience and that they'd be on a listening tour and provide guidance so i agreed and that's what we discussed my hope was that this meeting would generate a better understanding of some of the issues we've been speaking about at these meetings for months in the moment it seemed like that was the case but afterwards the response i received was essentially a pat on the back and an encouragement to keep up the good work along with a sentence that explained how they fully support the superintendent and the five goals he's laid out there were no new recommendations

087of what i could do or what this group of us could do there was no mention or offer for us to form a committee become part of an advisory panel or focus group or join a forum all of these ideas by the way are recommendations in that handbook about how the board can engage in the community or with the community so let me propose something different to all of you sit down and talk with us instead of us speaking directly at you like this and then a little later you speaking directly at us let's have a group discussion so you can ask us questions and hear from us personally back and forth i know your immediate response is going to be but the open meeting laws well i can't speak for everyone who's advocating for

088reform of the special ed department but i can say that those who i've spoken with are more than happy to have our conversation open to the public but regardless of what you choose to do i urge you to really do something something meaningful something that is actually part of your job description don't just blindly trust the man you hired ask questions that need to be asked the handbook describes your role as a leader of the district and an advocate of public education but what exactly are you are you leading and who are you advocating for you're not leading all parents or advocating for all students don't you think you should thank you amy raffle hi my name is amy raffel and as you know i'm a parent in the district in my career i have

089worked for the third largest school district in the country as well as for an equity focused education reform nonprofit i have also served on the board of directors for social service agency in the previous times i've spoken or written letters i have stated that i do not believe the board is fulfilling its duty i mentioned my previous experience to make clear that this is not something i'm just saying casually i think it's interesting tonight that there's a lot of focus on inquiry and questions because actually what i have come here tonight with is a lot of questions um members of this boe have represented the assault and abuse of five children over a two-year period as a one-off parents were told that the teacher responsible suddenly snapped and had a bad week clearly these characterizations

090characterizations are not true what i would like to know is of the board did you ask how it's possible to be a one-off or have a bad week and yet the incidents from two years prior were revealed from the investigation doesn't make sense did the board assist in exiting this teacher without transparency to our community is the full scope of the board's oversight practice to ask the superintendent whether they should be worried and when he says no move on and take no further action what questions did you actually ask did you assess whether the board had the correct controls in place to minimize risk in the self-contained classrooms in 2019 did the incident of repeated restraints in the middle school in 2021 highlight that whatever controls were in place were insufficient what assessment was done

091by you each time can you itemize the specific policies performance indicators and reporting mechanisms that were reviewed and how they were improved after each of these failures what data or reports have you requested from the district related to the failures to guide your analysis and plans for improvement and i have more questions does the board and district transparently report settlement costs for special education does the board and district ever include settlement costs and inappropriate line items to obscure them how does the board assess the value provided by our attorney does the board monitor whether it is wasting taxpayer money by having an attorney consistently recommend two-tier appeals even when the district knows they're likely to lose the appeals how does the boe evaluate whether the legal advice they are being given is resulting in more

092funds leaving the district or paying legal fees that could be better spent on investing in our district's staff programs and services on a positive note it seems we are starting to see some agreement on the need for an independent audit not only should our district have an independent audit but i believe if this board were truly engaged in in fact in effective governance it would already have compiled data detailing many of the areas of concern formed an advisory committee an initiated step towards launching such an audit during the comment section i would love for your response to any of these questions and specifically would love to hear what your commitment is to an independent audit and what stance you plan to take to actually lead that process because the judge and the jury should not

093be the same thing the superintendent should not be sitting around in choosing who is going to review the special ed program this is you guys this is your job you are responsible for oversight finally i am once again calling on you to give our community a full accounting of all the steps the boe has taken as well as what it hasn't done in response to these special education failures thank you [Applause] thank you matt golia good evening guys matt golia um i have two items i i wanted to bring up um they're both centered around septo septo is special education pto uh for those who don't know um the first uh item is is directed toward mr schlesnick and then the second item is directed toward the board um it's my understanding about the ptos

094i think there's six of them right five for the buildings and then um septo as i mentioned um you know as i've gotten more involved and interested in in the district in the school district um i noticed that earlier this year when when mr celesnek when you had meetings with the ptos septo was was not included in in the schedule um and the building ptos were now i'm sure your intention is not to exclude anyone and that the thinking is that special needs parents are covered by a building uh pto um but i'd like to submit to you guys that if you have a child disability is severe enough you may be affiliated with septo from pre-k until they turn 21 as opposed to changing your your pto every couple years with the building um

095as an example my school my son's school had curriculum night on tuesday and we received a deck um from the school pto which came from the principal and vice principal and it listed all the teachers and all the class parents and my wife is a class parent for my son's class but my son's teacher wasn't listed and my wife wasn't listed because it's a self-contained class is is the only thing i can guess also the k-2 class wasn't included and the three through five class wasn't included so i would just ask you if you have young children like how would you feel you know to not be included like that um i'm reminded every day that my son is different but something like that is just very you know kind of in your face um

096and again i don't know who put the deck together but i do know it was sent out by the principal and vice principal um so all that to say this might ask is uh mr superintendent that you have a dedicated budget meeting and include septo on that schedule i think that would really be uh appropriate the second issue related to septo that is more geared toward the board um over the summer we the district hired a three through five self-contained teacher um and my understanding is that often i don't know if it's always but often parents are involved in the hiring process now i know some in administration have taken responsibility they said it was a miss and and that's fine and i respect that but to you know to amy's point ultimately doesn't the

097board of education approve the hires right i'm just wondering what due diligence was done there was the question asked hey did any of the special education the septo parents were they involved in the hiring at all um so my ask to the board is um in the future as as hires are made in the district specifically ones that will be working with the special ed population that you please include someone from the executive septo board the same way you might for one of the other ptos thank you thank you oksana aeronaut good evening you know i never write anything for these things because the material is always right here it was really fascinating to listen to the very careful and prolonged discussion around the inclusion of words in the mission statement or whatever you want

098to call it inclusion equity all these wonderful words but as was said before not only are they meaningless if they're not put into practice but clearly from what matthew just said they are not reaching roughly 16 of your population and when i look at the aforementioned handbook for new board members in new york state one of the things it says on here is you have to check whether you really are aware of all community members and whether your data and analysis truly reflect the total community as was mentioned before there's nothing in the laws that govern how you operate that precludes you from having a discussion with this particular part of your community we're open to having it publicly and how else would we resolve systemic issues if this body continues to hide behind not

099being able to talk about specific children or privacy laws etc you are a policy-making body how shall we address systemic issues if you're not willing to change policy how shall we arrive at the right policy if we're never to have a conversation around what that right policy is the other thing highlighted in this handbook is that the district obviously devotes a certain amount of budget to your education conferences any sort of you know knowledge out there that may be helpful for you and i'm very curious if any of you have taken the time to really immerse yourself in the realm of special education as opposed to defaulting to your legal counsel to your head of special education but educating yourself the way you have perhaps about climate change and running a green building or whatever

100it is you're focusing on immerse yourself in this topic and try to live in the realm that we live in every day with our children i think it would be very educational enlightening and it affects 16 of your student population finally on this topic of being aware of all community members and whether your data and analysis truly reflects the total community i'm really shocked this went on notice but at the last board of education i quoted to you data from the office of from the department of education ocr that stated that in this district over a number of years the number of students subjected to restraints or any kind of corporal intervention or punishment 71 of those students were students with disabilities that is not equity and i don't know whether any of you are

101even curious about it because it happened on your watch it happened on the ship's watch it happened on many of your watch and i'm wondering if you're even aware of it even curious about it asking questions about it because that is trauma that lives with these children every day and they can't stand up here and tell you how they feel because if they could for that particular intervention or any of the other measures that have unfortunately been taken against the number of children here you would not be spinning your wheels things would be happening a lot faster don't take advantage of the fact that they can't talk to you directly but they can't post their experiences on social media if these were newer typical general education kids this would be a huge huge deal thank

102you thank you okay that brings us to our opportunity for the consent agenda and just as a reminder in a short while we will have an opportunity for some board discussion um so thank you for your patience i'm not sure whether we need to vote on anything separately tonight but i would like to pause for some discussion if someone wants to move the consent agenda can i ask for somebody to move it thank you julia and would someone like second thank you bill and then i'm not sure whether we will have something up on the screen but i did just want to refer back to something that was mentioned at the outset of the meeting which is that tonight we have the opportunity to publicly acknowledge 19 staff members with 25 years of service in

103the district and to thank them and to honor them this is a little bit different than how we have in the past been able to honor these employees previously but still thought it was important to create the opportunity to mention it and to provide you an opportunity to say something andrew they're all exactly 25 years or 25 or more these are the ones who've reached 25 years i think i think at the conclusion of last year if i'm correct and i should also just begin by noting there are some staff who um out of modesty or some other reason prefer not to have their names be recognized so we're celebrating tonight those who uh we're comfortable with their names uh being made public here but we certainly have congrats congratulate all of our colleagues in

104this category thank you are we going to just quickly go through the slides do we have them all or i just i have the names in front of me oh there are same clicker again okay here we go so uh we'll we'll name folks from each of our schools at john jay high school debbie freed and pat braglin i want to point out we recognize staff no matter their role in our district so we have teaching staff support staff custodial staff all represented here at john jay middle school katrina costello paul ciancio joe mimosa and kathy smolen congratulations to all at meadow pond elementary school jason briggs mark grossman kelly mazzoni and jacqueline kovach katona elementary school kim buckley and lynn swee at increased miller shelly rieger the transportation department one of our drivers terry

105clark and brian breese and that actually concludes those that we celebrated they were all recognized at faculty meetings at the beginning of the year they were presented with bowls uh speeches were made about them by their principals it was a very nice celebration and we always want to warmly congratulate colleagues who've given so many years of terrific service to the district indeed there are many beloved names that familiar faces and um we appreciate their institutional knowledge their dedication to the students of the katona-lewisborough community for all of these many years and we wish them many additional future happy years in catona lewisboro and so thank you andrew for sharing their names with us and congratulations to all and i'm not sure whether there's any further discussion on the consent agenda or questions i'll pause before

106we have the opportunity to vote on this proclamation all in favor on the consent agenda generally thank you all right six zero terrific thank you and this brings us to an opportunity for some board dialogue and discussion i'm not sure whether any board members have new business items that they wish to introduce or comments um you know we do thank members of the community for sharing frustrations and concerns i think some of which we have heard a little bit about in the past and others which perhaps were new and we take those on board and really appreciate the feedback we would encourage community members to please also share feedback as appropriate directly to staff members and building administrators when there are oversights missteps [Music] effects of inconsideration or perceived in consideration you know very important

107to keep the lines of communication open with those who are making decisions every day to support children to the best of their ability and to give them an opportunity to share their perspective to engage in ongoing opportunities for feedback and growth and thank you for bringing concerns to the attention of the board of education tonight um i do think it's important to clarify just on one procedural note that there are board policies that govern much of the work that the board of education undertakes though it may not happen in public session and so i do think tonight there is some confusion in the community as to the responsibilities of the board of education and how the board participates in certain oversight for example responsibilities and so i would encourage community members to refer to our

108policy library where things are fairly straightforwardly laid out if they're not you know available on the website where people go for information about day-to-day school district business you know i i'm not sure that's where people ordinarily look to understand how the board of education operates but certainly we're all very familiar with our responsibilities and the policies that govern our oversight of the district our governance of the district we all avail ourselves of professional learning opportunities related to many facets of education both locally and in the region at the state level and nationally though we don't always have occasion to discuss it here at the board table sometimes we do sometimes it's on the consent agenda as it was this evening um so just to provide that one you know piece of clarification though i know

109that doesn't in any way you know go to the heart of some of the frustration that we heard and some of the concerns that we heard i mean i'm not sure you know to that end whether there's anything that can be shared tonight that would address that but we are listening we do appreciate the questions and we'll continue to seek information as appropriate are there any other comments or thoughts a couple clarifying questions so um one thing that i heard tonight which i i think is something that we do is around obviously the boards one of the board's responsibilities is to hire and evaluate the superintendent and that is something that happens among the board i haven't participated yet but that's there's some element that's not totally public right that they're because there's personnel it

110happens in executive session or is that yeah as i just mentioned this is all outlined in board policy and yes there's board policy related to board self-evaluation for example it's an annual requirement and to the oversight and evaluation of the superintendent um there's you know plenty of very detailed information about how that works in the policy library um and then just on on the matter that um [Music] around i mean the question of inclusion so i heard the question from one of the community members tonight around um septo maybe not being included or self-contained not class not being included in some in a communication or in something and i remember just hearing that from another parent a couple weeks ago around that and i'm just i mean it doesn't have to be answered now but

111just sort of wondering i know that one thing that i was always impressed with when i moved here was that this district was known as a place that is committed to having excellence in special education and creating a learning environment for all students and um i assume the intention is that the self-contained classes are not separate even though they are separate in their own classes they are still part of the school community right that is the that's the intention certainly of the school district i just wanted to and it is i feel i just want to clarify i think we're hearing a couple of different things and with regard to septo we did hear a suggestion at a previous board meeting and it's a very interesting suggestion and again i would suggest this should be

112discussed at parent council where there's septo representation at the table and an opportunity to talk about how these meetings are arranged but typically the administration has offered eto opportunities to hear about the budget it's been referred to as sort of the budget road show i think it's a really interesting suggestion and an opportunity that i i'm sure the administration will be delighted to do a special or a separate septo presentation i also think it raises interesting questions because i could imagine opportunities whereby parents who might have a concern related to the budget related to meeting the educational needs of their own children or other children with ieps or 504s that there would be educational value to all parents and hearing that question so i think it's actually a very interesting philosophical question when we talk

113about the budget you know and to an audience of parent community members you know do we want to provide a special forum a separate forum for special education pto families or community members or is there educational value to all community members and hearing the questions that parents of students who are also affiliated with septo might ask and you know the answer here i think goes to one of the slides the answer could be and you know let's do it all let's do eto specific building level budget meetings and if septo leadership would like to suggest we add a new one that's a great idea and then i think tonight separately just to clarify you know the concerns and questions we're hearing we heard different concerns about self-contained classrooms and how families or classrooms were included

114and represented in some aspect of back to school night is how i was hearing that just to separate those two things just to add a little bit margarine thank you for i may not add because you you've said all that so well but just maybe it brings some further clarity we mary and i meet monthly with the group that we refer to as parent council parent council is the leadership of all the ptos including septo septo is at those monthly meetings and throughout the year we we anticipate what's coming up and so we talk with that group about budget uh meetings that are coming up we've done that in all the years that i've been here the interesting suggestion about doing a separate one for septo has never come up at parent council in those

115years so it's come up now i imagine it will come up as we uh get towards that budget process this year and we'll have this very interesting conversation about the pros and cons of separating out versus including in together so absolutely i mean that's the benefit of people coming forward with suggestions and we appreciate that and i think the last thing i just would like to perhaps clarify is that there are um there are fact-finding bodies and the board of education is actually not one of them and when there is a disagreement between um you know a parent's understanding of a set of facts and the superintendent's findings there is an appropriate hearing body and it turns out you know that's actually not a responsibility of the board of education that is simply outside the

116purview of the board of education so although it is um our responsibility and our um duty to listen attentively to everything that is shared with us in this forum and public comment you know i do want to clarify that repeating some assertions at every meeting is not going to lead to adjudication or um different outcomes that there there are fact finding bodies and and actually you know that is outside the scope of our responsibility it is of course within the scope of our responsibility to ensure that every single allegation is fully investigated comprehensively and appropriately and that findings are shared with appropriate parties and to that end the board has fulfilled its responsibility i believe to the satisfaction of the board as a corporate body um but again we welcome your feedback on on um

117effect of some of those decisions and um thank you for sharing feedback any further i'd like to just reiterate a couple of the points marjorie also we've heard and again we we appreciate people coming forward and sharing their concerns it's very important that people do that i think it's equally important that when we when the community hears about such concerns iterated particularly when we hear the word abuse as we heard tonight that we say every single time that it's imperative that if people have concerns that they come forward to us as quickly as possible that we have investigated it as thoroughly and as seriously as we can and we continue to do so every instance that's brought to our attention we do have accountability and protocols for making sure that the appropriate steps are taken

118and we have always taken those steps again as absolutely seriously as we possibly can there's nothing that's more important to us than the safety of all the children in our schools i want to offer one point of clarification and i hope it's just a simple clarification i don't mean anything more by it than that it's a couple meetings now where we've heard the statistics 71 referenced in reference to the crdc data that appears on the federal government's office of civil rights website i've looked at that data of course i'm so i'm familiar with it and i want to clarify it from my perspective though i'll be happy to engage if someone interprets it differently and when i look at it there's a single year 2017 in which one can look at seven reports of restraint

119and it appears the way it's uh listed there that five of those instances occurred with a child with disabilities you divide five by seven you get the 71. there are more years in which there are zero reports of restraint so i don't know if statistically there's a way to add all of those years together and still say that it's 71 over all of those years the way i look at it one could fairly say that the seven instances in that one year 71 percent were applied but in all the other years not only i think in the majority of the years there were zero instances and uh we heard i think once before that perhaps the district didn't submit data in 2019 in fact uh the federal government chose not to collect the data in

1202019 because of the pandemic they postponed the collection that year they're going to start again collecting the data this year thanks for giving me the opportunity to clarify that thank you andrew marjorie i just have one so something caught my attention which made me wince a little bit around uh disclosing of the financials related to special education and as far as i'm aware we're completely open right there's there's nothing applied on any line other than the appropriate line items as we're obligated to do i think by law certainly by accounting principles do we have any reason to believe that anything is being hidden on any line item it's not appropriate it's not supposed to be on or no we we deliberate the budget line item online we invite community members to join us here during

121those meetings absolutely or at least are welcome i think importantly there and we heard the point made tonight that it's important that there be people outside of the board and the superintendent to look at things like that and if there's one area that's audited by outside groups more than any other it's the financial world where we have both internal extra external auditors and we have comptroller's office who will come to us periodically from the state level and audit all of our financials in that level too as far as i'm aware they have not turned up the particular concern that was named tonight at any time a district employee he's an independent contractor through an audit firm and he reviews any disbursements made including legal fees associated with special education cases including settlements thank you and

122i think it just just to reassure the public that that's not just in like a insular group the audit committee and the finance committee both include community members that are not board members or i mean in fact we're outnumbered by community members you know there are more community members on the audit committee than there are board members so there's you know several um community members some of them who i think probably don't even have kids in the district anymore you know who are just financially savvy people who want to participate in something in the community so they participate via the audit committee or the finance committee good reminder thank you i think we're ready to look ahead to future meetings the board is next going to meet on thursday october 7th at 7 30 in

123the library in between now and then the policy committee will meet on friday tomorrow at 9 00 am next week audit is going to meet at 7 pm and sustainability is going to meet on friday at 8 15 in the morning and then looking out further into october finance committee will kick off on tuesday october 12th 7 p.m board of ed meets again thursday october 21st and friday october 29th is policy did i miss anything hope you do and that brings us to 16.01 and i'm going to make a motion for the board to adjourn back into a sex session discuss employment history of an individual thank you bill for seconding all in favor please say aye aye all right six zero thanks very much good night thank you oh jessie's gone right yes