001good evening call to order the october 14 2020 regular meeting of the board of education everyone please rise for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty um a reading of our mission statement we are committed to academic achievement and success for all students in a safe environment in partnership with families and our community our mission is to promote confidence inspire a passion for learning and to prepare our students to become responsible global citizens can i please have a motion for the approved revised agenda motion second all those in favor aye aye um questions and comments from interested citizens we have one this evening from lorraine loaning i'd like to just remind everybody go
002ahead lorraine um i just want to remind everyone that after everyone speaks this evening we have staff that will be um sanitizing everything when you're done thank you hello lorraine loaning district resident over the years i've addressed this aboard on this board many times many times i hope you know that each time i speak i want the district to be the the best that it can be for many years it was very personal to me as i had two kids who went through the school district and graduated from here this last year has been less personal but more pragmatic one day i'm a homeowner one day i'm going to sell my home and homes and districts with desirable school districts are more highly valued than homes in weaker districts so selfish me here i want
003the district to excel i really do uh but this district is terrible capital t when it comes to touting achievement that is unrelated to sport for years i i had to uh alert the district when there was a high achievements that you overlooked um my youngest son was a high achiever so oftentimes it involved ethan and i kind of put it in front of you guys for years i was told that the administration was going to look at ways to recognize these hard-working kids it never really happened it didn't come to fruition while my kids were here i don't see it happening now i know that it is hard to quantify achievements sometimes so when someone else does the quantifying for you it's a little hard to fathom how you miss a fastball right down
004the middle of the plea in mid-september the national merit scholarship people announced their semi-finalists this is a very prestigious award this district has a student who is a semifinalist this year my son was a semifinalist and i had to alert the district back then i'm kind of dismayed that i'm still having to bring this to your guy's attention i don't get why the district can't be more on top of this it's it's disheartening i know you have a lot on your plate and i appreciate that but we are school district and we really need to to recognize scholarly achievement you know and i don't know what else to say uh this has been kind of a repeat event for me and it's a little uh disheartening as i said all right i don't have a
005dog in this race anymore so it's less uh irksome but still this kid you know he really worked hard and he should be noticed and achieved and should be recognized thank you thank you can i just say something yes i think one of the things that's really disturbing is that when information like when information like that i don't get it i don't have that information i don't get a letter that says you have a semi-finalist because i will tell you personally that if i receive that information myself i would be touting it um i think there's a breakdown in how communication gets to this to the district because i know you use the word i consider ourselves sitting here the district so i will look into that but until you stood up there and said
006that i had no idea so there has to be a better way when one of our students makes that type of achievement that the letter goes to the superintendent because again i think that that's that's something that i would proudly acknowledge but i need to get that information so so we'll we'll we'll see what we can do but it's it's it's almost like every year i say the same thing um and elsie hopefully we can tie that into the i mean this is college board we're speaking about so the ap scholars that we had talked about at a previous board meeting that should be added to the list as well for recognition 100 and i and i think that um it's just really important for us to acknowledge that again we're we're a well-rounded district
007yes we have great achievements in sports but we have equal great achievements in academics and we're a school district right so it should be the academics that we speak of first i just somehow feel that the info the flow of information doesn't get to us so i appreciate you getting up i'm disappointed that you have to say this every year and then i go back and have to ask you know how did this happen but i also agree with mrs talbert that we we need to acknowledge the hard work that our students are um undertaking especially in times like this so so thank you thank you um this evening we have a presentation of our external audit report that will be given by gary theodore who is a partner at nugent and housler pc thank
008you gary hello everybody i'm a partner at the accounting firm of nugent housler we audited about 19 schools in the area and i've been there for over 30 years the everyone has a copy the financial statement in front of them i've gone over the financial statement in detail with the audit committee and they asked me to come here and just hit some highlights of the financial statement for the board and for those who want to follow along i'm going to do something a little different than i normally do and i'm going to start on page 67 6-7 and talk about oppeb other post-employment benefits and on page 67 there's showing what the balance of what you owe as a school for retired health insurance benefits to your employees and the top of the page we
009see the numbers start at the beginning of the year of 317 million and then now at the end of the year you owe 355 million which is an actuarially derived number predicting what it's going to cost to school to pay for health insurance for retirees and that number went up by 38 million during the year so that's having an effect on your government-wide financial statements so going back to what i normally do keeping that in mind on page one of the financial statements is the independent orders report and the school was given an unmodified opinion which is the best type of opinion that could be given on financial statements so that's page one after the audit report is a management discussion and analysis and i'm going to stop on one page there which is page
010nine so the school has actually in here two sets of financial statements one are the government-wide financial statements which have all the funds together plus long-term assets and liabilities and then we have the individual fund financial statements so page nine has to deal with the government-wide financial statements and that's where the the opeb liability for health insurance for retired employees come into place on page nine we compare last year to the year of the audit and on the revenues went up by four million dollars there's a column for change there and we can see property taxes went up about four million dollars so that explains uh pretty much that difference and down on the expenses in the change column we see expenses went up 16 million dollars and that has to do with the change
011uh in the opeb liability that i was pointing out in the notes after the mdna are the financial statements themselves starting on page 17. [Applause] pages 17 and 18 are the government-wide financial statements and the the fund financial statements are not affected by by the opeb only the government-wide are so on page 17 we see the balance sheet on the government-wide basis and the very bottom number is a a negative 261 thousand and that's a negative because our liabilities are more than our assets on this basis of accounting and as you go down about three quarters of the way on the page we can see the liability for the other post-employment benefits of 355 million and that's what's causing that negative so it's kind of an eye-opening thing to see what the long-term effects are
012of giving health insurance i'm sorry about that [Music] giving health insurance as a benefit and the cost that the school is going to bear over time for that benefit when you go to page 18 now we see the income statement on the government-wide basis and the third number up from the bottom the change in net position that's basically your profit or loss for the year on this basis and it shows a minus fifteen thousand and that's all because fifteen million and that's all because of uh the opeb liability and the change in that during the year so moving to the next page which is page 19 now we're getting away from the government-wide financial statements and we're looking at the fund financial statements on page 19 the second line up from the bottom is the
013fund balance and you can see for the for at the end of the year the general fund had a fund balance of 32 million dollars special aid fund was zero which is designed to be that way the school lunch fund had a fund balance of 288 thousand dollars the capital projects had a negative fund balance but that's just the timing difference because we're seeing the expenses before we see the income so that's nothing to worry about but you know getting back to the general fund fund balance you see a much different picture than the government-wide the school is in good financial shape but it's not reflected in the government-wide statements but it is reflected here in the fund financial statements if you go forward two pages to page 21 [Applause] now we see the income
014and expenses by fund and the third line up from the bottom is the change in fund balance and and you can see under the general fund that the income was more than the expenses by seven million dollars for the general fund during the year the school lunch special aid fund broke even the school lunch fund had a minus four hundred and nineteen thousand dollars which was a direct result of the covid uh closing down the school lunch program but still paying all the employees uh the capital projects had a negative balance but that's just a timing difference with the financing after the financial statements are the notes i'm not stopping there but after that is the supplemental schedules and i'll have you jump all the way to page 72. [Applause] so pages 72 and 73
015are now only focusing on the general fund and comparing what actual the actual results for the general fund to what was budgeted so on page 72 we see the revenue side of the general fund budget and the very last column the very bottom number 770 000 that's the amount of revenue that was received above what was budgeted so we like to see it in that direction not below and when you flip the page to page 73 now we see the expense side of the general fund budget and on page 73 once again the last column the bottom number 8.2 million dollars that's how much you underspent the budget during the year and as you can imagine it was an odd type of a year because of of covid but the general fund weathered the storm
016very well the last page i will stop at is page 83 and as you know the school district gets money from the federal government and if you get more than 750 000 you're required to have a single audit the federal government requires additional audit procedures so we do that here so on page 83 the last column the bottom number you can see the school gets 5.6 million dollars of money from the federal government and that's kind of a quick a recap of the financial statement we've been doing this audit for a number of years the the business office has always cooperated every question we ask get answered every piece of paper we want to see we drive them crazy sometimes but they answer all our questions they get us every document we need so i'm
017happy to report that the audit went smoothly and that the school is in good financial condition and that's it thank you very much i know we did meet with you for audit committees so i know we asked some of our questions do any of the other board members or anybody have any questions or comments regarding the presentation nothing don anything else no just again i pointed out every year i have no clue how the state is going to eventually pay down you know there's roughly 700 750 school districts in new york state um and to put it in perspective monroe woodbury's liability is over 300 million dollars so just multiply that times 700 school districts to give you at least a concept of how broke the state really is so good luck collecting that i
018have no idea how you're going to get that money eventually but there's other positive news yeah well it is a positive that i appreciate the staff the in the financial department that seems to work very well so thank you okay good night everybody thank you thank you moving on we're going to have an update on the reopening plan and covid19 um mrs rodriguez are you going to go first yes rodriguez is going to present with mr kravitz can you go to the first slide perfect um we are six weeks into the reopening plan and um i felt it was really important for us to share with our community the things that have gone well things that have not gone things that we consider to be challenges and maybe some changes i think i just want
019to go back to when the plan was created one of the things that we said we would do is always take things uh two-week increment um this has been a fluid situation things happen things change i know that we finally this week were able to go to a full a b schedule for the secondary unfortunately we had a covet positive case and we'll talk a little bit about that that forced us to close the building for the remainder of the week but i do want to share a couple of things that i felt have you know that that not only i have but i've received positive feedback um the fact that we are live streaming we decided that we were able to do that two weeks early and that was really done because the district
020had purchased bandwidth and so we were a little bit ahead of the game and so we were really happy that we were able to do this earlier that was um a push for our staff as well because we had not anticipated that when i did the presentation i said it would be the 19th but we were really able to move it up much quicker i think that the teachers did an amazing job of going online not only going online but having students in front of them that was a challenge for them and they rose to that occasion i had the opportunity to walk throughout the district and and visit some buildings where i saw students actually students who were remote you know uh being in conversations with students that were physically in the building again
021i thought that went really well our live synchronous instructions so um before that we had that you know uh aa1 b1 and so that's when we first started to bring students back into the building i thought that went well i felt the students um have really risen to the challenge and i know that they're under a lot of pressure and concern regarding all the changes that we've made but i will tell you that our students have been amazing they come to school they wear their masks they're compliant they move throughout the building they're very cognizant of the fact that we're in a pandemic so they have really been very collaborative um the other thing that has gone well is that we've had families that originally had decided they were going to go hybrid and then
022they wanted to go to remote and being able to have that flexibility has really benefited some of our families the other thing that we did and i and i will share that not a lot of school districts have done this is that we have taken a lot of our after-school activities and we've turned them remotely we've put them to a remote so students we know that students want things to be and i put it in air quotes as normal as possible but by having these after school activities and students engage in these activities it's been a really positive move for them it was a word i used in the beginning of the year we pivoted there's been times when we've had to pivot within 24 hours i think our staff and our students and our
023families have done really well in pivoting this is going to be the theme for the whole year as we get information we make changes and we make adjustments and i really do think that for the most part people have done a really good job of that and and i have their again um students behavior they've really really done a nice job so the second slide is really talking about um [Music] some challenges and of course one of the challenges that we've heard from students and families is that the workload has been difficult at times i think that we've given the students our online or in person but also the amount of work that they're getting at home for homework has been really difficult and what i think is happening in talking to some of the
024teachers is that our teachers are really committed to the curriculum so they see that they have a curriculum that they have to teach and when you have less time you you try to figure out how do you do that and how they're doing that is by giving it to the students to do so so we're working on that piece with our staff and our students but that's been a challenge another challenge is parents filling out the covet screening every time a student comes to school without a covet screening it requires an adult in the building usually a nurse to take the student's temperature that's really not enough we are required to have this coveted screening it's just not taking the temperature but it's an uh attestation that said that reads that you haven't visited you
025know a place that's on the the zone list that you haven't been in contact with someone who's coveted positive so there's several questions that you need to answer and so we've been struggling with that and i know that the building principle sends a letter home to the parents saying if that continues for students we may have to put you on remote and and the truth is is that we need to focus on educating students and all of these things that we have to do really take away from our time uh just teaching so that's been a challenge i think from our teacher's perspective it's been a challenge the constant pivoting the preparing things um the getting ready to teach in a very new way and i think that um the community has really been receptive
026to that this has been new to them and challenging for them but they've done a really really good job uh contact tracing so and again we'll we'll talk about that when we have a confirmed positive case there are many people in the district who now have to engage in contact tracing which means reaching out to every student or staff member making them aware putting them letting them know that they have to go on a 14-day quarantine and none of that is easy because it's concerning for families it's concerning for our staff it's concerning for our students so those things have been a challenge and we are working hard to get better at that that's not something i really wish that we would get better at but but we are as the cases as we're informed
027of the cases and then the last thing that i want to talk about is information from the state to the local level that has been probably one of my biggest challenges the governor will go out and he will have an executive order or he'll make a statement when i reach out to the local for example the orange county health department they weren't they aren't informed about it so there's a lag in time now the community knows what the governor said and the community is looking towards the district so what are we going to do all of that creates a lot of stress on all of us but it also creates stress for our families and our and our students and our teachers because when they hear someone in a position like the governor to make
028a statement they they expect me to be able to respond very quickly and the truth is it can take a week before i have final information so it is that lag in time makes it very difficult to be able to to be responsive and so um it puts an undue burden and stress on our families that i believe are already stressed out i think we need to take a moment and we need to acknowledge that everybody is doing the best that they can our students our staff our parents we're all handling this in the best way that we can but it is challenging and it it is stressful um and so i want to make a couple of recommendations and so that's the next slide we have been using monday as synchronous monday but it's
029a very very short period and one of the recommendations i want to make is that we should go to asynchronous and i'll explain why i think it's really important for our students to have an opportunity two hours during the day and we would schedule that to allow students to work on their own schoolwork but in on top of that have an opportunity to meet and talk with their teachers about what concerns they may have the way our schedule is built it's very difficult for us to do that so what i am recommending is that we allow for that monday to become asynchronous it also allows our teachers to really prepare robust instruction one of the things that we said was it's really important that our teachers provide a robust instruction for our students planning time
030is critical and so um i'm i'm recommending that we take that day and we change it into asynchronous it still means our teachers will be in the building it'll allow us to do some more professional development it will give students some time to breathe and to do some of this work but also it will allow them to have this student time that you normally would have had in a regular school day after school so you know a year ago if you needed to have extra help you'd stay after school you go during lunch none of those things can happen now because of the situation that we're in so so that has been really challenging for us um the next thing i want to talk about and i i have um mr hassler here i'm sorry
031mr kravitz i've been called worse that is true true that's true i want to talk about how do we make a decision to close the building and so um we'll go back and forth but that really is a case by case first and foremost if a parent or a teacher says that they're covet positive i cannot do anything until that has been confirmed by orange county health department and i know that's a struggle for people because people will say well i sent you an email and you knew that such and such was positive the answer to that is you can give me all the information and i we will follow up on that but we are unable to put that on our dashboard or send a letter out to our families until orange county health
032department has confirmed it because the way that it works is the labs will send that list to orange county and so would be it would be um dangerous for me to go on the on the whim of somebody who says yes this person is covet positive and i would go through this whole process so there is a protocol in place that i must continue to follow and i really need parents to understand why we do that um we have air quotes i think they also everyone needs to understand that this also happens very quickly at times so we can't give you know as a building principle and everybody else has been a principal you know that um when two kids get into a skirmish and you you want to tell parents on both sides every
033single detail that that you know possible it's frustrating because you can't tell everybody every single thing and that's the same same as in this case yesterday what we can tell you is and we'll use that as an example yesterday orange county department of health confirmed the positive case at the high school at one o'clock in the afternoon so when we're sitting down it's one o'clock we know the building's dismissing at two o'clock we know we're going to be shutting down now you know for for however long we want to get people that information so that they can prepare if they're you know if they're going to be home and and the like we have to now begin our contact tracing we had to talk to the the staff members who were exposed and even just
034having those conversations takes time because you're bringing people in and you're telling them hey just so you know you were exposed to this and everybody has different reactions depending on their their level of comfort some people you know were kind of like all right no worries i'm good i did what i have to do whereas others who might be less comfortable or may have certain situations going on at home had a very different reaction it was much more emotional and there is a human element in relaying that type of information and that takes time and everybody wants or a lot of people want answers right away and they want all the answers and sometimes it doesn't work like that so now we're we're up against the end of the day we want to get people
035information we want to tell teachers we can't tell them everything we don't have every every single answer and it's all swirling very very quickly so that's why the real time piece is up there and and then buildings are different and situations are different and we've seen that now in a couple of buildings and you can't even get into every single reason as to why they're different because there's a danger of exposing potentially exposing who um who was diagnosed positive and we can't do that so we can't share the specific you know child obviously in a case like the high school just understand that if a student has a nine period day that's potentially nine periods that they've been with other students you know possibly a cafeteria as well and you're talking at you know you
036could very easily get upwards of 100 different kids staff members that need to be contact traced and that takes time because as you know every parent may very well react differently as well so all those phone calls happen we had do all of our contact tracing and that's an example of how that works that number of 100 is at a 25 you know attendance right so if there was fifty percent then that would be at least double the amount of people oh yeah sure i'm income tax right so that would right and remember when we're getting the initial information we're sitting there and trying to figure out in real time exactly how many people were there and at exactly the right time what day is it was it the current day was it two days
037ago was it five days ago um and then it's counting back to say all right you had exposure on this day and the people you know if it's two days earlier how many other people could have been possibly exposed the transportation piece is included in that as it is and then orange county department of health tells us who has to quarantine so what we do is we reach out to them and we say all right these kids were in this class who has to quarantine and they're the ones that say everybody has to quarantine for the 14 days and it's it's 14 days i think there's been concern about is the 10 days is a 14 days they are very hard on the 14 day um let's say 14 days from exposure from exposure so
038and and so what happens is they use the word infectious so if someone is infectious then that's the day that we start to count and we start to figure out who the people were now now let's take an opposite right we have last friday we had i think it was six cases that we reported and of those six cases we did nothing because the students some of the students weren't in and when they were in they were not infectious so those are the pieces that we need to make sure that we people understand um we as a district have no desire to to um not share information but the problem is and i go back to this the one of the biggest problems we have is that even though you as a parent may share
039this information with us we cannot share it on our covet dashboard until orange county says yes because this is the way that it works at three o'clock i get a dashboard from orange county health department that lists all the students that may have been that that are positive i then take that data and then we have to do our own dashboard and in order to be able to click and say that i have a positive it requires me to say at the bottom yes i confirm this with orange county because i think we've gotten a lot of feedback from people saying well well you knew this happened over the weekend and my response is we may know a lot of things but until something is confirmed it is not a fact so can orange county
040put numbers in your dashboard they cannot orange county cannot put numbers in their dashboard they can only put numbers in their dashboard which then that's one of the things that we have to make sure is is that i the two dashboards are the same right so if they have a one i have a one um and there's a delay there can be a delay in getting that information to us and for example one of the cases that was reported on friday the the person who tested positive it had been days before and through circumstances out of their control they were no longer physically present in in our state so now you're dealing with trying to get a hold of the department of health in an entirely different state and you're saying no i swear this
041is who we are i promise you we're the department of health or where you know the school district can you release this information and they're not they're not inclined to do that very easily but that delays orange county in getting an actual confirmation which is what goes in the dashboard which is what would you know causes us to shut down and and i also want people to understand this is taking a lot of manpower like we have this covet 19 is taking a lot of manpower from the people who normally do something else kids get colds they get injured you know all the other things that is typical in a school they have to do that plus this other piece so so when i say that people are a little overwhelmed that's an understatement and
042i just want to make sure that people understand that we are 100 committing to bringing students in school um but that takes a lot of time and a lot of a lot of um making sure that kids are safe and so when we make a decision that decision must be discussed for four or five times okay what are we gonna do and and i just want people to be clear that it's not just me sitting in a room making that decision i don't make decisions arbitrarily i make them with the consent and information from orange county and so we have to go with what's in the best interest of all the students and i know that people were concerned yesterday that we shut down for the remainder of the week but when you have the
043number of covid you know the possibility when you're doing contact tracing we have got to do our due diligence and so when i talk about pivoting we're going to be doing this and and i just want families to understand i mean i received an email last night from a parent um who said look i'm really concerned i'm i'm dealing with my own medical issues we were able to at nine o'clock at night dr sassy was able to say to the parent you didn't receive a phone call we double checked your your son is not on that list so people are working till nine ten o'clock at night making sure the information to parents is accurate um we have got to make sure that our covet dashboard is in fact accurate and accurate means that it's
044been recognized and approved by orange county health department so i actually wanted to just say this sounds like a serious struggle for this this is a lot of work it is and what came to my mind was by the time a student or a person is already tested positive they are already infected right so they may have used the bathroom how are you actually answering who went into the bathroom we believe it or not there's a notebook in teachers classrooms i mean this is this is the depth of what we are doing that if you leave a classroom to go to the bathroom you need to sign in that you went to the bathroom at this time it is it is really mind-boggling what everybody is doing look i'm the superintendent i sit back here
045it's the people who are working in the buildings the nurses the teachers the everyone who is doing all the work the custodians people are really working hard to make sure that we keep kids safe the thinking you know um another example was my students who go to c-tech were denied going to seatec that's right because they weren't sure which is now shouldn't they have the dashboard too shouldn't they be linked to who what and where yes but here's here's the piece they are going back tomorrow my seek text my c-tech students are going to be going back to boces because none of them were part of the contact tracing but this is all new so boces doesn't know what they should do we we certainly had a very good conversation today and we were clear
046on how we're going to move forward but these are all the different things all the different things that we're navigating that we've never had to navigate before and so i know that you have to um respect the privacy of those 100 so those students i'm just going to give the example because you just said the students that are going to boces were not or ctec were not infected however students that know that students that are not in the classroom now know that those students may have been the ones that are infected so it just seems so strange and i can speak to that so you have every student who was in the classroom with with the covet positive um person they're all on quarantine so every kid also it's not you don't know oh it's
047the horse so everybody including teaching staff which is where i'm going to go in just a second so just really quickly i know that the last bullet talks about the teaching learning schedules for short-term versus long-term closings and so that is up there basically what you know now is that the high school even though that they're they're not open for the next few days or they're teaching remotely they're on a regular bell schedule for the next three days when we've had if we need to move to a longer closing or we would consider going back to the fully remote schedule that we had at the start of the year um for for all the same reasons that we had at the start of the year so the next before you before we go there i
048have a question about the boces piece um did boces notify our our district that they were not accepting our monroe woodbury students no they just didn't let them in well i mean i hope there's some accountability there because you know our district got a lot of you know feedback today that we did not and we didn't even know about it right no there was a lot of clarity in the conference there was there was clarity in that conversation today that i am really confident that moving forward that will not happen again because that's not how we should operate right we sh we should be clear that there's lots of ways of communicating with people that should have been communicated to us so did they have a knee jerk reaction and just say do not have
049no monroe woodbury students come off the bus and enter is that how it went down pretty much but they didn't tell the anybody i mean right i mean building principal didn't know i didn't know transportation transportation didn't know none of us knew i think that's one of the important factors that i know many of us have conversations throughout the day with each other as we have kids that sit in the school district i don't personally have a child that goes to see tech but i have friends that do and i think it goes to elsie's point that things are literally changing on the daily and while i can understand that it is very frustrating as a parent to not get that information instantaneously it's important to realize that there is a process to a lot
050of this and the knee-jerk reaction sometimes as a parent is to be angry with unfortunately mrs rodriguez or mr cassidy um in a situation such as this morning with c-tech when in fact given the opportunity to kind of navigate that situation and find out what exactly happened we were just as much in the dark as those parents were um and that goes to a lot of what's happening sometimes with the covid testing piece of it that it is very easy to have that knee-jerk reaction to be accusatory or think that either mrs rodriguez the building principles the board of education is not being transparent in what is happening but i can literally sit here and attest that that is the furthest thing from the truth and i think most of us would say that as
051well um to elsie's point that we've sat in a lot of these meetings and and seen some of the craziness that goes into it i personally spoke to her yesterday about six times to which i wanted to say if you can please clarify because one of the questions that we've gotten a lot from other parents in the district is why do these students in the class that were six feet apart perhaps by barriers with masks and not and socially distancing why is it that not mrs rodriguez but the orange county department of health is asking them to quarantine i think that the safeguard but but my point to that is that that the knee-jerk reaction is that we're we're bringing students in and yet we're going to continually close and the decisions are being made
052to do this and it's but it's not it's almost out of our hands that was my next level it is it it is out of our hands but i'm going to tell you we are powerless we we the amount of info remember we're in education i want to remind everybody that we're in the business of teaching and learning and we're now in the business of met you know making sure that we're we're keeping everybody safe and healthy so we are constantly getting updates you know mr kravitz is constantly having to attend this webinar the webinar that you he was on yesterday clearly says on the webinar that if a child is identified as coming into contact with a student who's covet positive that child has to has to quarantine for 14 days they can go
053and get a test but they still can't come to school and that's new york state department that's the new york state department of health that is their rules however if you look at this and if you are positive if you are covet positive the 14 days aren't necessarily what you have to mandate you you have to get a letter from your doctor saying that you've tested negative and you can come back to school so that is the information that we are getting from the doh from orange county health department they that is their guidelines and the governor himself today said that if we don't follow these guidelines they're going to take away some of our funding well that was my next question if the orange county department of health tells you something you can't override
054them absolutely not no i just want to just to clarify that people seem to think that you have the decision to say otherwise if they say you have to close but you do not i i don't i will tell you this as an educator one of the best parts of being an educator is that you can control a lot of things i will tell you that this past year has been we control very little all we can control is how do we get things done what do we do when we're asked to do something else planning as much as we can we have got to do what we are mandated to do we don't have any choice it doesn't matter if somebody else isn't doing it i still have to do it so these are
055all the things that i feel that the district and the community gets upset about but again we have got to do what we are required to do whether the rest of the country is not doing the right thing we still have to do it and about the country i think again our concern in our community which a lot of people have reached out about is as we sit here tonight there is evidence that a local community that is not supposed to be attending school when so the questions that we get are why are we monroe woodbury so inclined to follow every executive order and the answer is because that's what we do and i know that that's not the popular answer i know that it frustrates me as a parent that when i'm driving my
056daughter to school and i know that certain community members should not be in school and yet still are it frustrates me it angers me a lot of different things and unfortunately i understand where mrs rodriguez comes into it that we can't just throw caution to the wind and say we don't care we're going to incur the fines or we're just going to go against the governor's executive order and we're going to stay open like our neighbors are and unfortunately that's not how monroe woodbury operates so while it's frustrating that frustration needs to be taken to albany and not to monroe woodbury and i think i think what the community can really be confident about is that i will always advocate for our students with anyone that i come across whether it's the governor the governor's
057assistant orange county health department i will always advocate for our kids and for what is best for our students so decisions will be made and always and in their best interest i'm sorry and one last piece about the voices because there was a lot of discussion today will those students and their families will there be communication to them to say we're sorry this was not on this is due to boces miscommunication and you are scheduled for that went out today so after my conversation i sent out an email to mr cassidy who then forwarded to the students who attend this program to say you are going to be tomorrow you will have you know the ability to go to your program whatever day your schedule because it's a staggered schedule but yes they were informed
058today so so just going back to what happens on a typical day so i just want to use yesterday again as an example we had um we had nine teachers who were told that they have to go into quarantine for the full 14 days so it's a really easy thing for them to they you know they'll pivot to remote instruction and it's really easy for those particular classes that are also all quarantined however you now have four classes every day where they're not going to have a physical that their physical teacher in front of them those teachers will now have to remote in and now we have to get coverage for those classrooms and just a state of affairs as far as substitutes throughout the well throughout the state it is very hard to get
059substitute teachers um nowadays and it is every single school district in every single area of of the state typically our substitutes we have a lot of retired um folks who tend to be our substitutes we also have a lot of stay-at-home parents who tend to be our substitutes who can't do that now because they're at home with their own kids um we do have some college kids who said oh look i'll come and i'll substitute um but that that may not be the best thing you know depending on the particular position so every single teacher is struggling with that and just those nine teachers alone that's 36 classes that we have to to cover during the course of a day in addition to anybody else who is normally out or supposed to be in there
060what happens if you don't have a substitute so they we tr we internally cover it we try to as our best but typically we try to cover it with teachers who may be willing to give up their prep time we pay them to do that that's part of the contract but again that's another cost it costs more for us to have a teacher coverage than to have a full day substitution does that allow driver lc drives no does that allow for the students that are home to live stream into a substance too right and that's the point the students will be still able to live stream in they'll just be somebody who will be dealing with the management of the physical management of students within the confines of the classroom the substitute is going to
061set up a google meet for that classroom the substitute they'll they'll they'll be able to do all of that but the teacher actually teaches the teacher is doing the teachers actually teaching the kids will have their phone books there and they should be able to do everything as if they were were in class definitely obviously not the same but they'll be able to do that i think we have a question over here i think that it would be helpful when the communications go out if it's guidance from orange county health department that it it refers to that because i think part of the confusion with the notice yesterday was it looked like it was a district decision and not really guidance from the health department and i think that would quell a lot of questions
062because we're already putting out there we're going to follow the guidance and i think we should just state that that's the guidance that came out right it would help i think answer questions that people have so we could do that the only issue is guidance is part of the conversation so when we talk about guidance it's going through the particular case so what you're saying is point to the guidance that guidance isn't in there so there isn't a physical document that i can refer to so when we talk about guidance is sitting down it's it's having the conversation with them and then going through the process with us and saying yes this is what you should you you should do yes that's the united a conference as st our conversation okay that way it's clearer
063that it's not just the district making a decision you know and it's a case-by-case basis right so right um do you want to just to talk about that there here is some of the guidance can you skip matt to yeah that one go back to the other one oh okay there we go so here is some guidance it's a little crazy but you can see that when you have a covet positive student if you look at closing it'll tell you that you you probably can close anywhere between 24 and 72 hours this is something this is this is a document that we also use because there's so many different cases but maybe we can i don't know do we have this on on our website i don't think so we may we can so we
064can we can we can use that as well but we'll word it so that there isn't a confusion and people really have clarity and they'll say document to give to to parents i think is the link to the pre-k the grade 12 covet 19 toolkit that that came out recently and what that does is it breaks it down for for parents or staff members and it has leading questions such as can my child go to school today and then it's if if this happened then yes if this happened then no and it breaks it all down it's it's really clear um and we can get that to parents as well i think you were going to say something i have one more question yep um someone i know that was impacted by this has a
065sibling but the sibling's still allowed to go to school but they're the other part you know of the right is home and that's uh that's a challenge that's wow that is allowed so if if there's a sibling of the of a if say a student is positive the sibling of that student would have to quarantine not possible if there's somebody else who has to quarantine and now there's a sibling rulers for the other person has to quarantine it's directly still go to school they they talk about specifically direct contact so if mrs mccleary is positive and i sat next to her then i'm a direct contact but if i go home to my brothers and sisters they are not direct contact and and again we're going to give people the yeah i'm sorry is this
066up there yet no you're going to put this on no we'll put that we'll put that up there so that you can see weird um it's just a it's a little illogical but i i understand what you're saying because a sibling would likely have very directly we had a case in monroe where um two families they had a birthday party and they had contact with everybody else and every family member got sick to your point none of the ones they con had direct contact with did but everyone in the house got sick one of the one of their friends slept over he got sick and then that whole family got sick but it makes no sense but the so far the limited data shows that your family members are going to get sick yes it's
067uh yes some of this stuff is um hard to explain but it's in the it's in the toolkit i think i think referring to the toolkit and having on the website will be a great help i think the next page is something you should this show so i just wanted to because i think that sometimes people feel that we're not we're being disingenuous that's the last thing that we are we are we are very upfront about this so if you look at this form um i had us print one of them you can see this is just a mock-up but you can see i have a covered positive student and over here to the right i have to make sure that it comes from orange county i know that parents keep saying but if you
068know i cannot i can only report it when orange county tells me that it's okay so i just wanted to show this page so that people can see that and then the last page is the school district report card or covid report card if you take a look at that matt did you want to speak to that one uh sure so basically this is what anybody can see if you go to the website on the bottom um every single day after our dashboard is completed after the the orange county dashboard is completed this is what goes up there it it'll tell you the daily new positives on a specific day your seven day totally 14 day total and then your total from the start of the school year so it's just you know if people
069are looking for more information it's it's there one more thing i should say is that there is a hudson valley dashboard which i was contacted to say you have 19 cases i do not have 19 cases the problem with hudson valley dashboard is that it takes everybody in the community which means if you are a child that lives in this district and you are positive you come up in that hudson valley as monroe woodbury that does not mean that you attend our school so you could be a student who attends a private school or goes to school in new jersey that will come up under the hudson valley i i really want to encourage people to take a look at this dashboard this is the one that reflects us and the one that we report
070two more things i want to say is that um one more thing is that i am only allowed to report to families what i put in this covet dashboard so for example i can speak about that it's a student i can say the student was a hybrid student i can say the student is a remote student the only thing you should note is that a hybrid student doesn't necessarily mean the student was in school so i think that's the other piece people are saying wait a minute this is you reported a student who's hybrid but you're saying you don't need to do anything it could be that that hybrid student hasn't been in school for a week so i i do nothing you know there is nothing for us to do other than share with
071parents so again i think there's a lot of things that we need to share with people and information and we just felt that this would be a really good time for us to do that any other questions did you say this link is on our website it will be no no we'll put that up it was also included i think in some of the letters that were sent on yeah i'm sorry you're saying no you're saying yes we could see this i found the inspire page yeah i could see this so i'll see there's three dashboards hudson valley orange county and iris so hudson valley is reports everybody in the district not necessarily our students but orange county and our dashboard should always be the same because the information that we print is on ours
072right so those who should be the same hudson valley could have a lot more kids but they don't go to our schools for those that are looking though if you go to our inspire page for monroe-woodbury and you scroll all the way down to the bottom under where it says have questions contact there's a school covid 19 report card link for new york state department of health that is what takes you to this so that everybody see that correct so that's what's going on that part is already on our district webpage under the inspire section suzanne the other documents that were referred to tonight uh will have loaded up yeah we'll load them into into there and if you're curious about other schools you can go look at those too right i've got it there
073yes that one takes you to the new york state page not the one that uh elsie just referenced for hudson valley right the hudson valley was just something that was an article in the paper which i then got called on as well to say that why do they have so many students you're not reporting all the students that is not all of our students but i needed to say that because some of our staff and parents were very concerned that we were not reporting accurate numbers ah okay okay anything else okay thank you for the presentation moving on to our next presentation is going to be by dr hassler he's giving a presentation about um the culturally responsive education prince can you wash my eyes great so thank you once again to the board of
074ed for the opportunity to present this information to you um this this presentation came out of a number of different questions that we received regarding some initiatives that the the district has been focusing on recently and the board has asked for just an update on some additional detail behind some of those initiatives and the rationale behind some of those initiatives so just to give a little bit of background information in january 2018 the the new york state board of regents convened a commission to develop a framework for culturally responsive sustaining education they partnered with the new york university metropolitan center for research on equity and the transformation of schools they conducted a whole series of research initiatives and gathered information and as a result of that work they published a document in september of 2019
075last september called the culturally responsive sustaining education framework and the link to that on the stated website is is up there um the the document includes a number of different um uh critical pieces of information uh this this piece is an excerpt from the document and the reason why i pulled it is for the the very fine print in there is a statement that appears a number of different times in the document itself and i'll read it to the group it says the crs framework helps educators create student-centered learning environments that affirm racial linguistic and cultural identities prepare students for rigor and independent learning develop students abilities to connect across lines of differences elevate historically marginalized voices and empower students as agents of social change and in order to do that they they developed four
076overarching guiding principles which are for the environment to be welcoming and affirming that's both for families and students for high expectations and rigorous instruction for inclusive curriculum and assessment and ongoing professional learning and support so to illustrate that this is a another illustration that's in the document it comes from page 12 where it basically outlines the four different principles and identifies different elements that are are evident of work within each of these four different principles so the first one is welcoming and affirming an environment which would include a responsibility for the school district to the responsibility of the school district to learn about the cultures of their student body of all students for them to forge close relationships with their students as well as their families to weave in social emotional learning programs within the
077school district and to ensure that materials that are being used that represent and affirm student identities within inclusive curriculum and assessment we are to include current events within our curriculum to we are to involve students as co-designers of curriculum and we are to access a diverse array of different resources within the classroom underneath high expectations and rigorous instruction that includes giving civic engagement opportunities for our students it includes project-based learning activities on social justice and it includes leadership opportunities for our students and finally under ongoing professional learning the staff is to be trained in diversity equity and inclusion and we are to support curriculum for traditionally marginalized voices so the next thing that i did was to start to kind of compile some of the things that the school district is doing to support each
078of these four principles and and many of these things even though this document was published in september of 2019 many of these things involved initiatives that were ongoing even prior to the publication of this document so that the first principle that i share with you is to create a welcoming and affirming environment our stage our school district has had a strategic plan initiative over the the last five years or so in addition we've had a reopening task force the reason why i raised these two initiatives is because the social emotional learning component of these two initiatives of the school district have been very prevalent in many of the things that we've been doing as a school district the strategic plan committee has an emotional wellness task force and the reopening task force also had a
079social emotional learning task force to incorporate social emotional learning within our school community k-12 the school district has partnered with an organization called eye opening enterprises and that organization is working with us on a number of different initiatives one of them is professional development which i'll speak a little bit later on um they're also working with each of the schools on uh establishing equity implementation teams to evaluate some of the initiatives in the within their schools and to ensure that there's equitable access across our student bodies we've started uh i don't even want to say started we've we've had a number of different surveys that we've administered over the last six years within the school district in an effort to have all of our our stakeholders involved in decision making and to gather feedback and
080that ranges from a number of different areas most recently we've had surveys related to our reopening get gathering feedback from the community about their experiences on from the staff about their experiences from the students about their experiences related to our reopening our district leadership committee has established goals in recent years involving social emotional learning as well as wellness and community awareness student and family engagement has also been a major initiative for us where we've looked to have student family representation all of these district-wide task forces that i've mentioned have student representatives on them as well as community members that are on them in fact i participated in our high school pta meeting uh i think a week ago and our high school pta really now is emphasizing that they're a a ptsa which is a
081parent-teacher student association which is fantastic um we we've had the the mw pr the mw cares initiative which is well represented on our on our district website we're looking to uh increase our bilingual staff and and we've had um you know an examination and an emphasis on our hiring practices and and supporting you know staff staff and hiring staff who have the ability to communicate with um with a number of our bilingual students we have we've expanded our newcomer programs within the school district and our bilingual programs we've worked on extensively on our community outreach where we've had community liaisons within our schools and we've partnered with our local police departments for some community coalition activities we translate extensively our documents our emails that go out our website is accessible in 10 different languages for
082people to be able to to have access to information that's published on our district website the the next principle is inclusive curriculum and assessment so um th this is some work that we've started recently where we took a look this past year the 1920 school year on on some summer curriculum initiatives where in february of every school year the staff compiles summer curriculum requests to do over the summer this year we had three main themes or categories that summer curriculum work was approved the first category was if there was a new course that was being created where there might have needed to be some additional curriculum writing that took place with that we also did summer curriculum work with regard to the shift to remote learning obviously and finally we we had summer curriculum work
083that involved multicultural education diversified education and diversified curriculum and a number of different departments across the school district from the english language arts departments to the social studies departments to the library did work in in that particular area we also looked at ways that we continue to evaluate our curriculum and the programs that we're choosing two main areas in addition to a variety of others are are critical in how we evaluate new new programs that we may consider implementing within our school district one of them is student accessibility and and is the material that is included in that program something that is accessible to a wide range and a diverse range of our our students um as well as student connection where is the material that's included in in that program or that curriculum something
084that is engaging to a diverse population of our students we're also looking to increase student choice an example that that i've in some of the questions that i've been asked about this an example of that is the the sixth grade english language arts curriculum includes a portion of the new york state ela module module one which involves students to read the the lightning thief and the the the theme that that is that that book is intended to cover is a hero's journey and all students read the lightning thief and one of the things that we've talked about is how can we increase student choice so that way while here a hero's journey is the theme that is is taught by using the lightning thief can we give students choice where the the characters within a
085book may be more the students may be able to identify and connect more because that may they may have a similar identity or common characteristics so rather than having a one size fits all giving students the opportunity to be able to still work towards a a particular topic or theme but allowing them that the opportunity to be able to choose literature that might be a greater connection to them and also uh professional development which which is a later slide that i'll speak about the next principle is the high expectations and rigorous instruction so included in this uh are some of the things that i listed earlier with civic engagement for our students where our students have the ability to gather volunteer hours and community service for enhanced diploma opportunities to ensure that there's accessibility and
086equitable access for all of our students with regards to accelerated courses that's something very much that we are are looking to improve upon i know that that's one of the major focuses that the equity teams are going to be digging into at the at the building level the inclusivity of student voice this is one of the things that i mentioned earlier where we have many student representatives on on district committees that includes the strategic plan committee the reopening plan um the there's also we we have a student representative on the on the board of education emily is i believe our fifth student representative on the board of education which is something that the district is very proud of we're looking at different pathways towards education where rather than having a traditional pathway towards graduating you
087know we have an our pathway towards education students have the ability to be able to get new york state mastery in math or sciences we're looking at the possibility of creating a an education pathway towards towards graduation another major theme is quality versus quantity and this is one of the things i think that was a takeaway from from the the spring closure is that our our time with our kids is very precious and we need to make sure that the instruction that we're providing to them is quality meaningful instruction and it's not something that is just quantity quantity quantity and having high you know a rigorous rigorous instruction does not necessarily mean an over abundance of work it means providing quality instruction to our kids the the student engagement task force specifically where i was
088talking about the inclusivity of student voice this is this is something noteworthy because when when we were embarking on our our reopening plan and our reopening committee over the summer one of the groups that we met with was our student engagement task force from our strategic plan and we were talking about different models with regards to opening school and one of the major themes that the students shared was at all levels that they wanted to have the opportunity to be able to be in the building and different school districts looked at different models at the elementary level versus the middle level versus the high school level and that was something that was very critical for us was if if there was a model that we were going to roll out it really was going to
089be something that was going to be k12 and that that came directly from having students sitting at the table and working with us to be able to make some of those decisions the new york state seal of by literacy is another is another item that we have implemented this is our fourth year of offering the seal we've had dozens of kids who have completed the seal basically it recognizes high school graduates who have attained a high level of proficiency proficiency in listening speaking reading and writing in one or more languages in addition to english this past year despite the closure we were particularly proud because we had a number of students who got the sela by literacy in multiple languages up until then the previous three years we only had students who achieved the seal
090in one language but we had a number of students who were able to complete that with um in multiple languages and finally the the last category is professional development um as i said the eye opening enterprises we've partnered with them to do some of the equity work at the building level we've also partnered with them to conduct professional development for our staff they did two days of professional development prior to the opening of school for our superintendent conference days and the professional development was on trauma-informed education as well as culturally responsive connections in the classroom and this is work that's going to continue for the remainder of this year and into the 2122 school year we also partnered with the orange county department of human rights and they did some professional development during our administrative
091retreat over the summer our staff offer a number of different in-service courses to be able to support this work and we also have professional development opportunities that exist outside of the school district beyond our offerings where um orange ulster boces rock lombos is the rocklin teacher center different local organizations do different seminars and trainings over the course of the school year and we support our staff and registering for those trainings and it includes trainings in um uh bias awareness it includes trainings on um diversified uh curriculum diversified instruction and that's that's work that's ongoing and that's it questions thank you i i first want to say thank you to dr hassler because the end to the board because we've now sat through this presentation twice congratulations [Laughter] this was presented to us at our um
092workshop retreat that we had a couple weeks back but we felt the importance to bring it to the public forum since this has been something that came up on the forefront um and i just want to i just want to have you touch upon two things because again i think sometimes it's the perception of the timing of some of the material that has been presented to the students right so if you can just go back to um the fact that i get that we have rolled this out and released this as of this past september but this was something that technically came down from the state as a new curriculum especially the social um justice component of it sure this this document was published in september of 2019 so at the beginning of last year
093school year correct correct so this was work that was done you know throughout the big it started at the beginning of the school year remember summer curriculum requests are initially submitted by the staff in february so some of the curriculum that you're speaking about was the result of summer curriculum work that was written over the summer but this was work that was done beginning throughout the school year last year okay pre-pre-covered pre-closing basically instead of being reactive we've been proactive all along right and part of the reason why for me it was important when i was asked to do this presentation to sort of present a holistic perspective where many of these initiatives you know from the strategic plan and social emotional learning and all the things that i'm speaking about the equity work this
094was work even though the the um the the framework that came out in 2019 really kind of like gave the the initial nudge across the entire state for school districts to embark on this we had started this work even even before then um some of it is new i mean you know the the our our partnership with eye-opening enterprises is something very new where that came out of the scl task force that was part of the reopening plan so some of this is new and some of it's old and and it's very much ongoing so um you know i have a question on the monroe woodbury initiatives under surveys is the climate survey under that sure i mean i i know the reason why i put six years was because our survey started way back
095then with the climate surveys so when was the last climate survey that we had the well what's interesting is the climate service kind of went through an evolution where one of the things that we're now sort of conscientious because we've started this survey process is to not inundate people with surveys so we moved from two i think we did two years worth of climate surveys to have kind of like a benchmark and and some work around improving the climate and then following up on how we were doing and then that transitioned into the strategic plan surveys which the strategic plan surveys were much broader where the climate survey was focused specifically on basically life within the school district that was part of the strategic plan surveys but that included other things as well including curriculum
096and a number of other things so the the rationale was when we started doing the strategic plan surveys was that the the climate survey was essentially embedded in there even though it was two completely separate surveys the what we were looking to gather feedback on was still included within that that strategic plan survey if that makes any sense or whatever no it does so when would the next climate survey we just did it we just did it in february right before covid we did a survey we haven't discussed it because then school closed right but we did our survey in february the survey in february was the the follow-up version of the strategic survey that includes the right because i don't recall seeing it come in oh yeah i did it did you do yeah
097it did well then i didn't fill it out you have time really so it was the climate survey well no no we were very cognizant not to over survey people because after a while oh i got that so what was it called what was it actually the strategic plan surveyed okay some of the questions from climate survey were redundant on there and so instead of surveying our same stakeholders twice the decision was like to do as a part two of strategic plan that embedded the same questions of climate service okay but we specifically say it's a strategic plan survey not the climate and again the population that those surveys were administered was the same group of people so the initial climate surveys went to students and families and staff the same thing with the strategic
098plan survey so again rather than inundating people when we reviewed the strategic plan survey that that we administered a number of different times the the elements that were um included in the climate survey were also included the questions might not have been exactly the same as the surveys weren't the same company but but your results we will know what those results are because the one major issue was what i would i might take away was the high school social emotional right so here we are rolling out all these different initiatives we're doing things has that changed right i mean it's a different cohort of students clearly that took it then and took it now but did anything change did we move the needle a little bit right i think one of the things that was
099noted this year and i think emily you said it was that we began the first two the first two weeks of schools we really focused on the social emotional piece which we really have never done so and i know that you mentioned that the teachers were making connections with their students that was a big thing for us as far as what the survey said and one of the things the survey said was that students felt like they weren't making these connections so so okay yes yes yes i do remember gotcha and i think i'm sorry go ahead i think it's important to note the piece that we discussed with community outreach and the student and the family engagement um i do know and mrs rickers not here was part of the sel task force but
100um maybe dawn can speak to dr pickens and that we've already done one webinar that we had back and i think it was 80 or so parents that logged into that roughly right but i do think that there's a plan to do a future one that again you know one of the positive things that i guess that's come out of kovid is you really have no excuse not to attend to these things absolutely in your living room on your laptop instead of having to go to the high school and actually see the guest speaker in person you can do it from your living room so i do hope that more people will take advantage of the next webinar i'm sure it'll be well advertised we're working on some dates yeah probably the end of october
101beginning okay it's just another component that we have to kind of bring everybody on to the same page absolutely so i mean and i think you know to go back to a few board meetings where emily was speaking about some of the work that she's looking to do this year i mean listening to what she was presenting for me was sort of a an affirmation of the work that's happening because when you know you hear some of the themes and what i was presenting about equity and accessibility and things like that i think for one of our students to be able to come to a board of education meeting and speak about the work that she's looking to do which i think is very much tied into what i'm sharing i think is a great
102affirmation of the work that's happening within the school district i agree i think eric i know you didn't go into it too much but it's not really applicable to the curriculum pop but the equity task force that's going to come out of the implementation team in the district that's going to include parents and students and they'll be voices representative of the entire district so absolutely yeah and and just one reminder as well that when we were doing the reopening task force the commissioner the interim commissioner said you had to do a social emotional piece as well i wasn't going to get i wasn't going to give them credit i wanted i want to make it sound like that was our brilliant idea no but it's this is not and i'm not saying that we wouldn't
103want to do this but but i think that this is in in response to what we're required to do not not that we're not that we're doing it because we're required but i also want people to understand that like many things that come to us from scd we have a responsibility and we have to do what we are asked to do so it's it's really important for our community to understand that as well absolutely and and in reality what you're saying the the for example the reopening task force we followed their exact model i mean we were required to have that but basically we designed our model right after the model that the state was implementing themselves with regards to having community forums and gathering information from and feedback from all of the constituents so
104we followed their exactly right and there's been a lot of people in part part of that conversation so that hasn't been just again it's not cabinet who sits in a room and says this is what we're going to do we inc we are very inclusive and this summer was an example of that we had a lot of people who were part of these committees who shared and and and i what came out of that was really from the community and and the teachers and the staff and and and again i think part of the reason why i highlighted the input specifically of the the student engagement task force was you know sometimes people sit in these committees and they're like is this a colossal waste of my time is this really going to make a
105difference and i think that that was a great example of 100 we sat in a room with the kids it was the cabinet and the group of students and students at all age levels were like we think that it should be a k-12 reopening plan and after that it was a k-12 reel i think emily were you on that call yeah yeah yeah she was emily was on that call as well and it was a resounding i would say most of the kids said no if you're going to open you're going to open for all of us right that includes us and eric just to point out again i mean to what stacy said this guidance that came down with september 2019 correct a lot of the initiatives that we've been doing as a district
106including the mw cares or the professional development or choose love curriculum they have been in place before this absolutely correct and i think to that to the point of the fact that it is coming from scd you know they got the idea from not that i want them right but not that i want to pat us on the back but it does warrant your guys credit that you're not just checking a box and going through the motions of doing it it's kind of that in my opinion we are going above and beyond by including students including parents and to that effect offering up webinars and things to the community not just going through the motions of okay this is going to be the current curriculum that we are going to teach in the classroom absolutely
107i think that's an important part i mean the questions that i've received related to a lot of these different initiatives are very welcome because i also take that as feedback when people reach out to me and they're saying you know i got a question about x y and z that either something that my students my child is participating in or something that's going on in the classroom or whatever just like with all of these other forums and surveys and everything else that's a form of feedback so you know and the sc sed guidance is pretty specific as to what they want taught right as far as the social justice and the cultural responsiveness so if they look at that guidance parents and community they're curious they'll see the specific language absolutely that says you are
108required to take talk about this this this it doesn't dictate when you have to do it right it doesn't have to say in the first quarter but at some point during that school year correct yep okay any other questions okay thank you so much moving on authorization of attendance to the 2020 nisba annual convention um can i have a motion to approve state emotionally we will attend um which i believe is the third week of october i forget i think somewhere around there um we can publish that i think it's like the 22nd or the 23rd i think i start attending it virtually that'll be a virtual convention uh motion second second all those in favor all right okay um another motion please for the appointment of a voting delegate at the 2020 nisba annual
109convention motion to appoint stacy mccleary as the voting delegate at the 2020 nisba convention motion second all those in favor all right um next is we want to discuss the vacant board trustee position due to the resignation of mr dilorenzo so basically what's been happening is we have um consulted our attorneys to see what our official steps are so basically we have three potential options as to how we can fill the seat so ed law confers the power and the duty to fill any board vacancy on the board of ed so the choices that we have are the board may hold a special election to fill the vacancy within 90 days of its occurrence i will say that with with that election that is at the expense of the taxpayers so that is one option
110that we do have second option is that the board may decide to appoint someone to the vacancy the board may appoint an eligible citizen to serve until the next annual meeting and vote which would be this coming may 2021. after the board member had resigned back in november of 2020. the appointee following a presumed board solicitation and interview process would serve a short period of time before having to face an election in the may 2020 excuse me may 2021 election so basically that particular uh piece would be that if we filled the seat the person that would be in that seat would then have to if they chose to run for re-election this may of 2021. the third option that we have is that the board can choose to leave it vacant and then it
111would finish out the term as a vacant seat which is what we currently have right now and that spot would be up for election in the may 2021 um budget vote and board hearing so those are the three options we just wanted to kind of present that out there that that's something that we'll kind of be discussing to figure out exactly how we are going to fill that seat i will mention that mr d lorenzo's seat was up for re-election this coming may 2021 there's three spots every year and his would have been one of them so just wanted to put that out there so that everybody's aware of what the options are any discussion about that i would go for three option three option three okay so definitely not option one yeah right i
112think at this point the discussion that you know that should be is how fiscally responsible it would be to hold a donna roughly ten thousand dollar election and in the middle east in the middle of a pandemic and when truth be told it's only a couple of months before that seat will hopefully potentially be filled anyway come the may election okay since we are discussing this it's probably a segue for me to make an announcement that my last meeting will be november 18th correct so i will be resigning from this position as well so yes so we will have so the same scenario will apply so we will have um unfortunately another vacancy and unfortunately what happens in situations like this which is important for the community to note is that unfortunately as lovely as
113it is to have lorraine here she has no longer living in the district um i will have a residence in the district but in my good conscience i could not walk around here pretending that i live here even though i do have a residence here so i cannot outright feel that comfortable with that scenario so i have for the benefit of the taxpayers the benefit of the community and the benefit of this board i have to be upfront and honest okay so lorraine's position is up for so lorraine's position is technically not vacant until next year which is may of 2022 however we have consulted with the attorneys again to see how that may impact anything and it it does still read exactly as this so those three options are the same correct the three
114options are the same so we would then have the potential to fill that seat however the initial understanding was that if it was filled that individual would remain in the position until next year which was when lorraine's seat technically would have been up which would have been and that is not the case no that's not the case it is not so that person would still remain until this may of 2021 and that person would then have to rerun should they choose just like mr dealer and it would be four seats though as opposed to the three that's the usual correct there'll be four seats would that person be running for a term of two years or three years three years no right it was it's for the remainder of her term and then they would
115run on their own correctly afterwards so they would one year and then so who they would run against would determine who got that seed the lowest count how do you figure that out it's the lowest really second lowest the second lowest yeah okay so we could have two different options for each seat we choose option one for one and option three for the other so we could build one and not fill the other correct until maybe yes and it may yes exactly so it's treated as two separate individual um situations um and like i said the only clarification that we had just received is that even though her term is technically not ending until next year whatever we did with that seat would have to rerun this 2021 and then if they chose to they
116would re-run again as mr tucci just said for next year which was when lorraine's seat was about to begin so they'd be running to fill her her vacant seat and then running again for the seat on their own correct and is there an option to appoint yes there is a spotlight but only to me yes that you can appoint someone to people yeah so okay so we wanted to make sure that we got that out there to the public so that we could further kind of discuss it moving on annual professional review appr hardship waiver can i have a motion to approve the annual appr hardship waiver motion good all those in favor um approval of the revised board committees i do apologize as this was my error the last time it was on the
117agenda but i did not take an official motion so please note that we've altered the committees this is on our agenda so motions on second all those in favor um sec next is 14.1 resolution for stipulation of a settlement may i have a motion to approve the resolution second second may i get a motion to approve the minutes motion a second i second all those in favor aye um committee reports um don do you want to say anything about audit i know we just had our presentation but anything else no i think i think we've covered it for audit i think facilities we've made real progress i'll let patrick fill in the details but i think we're coming to an end of the punch list or and there's working on a new a new oh
118patrick phil what it can do here's all the dj do you want to say something to him no no you're good no no i'll let you fill in the details of the visitation as well then so um yeah so we had a facilities meeting uh last week i think it was and uh we went through where we are in the open capital projects and like don said we're almost 100 done with smart schools bond act which was cabling there's a couple little items with the turf and hvac project at the high school we talked about visitation we talked about you know we hit every building last year was a very active uh committee i think you did a lot of good work and from that there were a lot of not a lot but there
119were some things that that we did for instance at the high school creating a security vestibule and other things which we sort of made a determination are really more like capital project items and then we discuss capital project items at the at the meeting and we actually determined that we're going to have to have more discussion about that but but the bottom line was we've deferred a lot of maintenance i've talked about this many times we need very basic things in every single building you know boilers roof replacements that kind of stuff um you know there's there's uh probably tens of millions of dollars in that very mundane boring uh facility investment stuff that we're gonna have to do so it's a matter now about prioritizing what we want to do planning financially the financial
120plan is almost as important as the capital project plan and the idea would be and i've talked about this before setting up a timeline so that we go out to the public we get authorization to do some work and ultimately when we start doing the work involves you know the architects putting together plans and specs we have to go to sed and have that approved i mean there's a multi-year process but but when we actually go out and issue bonds that is borrow money and start to repay that we time that so we're repaying and retiring existing bonds at about the same time so we we can do potentially tens of millions of dollars of work with a capital reserve contribution retiring the debt and building aid with little or no impact on the tax
121levy so so that's the financial component that we're working on as well so i think we're going to have another meeting next week actually where we're going to kind of finish out that and um i've talked to matt milnamow of land so they're going to get involved and so we'll we'll uh you know we'll keep that ball rolling okay one of the big initiatives is not to increase the the tax cap correct of what we are now right stacy i just want to speak a minute about visitation uh as far as last week when we were at the middle school in the high school as part of the reopening you know just to kind of see everything that was going on and um it was a very positive experience everything the children were happy to
122be there and everybody seemed you know stiff and teachers were going above and beyond to welcome our students back the traffic patterns looked good um we peeked into some classrooms and some offices so everything was good at 25 and uh i'm sure equally as good at the 50 we haven't had a chance to do that yet and did you want me to speak about the orange county school board meeting just very briefly i attended the virtual meeting last week and it was a presentation by adac and they talked about some of the services that they offer to the school districts and i think that they used us as a reference a lot because we did pretty much pilot the teen intervene for orange county there was not a lot of awareness as to what they
123can offer school district as far as presentations on vaping and youth bureau opportunities so that was uh nice to hear that we had some positive feedback with the teen intervene program and then the school districts talked about their experiences with reopening and and what's been happening for them and i shared a little bit what's happening with us whereas we're one of well we are the only school district in orange county that is part of a yellow zone and what that represents for us and know are you going to talk about that at all now i am um sure do you want to wait till we go around the algorithm i just that was a big part of the conversation that took place between us that on that call that night it took up you know
124the majority of the meeting just them hearing for the first time what it actually means for a school district to feel what that is um to be part of the yellow zone and what we the expectations that are on us as a school district um so yeah okay thank you and i'll speak to policy that um unfortunately we did delay our meeting that we had planned last week um i'm going to blame it on kovid because as we have literally daily changes it was unfortunately one of the things that because we had no pressing policies that had to be put on the agenda for this week we did opt to postpone that meeting so we will look to reschedule that meeting and get it back on the calendar um but unfortunately we had some other
125stuff that was more pressing issues that came out of the governor's office so we decided to postpone that meeting but we will get it back on and publicly post it i believe we had two or three policies that we were going to work on for that we have three yeah so three policies so we'll make sure that we get that back on the calendar um and a report by emily board representative so before i give updates regarding the launch of my new sat program i just wanted to share some perspectives of online and in-person school for my fellow students regarding the closing of in-person school for the rest of the week at the high school i can't say that students aren't highly disappointed and frustrated however for the time students and i'm sure teachers were
126able to be physically present in the building it was a really nice reminder of normalcy for us and we all enjoyed it a lot whether it continues in the future or whether virtual will be the new normal i just want to say thank you on behalf of all the students for at least trying to get us back in school i was truly lucky to be in the a group that went in yesterday at 50 i hope that others will eventually get to do the same um the only complaint of students during virtual schools that i've heard from multiple students was the issue regarding the status of cameras being on during google meets the opinion that cameras should not ever be mandated or forced was strongly stated to me directly from some people the issue for
127this lies in the fact that students live in different socioeconomic classes and some may also have very chaotic households and this is totally understandable however i feel like when there is um some like discrepancy and um misunderstanding on the side of a student situation um students should also try to understand that it's very stressful for teachers to try to teach online and just see a bunch of closed cameras and i think students need to realize that for classes that are like performing arts band orchestra cameras it's really crucial for the class to just runs smoothly so but for the meantime i've noticed that there's no official rules dating cameras have to be on but it's highly suggested i hope that we can keep it this way to respect those who truly don't feel comfortable with
128their cameras on so and to end my student report i wanted to announce that my student led sat program essential prep has officially launched our website is currently active and we just started virtual classes yesterday on the initial launch day we actually got so many students that i decided to enlist the help of two more seniors brian whitfield and olivia mcquade to help run and teach the program we currently have over 60 students taking our class and we are helping additional late students join we have two beginner classes and one advanced class each of these classes will be run two times a week for an hour to an hour and a half we are soon going to be putting up extra help links on our website on the weekends for those students who need additional
129support again i'm really trying to push a lot of resources to those who really don't have access or knowledge about them i'd like to thank mrs rodriguez mr williams and mr cassie for helping me get all the information put out there to all the students um that was a really crucial part of it i'm very excited to keep going with the program all the students so far i've been very engaging and excited about learning which is nice to see um one student actually told me that this was exactly what she wanted at monroe woodbury and that was really heartwarming to hear so thank you guys that's great emily can i have two questions one's for bargoff but one is for you how are you advertising to the students and or the parents about the class
130so i think there was a flash email sent out to all the parents of junior and seniors because i'm prepping for the december sats which some seniors might be taking additionally i requested that a link on the website be posted directing them to our website okay good and there's also been a lot of like passing on um communication from like you know students to other students and so like i've gotten we have an open email that we are addressing all of these we got we get like tons of messages daily so okay great all right thank you so much and my second question isn't to something that you said but i know um i believe it was back in one of our early september meetings that bargov had mentioned addressing the um the google backgrounds
131has that come out yet because i do know that that would definitely go to what emily is referring to for some of our students being able to have a forgive me because i'm not tech savvy like a like a backdrop behind them when i thought we had already so we decision that we weren't going if they wanted to shut the camera off that it was okay did i understand you to say that no we encourage them to to have the camera on remember we talked about what their environment was going to be like right but i think that barcodes so the google google released couple of weeks before a feature inside the google me it's called google background blur okay so when you use that background blur feature and and we actually have a video
132we'll make sure that we send it out to the students we have a video on our youtube channel so when you turn that on you can just see the face and and a person you cannot see the what's inside the back behind the background and that feature will help a lot we we in the beginning we heard we heard a lot of from the students that not many students will be comfortable but use by using this feature it should actually lessen their worries so again is that being somehow advertised to parents and students that that's available we will make sure that we okay i thought it was automatically going to be on there so that everyone is on the same and if they chose to have it you know that's one thing but you know
133they have a choice of turning on and off some people may live in certain areas where they just it's none of anybody's business what is going on in their home or what is on the walls in their home or anything just completely with this feature you would not see what's behind me so there you will just see my face why i thought it was going to be on no it's not it's it's it's per user not us the user right it has to be enabled by the right enabled by the student so we should we we will make sure we advertise to the parents and students yes yes okay they might not have been aware of this feature yeah so that that gets known and then hopefully emily can report back to your students that
134might have been saying that that mr vias will hopefully get something out to them that will give them a tutorial of how to do that yep okay and if you haven't checked out the essential prep website you should because it's impressive yeah okay that's cool emily it sounds amazing thank you for for doing this initiative um i'm just wondering i'm sure it's going to be very successful would you consider doing an act yeah definitely um sat it's been known to be more of the widespread method of test taking so and that's personally what i took so it was easy for me to kind of get all the materials out together but i'm considering doing it past the december date for the sat when i'm prepping for like spring dates then i'll start considering even like
135ap like tutoring and stuff like that and the ac in addition to that because emily is the founder the executive director and a tutor awesome thank you so much emily uh moving on to personnel for matt um thank you very much before i ask for um approval of the items listed under personnel i just want to point out one person who's going to be appointed tonight and that's under our certified appointments and that's miss teresa padilla who is going to be our new secretary in the curriculum and instruction office working directly with dr hassler god bless her i do just the patience of her sitting here i think we all feel the same but she's still she is still here she's still smiling congratulations as long as you approve the items listed under personnel you
136wouldn't mind doing it but theresa he's even louder in his office i can hear him in my office all those in favor okay thank you um good luck too not that you'll need it really um business and financial patrick so stacy i would also um respectfully request the approval the items on the business financial section agenda which include our standard monthly financial reports for july and august acceptance of seven donations two donations from orange and rocklin to central valley for stem classroom grant and also a stem classroom grant for i think the other school was forgive me smith clove thank you uh we have two contracts for um related services and transportation through orange ulster boces declaration of obsolete items wrestling mats and a scorers table we have a capital project change order approval of
137that it's actually a credit for 1418 and a resolution to accept the external audit report that was presented by gary theodore and our internal audit reports also which were viewed by the audit committee and and if forgive me i'm going to go back to the donations i like to read the donations and i skipped over that so it was orange and rocklin two donations uh a donation instrument donation full-size stradivarius violin from adam nussbaum a another donation of an instrument a percussion pearl percussion kit from kimberly hashem a similar saxophone from cindy catherwood and unused fabric for the middle school high school facts program from amanda yankulis forgive me if i mispronounce your name uh 14.57 donation to pinetree from global impact so seven donations i want to thank everyone for the for their generosity
138there that's it that's everything okay thank you patrick motion second second good all those in favor aye aye and i'm sorry before i forget and move on i just had a question from um about regarding the sats are we still on schedule to host the next upcoming sats and acts because now that emily just brought that up i know that was a question in the community also well stacey that's actually and psat yes it is this ct is this saturday um at the high school and we have like 500 students correct and i know i have a child in that so i got a reminder that it was still ongoing and the classroom assignment as well yeah the psat is on okay and i think we're going to evaluate future use as it comes up
139on a case-by-case basis is that no that doesn't answer the question though yeah because i think it's already been somebody publicized that college board canceled our november 3rd so did we cancel in november 7th s.a.t excuse me november 7. so let's go back to the original question this saturday is the psat s-h i i think we're going with that okay that's on yes that's on the other ones i'm not sure we'll have to go get back to that how many students will be in the room for the psats do you have any idea a couple of hundred hundreds you know i i don't know not in the same room i don't know i believe that i want to know being socially distant yeah they're gonna have my concerns i think they capped it at a
140certain amount they did they'd be able to socially distance right right they did smaller than usual i just wanted to clarify that for anyone listening that the kids will be taking the exam but they will be distant appropriate precautions will be right yeah for sure but i think that's the concern too for the november seventh one because i think if it's cancelled then that's something that i think parents are looking to find out from because because then they haven't really can attest to this they have to have an opportunity to try to go someplace else is i believe the concern okay um so yeah so hopefully we can try to get a decision on that yep asap we can follow up on that okay you didn't ask about questions on financial i'm sorry questions on
141financial lorraine all right so under the um contract um agreement with lori for feeding evaluation services is that a speech pathologist specializing in feeding i believe that is what it is that is okay yeah well i have to say this is very good that you're doing something like this this is a long time coming thank you you're welcome okay thank you um committees on specialists i'm sorry just in time for you to leave too i know i know that's okay it's all good okay it's that behind the scenes stuff that happens um committees on special education and preschool special education may have a motion second all those in favor aye reports by board and central office um dawn um just thank you to elsie for the reopening uh conversation and obviously all the work that's
142gone into every decision that's been made with you and the cabinet and all the administrators and teachers and staff and thank you for truly always having our students and our family's best interests at the you know heart of every decision that's made thank you to dr hassan for your presentation i'm happy to have heard it twice congratulations to teresa and thank you for your patience and it was a very long meeting for you to sit here but we appreciate your commitment and good luck and that's all i have thanks thank you don same that was easy nice and simple suzanne yeah i'd like to thank everyone who presented tonight and good night everybody stay safe and stay healthy thank you emily anything else i just want to say that i know you guys are like
143it's really stressful like me being here and hearing all this like it's just like wow i didn't realize so many things were going on so i just want to say thank you so much for trying to make it work thank you donna um i just wanted to say that thank you to elfie for your unwavering strength leadership advocacy and dedication to all the students and staff and this entire community because it is i see it on a daily basis and it is unwavering and just all done with love so thank you and it shows yes thank you and also happy birthday to anthony on november 7th he's like wait happy early birthday thank you um um so yesterday was the first day for a 50 of our students come back um unfortunately it was just
144a one day but that that's fine our infrastructure stayed very very strong we are still at the one-third of capacity of what we plan so we are very excited and whenever we are ready to bring the students we should be fine from the infrastructure side we also work during the summer one of the things that we were looking at is how do we bring the instruction outside the building and and as of earlier this morning we have at least one parking lot equipped with the external what we call outdoor wireless access points that allows the connectivity outside the building so when the weather is good teacher can take the classroom outside including their chromebooks so we are piloting this with one parking lot in every building and the goal is to get the feedback and
145expand it to the more parking lots for all the buildings thank you great thank you eric so congratulations once again and and welcome theresa to the the curriculum instruction office when uh when i made the move to the curriculum instruction office my kids asked me you know what what do you do there and i said well you know the cni office is in charge of all the things that kids learn and that was very disappointing to them like they thought it was very boring so i hope it's it's you know i'm going to try to make it as glamorous as i possibly can because in my kids eyes it's not as exciting as they think so i'm going to try real hard congratulations and welcome patrick yeah i just wanted to thank and acknowledge the
146business office staff and the treasurer tanya molrad for the work they did with the audit committee they everybody kind of took off here but uh obviously we know it's a lot of work it's a very important thing um we're audited by the external auditor the internal auditor occasionally by the state controller so those are all internal controls those are all outside folks and entities observing and monitoring what we're doing and you know we use that information we submit that to both the state education department the office of state controller we submit data that's used for our state aid for this year so all the information that we were audited in 1920 uh and we went through that process we're submitting that through the state management system that's you know how we get our state aid
147for the current year and we're using that data to make projections for next year's state aid the state aid runs we get so it's super important and everybody did a great job like they always do so just thank you and acknowledgement to to everyone that's a part of that yes thank you thank you um i don't really have much i can go over the covet presentation again if you want if not have a wonderful night uh thank you to the presenters um congratulations and this wasn't a bad meeting it was not even two hours well almost two hours um i just want to say that you know uh it was it felt very strange to make an announcement that i'm resigning so i'm trying to really process that so until next meeting stay safe and
148healthy and i'll see you then thank you michael thank you to admin and faculty for continuing to be flexible for all of your efforts as we move through the current environment and good luck and godspeed theresa [Laughter] wow you must know eric well she mean matt it's official right she's appointed now they voted on it right back oh out god anthony i echo everybody's comments and congratulations uh to everyone here and uh thanks to everybody's hard work during these historically uh difficult times have a good evening sounds good yeah have a good night thank you um okay so i'm going to take a couple of moments i just want to say um the same as uh donna because i'm sorry i always do that i always think she goes last no you're the president all
149right you're the president you go last i don't like going so very very quickly i you mentioned the yellow zone that's like a bad word in my house um but we were designated by the governor uh on thursday or wednesday i had been repeatedly told that we would not have to test but of course that changed when the governor said that we are part of the yellow zone and so the last information i received today would was that we would have to test 20 of our students and staff that we would be using the rapid test i will say that the rapid test has about a 60 accuracy and uh so there will be a letter that goes out tomorrow deciding what we're going to do as a district but i just want the community
150to know that the decisions we make are always going to be in the best interest of the students we will not get involved in any of the other parts that go on but we will make the best decisions for our students and you will get a letter tomorrow i didn't officially send it out because the letter that i had written this morning changed after i spoke to someone so things are constantly fluid but yes they were designated as a being part of the yellow zone and as a result they'll have to take they'll have to be tested if i want to continue to have the students in the building there's a couple of more things i want to thank eric for his presentation this friday is think pink i just want to remind people that
151one in eight women are diagnosed with breast cancer i'm a breast cancer survivor so early detection is really important so i just want to remind people of that if you haven't had i know this is kind of weird but if you haven't had your mammography go get one um the other thing is that the following week on october 23rd from october 30th is red ribbon week and we are hosting it so there there's going to be uh many activities virtual activities spirit week is going to begin on october 23rd to the 30th there'll be events look on our website there's all these there's a lot going on again i will tell you that we are all trying really hard to keep things as normal as possible so these events are important you'll hear more about
152it we were acknowledged by nisfa as a school uh has we've been placed on the academic honor roll for earning the school of distinction award in the scholar athlete team award program in 2019-2020 next board meeting i will talk about the students that lorraine mentioned i have to get that information and congratulations to teresa you're a great addition and i know that you will handle him [Laughter] oh and here's the award sorry thank you here is the award that we got so we got this and we got this other this this other piece as well this this um certificate thank you thank you okay sorry now my turn remember you're the president yeah i got last i'm used to you i'll follow you um and with that i just want to reiterate also what donna
153said that while i don't sit in the office and see it every single day i think many of us board members and especially myself can attest to not only what mrs rodriguez has done but every single one of the members of the cabinet when i tell you that we are pushing and asking questions and they are 100 always answering our emails answering our phone calls several times a day weekends nights that is what's happening so as a parent with three students who sit in the district i appreciate that and i just want the community to know that behind the scenes when things are literally changing every day um and we could leave this room and and find out that there's new guidance i just want to say that i appreciate all of the hard work
154that's going into it and on emily's behalf i think that the students appreciate it as well so i want to thank you for that i want to thank lorraine for getting up and speaking about her concern and i think it is something that i'm hoping that as a district we can make a more concerted effort for it i don't know if maybe that's something that even emily can kind of help out with since she has her ear to the um you know to the students and seeing what's being presented academically i know i did just hear of something over the weekend that i'm going to bring to we're very fortunate because we have uh prudence thurston and we have carol spendley who are our communication liaisons along with our i.t department that we have great
155resources to get this information out so i know i recently heard of something that i'm hoping to be able to share that is not an athletic component but something i think is you know great and should be recognized i think it's one of the components that it's nice to recognize some of the great things that our students are doing so i appreciate that comment i want to thank our audit and all of patrick and his financial team because i know that that is a lot of work that goes in behind the scenes and we only get a brief snippet of it but i want to thank them for everything that they're doing behind the scenes i also want to thank dr hassler for giving his presentation not once but twice upon request so i appreciate
156that i think it's important um and i also wanted to acknowledge that i believe we also posted on our facebook page for the school districts and i'm hoping that it'll go on the district homepage about an award that mw cares is receiving that we just got acknowledged by the state so hopefully that's something that can get up there as well so hopefully we can share that and i think it speaks to the sel initiatives that the district and one of them being mw cares but yes the choose love curriculum and a lot of the choose love i i dug up the information okay yes please share because i don't have the details so in in the spring we were nominated by the orange county youth bureau to the new york state office of mental health
157for an annual event that they that they host called what's great in our state a celebration of children's mental health awareness and mona woodbury is being recognized as an organization that does outstanding work to bring positive mental health and outcomes for children and you children youth young adults communities and families um and so i'll have more information because the the ceremony is later in the week so uh once we participate you know we'll be happy to share it with the board and be recognized at the next so we were nominated okay if you're an actual winner i i believe so yeah yes are we the winner i i i i believe that we are oh we are the winner i i i think that it's just they i don't know that it's necessarily an award
158it's more of like recognition oh yeah that's what i mean i recognize yes okay so i'll have additional information this was the the the snippet that i'm reading right now was what was communicated to me in the spring when they originally made the nomination and i believe that there was notification so i'll more information will be forthcoming on that okay great okay thank you and aside from anthony's birthday which happy birthday early we also have three cabinet members mr villas mr cahill and mr kravitz wishing them a wonderful birthday and previous birthday two days ago wow they're all october birthday yeah all october they're three october birthdays yeah eric's november so i think it's close october november is that old libra you could play right on the cusp depends on depends on what the heart
159it says good team okay thank you and welcome to teresa and uh good luck i'm sure i'm sure it'll go smoothly everybody's wishing her luck can i please get a motion to adjourn into executive session to discuss a second discipline a particular employee all those in favor