001okay anytime we're ready okay could we please have everyone rise for the pledge and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all do we have any changes to the agenda no we as a note uh sue freeze is absent tonight [Music] so we need a motion to approve the agenda motion second motion by barb second by brad all in favor aye aye i saw justin i didn't see care did character here's a thumbs up okay i don't have them on my screen to change it so all in favor motion carried next we need to go into our retreat correct so our first item on the retreat is right here to the right to approve the agenda so uh karen mcgarrett is up for our retreat
002so i'm going to turn over control of the screen and the audio to karen all right so you can see my screen can everybody hear me head shake yes all right beautiful sorry may i interrupt do you want me to stay or do you want me to leave at this point jan i don't think you need to stay we'll be here for a while and i'll just do the exit information okay thank you everyone have a good night all right so um tonight we're going to talk about a couple different things district reserves and fund balance and future plans and all that good stuff so anybody that's um was on the board in 2019 that the slides will look familiar but some of the numbers have changed to protect the innocent um but um our
003reserves our funds provide basically it's a it's a savings account when you have a reserve you set aside money for a specific purpose um some of them have to be approved by the voters some of them can just be approved by the board so in re reviewing everything this is what we have as far as restricted reserve funds workers comp unemployment ers trs eblar capital reserve repair reserve and then we have four commitment funds of opab tech capital outlay and equipment replacement we have assigned fund balance and unrestricted fund balance so in going through each one of those workers comp preserved is is reserved for that specifically to pay um or to assist in payment of our workers comp uh costs so the amount in the reserve as of six thirty twenty one is two
004hundred and eighty three thousand five eighty one our current actuarial balance of workers comp um claims is two hundred and thirteen thousand dollars so we are uh adequately funded for workers comp each year we add one percent of the change in fund balance to it and each year we use 25 percent of the aqua actual workers compensation billing to uh use the reserve fund so every year we use money and we put money back in depending on what our reserve fund uh policy indicates so the second one is unemployment and uh maximum balance permitted is a 000 and if you look you see our 2021 balance was 661 000. this was extremely over funded and the last time the state came in to um audit we kind of got our hand slapped for being completely
005over funded in this so we haven't added any money to it in a while and actually i didn't use any money last year because with covid there was all kinds of state and federal reimbursement for unemployment and we are awaiting a 56 000 credit uh from the state so i did not put any money in there and i did not take any out so um that is unemployment next up is employees retirement reserve this is for a non-certified staff again our current balance is 1.2 million dollars and funding to cover three years of expenses is approximately 1.2 million so again as with workers comp this reserve fund is adequately funded this one gets increased by two percent of the change in fund balance and each year we use 50 of the annual ers costs for
006uh this reserve the next one is a pretty new one it's only a couple years old um is teachers retirement and this is for all of the certified staff so instructional administrative staff so each year we are funding it and the maximum that we can fund it with is two percent of the annual total salaries of certified employees so right now the maximum balance that we can carry on it is 10 of the actual certified employees salaries so currently we would be able to have a maximum balance in this of 1.4 million dollars and our current balance is 1 million one 32 four so next year we'll be able to fund it with the two percent but then we'll also be able to utilize part of it uh when we originally set this up we
007held it to um we would not use it until it was fully funded uh for a couple reasons one is in the primary reason is because we needed to get rid of some of our unassigned fund balance so this was a good place for it since they finally allowed us to have this reserve so this will help in paying teachers retirement costs going forward next up is employee benefit accrued liability or more popularly known as eblar and uh what this one is is for um anybody who retires and has unused second vacation that can be paid out according to their contract or the union contract this um covers that funding or covers that cost so we use one percent of the annual change in fund balance each year and um each year we pull the
008amount of the actual costs out of it all of the contracts currently that have payments out are on a three-year basis so if somebody has say for example a teacher has a maximum of 200 days that they can have in their contract it's lower 21 000 if i remember correctly that they can get in a year um and that is split over three years so we pay it over three years so every year we have you know different individuals that are being paid for that we um pay to a 403 b for them based on their union contract so right now the current liability is 2.1 million dollars and our current balance is 1.1 million so this one will continue to get funded until we reach that total liability and then we won't be able
009to fund it anymore next one up is capital reserve which really we don't have right now because it was uh approved to be utilized in 2018 for the vote so um and you can see at the bottom i'm recommending um that we go forward with with creating another one on here it says 10 million i was speaking with mark and bob and kristen earlier and i said 20 million so you know it's really up to you guys um how much you want to put away for future projects and it needs voter approval to create the fund to fund the fund and then to use the funds and the use of it would be to transfer it to the capital uh to the capital fund from the capital reserve fund in order to actually expend it
010on a project aaron can i jump in here for a second no sure just declare thank you um see perseverance i'm not going to give up uh just to clarify that just like what karen said with the other reserves we're not going to take or we don't anticipate taking 20 million dollars in the next six months or nine months and plunking it all down into this reserve account this is something that will grow over time as our finances dictate and i just don't want anybody thinking that we're going to put 20 million away in one single year if we do get to that point that'll be a separate conversation um based on the the finances as we move forward uh into the school year uh and with capital reserve accounts like this it is often
011a point of confusion for the community that they think it's fully funded it whatever the allocation is when we did it in 2012 uh that uh reserve account was only two million dollars so as we're getting into bigger projects it does make sense for that reserve account to be a little bit more robust and it will take some time probably not as long as other districts to get to that point but i just wanted to clarify that thanks karen back to you yep thank you uh next one up is the repair reserve and this was funded at the same time the the former capital one was um it's it's funded with 1.5 million and has been earning interest since then uh we can as a board we can have a public hearing to say that
012we want to utilize funding from this to do x um and once we do that that we pull it out and it can't be replenished um if it were a an emergency um we would go ahead and utilize the funding based on a board motion and then we would have to repay it within two years of using it so basically we have one point almost 1.6 million dollars available to utilize for repairs to our buildings and facilities equipment so next up we have commitment funds now as a new york state school district technically these are not considered real reserve funds they uh the dollar figures that are in these funds are still considered part of our unrestricted fund balance but what this does for us by establishing commitment funds is show that we have a
013plan in place for these different items and um as we go through them you'll you'll see what each item is for but it just shows the state that we have a game plan for our funding especially because we are over our four percent um legal fund balance limit so the first one is opeb and this is the most difficult one to understand and it's just the strangest thing ever so other poison post employment benefits commitment fund is really it's funds that the state and federal government by a gasby i think it's 54 government accounting standards board ruling we have to put have to have an actuarial calculations done and this basically is saying this is the amount of money that it sort of costs us by having our retirees in our health plan if we
014did not have any retirees in our health plan the um actuarials would say well your health plan costs would cost you less because you have younger people in there that wouldn't be costing you as much so even though we our current liability according to the actuarials is 1.2 million dollars we're never actually going to get a physical bill that says you owe us 1.2 million dollars where that bill will sort of show up is in the increase in our annual health care costs so this is established in the event that we have to actually end up paying this right now they've never said federal state government accounting standards board or anybody has actually said that we have to pay any of these but it really wouldn't surprise me if that were to happen sometime in
015the future so for now again we have 1.2 million dollars sitting aside and if we needed that for some reason all the board has to do is make a motion to close the fund and it would go back into unrestricted the next one is the technology commitment and this is just exactly what it says it's our commitment to fund our technology across the board um each year it gets replenished up to um a million dollars and used you know throughout the year if we need it uh in our budget you know depending on what we're doing right now we were able to use some of our grant funds to get a lot of our equipment so we shouldn't need to pull a lot of it out for this fiscal year but it would be able
016to cover any hardware or software um costs that we have that's which is really why we were able to so easily go to one to one on laptops and one-to-one on laptops for not only staff but students as well because we had this money set aside and we are able to use it on an annual basis to fund those types of costs and next up is our capital outlay and what this one is is we can each year we can have a small project less than a hundred thousand dollars um and there's a caveat to that that we can we don't have to go through you know all the whole rigmarole of a tool total huge capital project if we have something that's you know less than a hundred thousand dollars we can do it
017this way you put it in the budget you just make sure that everybody knows that hey we put this in the budget we're going to spend 100 000 and the best part about it is that we get building aid on it um in subsequent years now here's the caveat which is good for us because we're a small school well small city school district we also have exceeded our debt with the amount of debt that we have out right now so that means that we are able to fund capital outlays in excess of a hundred thousand dollars so i've got some feelers out to our um financial advisors as well to confirm uh that belief we met with young and wright today and discussed this so this might be a way to do uh smaller pieces
018of the um [Music] building condition survey items that we want to address more quickly than putting them out in a full capital project so the way this commitment fund is set up right now it's a maximum of a million dollars and the 2021 balance would be 743 990. next up is equipment replacement considering that we put a ton of money in such things as you know steam and our transportation facilities and our um you know we just have the new electric vehicles and all the equipment and stuff that we put in at betts park we have um an equipment replacement commitment fund so we can start to use those so something goes down that's you know maybe a 50 000 or 100 000 piece of equipment we don't have to go oh my gosh what
019are we gonna do what are we gonna cut how are we going to fix this how are we going to replace this we just say hey school board we need this because it wasn't budgeted it was an unexpected expense etc can you approve this and um right now we have 990 in here available for that as well and again maximum balance in here is a million dollars and one of the other things i'm slowly working on and i know i've said it before but it's just it's not a top priority so it keeps getting pushed to the side with everything else going on but one of the things i want to get is is an equipment a larger equipment replacement schedule from transportation from facilities from athletics so we have kind of a schedule in
020what we're looking at and what may need replacement within the next um three to 10 15 years depending on what the equipment is so assigned fund balances this is the amount of money that we pull out of our fund balance or out of our savings account essentially every year as revenue to go into the annual budget do we have to do it no we don't what we do to make it to to utilize our fund balance because we are so over funded so right now uh we have three million dollars i think it is that's coming into the budget for this year that came out of um the existing uh fund balance there's no maximum um as it states just you just can't exceed your fund balance you can't exceed what you have in your
021savings account essentially so this uh little chart just shows you how um when i started here back in 1011 um that's where we were we were you know very low on assigned fund balance and now we're we went way up in 1920 then we're coming back down we're gonna kind of settle out between three and three and a half million dollars is what i've projected in the next uh five years so here's the good part fun balance and i'm going to slow down right here for a second because i know i've talked about fund balance and reserves a little bit but in thinking about fund balance and you know what is fund balance and what it is is essentially it's the amount of money that you've received which is greater than the amount of money
022in which you've spent in a year so basically your net income so in a in a school district when we're not a you know a corporation or a company not um subject to those rules we have uh you know our leftover money so to speak is our fund balance so how we use it according to the state we can only have a four percent fund balance and that four percent is four percent of your next year's budget we are a little over and that a little i mean a whole lot so looking at what the state considers our unrestricted or unassigned fund balance you take we have to add in those uh reserves that i call the committed ones so that's the technology opab equipment replacement and capital project um plus the unassigned which is
02323.4 million so our grand total of unrestricted unassigned fund balance is 25 million dollars our next year's budget our current year budget is 47 million so that's 52.5 that 52.5 percent is what the state wants to be 4 so we're just a little overfunded but we've told them that you know hey uh there's a reason for that and in part is their own fault um they did not timely fund us for 17 18 18 19 19 20 and um native american tuition contracts those costs alone were around 17 000 17 million dollars so have they given us those you know on a timely basis this 25 million would be much much closer to uh probably 10. so you know while they can they can slap our hand and they can say that you know you're
024you're breaking laws whatever they want to call it that you know you're above your four percent fund balance which the majority of of um of the time we are and a lot of school districts are and a lot of school districts will be because of all this new federal aid that came in um you know we have a plan somewhat we have a very good uh reserves plan that we i just kind of breached through in each one of those reserves we have commitment funds and you know we are working on a long-range capital plan that will really help us plan so it's not like we have this money in the bank and we're not doing anything about it and it's just sitting there growing um so that's where you know i like to tell
025the state that yes we have too much money but here's our game plan on how we're going to spend it so karen the can you go back to that previous slide so the the 25 that we have uh that's totally well the 23 480 that's totally unassigned in any of the commitment funds or the other reserves that's sitting out there on top of yep everything else we have yep completely separate pocket okay and so if there was some kind of an emergency and we had to pull from some of the other committed funds we always could if we okay yeah and we could even pull directly from unassigned excuse me for example you know if we had some catastrophe and we needed to you know i don't even know i can't even think of anything
026if you know say the bus garage flooded and it ruined everything in there um we could you know cover those costs obviously we'd have an insurance but we'd be able to you know expedite things because we have enough cash in the bank to to help with that and we earn interest on that yep we sure do okay it's not as much as we had been or the rest of the the world has been because you know with this whole covet stuff going on it's just been a nightmare to get any good interest rates but yes we do earn interest on it so our annual use of funding um [Music] once they're processed so each year i send you a board resolution that says you know we're going to use x number of dollars from workman's
027comp we're going to fund workman's comp with x number of dollars we're going to um fund you know all the different reserves that i talked about and stuff like that so those resolutions will be on the next board meeting and once all those are are in play the 20 um no i forgot my number the 23 480 really becomes 20 million dollars so we're pulling you know 3.2 million dollars out of fund balance and putting it in those individual reserves at least that's my recommendation and hopefully it will approve that at the next board meeting um also for 22 23 i'm projecting to use three and a half million dollars of that for um the budget and then you know there's the potential is there going to be a transfer to capital don't know um
028my recommended use of impact a depending on what all the budgets come in at is probably going to be around 15 million right now it's 13 something so given staff increases and the number of staff that we've added i can see it being probably closer to 15. excuse me what did we get in impact aid this year this year hasn't been funded yet but prior year was 16 500 i think okay i have it right off the top of my head but i think it was 16. i know it was 16 something okay so we're getting when we initially got it um back in 1314 we as the district said we are going to wait until we have this money in hand in the bank before we budget it and use it the first several
029years um we didn't use a lot of it we used quite a bit of it but we didn't use all of it in the last two and three years we've escalated that percentage um that we're using so now it's going to be you know we're gonna we're getting close to the point that hey we need to really watch this because if for some reason they don't fund us as much for instance two years ago um they funded us at 100 lot which is the maximum amount that we can get but last year we're only at 90 percent lot so and that changes based on the number of applicants they get based on the information provided to them based on the number of month amount of money they get from the federal government so we can't
030really say that we're going to get more or less than than the previous year because there's all those other factors in that as well as our our budget and our um the costs that are reported to the state each year so next up here's what we look like so looking at this number 2348 that's where we work 6 30 21. we need 17 million dollars to finish phases 3.3 and 3.4 excuse me we're gonna use three million dollars for this year's budget we have to fund reserves about 3.7 million dollars funding of food services i've got uh my projection is that in three years we can be back to self-sufficient for food services but based on all the the new changes in food services the new staffing etc um we're um going to be in
031the red for a little bit change from fund balance for 2122 i'm estimating that this is going to be seven and a half million dollars the reason i think it's going to be seven and a half is based on the money that we're getting from the federal government for cares act for sursa for arpa there's all those different pieces of money that we're getting that we essentially pulled a lot of that money out of general fund but we had it in originally budgeted in general fund but now hey we have this other money so i'm guessing um we're going to have an increase in fund balance for 21.22 and about seven and a half million dollars so then we're going to end with 6.7 million so that 6.7 starts next year then we're gonna pull
032three and a half million dollars out and put it in the 20 um 223 budget then we're going to use um a million dollars to fund the other reserves we use half a million for food services i'm anticipating that our revenues will be two million dollars greater than our expenditures and then i'm also going to recommend that we start a new commitment fund for the new retiree awards that were that are part of the new um union agreements that for each year an individual has worked for the district they get a thousand dollars upon retirement and the reason this is six hundred thousand 000 and i know it's not going to happen that every single person that is 55 or older would retire in one year because that would be decimating to us but if
033everyone that's 55 or older retired the first year that we would have to pay out that thousand dollars because that's um done over three years the first year would be just under six hundred thousand dollars second year same thing the third year drops down to 500 um and it uh you know goes across the board so i'm i really think that we should set funds aside for that uh because it's going to be an annual expense and it's uh it's kind of a costly one so at the end of the year we would end up with 3.1 million dollars that 3.1 goes to the beginning of the next year we go through the same process and now all of a sudden hey we might be hurting and this does not take into account any transfer
034to capital for any future projects that have not even been discussed yet or any local share of any future capital project that may have been discussed and it also assumes that there's two million dollars that are is received greater than what is spent in each year so don't panic and the reason you don't have to panic we're not running out of money is don't pay attention to that mark is we currently have 26 million dollars in deferred revenues that are from impact aid there's 26 million in cash sitting in the bank historically we've received about 16 million in an impact aid for the last four years that have been pretty consistent on how much we're getting currently this year we're using just over 12 million in the annual budget the difference sits in deferred revenues
035until it's recognized and budgeted for purposes as determined by the board so like i said earlier we received the money in one year say we received this the money in 2122. so any funding that we received regarding impact aid from er july 1 of 2021 through june 30 of 22 we set aside in deferred revenues then when we need it for the budget we pull it out and put it into revenues so if we were not to get any more um impact aid i would take from this 26 million that's sitting in deferred i would take 12 million dollars for next year's budget but because we're going to get an extra 16 so it's slowly you know builds up again but my recommendation is to create the capital reserve like we had talked about earlier
036and to create two commitment funds one is the retirement awards that we talked about the other is turf replacement the turf is warranted for 12 years now the majority of it the football soccer lacrosse field and the baseball field will more than likely make it 12 to 15 years but the box lacrosse pieces because that's just so much more wear and tear on those it might not make it that long or if it makes it to the 12 years then it'll need to be replaced in the 12 years turf replacement cost rate now based on what we have over at vets park only is estimated at seven dollars a square foot and there's approximately 270 square 270 000 square feet so it's about 1.9 million dollars to replace just what we have right now so
037we need to to you know really take a look at that that you know are we gonna have two million dollars essentially in the budget in 12 years to be able to replace this but if we have this commitment fund and we're working on replacing it you know this whole time if we say it's going to be 12 years we can divide that um you know into 2 million and put that much away each year so we need to carefully plan how we're going to continue to expend the funds and develop a plan um for our future so and speaking of the future capital projects phase 3.3 is now on the addition and renovations at prospect um the state fpf forum for 7.6 million dollars is being signed and submitted this week of that 7.6
0383.9 of it is additions and 3.6 of it is alterations 3.4 will be the district office edition and some other renovations within the high school building and phase 3.5 will be the track in ancillary buildings other items that have been discussed in some way shape or form are a new transportation facility a little warrior academy aka early childhood center or a softball field to be uh turfed so and that's what we know of right now that's what we've talked about in the past uh as far as capital projects so what i'm going to talk about briefly next is the building conditions survey and this is the project that we're working on with um young and wright so they've gotten us the preliminary or not the preliminary but the first piece of this whole project with
039them and that's the building condition survey so with this piece if you look at the bus garage the items that they're saying within one year need to be replaced or repaired is 69 000 within three years four hundred and eighty seven five within five years two and a half million within seven years um five hundred eighty thousand she's five thousand eight hundred dollars for grand total oh for grand total of 3.1 million dollars and career building same thing um one three five and seven years high school and prospects so if you look down here at district wide and shoot i'm gonna have to let's see hang on i can't see that all all right there we go so for this one um my information is a little taller than my slide so um district wide
040701 thousand dollars for year one for year three or um 11.2 million and five years out 17.7 million seven years out 8.3 million for a total of 38 million dollars so that's just in summary you know what those items uh would be to to essentially fix things that that they discovered so each building i have this let me try and blow this up again so career building they're talking about hundred and twelve thousand dollars so first year this is what they're recommending uh for rear building the uh building envelope exterior doors for overhead and exterior walls columns wood i'm not sure what those are but concrete footings security cameras um emergency standby power system and heat generating systems with first air so they're looking at these items that they believe um need to be fixed
041or repaired within the first year so it's a hundred and twelve thousand dollars this is year three i only went to year three on each one of these because it's it's a lot more information um on each one of these so if you look at bus garage here's the 69 thousand dollars we talked about earlier which is exterior doors replacement exterior door overhead uh chimney i was like i didn't even know there was a chimney in the building um piped heating or cooling and piping um thousand airline ventilation equipment force first one thousand dollars so those are things that they feel um should be addressed within year one um back in the bus garage and then um it goes on with all this other other things for the bus garage same thing for main campus
042here the exterior doors the pa systems era handling ventilation equipment the catch basins drop inlets and manholes whatever those are site furnishings benches you know all those different things so the high school i call it the high school but it's the 50 iroquois campus um building is 358 for year one year three uh or you know you're looking at 6.2 million dollars so what we're doing and um and this is the same thing for prospect all their different things this is now again this is based on what young and wright recommends so first thing for um prospect they're talking about theater sound system and theater like but not even they use the stage we want to put 110 000 into that to have there we want to send them over to the high school and
043have them use the big stage in the big auditorium um things like that so this is you know currently this is what um uh young and wright has has said but we as a district need to go through the determine what we want as priority so your takeaways from this whole thing is we have sufficient funding to operate our existing programs we have funding to fund a portion of capital projects but we need to carefully plan ahead to avoid having any funding issues given our continued growth of the number of employees our initiatives in our capital projects so how do we get there we continue our project with young and right to develop a long-range capital plan and then once that's developed we go through quarterly reviews so every quarter we review the long-range capital
044plan and a long-range financial plan where are we where do we need to go what happened in the middle that you know something funky happened um that you know ended up costing us a lot more than we thought or something completely opposite we were going to do something and then it decided to no let's not do that um so we update those the long-range capital plan and long-range financial plan become essentially living documents and they're updated on a quarterly basis and it's not just something that me mark and bob or mv mark and bob and in finance look over it's something that really should be presented at every uh board meeting and and discussed so we're always all on the same page and we're all moving in the same direction um looking to you know
045proceed with the betterment of of the district and that is a wreck wow so um before we jump in for questions is there any just a couple of comments and karen i just i want to go back to i think it was your summary slide where the seven year building condition survey to do everything district-wide is roughly 38 million yep okay just for the board's benefit that's just the things in the building condition survey that is not additional items that we decide to build or create these are things within our buildings our grounds our operational systems currently so if we decide to add a you know musical carousel that's not in there uh the cost associated with the 38 million dollars of work the architectural fees the insurance fees the construction fees those are karen
046i believe correct me if i'm wrong not in that original amount either correct this number is construction only no architect no engineering no um uh gc no clerk of the works none of that so good uh so just as a general guideline and i'd defer to carry on this but all of those other things added in if we decided to do all of them we're not advocating doing all of them in a seven year period but approximately 22 to 24 more to add all of the other requirements to do that work uh and some of it will be aidable and some of it will not be aidable correct and then how long before um like is this a finalized version of the building condition survey karen yes it is but what we need to do
047now um like i talked about the i just used prospect i think it was for the the stage um we need to as a district go through each one of these items and say you know what do we think is a priority excuse me maybe we want i'm you know we're looking at prospect right now and it says in three years the roofs well we've got the roof project in the current capital project right so we've already escalated that one you know so maybe there's other things that that want to be you know escalated versus being pushed down a list a little bit i mean to me that sounds like that's where we need to have a a retreat just to go over the building condition survey and i think that would be i think
048that's a great idea and i would um request that that happened but request that it happen after we get the long-range finance or not financial long-range capital plan worked out a little bit further okay well then you gotta let us know when you're ready yep and we can all start looking at it and uh we really need to have a just a group discussion on it yep yeah what i'll do actually tomorrow when i go in the office i will pull the full um like this um data for each one of the buildings and um i will email it to everybody so everybody has it so you can start looking at it you know when you want something to do you know you can look at that instead of watching the bills games and get
049frustrated wow that's too soon karen too soon so do any other board members have any questions about the reserves or the building conditions survey and facilities so can i just clarify karen are you going to give us the go no go of when we can start to look at a board retreat based on the longer range uh plan or seven aspirational goal now and then we've got a deadline to try to reach well i'd like to talk to alyssa um to see how long she thinks that whole process will take so i can i can um report back at tuesday's board meeting of when we can establish the retreat and alyssa is one of the um staff members from young and wright who is really quite an expert in the building condition surveys in long-range
050capital planning long-range facility planning okay hey can i just add i want to second that about getting this thing off the ground um we talked about this back in july we talked about making this a priority for our august retreat um we even tried to get people on board to meet that saturday afternoon when we were in niagara falls that was back in july we talked about it now here we are august september october november and we're still just talking about setting this up i just wanted to point that out well we have we have a meeting established with on december 1st we're going to meet with all the admin team and do some discussions there and then december i can't remember what friday it is um in december it's early um we're going to
051meet with young and write again to go over the building conditions survey and to go over um the findings from the meeting that we have with the admins and then we'll go again so that's where i need to to chat with um with alyssa to find out what the the schedule is so i can come back and tell you how long we think this is going to take okay and then we'll get a a plan in place i think once we can get it with the long range um just like you you said in your slide karen you know then we can revisit it quarterly and it will be something that's current and we're always working on it so i look forward to it yeah me too does anyone else have anything for karen no
052i'm good okay good job as always karen know it i'm good thank you okay uh so we have um and she popped in and then she looks like she just popped off melanie beardsley from webster's only so she's signing right back in right now and melanie is going to talk to us about some board professional development with regard to public comments uh so that we can avoid the news jaimel welcome um regarding public comments as well as some updates and perhaps some perspectives on the covid status for schools and our employees so mel uh all of the board members are here with the exception of sue freeze who is excused mark karen and kristen are also on the call with us all right can everybody hear me and i'm just gonna rename myself for a
053second i participated in a moot court thing for ub the other day and it looks like i'm still listed as an evaluator so that's better um and bob you're letting me share my screen right share screen three sure it should be okay now yep i should be good now everybody can see the screen right yep all right so um i won't take too much of your time but i just wanted to run through a few things that um bob asked me to go through here with you today um this is some really interesting topics that have come up lately uh in board meetings and by boards quite recently public comment and how to address public comment should you be responding how are you going to deal with potentially divisive and very difficult comments uh that
054are coming up more and more during during board sessions right now and what options do you have um so we're going to go through that and then i'm going to briefly review the newest latest and greatest testing requirements that we have for covid right now i think it's really important that everybody know what your obligations are and generally what the rules of thumb are and some of the issues that we've been seeing so far if you have any questions please feel free to just interrupt me i'm happy to answer them to the extent that i can and if i can't i certainly will let you know all right so i wanted to talk about public comment first um we've had a number of boards lately who have been bombarded i'll say with many many people
055who have wanted to engage in public comment and there's a lot of confusion out there about what public comment really is supposed to be what the purpose of it is and whether or not you even are required to have public comment so public comment is actually not a statutory privilege or right that the members of the public have that being said the commissioner of education and of course nearly every single school district in the state encourages and permits public comment we find the value of public comment to be very much worthwhile and generally speaking i've never met a board that doesn't want to hear from the public so it's not a statutory right we have had some people come to board meetings and say that it's their right to speak technically it's not however we
056do usually highly encourage it because it's a very important part of the public board meeting but i think what's more important is to understand what a board meeting is there we've had a lot of confusion about this too a board meeting is not a meeting of the public a board meeting is a meeting of the board to conduct their business in front of the public so the public understands what are the concerns and business issues that the board is discussing what is the business that they're transacting what are the decisions that they are being made it is not a meeting of the public and i've heard that time and time again recently with with some public commenters and folks who are coming to the board to really be heard by the board on issues that
057may or may not be before the board and and they continually say this is a public meeting so i have a right to speak it's not really it's it certainly is and we're supposed to be transparent in in the way that we conduct our business but really the purpose of the open meetings law and the purpose of having a public board meeting is so folks from our community our employees our students can come in and see how is the board operating how are they transacting business how are they discussing and completing the work of of the school district on a day-to-day basis that is the purpose of the open meetings law and the transparency that we're talking about here that's why public comment is a vital portion of that because you do often want to
058hear from members of the public your employees your students about items on the agenda that are before the board about action items that they may or may not be considering so again you're considering in the way that you transact and conduct your business again that comment from the public and the input from the public to the extent that they want to have it so that is really an ideal world how it all works together and i think at times it can be really helpful to clear up that that set up in that structure because a lot of people do think it is my right to speak i have a first amendment right i'm allowed to say what i want to say in a board meeting no matter what and that's not exactly right not that
059i would recommend that we go out and say you you public member are completely wrong about it but i think it's helpful to encourage that type of education about what a board meeting really is and the portion of public comment that can be inserted into the board meeting and viewed by the board so i want to talk about some best practices for public comment um i think it's really important that we create some expectations for public comment and the more expectations that you can lay out in a clear and easy fashion for the public to understand the better and smoother your board meeting or your public comment is going to go some districts have a policy or have a provision in their policy about public comment i took a look at our policy manual online
060it actually looks like we don't address explicitly public comment in our board procedure policies so that is something that you the board could consider for the future do you want to develop some sort of public comment policy that you're inserting into your board procedure policy do you want to put forth some expectations and some protocols and these are on on this particular slide all of the bullets that i've listed here do you want to talk about whether or not people need to sign in whether or not you're going to limit the people who are going to comment publicly to residents of your school district i've seen other districts limited to residents and employees of the school district and that is a reasonable restriction quite recently we had a board who had folks from out of
061town not residents of their school district not employees whatsoever start to come in droves to the board meeting to provide again their perspective on certain protocols that the district was considering at the time again that may be helpful the board may want to hear that but at the same time if it's if it's causing a disruption to the board and to the board's ability to have a reasonable and efficient meeting you may want to think about who you're permitting to come in and speak publicly at your meeting do you want to put some sort of limitation on that so you're really hearing from your community members and not somebody who is not from your community not somebody who is not a resident who's not paying taxes or who doesn't have a child in the school
062or is an employee of yours yes bob so i i just i just want to clarify we actually have a delineated policy it's 3220 okay and we actually print this on all of our agendas and it talks because we had done this a number of years ago to be compliant with the indigenous policy and procedures for impact aid and in that that comment it delineates public expression at our board meetings that it's a participation in the meeting of the board a period of time which persons may address the board should occur at a place in time on the agenda except the chairman which would be the board president at the meeting may at their discretion permit uh public comments at other times during the meeting and it must be directly related to an item currently
063under board discussion not involved personalities provided further that the person wishing to make such a remark is a bona fide resident of the school district district and that um the um it does it also indicates that it shall be specific to items on the agenda and shall not involve personalities um and shall be limited to a total of 15 minutes by a total time for the board member but it does not um indicate an individual speaker timetable so theoretically under our policy and our guidance one person could monopolize the entirety of public comment we've never had an issue with that of anyone really even filibustering but that is something that we do want to take a look at but that's printed on each of our board agendas where there is public comment which other than
064retreats um is every meeting good what's interesting is that when you go to your board docs if you search public comment it doesn't come up anywhere so we should definitely look at that and possibly fix that um because i had searched for it thinking i'm surprised that you didn't have something about it on there but if it goes under public expression that might be why it has been going on for me yeah it's listed yeah yeah but i'm glad that you at least have a policy on it because i think that's helpful but to your point bob that somebody could monopolize the entire time i do think that that's important because you can really have a board a board meeting go awry if somebody does do that what i've seen other boards also do is
065say that no one is allowed to cede their time to anyone else and if you are are interested in doing that we're not going to permit that everybody gets three minutes or five minutes and if you are speaking on behalf of an entire group which we just certainly haven't had before if you're speaking on behalf of the entire group you can have five minutes versus the individual three minutes that's another way to delineate it and what that really helps with is the efficiency of the board meeting because if you have a number of people who are coming to speak on the same thing as an entire group is it really worthwhile for the board to hear the exact same message five times or is it more efficient for one person to speak on behalf of
066the entire group they're given a little more time you hear the same message and the board knows that it's coming from the group the theory behind that that type of protocol where you limit it for groups is that we really don't need to hear the same thing time and time again it is helpful for the board to know that it's coming from a group versus a single person and so that is helpful there and you could consider something like that i think one of the most important things with respect to public comment are the listing or descriptions uh of the parameters for public comment and what topics can't be discussed in public comment and i'm talking about and bob referred to this when he was reading through the policy individual matters personnel matters the naming
067of students even though if it's a parent they technically can disclose their own child's name to the board that's not technically an issue but the minute they start talking about any other student it is absolutely problematic you know i think it's really important for individuals to understand when you come to the board to talk about a particular matter it's got to be generally something that's on the agenda that certainly is appropriate and it can't be something where you're going to single out a particular employee or person in front of the board that particular issue more likely than not is going to be something that the superintendent or an administrator is going to hear about and handle with that particular parent or community member who is coming forward which really leads to my next point when
068we're thinking about when somebody comes to us in public comment to talk about a particular issue and they start delving into these areas that are problematic it is vital that they immediately be stopped in a very professional civil and courteous way and say you know i apologize i'm sorry i'm going to have to cut you off but this is you're talking about individuals or you're starting to talk about matters that are not before the board right now that's inconsistent with our policy and our expectations for public comment i would refer you to the superintendent uh who will certainly hear your concerns and your questions and be able to again get you in touch with the right person or office that can handle the concern that you'd like to bring forward so it's not as if
069you're saying i don't want to hear from you parent or community member you're directing them to the right place and the right forum to have that conversation because it's not in a public meeting that you're really supposed to be talking about those things because again the meeting is really for the board to transact its business and discuss the business that's before it so i think that's really important what i've noticed with many boards lately is that the board president prior to public comment has begun reading again another statement whether it's from your board policy or something that they've developed based on the board policy to remind people here are the expectations for public comment here's what you can expect from us the board in response to any public comment and here's what the consequences are
070if you start to delve outside of those those parameters to be honest with you um we've had to be in some districts a little bit more restrictive unfortunately because people have been very animated and emotional these days about particular issues which again emotion is just fine but it can't delve into obscene defamatory threatening uh conversations and topics and so we've had to unfortunately remind some people of that hopefully you don't have those types of things before you but if you do you have to stop it immediately and you have to put the person on the right track again and you give them the opportunity to correct and finish their public comment and if they can't then you excuse them and you have to you have to ask them to go sit back down so the
071board can continue its meeting so additional considerations and and these are just some some ideas i talked about the board president statement before public comment um we've had a number of boards who have actually gone to a more thorough statement beforehand frankly addressing a number of the concerns that people have had over copied protocols or i i fully expect some other more hot button topics to come to light with school districts where people really want to be heard and nisba has actually also put out a a proposed template statement i certainly can send it to you bob can send it teresa to teresa if she'd like to take a look at it where they have noticed an increased participation in board meetings which frankly is good i mean we want the public to come to
072our board meetings we want to participate this is a meeting in in open so they can understand what the board is doing but again keeping everybody with the same expectations nisba has taken on the option of putting out a proposed statement before public comment to again remind everyone about the parameters and what's expected some other options that you can have and i've seen other boards do this speakers have to sign in if they're going to speak they have to identify the topic of their comment and they have to have a plan to follow up with the speakers meaning make sure that you know how you're going to follow up with somebody who brings an issue to the table that may need to be addressed whether it's by the board president whether it's by the superintendent
073how are you going to respond to that and and how should you respond to that which the general rule the thumb is it's it's not appropriate to respond in that moment especially as an individual board member you know the board acts as an entity you are an entity and you make decisions as an entity not as individual board members so holding it in trying not to respond or react or interact with the speaker during public comment really is vital because you're there to conduct district business and you can request that the superintendent or the board president is going to follow up with respect to the comment or the person afterwards but engaging in a back and forth usually leads to a conversation that may or may not be appropriate for public session and may or
074may not be relevant to the agenda that the board has for that particular meeting there are a few instances where responding to a public comment is certainly appropriate and in fact may be a best practice and it's really these three situations i have on this slide inaccurate comments misinformation or information that is simply wrong you know if if somebody's making a statement about you close school because you just don't want kids to be educated mr bridenstine and clearly there was absolutely no reason well no in fact there was a reason for closing school the other day it was the weather our covered numbers were xyz we had you know um con consulted with the department of health whatever the case may be with a statement like that where it clearly is not based on any
075sort of fact that you can easily rebut and it's appropriate to rebut of course you can do that and sometimes that really is helpful comments related to policy where you can refer the person directly to a policy that may be on point that the person may or may not know about is always always an appropriate response again you may not know it at the time so it may be something that the superintendent or the board president needs to respond to the person later on and then comments that weren't placement on the agenda so these are really comments that are talking about issues and concerns that the board may want to put on an agenda for a future board topic you know this would be something that i think the board would probably talk about at
076agenda prep further on with the board president and the superintendent but again this is the value of that public comment session members of the public your employees your students may bring issues and items to the table that the board considers to be worthwhile to be putting on the agenda to discuss and further detail so those types of things are things that you absolutely could consider responding to i would again caution you about responding immediately because i always think more often than not taking a moment to think about the person's comment and how you may want to respond to it is a good idea i think responding in the heat of the moment oftentimes is usually gets you into more trouble than it's worth so but these are the these are the items that you would
077actually look to providing some sort of response and commentary if they're brought up in public session where you can give some feedback to members of the public and i think when you do see that back and forth in a very limited instance when it is appropriate i think members of the public really appreciate that because they don't feel then that the board is just never responding to them in any way shape or form no you're responding when it's appropriate and if it's not appropriate because it's a personnel matter for example they're hearing and seeing the board president and our superintendent say you know that's really not an appropriate topic for public comment i'd be happy to speak with you afterwards or to send you to the building principle where i'm sure you can have a
078conversation with him or her to address that particular matter seeing that type of interaction i think really helps the public's view of how the board operates and what the purpose of the board meeting really is so that's my public comment session um before we go on to testing requirements any thoughts right now any any issues that the board has been dealing with or any questions that you have about um the the recommendations that i have and just so you know i did send this presentation to bob so i'm sure he'll share it with everybody um at some point to the extent that you find the slides to be beneficial so mal i would like to get that template that you're talking about um just we do read things and people are required to sign in
079and state what they what they want to talk to the board about so we do have that but it's an always a good reminder that we shouldn't be going round table um to try to respond to everybody whenever they just make a statement so absolutely i'll send that template statement um to bob so he can disseminate it to to to everyone um so you can see that and it's a natural reaction to want to address somebody's question or concern that they're bringing to the table right we're all human that's what you would want to do in that particular scenario but in public comment that's really not the best way to go more often than not there's likely another avenue to address the concern that the person is bringing to the table that would be in
080the best interest of the board and still support the efficiency of the board meeting that you've got okay now before you transition we we have uh a requirement through the impact aid program and the indigenous policy and procedures that if someone formally presents a concern and we've subscribed to the notion that a formal presentation of a concern occurs at any articulated board meeting whether it's the board of ed meeting or the finance committee or the indigenous ed committee meeting or in writing then we by policy to comply with impact aid are required to respond in writing within 30 days it may be thank you so much i look forward to meeting with you next week to discuss this in person and we keep track of that and we log those because we have to while
081we don't always get asked for that we have to have a running record under the requirements uh for the impact aid program so we've gotten better at that but our statement in the beginning is uh is something that we've gotten back into the habit of reading and we do respond the one piece that i would suggest maybe that the board considers uh just you know for future kind of consideration is that if it rests on the board president only to read that statement then that puts the board president in an awkward position um to read that public statement and maybe that's okay but it is also powerful if board members also at each meeting rotate and read that i've seen that done so that the board president isn't always the heavy or the bad guy
082which sometimes can make the meetings a little bit more controversial or tense we've not really experienced that in any magnitude compared to other districts in erie county but it's it's a thought to share some of that um responsibility with the board so that it's not just the board president or the superintendent cutting them off just do you have yeah do you have that statement too i mean teresa mentioned that you have people sign up for public comment is that my understanding yes and so do you have that statement on the sheet that they sign up in because i i think that's sometimes helpful too some people never read it but sometimes they do and they say oh i didn't know about that and so if they see it i think that's also helpful i i
083see the sheet and it's landscapes and i you know it's got their whether they're here whether they want to talk whether they want to share something in writing with the board i'd have to look at it um to to verify that yeah that could be something that you consider too and i have a question mel our policy or public expression says they have to be a bona fide resident of the district we did have a gentleman speak several months ago i think last school year when we approved the high school raising the progressive pride flag he came to speak he was generally very respectful and but he was not a resident of the district we didn't realize that at the time and i've seen news reports where it has become a hot issue for a
084resident to give their name and specific address and then they've been kind of targeted in the community or i don't know what the internet term is when you call them out and you go to their house and i'm drawing a blanket i'm sure mark knows what it is um but i'm a little uncomfortable with someone giving their address out publicly because if some lunatic or some person with an over abundance of enthusiasm on a particular topic may put that person who's legitimately coming to era concern in harm's way is there a liability with that should we take a look at that or just have them fill the form out i'm not sure what the best practice is for that but it is something that's a newer concern yeah so there's not there shouldn't really be
085any liability on the school district for a member of the public coming and then providing their address because they want to speak publicly however i i have seen other districts who have done it and who require people to state their address publicly and i have the same concerns you have bob what what you could do instead is have them sign up and you could have your district clerk or somebody else even after the fact just take a quick look at the sheet and see if they can verify that people are residents now the board can always invite somebody else who's not a resident to speak there's nothing that prohibits it it's just a restriction that is a reasonable restriction if you wanted to actually implement that but if you wanted to do it that way
086where you had them list their their address on the sheet if you will so they're not stating it publicly or not listed at all and have somebody again just take a brief audit of the sheet after the fact and if you find that there's a non-resident who came and spoke you can always contact that person and just let them know we realized that you came and spoke please be advised only residents or employees or whatever your restrictions are are allowed to speak during public comment buyer review you are not a resident of the district so if you sign up to speak again you will not be permitted to participate in public comment you know something like that where you're not again blasting everybody's address in the meeting and i think that's come come out more
087especially with virtual meetings and the recording of meetings now right it didn't happen very often because most people not many people went to board meetings at all and they weren't always recorded so you didn't have a record of somebody stating their address online now that's not the case anymore so it is a concern i have seen it before and those are the options i think you could look to unless you want to open it up to everybody and not really enforce the resident non-resident rule you know to the extent that you want to but those are the options you have thank you absolutely all right anything else on public comment all right well let's let's briefly talk about the the latest and greatest of testing requirements for for covid19 um most of you i'm sure
088have probably gotten some updates and have heard this both in the news with neighbors friends with family with everybody right um what is going on with testing so in the beginning of september september 2nd 2021 there was an emergency regulation that came out and then the commissioner of health issued a determination stating that teachers and staff all people 12 public and non-public schools we're going to have to go through these testing requirements and it really stems to a number of people including substitute teachers school student teachers administrators of course support staff even contractors who are working in our school all of these folks are covered under these testing requirements um and we're going to talk about you know where there could be a couple of different exceptions one of which bob and i have actually
089talked about just recently so who has to be tested and who could potentially be exempt from testing individuals have to be tested once per week if they fall into any of the geographic categories where there's low all the way up to a high risk of transmission everybody's in these categories right now in new york state i i suspect that we're going to continue to be in these categories for quite some time but i think there's i think many people don't realize that there's actually a threshold geographically for transmissions rates that we have to get to first to trigger these testing requirements and once we start to fall below those thresholds we will no longer have these testing requirements and think about last school year you know last school year we had the different zones right
090and salamanca luckily was not really impacted a lot by many of those zones whereas the suburban school districts were in these really funky zones for many many weeks and months and were engaging in testing um all over the place so just know that there is an end in sight to the extent that our transmission rates start to decrease more and more and more once we are below low we will no longer have this testing requirement so it won't be a forever situation the other thing that you should know is this emergency regulation that came out is only in place for 90 days unless it's extended i fully believe that it will be extended to the extent that the transmission rates are still what they are right now for some time so i doubt that we're
091going to be done with this in 90 days however it is a safe hold in there so it won't continue forever but it will likely continue i i suspect for probably 30 day time periods after the initial 90 days so it was initially issued september 2nd 2021 so we've got three months from that and then expect that we're probably going to get some sort of monthly update as we continue on do we have to continue this do we not have to continue this but i think it's helpful to know that because i think most people just think i have to be tested right now or i can opt out if i don't want to be tested and i want to be vaccinated and this is just how it's going to be forever it's not technically
092the case i'm sure it feels like that for many many people right now but the end can be in sight to the extent the transmission rates go down so that that's the the standards that we're working with here who's exempt from testing fully vaccinated teachers staff contractors anyone can opt out of the weekly testing as long as they provide us proof of vaccination which can be their excelsior pass or your vaccination card you have to be fully vaccinated which means you have to be through your second dose and the 21 or 28 day time period depending on which which vaccine you received once you're past that time period you are deemed to be fully vaccinated who else is exempt from the testing so the determination specifically listed pre-k programs that were outside of the school
093district meaning a pre-k program that wasn't lumped in to one of our district buildings and it was held by let's say you know one of the local daycares for example if you had a pre-k program that was not in school you don't have to engage in this testing and the teachers that are working solely in that pre-k program would not have to be tested the question came up if we have other programs that are not in our district at all community ed program for example would those folks have to be tested i took the position that we would treat them the same exact way we would treat the pre-k program and that the determination from the health commissioner does not address every single scenario so i would treat them the same exact way as a
094pre-k program that's not in our building and those folks do not have an obligation to engage in this weekly testing same thing for example for somebody if we did have somebody working entirely remotely for us if they're not coming in our building if they're not coming in and having face-to-face contact with our students and our staff then i would say that they are exempt from testing so i think all of those situations are our folks who are going to be exempt from testing along with the fully vaccinated folks and then it really whittles it down to folks who have decided to either not share with us their vaccination information which surprisingly i have had some people who have felt very strongly that they do not want to share their vaccination information and so they will
095engage in the weekly testing versus giving us their vaccination card or their excelsior pass that is their choice they are allowed to make that choice we respect that choice that they make and therefore we put them into the weekly testing obligations of course some people feel very strongly about not wanting to get the vaccine or they can't get the vaccine for a medical reason then they go to the weekly testing i have seen and i don't think that they have gone very far um some employees say that they have a medical or religious exemption to the testing itself um generally speaking when we have had some employees come to us and talk about a medical or religious exemption to the testing itself to doing the nasal swab the saliva test what have you i have
096generally recommended that school districts engage in the same interactive process for any other medical exemption to a job requirement and we don't just say no to them we ask them questions we interact with them more likely than not i think it's unlikely that there is a medical or religious exemption to having a saliva test or a nasal swab or engaging in this weekly testing but again i don't want to say never say never and i think it's really appropriate that you go through the process to make sure that you understand from the employee what their concern and what their position is and why they believe that they have an exemption to the testing but that being said i think it is very unlikely so for right now everyone and the other thing i should mention
097is in this determination from the health commissioner they didn't put in any particular start time there was no start time there was absolutely no start time so in the beginning of september when this first came out districts were not provided with any information about when they were supposed to start this so most districts and bob correct me if i'm wrong i think salamanca was was in this boat too started working with their county departments of health to figure out can we get testing on district premises so we can provide a convenient way for the employees who are going to engage in this testing to comply with this mandate that that we are currently dealing with and so many many districts started the testing once they were able to get the county department of health to
098set up a testing opportunity for our employees on our premises and again there's not a particular expiration date it's continuing for 90 days right now we're going to be looking at the transmission rates i expect that this is going to be again reinstituted every 30 days after the initial 90 days and we'll just have to keep an eye on everything as we continue to go through this but those are the overall requirements when we're talking about the testing requirements for the opt-out for vaccinated individuals and then what happens if we don't comply so technically if we don't comply there can be a maximum fine of up to one thousand dollars for each violation the department of health and the determination from the health commissioner has said each day that we are not complying can be
099a separate violation so again i haven't seen any departments of health so far really go after a school district when we're talking about testing up here in erie county we have had our department of health really put together a group of what's called sanitarians and these sanitarians from the department of health are going into school districts and auditing them and when i say auditing them they're auditing the compliance with the kobit 19 protocols is there are is everyone wearing a mask is there appropriate social distancing how are the protocols being implemented i have not heard from any particular district about the auditing of those programs and how they're working on it but i have seen of course in the news and some of you may have seen it too right now the department of health
100at least up here in erie county has issued a clarification to one particular suburban school district about mass breaks so up here they're taking a very aggressive stance i don't necessarily know that dr watkins at cataract county is going to take the same sort of tact with the districts down down in the southern tier in cat county i certainly hope that that's not the case that's not how they've been operating throughout this pandemic that's certainly not my experience with the other districts that are down in ketteraugus county that they've been working with so fingers crossed that hopefully you can continue on with the relationship you have with ketteraugus depar the cataract county department of health because i think it's been overall a fairly good relationship and less adversarial than what i've seen with some other
101counties and some other districts so if i can just jump in here with regard to this and kind of in general terms we still have a significant number of uh full-time regular monday through friday type employees who have opted out of disclosing their vaccine status or testing we have a number a significant number of our full-time staff that are participating in the testing uh protocols with cat county uh and that's good and but we still have a number that are choosing to go independent we support that that is certainly their prerogative as long as they comply we've had one instance of all of our staff that has not complied and we're dealing with that individual separately and privately they are not at a point of termination but we are following the protocols that the the
102guidance and the requirements uh force us to do it's certainly not um something we would normally do without the corrective i think it's important to note that since uh about two weeks ago when we got the okay from cat county that they would provide the on-site testing clinic that the time expended by julie creed our nurse manager josie hubbard in our personnel office ray haley as our chief of security and my office in addition to karen and mark in building principles this requirement has been exhaustive uh of an uh of an endeavor for us to make sure that we're compliant it has been substantially disruptive to operations to comply with this we are complying with it we have another test clinic tomorrow the test clinic will be operational even if school is not in session
103because of holidays which creates an additional burden for our buildings and ground staff to have two site locations open um i i just want the board to understand and to anyone that may listen to this recording once you know we we post it that this has been an incredible burden for our staff and it has been substantially concerning to the faculty and staff who are having to make the decision to be tested weekly as opposed to vaccine to have a vaccination or to get the vaccine and as mel indicated this is going to continue for the foreseeable future i have not seen nor am aware of any additional staff member of late that has made the determination that because of this they're going to reconcile their personal beliefs and get vaccinated i'm sure that that
104may happen but i'm not aware that it has happened at this point in time so um if if if you call and you don't get us right away we are probably test tracing or contact tracing individuals to make sure that they're compliant and it has been a significant time stealer bob i just want to you know we've talked a couple times about this and i just want to make sure that all the board members are aware that if we don't comply that we could be removed from the board uh and to me that's pretty serious um that if if we're not trying to follow this mandate so which which kind of goes back to if anybody tries to say anything during uh public comment you know whether reporter against it i just want to make
105sure everybody understands that you know what the implications could be to the board members if we don't follow through along with the fines of the school district which is something we don't want to have happen um that i just want to make sure everybody understands it knows yeah i think i'm just gonna say mel before you jump in i think there's two factors here there's willful ignoring of the regulations which would be really bad um and and i do believe that the commissioner would remove board members and would not play games and pull certifications of individuals who played fast and loose uh and willfully ignored the directives as opposed to we have a staff member that we believed was tested or they get tested weekly in the county or for some other reason the test
106results get voided and we don't have it we're looking at complying with it to be tested weekly what those test results are is another part of the process and you know we are spending hours each day in pursuit of compliance with something that is never been done before at all let alone every week and um we're going to get this as right as we can get it i'm confident of that we've got great staff deployed but i am not personally going to put any of you in jeopardy i'm not going to put myself in jeopardy or any other staff member and allow them to kind of play fast and loose it's just not an option it's not going to happen and the only thing i was going to say is that i sad is taking
107these these emergency regulations and determinations from the commissioner of the department of health and the county health departments quite seriously and they certainly have come out and said quite publicly that they expect all school districts to be complying and following these these regulations and these determinations that are coming right now while we're still in the pandemic so we certainly know where sed stands on this and i agree with bob that you know a willful failure to not comply with these with these regulations and these requirements is very different than um you know trying to get things together and comply as best we can while knowing that there are going to be some practical obstacles that you always be faced with and so we will do the best that we can and continue to do the
108best that we can in a very unique situation and in an unprecedented time does anyone have any questions for mel or comments well thank you all for your time i really appreciate it and i will uh get out of your hair and let you continue on with the rest of your evening thank you all right thanks everyone okay so we're gonna transition to round table and i believe we have three district roundtable topics from mark and myself and karen thank you for your facilities uh and financial conversation i'm gonna kick it to mark to talk about uh an issue that we had uh last week at the personnel committee about a position we're looking to create and uh and why so i'm gonna turn over to mark uh for that follow-up conversation from sure thank
109you uh let's see um this was originally presented to uh the personnel committee here we go let's see can everybody see that yeah all right um there we go a couple things were brought to my attention regarding uh service that we currently have that's provided through area one boces um this is the customization of powerschool which is our student management system this particular service allows the district to essentially buy a person erin boces has one person at the moment who is capable of providing the service we were informed that actually we reformed last year that the service was going to end we were informed again this year that the service would be ending we sort of finagled it to allow the service to continue we're heavily invested in this service meaning in a moment you'll
110see what it is that that does and allows us to do so this is just a quick rundown of the current projects and some of the outcomes that the customization allows us to do with powerschool one is the impact aid report allows karen to run the report to identify exactly who lives on territory this is obviously not something that comes with the typical power school package it's very specific to our district the programmer went in matched up the residence of the student addresses of where they actually reside match that into the territory boundary in a mapping software and then we now with pretty much the click of a button can identify who is exactly on territory and off territory and we can run that pretty much instantaneously we have the sports and athletic tractor it
111allows our parents to sign our student athletes up and complete the history form this sounds like it's not really a big deal but what this does is it allows our students and parents just simply to go into power school and sign their students up previous to this we had lists that were sort of um typically signed up in the office we then had to go through and identify if there was a health history issue with the coach those had to be then printed off given to the coach if a student comes on late there's a chance that we may not know what their history is if they have an allergy to something underlying medical condition if they have an iep they need to be informed of that there are an awful lot of holes so
112this is there's several other things here our related service model uh module the online enrollment process um kristen could talk about that because it affects her office but it allows us to basically do the vast majority of the enrollment school enrollment process online and has reduced the time it takes to enroll a student drastically i don't know kristin can you speak to what the actual change has been there sure when we were doing the typical registration process in august and september we could have anywhere from 30 to we had 70 outstanding students that were waiting to register and get all of their information and to start school in september this year on the first day of school we had four it has allowed everyone to be processed in a timely fashion our longest day has
113been three days before child starts and that was before school started and now that we're into the school year students are starting within a 24 to 48 hour turnaround so without that module we really didn't realize how much of an impact it had on us until we were forced by kovid to start using it immediately um there's also the customization of report cards we're transitioning from well i guess i would say transition or a traditional report card process to a standards-based report card these are multi-page report cards that have to interface with the student grading system that the teachers use we can this is the work that this particular individual does when we buy him from boces there's also a field trip module lunch counts and all sorts of other customizations this is just you
114know probably the top ten um there's also discipline modules that allow us to track student discipline it goes on and on and on um so this is the type of product that's produced through this service the problem and concern that we have is that all of those will be going away likely at the end of this year as soon as an update to powerschool comes through we've been told that erie 1 boces is not going to provide that service anymore there is no service for this for ca boces i haven't had a chance to look and see what you know when we say ca both season erie 1 or winnie wreck that is pretty much all of the schools this side of rochester i don't know how cross-contracting with another state or you know buying
115a person to come on site from you know hours away would really work but getting cutting to the chase the reason this came to the personnel committee is because we believe there's an opportunity to create a position ca boces has indicated the title it's still a competitive uh position which is senior system analyst programmer this person would do all of these services that we've listed here as well as train our people to be able to essentially replace them if that person were to go we don't like to be dependent on an individual person and we're learning that that can become a problem us and several other districts so the key would be for our people to get trained on this they would also you can see down here supervise pretty close to all aspects of
116powerschool use um and be our primary trainer so if what we're looking at with boces right now that extended support it's referred to as we buy this person this programmer for 42 days at a cost of 24 000 so that's what we pay to boces for the 42 days we also pay them fifteen thousand dollars a year for support and training if we create this position those two fees that we would post uh pay to boces would go away we would have our own person now that doesn't come without a cost the approximate salary that we're looking at is around 79 000 there is another factor to this which is this particular person we can farm out to other districts and that rate is about five to seven hundred dollars a day and we estimate
117that on an annual basis we can recoup thirty to forty five thousand dollars um of the salary so that's the position that was proposed um i'm thinking some of it was because we didn't have as much information um i don't know if there's more information i can provide to people it is it is a civil service position it is competitive meaning it would have to come off of a list at this point in time there is no list but the person would have to test in order to stay on the list um so that's sort of where we're at the consensus of the personnel committee was to bring it before the whole board um to discuss this would be the part where we discuss well i'll jump in first um i'm the one who suggested
118bringing it to the full board because i'm not in favor of this i was on the fence and since then i've changed my mind to i'm really not in favor of this um i asked mark why we would buy into a program that is so unique that we can't find another way to update it um another question i believe barbie even asked the question is well what does marcy do um then you know in thinking about this and also seeing a facebook post today my question is what does su do sushnafer um and i actually i just pulled this up and i wanted to read this this is on aaron strauss's facebook page today and it's congratulating sue on winning a 2021 outstanding leader of the year by the new york state association for computers
119and technologies and education association so part a couple paragraphs down aaron's writing this susan came to our district in 2017 as a computer technology teacher she has 20 plus years of combined teaching and i t experience under her belt which she aptly applied here in 2018 our district quickly recognized susan for her gifts in planning speaking and teaching technology integration and promoted her to to technology coach since then susan has been responsible for launching many of our edutech initiatives including the comprehensive powerschool lms system the classlink all-in-one sign-in app and serving as technology coordinator for our cte project sammy college certification program which just launched this fall so again we've got marcy and apparently we've got a rock star with sue schnafner who brought power school to us so that's why i said i'm not
120in favor of this position um and even if we do move it forward i'm i'm not i'm not in favor of this we have the person who brought power school to us already employed so why create another position so i can answer a couple of those questions um you know this is the title of this program person is computer programmer knowing how to operate a computer and programming the computer are two entirely different things sue is terrific she brought the power school learning management system which is class pages that's not what we're talking about we're talking about the massive database that manages every piece of student data um behind the scenes there is this is why we have a service that's provided through boces um typically you know a school does not own a programmer
121and what we're looking to do is if we want to be able to provide these customized services um really you know this is how we would do it if we again it's a matter of becoming efficient and effective we can do it other ways you know so every other district you know has an online enrollment process that takes or not an online enrollment process or some third party that takes hours uh karen can go back to doing the impact aid report um without this customization there's not you know it's not like we can buy a package that will tell us who lives on territory and off territory so these you know and marcy brown is an administrator who manages and oversees every facet of our information technology network she's not a computer programmer um so
122again i just want to make sure that we're clear on what we're talking about we're not talking about somebody who uses the computer we're not talking about a teacher who utilizes it or a teacher like sushnafer who's phenomenal she has presented to us on class pages she has basically managed all of the learning management system which allows us to teach while we are remote and has done so she's presented to us multiple times we recognize her but i would say her talents would be very much wasted if we lacked her in an office and had her programming computer language but again all of these things can occur in a variety of different ways we can purchase other services to do these and you know if we again it's really just up to the board to
123decide if this is the direction you'd like to go if not we can come up with other ways to get this done so mark why aren't they um supporting power school anymore so they are supporting powerschool they're not supporting this portion which is the customization they would rather have us so you can see every time we want to make a change to a report card then we would have to hire their programmer at a rate of 250 dollars an hour they don't want to have us be able to run the impact aid report or the sports athletic tractor they would prefer to sell us another module that gets added on so there are competing pieces powerschool is still going to be what there's only two maybe three student management systems in the vast majority of
124new york state power school which most large districts utilize e-school which is what we utilized before and some other there's like school world or something that's another one power school is one of the largest student management systems literally in the world it is used in every country that has organized education it's customized in our case for new york state we look to be able to say if we want to do some of these nice things that we do you know the field trip module so there's no paper we can take and develop this or we can i probably buy some other add-on piece that teachers will have to go to to then you know complete in fieldtripper.com then send that over to powerschool and then we print it out through powerschool we looked at using
125the power school as a sole source of data management it's cleaner from a data management perspective and this up to last year was a service that boces provided and they provide the service to i don't know probably 14 to 15 school districts we actually hosted the powerschool user meeting in salamanca last month so you know we are a leader in the use of powerschool we have a lot of this customization um primarily due to the work of some of our building leaders um kristin and pps a lot with levi but you know again it's coming with a bit of a consequence is that if we want to be able to have all of these nice pieces there's a certain piece of upkeep and maintenance that goes along with it for me i think i'd rather
126have students who are achieving than ease of use for karen or anyone else i'd rather spend money on a couple guidance counselors a social worker tutors things like that buying into this program again i don't understand why we would buy into such a limited program if we can't even customize i don't understand why it's the biggest program in the world and we can't find somebody else to customize it for us i don't understand why we have to pay them to do the territory boundary when we have graham hayes who is a gis professional who could do that as well i just don't understand this whole reasoning behind this um and that's why i'm against it i just don't i don't see the reasoning i don't see creating another 80 000 position when we have kids
127who can't even read when we have kids they're still struggling with their core classes you know these types of things so uh the more we talk about this i'm a hard no well now are other districts across the state doing as far as uh uh you know trying to figure this out if if if this product is is not being uh supported by erie one are there other boces areas that are that are continuing to um roll out support for districts so like i said most of them are simply purchasing other products so you know that's you know if we don't do this and we want to have somebody who if we want our students to be able to sign up electronically we just purchase an athletic tractor and train everybody on how to do
128that if we want to have students register online we purchase another online product and we train everybody on how to do that if we want to have our report cards be standards based then we pay 250 an hour every time we want to make a change to the report card um so you know then that's what every other district does so when you go to another district they'll have six or seven applications that they have that they purchase support um you know just like all of the other ones that we do um and that's i mean i guess we very easily can do that either way we we have been paying for this service all along we have the opportunity to bring somebody or create a position so that we can actually modify the database
129even more and make it easier for our students our parents and our employees to utilize um and that's the real point here we're not taking money away from any education piece we're actually providing more time for our teachers to be able to do what they do which is teach but again we we um actually purchased this through a coaster correct through boces everyone boces correct um how much of of that is is aidable i would think all of it's aidable correct karen did we come up with that answer no we did not i requested the info from ca boces and uh was unable to get it amy didn't reply to me before the end of the day okay i would suspect that it is which would bring down the total cost of using uh an
130eerie one programmer even if we have to um pay whatever 250 bucks a an hour you know to create a special report that we have to pull might be more economically feasible than than hiring somebody full-time which we get no hate on right totally agree with that so i'm just gonna pull this off and assume this is um a no which is not a problem i just think it needs more study so and as we all know i'm only one of seven so mark before we transition off this i i have a a couple i guess a question the service will still be in effect for the remainder of the 21-22 school year correct that's correct okay and assuming that boces drops this particular customization and we have to go a different route um is
131would there be an opportunity rather than purchase a whole service to provide a consultative contract with uh and just to be clear the bob that mark's talking about on the slide is not me it's it's bob schiffman who's the programmer from boces um would there be an opportunity to purchase a separate contract like we've done for other experts in the field whether it's steam or native curriculum development is is that something that's potentially a july one conversation if boces fully ends the program that we've uh become accustomed to certainly the key is to find someone who knows the system right and this was not hiring a i didn't talk about bob a person this is create a you know hire a programmer that will allow us to customize and become more efficient and effective and
132have a single database system and then at the same time be able to farm that person out to other districts and recoup the cost if that's not you know i'm perfectly fine going in whatever other direction he may very well get hired by another district and then he's totally off the market and you know that's that so if we're looking at a certain person the key is this is a fundamental shift from investing in a single database or do we then farm all of these pieces out to other software packages which whichever that's you know that's the way the work gets done right it's really the efficiency of the work i mean i i'm only going to speak for myself and i don't know everything about software but i can tell you that i have
133been an integral part of many softwares at the nation and that sometimes when you can customize and you can get support for that customization you know you know carrie you said well so so what if it cuts down on karen's time but but you know i bet karen feels a little bit differently on that because she's got so many different irons in the fire that you know you want to make you want a program that you can utilize and you can customize and you can get what you want and i know that i appreciate that aspect i also know that even with the customization of our software there's people that we can go to that can help run the system and then there's also that development piece where you have to go back to your
134programmers to help with that code for the customization and i'm always a big one especially for technology to say hey can you do this so that it makes my job 10 times easier because why would i want to spend all this extra time running extra reports or doing things twice if i can get something customized and it works better for me and believe me we use at least six different types of software at the nation so you know i can appreciate where this is going i'm not saying we hire a particular individual but before we rule this out you know let's stop and think about do we want karen's time spent um running multiple reports so that she can come up with the data instead of investing money to be able to run one i
135mean i don't want to cut off my nose despite my face and so when it comes to certain things with software and technology i'm a big advocate for making sure we get what we want you know i i'm not and i don't fully understand everything that powerschool does but you know boy i would be upset if i said hey we're trying to customize our software to be able to get it to do this and somebody told me you know what just go buy a couple other ones and merge it together you know so um that that's my devil's advocate piece on that because um i can appreciate where this is going i don't know karen if you have anything to add or because you use it to get your reports and things and to me
136you know especially when we start talking about state impact aid and wanting to have accurate numbers you know we know what kind of money we get for state impact aid so um i want to make sure that you know it's i remember the first time karen had to compile all the data for state impact aid and how long it took so if we have a mechanism in place to help um you know we're really we really need to make sure we understand that fully that's that's all i want to make sure i get across yeah i can add my two cents for sure it i mean it literally saves me like two weeks time what what normally would take me two to two and a half weeks of just pulling data and proofing data and
137running it against the um state or the county gis site etc um i can run in a couple days so it's it's definitely a time saver and you know if if powerschool never made another change then we would be okay but they make changes all the time it's just like when you're upgrading your iphone you're you know you update your software every couple weeks um it's the same thing they're out they're constantly making improvements and when they make improvements it changes so you have to update these reports it's the same thing on your iphone you have to update your apps um for every time that you know apple makes a change so it's it's really a huge time saver and um you know in my opinion and obviously i'm not a parent and using it
138but i know that if i were a parent i would want to go to one place to do all this stuff versus well which app do i have to go to to enroll my kid for sports and which one do i have to go to to sign up for lunch and which one do i need to go to for this then the other thing so i think just having one overarching you know piece such as powerschool i think it's a big advantage and that's my two cents i would just uh echo karen's comment going back to the early days when we had e-school and we were trying to start the impact data applications we were quite literally going through record by record to verify kids i would just strongly counsel everyone that when we start
139slicing off sections of the student management system inherently we're going to lose data where the data systems are not going to speak to each other well and the one thing that has dramatically changed under the powerschool umbrella and partially with the customization that we have done we know we are different and we need different data and we want different data we will lose some of that efficiency i don't want to go zombie apocalypse and say we'll never be able to get it that would be disingenuous but it does slow down the ability that we can respond or the ability that we can get information from parents or to parents or get information from other districts when kids come to us and looking at those specialized and customized things we have kind of made our mark
140being somewhat innovative this is not unique for district a to create something that nobody else has and then sell it both kristen and i have experience in doing that with autistic programs in another district and you know as we become more proficient at it ideally we want someone that's ours and on staff that's going to be here for years and years and years rather than a patch when boces is abandoning us with the customization i'm a little i'm a little frustrated by that but that's not uncommon when the service levels of other districts drop then boces will either jack prices up which they're not doing or end programs that's relatively common but what we don't want and what we shouldn't settle for is like what we had with e-school or clear track that wasn't meeting
141our needs the program will change the program will evolve we should try to be ahead of the game and the last thing i'll say is the programmer is very much like in a car dealership you want the salesman selling you the car and getting uh in in being able to have access to the kind of car you want to buy they're not the guy fixing it when it breaks down this is what we're talking about sue's great with the teachers and even mercy is great with managing the technology department neither are programmers we want a programmer we need a programmer and we also need that programmer to help us train to have someone that can be there for the long duration um but we just don't have anybody on staff to be able to do
142the articulated programming that we're really talking about to customize and i'm not the expert in power school mark and karen use it significantly more kristin uses it all day long um but you know my two senses we really should avoid slicing off and having multiple programs we did that 10 years ago and the data was a mess that's just my two cents all right i like your i don't think anybody's asking to slice off you know uh you know sections of power school i think um what i heard carrie say is why can we utilize uh personnel that we have on staff already to [Music] to generate the reports that we need i know we've we've sent for several folks folks to uh different trainings on powerschool to learn you know those those things yes
143and and i would agree dale that's that's kind of what we want but those staff members have attended one or two or three trainings this is someone that is you know the consummate pro you know whether it's this person or someone it's a consummate person that just does programming if we if if we look at all of the other duties and responsibilities that other people have whether it's sue or marcy or or levi or hell even hack even secretaries that are using powerschool and trying to you know get customized reports i think and would defer to mark to talk about the difference that the programmer is doing as opposed to the end user who's taking that predetermined report and then using it for instructional purposes because i really think that's what we're that's what we're
144uh kind of talking about well here let me jump in here because i'll tell you what i'm talking about is why would we buy into a program that we're so limited in how we update it this is a worldwide program as mark has said why can't we get tech support from anywhere else in the world why do we have to get this one specific guy bob whatever his name was and hire him on our district so that's that's what i was talking about if this program is so worldwide is so robust is used by so many other districts what are they going to do about their support there's got to be support out there you don't buy into a program and then never have any support and i was saying bob i loved your analogy
145about the mechanic in the car i'm glad that we all understand that when we buy a car we're buying the mechanic too right that's basically what you said so we buy a car we're buying the mechanic i love that analogy um i just don't agree with this program i don't i mean i understand what it does i don't agree that we're locked into this one resolution uh bob you mentioned hiring somebody and having them for years and years and years while in the personnel committee meeting mark mentioned that this guy is just looking for end of career he said he's only got three or four or five more years and then he's retiring so that's not years and years and years so there's a difference there right well i thought i actually like power school
146i'm sorry delay again did you say you like satellite internet i do um i i use it daily myself and and i've built customized reports you know it's it's really not the difficult one once you know what you're doing um but it does take take time and training and and and uh and understanding you know what kind of data you need um that's why it's you know um i think it's something that's doable you have to recognize what what reports you want to pull off and then and then program you know what you need yourself um you know you know it's and have we checked with any other to see if if if it's a service that they're offering um maybe we have to enter into some kind of cooperative service with uh orleans boces
147or or capital region boces you know um have we looked into that i have not looked beyond the difference here is that we have him on site he does training with our people and that's what we're looking for and again i don't i feel like i really not communicated this well because this isn't just writing a report this is literally writing software that is completely unique there you know there is no other district um that has the enrollment process that we do as fast as streamlined because it was totally customized and written for us um it requires some maintenance and upkeep but you know as kristin said it has streamlined the process for our parents and for our registration clerks and you know simplify their time sure we could hire another clerk um and add
148in overtime for them to process the old way which is what other districts do we i any not anyone you're right dale it takes some training to run reports we're not talking about reports we're talking about customized tables that allow us to come up with our own process let's say for discipline instead of having forms we complete an online field in powerschool linked to that student it can transition and track all the way through it's not an add-in module it's customized for our discipline scenarios the teachers see what's going on that isn't anywhere else we could probably purchase some other ad on surface but then again we're buying another service we're paying the maintenance on that all of those you know have a total cost of ownership um that you know as well as the
149training for the the personnel so you know i um i guess one of the things i would like to do because i feel like we're taking way too much time on this um is you know if we want to table this and we can i'm happy to answer other questions and maybe i'm not the person to present this um i have pretty much zero interface with the customization piece so maybe this is having levi kristin principles all those people who do this come forward to talk about it and again this the point of this is to have our personnel be trained by this person who is the trainer who and again if it's the bob schiffman that's great if it's somebody else i whatever we have a need for this or this stuff all goes
150away and we have to add in extra services it's one of those two options really and yes we would like to build the capacity of our own staff but this is pretty specific niche and while we send people to powerschool university it's on you know utilizing the data utilizing different components of it how to train there's a learning management solution piece there's the behind the scenes school setup you know every cl every tick of every minute is tracked and reported to new york state through powerschool there's a whole scheduling component that's done all the students schedules are built in powerschool that's a massive component that people get customized and trained in that's not computer programming so i'm going to just recommend we can table this you know as long as we want until people are
151comfortable or we just decide we're going to go in a different direction but i i don't want to fatigue this out for for too long because i think there's a bunch of stuff i'm only number this is only number one and we haven't even gotten to the rest of everybody all right well if we can transition theresa and the board of members if that's okay yeah i mean i i really would like to have more of a discussion about this in another time because well i really i don't want to see us lose customization and and again uh if somebody took all the customization away from from me uh i would be heartbroken because uh you know i i can appreciate what it does and and and believe me when i ask for customization um
152you know we want specific things so i i really appreciate what this program probably is doing and i understand um again that it's i don't care if it's the person i just don't want us to lose the customization and at the end of the day i don't want to see us just spending you know spending a dime or uh to save a nickel i i think is what the old adage was just because you know we didn't take advantage of something that we could have and uh and one way or another we're going to pay for it so we just have to figure out if we want to employ the person or if we want to go out and hire a consultant to come in because you know if we want to keep the customization
153which to me is the the greater piece of this then we have to do it one way or another so that's that's all i i want to say on that so mark why don't you go to number two okay number two is me wait mark did you have another one that i wasn't aware of well remember we were going to talk about the land acknowledgement statement oh yes hopefully that's quick yes okay so um with this being um let me just bring this up um with this being native american heritage month um we have talked a little bit about a land acknowledgement statement we had one it was sort of i don't know if it was in the final form draft form um that was read at the bets park opening either way our native
154american curriculum team and our seneca studies teachers got together they took some of the components of the existing land acknowledgment statement they utilized the governance um the guidance here the native governance center's land acknowledgement guide and the beyond the land acknowledgement guide as guidance and i asked them just to provide a little bit of a summary as far as how and why what a land acknowledgement statement is for those folks who may not be as up to speed on it and what some of the components are that are in it so what they return back to me i'm just going to quickly read the purpose of a land acknowledgement is for an organization district or an educational institution to formally acknowledge and reflect on the history of the land as well as the genocide forced
155assimilation ethnic cleansing approached upon and or stolen lands and the forced removal of indigenous peoples land acknowledgment statements acknowledge the indigenous peoples of the land being occupied and whom the land belongs to that hold a unique connection to the land associated with traditional knowledge languages cultural practices and oral traditions built over many generations and passed down to future generations in many cases the land being acknowledged no longer is in possession of the indigenous peoples and is used as a first step in initiating the reconciliation and living celebration of the resilience of indigenous peoples when in developing a land acknowledgement we used both the native governing centers land acknowledgement guide and beyond land acknowledgement guide as well as individuals research and knowledge bases built over time and with a focus on the land the salamanca city
156school district stands on there are many parts to a land acknowledgement first knowing and including the indigenous peoples to whom the land belongs to next involves including a brief and accurate history of the land and related treaties because salamanca schools is an educational institution it was also important to include the forced assimilation of seneca people and recognize the trauma that continues to impact the community and traditional educational practices among the seneca today lastly the acknowledgment includes an authentic appreciation for the cultural diversity within the community and the inclusion of other members of the hodinoshoni confederacy that attends salamanca school district the land acknowledgement that we're going to talk about tonight was developed by members of the native american curriculum team including jerry musial and gabrielle papa family school liaison brittany jimerson and was reviewed by
157members of the indigenous studies committee an accurate and appropriate land acknowledgment statement on behalf of the district works toward building an authentic relationship with the seneca nation of indians to whom the land the school district stands upon today the work the district is doing goes beyond the very basic and fundamental steps towards reconciliation and ultimately the empowerment of indigenous peoples and is something to be celebrated so what um i'm going to do is um i'll read it just so that i can you know we can because i don't know sure if you can see the screen as well as let's see here it is right here i do want to just sort of give a little bit of a rundown while we're while this is on the screen there are several different versions that the
158native american curriculum team is recommending one is a more formal and thorough land acknowledgement that is endorsed by the school board and becomes really the land acknowledgement of the school district this is then going to be taken and parsed down into grade or age appropriate land acknowledgement statements that will be read at each one of the buildings um it makes sense with this being native american heritage month that this would be something and the team has asked that this be read at the next board meeting and is perhaps even read at every single board meeting given that we state the pledge of allegiance at all of our board meetings it would make sense to then recognize the land that we are standing upon and that the district is upon which is belonging to the seneca
159nation of indians so the statement itself is about four minutes long um but again remember that that can be modified and brought down for other particular settings so the seneca or the salamanca city central school district acknowledges the homeland of the ananda the people of the great hill the seneca people who are keepers of the western door for the hodino shoni confederacy and whose ancestral and modern day land and water salamanca school district now stands this truth is told by the words spoken by the george washington belt and the two row two row wampum and codified by the 1794 cannondale treaty the 1794 treaty was signed by timothy pickering as a representative for george washington and ratified by the u.s senate as the supreme law of the land we are mindful of our geographic proximity
160to thomas indian school a boarding school for native american children operated on the cataractis reservation of the seneca nation in irving new york from 1857 to 1957 we also acknowledged that seneca children were also removed from their homes and sent to tunisia indian boarding school in quaker new york and carlisle indian industrial school in carlisle pennsylvania which were boarding schools off territory these boarding schools implemented the federal indian policy of forced assimilation which included the prohibition and punishment for using seneca language and forsaken cultural expression we recognize this century-long trauma and cultural genocide continues to reverberate within the seneca and other podino shoni communities we send love and acknowledgement to the survivors that reside in our community today we acknowledge that one-third of this territory was flooded by the construction of kinzua dam despite and
161in opposition to the 1794 canandaigua treaty we recognized this forcibly removed seneca families from their homes and pushed them into salamanca city central school district we offer care and support for their children and grandchildren we acknowledge we are standing on the seneca territory of ohio in an area called oneeddago meaning place of the hemlocks further we acknowledge that this city and school district exists through the goodwill of the seneca nation of indians and was reaffirmed by the u.s congressional acts of february 19 1875 and september 30 1890 that authorized the seneca nation of new york indians to lease lands within the cataracts and allegheny reservations salamanca city school district endorses the united nations declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples and strive to surpass each of the articles we wish to strongly state our commitment
162to teaching the history culture and language of the ananda watka and beyond in a framework that acknowledges settlers colonialism and its consequences to educating all of our students to understand the foundational nature and ongoing existence of settler colonialism as a social political formation and system of thought mindful of these histories we work toward understanding acknowledgement and ultimately reconciliation the sale omega city central school district acknowledges and greatly values the diverse community members from indigenous nations their spiritual and physical relationship to this environment their rights their resilience their sovereignty and their heritage we also acknowledge other members of the hodino shoni confederacy including the tuscarora oneida cayuga onondaga and mohawk that have a connection and presence here we stand with all indigenous peoples and their staunch resolve to remain connected to this land while we cannot
163undo what has been done it is the goal of the salamanca city central school district to make improvements that will benefit the next seven generations of indigenous students so as i said that is a collaborative effort between many of our educators and consultants in the district they are presenting this essentially to the school board and would look i anticipate for adoption as the district's land acknowledgement statement i'll jump in first mark way to redeem yourself um i'm serious that's not a joke one thing i would suggest is that you send this over to tribal council for their review and their acknowledgement and quite frankly their blessing um this is this is a very important issue and it needs to be reviewed by seneca people before i mean the seneca government before this goes into um
164action um personally i think some of the things could be changed in there referencing seneca people instead of seneca nation of indians the land belongs to the people seneca nation of indians as the uh white man government corporation that they assigned us it's not who we are seneca people are probably more accurate that's just my thoughts but i would recommend this go over to tribal council and wait for their blessing well i appreciate this this is quite frankly honest i mean awesome it's it's pretty good i agree i agree with carrie you know it really does need the the blessing of counsel and in the executives and uh you know it should be read at the board meetings i mean is my my thought i i think it's important and that you know we do
165reside on the reservation and uh we need to make sure that everybody understands it and respects it so that's that's my two cents very good so i will um have the uh the teacher the group and you know we agreed and decided that this was something that needed to get done i can't take much credit of any for all of the work there was an awful lot of work that went into this but um i will have those individuals present that or figure out the process to get that appropriately presented to the senate commission and the council and uh make sure that we can get moving forward with that just as a side note uh we do have a meeting i think it's next week the 16th i think that's uh i'm not even sure
166i think it's next thursday with president page uh so you know that mark that might be a good thing that we can put on that agenda um for that joint salamanca school district uh seneca nation and city uh government um i i i would personally like to acknowledge the the work of probably dozens of people and and students and and staff members who contributed to this and i would hope that rather than us read this at board meetings that we could do like we had done and utilize our students to to send this powerful message adults reading it is is really a tremendous progress point for the district but i think anytime we put students as the voice of our district it tells people that we are serious and that we mean business i'm awfully
167proud awfully proud of the staff that uh worked together to put this and i i'm thinking you know reflectively back 11 years ago that this wouldn't have happened and it really shows the relationship that we forged both with the seneca nation with our staff and the seneca people and kerry i think your comments are really spot on about seneca nation of indians and i recall a conversation not too long ago before matt hagels became president up at the administrative building where the conversation was we really don't want to refer us the district referring to the seneca as the senka nation of indians and we've kind of dropped that vernacular in almost every instance this is something that the district and our community can be proud of and um i think this is a really a
168job well done yeah i agree um i wanted to share something with you guys since you brought this up um a good friend of mine don colbert her grandmother passed just this past week she shared a story on facebook and it kind of uh drives home a little bit about what we're talking about and i was going to share this with you guys some of you may have seen it some of you may not but i'm just going to read the first paragraph she says her grandmother virginia strasser she passed um distant relative of mine coincidentally um i want to share a story when the kinzua dam was coming through our community in the 1950s and 60s it brought immense trauma the stories of everybody's home being burned to the ground my mom came home
169from school one day and her home was gone others hurried to grab what they could from their home and stood and watched them be burned down the smoke cloud that covered the sky and the smell of death as our ancestors bodies were dug up from the cemeteries to be moved my aunt myra talked about having to identify her father and sister's remains she knew her father because she recognized his belt buckle and when they opened her sister's casket her dress disintegrated when the air hit it my mom has spoke of the smell in the air during that time which reminds me of the smell described on 911 in new york city as a young child they made them put their heads down on their desk and not talk about it they had to pretend nothing
170was happening i see her in the film land of our ancestors in kindergarten standing with her hand on her heart saying the pledge of allegiance to a country that was doing this to our community this was in selameka city central school less than 60 years ago this isn't something that happened a long time ago and my family has carried this trauma for years since that's the first paragraph of wishing rule it goes on to more personal about her family and other things but it's so poignant what are we talking about this type of stuff thank you for sharing that carrie i wanted to echo a lot of the sentiments that were saying said by carrie and teresa i'm glad that this will be going forward to the seneca nation for their review as well and
171you know i hope that this brings forward more conversation and even those uncomfortable conversations and you know my father he won't read this until i read it to him he doesn't get online or anything but uh he'll be he'll be touched by by this land acknowledgement because he's a he's a man that made it through that whole kinzua removal part and he went away to the army and when he came home he didn't know where his home was um it was burned so this is going to spark a whole lot of conversations some good some overdue some not so good but i think this is a step in the direction that's uh it's gonna help help repair some people thank you okay wow it mark it's going to be tough for me to top that
172with my two things that are seemingly completely inconsequential at this point in time um the the first one is just to confirm with the board members that our discussions with the city of salamanca and the library board have officially ended uh the library board has informed us that they do not want to partner with the school district and give up control or authority of anything not that we were really looking for control or authority but i just wanted the board to officially know that the library board has somewhat graciously said thank you but no thanks so it doesn't mean that there can't be future conversations so the library board and the city can you know continue to do the work that they've done for the community and will be here ready willing and able to
173assist if a later date uh does come so i just wanted to officially kind of bring closure to that i do want to know that karen just sent a message that she has to um [Music] bow out so i appreciate that and i'll follow up with karen and thank her the last piece which is kind of interesting uh and kerry i think you'll appreciate this um so we received a call late yesterday i did probably around 10 o'clock at night at home from section 6 and they long story short they have the new york state cross country championships and their carrier contractor for coach buses has bailed on them and they've also bailed on the new york state girls swim sectionals in ithaca next week in at the cornell ithaca campus so they're asking us
174and i did agree because we do have a policy about renting out our vehicles so assuming that we can get bus drivers uh the section has asked and we'll be sending a formal document asking to rent our coach buses so zipping down uh probably route 28 to binghamton on friday and then returning on saturday will be our two coach buses with students from every other district in western new york so um i did take the liberty of of uh asking bob finch to make sure that we could post that and actually have drivers to do that friday morning and then returning saturday it doesn't conflict with any scheduled athletic or recreational activity that we have scheduled so i just wanted to kind of let you know that um cell make is bailing out section six
175um i did make a notation i won't acknowledge it on the board meeting about what happens after this with our expectations for the section um but i can fill you in on those private conversations but i did just want to alert you to that in case you're driving down over to binghamton or in ithaca next weekend and you see our buses transporting other kids they'll be so jealous it's like drop mic drop moment so you know yeah and and i do think that part of that is you know we talk about often about being good neighbors to people we've had other requests for other athletic teams to use their fields as their fields were flooded and unplayable i think every time we extend our district out a little bit more i think we represent our
176district our our students our staff our community uh with exceptionally uh high standards i i think people do take notice of that so that brought great joy to me last night okay um we do have one other issue to talk about we can excuse mark and kristen and and then i'll turn it over to theresa unless there's something else for the board members while kristen and mark are still here i'm good okay mark and kristen thank you thank you have a great night