SU Board Meeting - August 22nd, 2022

001hello everyone i am amy mcmullen i'm the chair of the windsor southeast supervisory union board we have a regularly scheduled meeting this evening beginning at 6 30 and we are starting at 6 32. i want to welcome everyone thanks and enjoy the little bit of rain that we're getting it's great um let's see are there any changes or additions to the agenda is this the where we talk about the correspondence no i'd like to do it i'd like to make a change to the agenda okay oh well um uh i dropped the ball on a few aspects of the hiring and employment policy and i'd like to just push that discussion off to the next meeting okay sorry ben it's my fault i apologize um you're good it's all right um and then does that

002discussion about uh how to manage correspondence through emails from community does that go under um you can have that or discussion about it yeah we'll um we'll swap that for the hiring employee are there any other changes or additions uh my my question was about whether or not we were going to add school start time you know drop off to this meeting or christine's letter to me said that some schools had it covered or if we wanted to bring this up just in the scotty school board meeting does it affect everyone or is it mostly so it depends on your your district and your school whether or not you have the staffing to provide some child care coverage prior to the school day starting so early early drop off and it and i think in

003some schools they do that that's a really important part of um what their town has determined we could why don't we hold off i mean i think and have that on the uh [Music] but you know my my definition i just just want to clarify my concern my concern is not having an early drop-off period but having the drop-off period early enough so that students can have breakfast not in the classroom at eight and so that and students also have time to do the transition and to be able to be in the room transitioned ready to start a date so that's my big concern i mean granted the parental drop-off at an early date is is a convenience issue as well and it's a hassle for parents but my concern really is about having the

004students be able to have access to the building early enough to eat breakfast transition and then get into the classroom and to be able to start the day and i mean the teachers are contract from 7 45 and it really i mean students should have that 15 minutes to be able to transition to be in the classroom getting their stuff undone and stuff like that that's my concern my concern is not having the opportunity to have like a seven o'clock drop off okay yeah so so as it is now i think i think correct me if i'm wrong all schools participate in breakfast after the bell which is getting breakfast after the bell starts feel sorry kind of uh contradictory to what you're saying i think they do at this point go down kids get

005kids kids get dropped off between 7 50 and 8 with school starting at 8. and and i'm only speaking for heartland now because i haven't been in the other schools first thing in the morning but once kids get there the older kids sometimes come down right away but the younger kids usually it's a classroom leadership role they go down and get the breakfast for the kids and come back and bring them to the classroom um and then they typically eat during their morning meeting or during their morning work time right i think it's great to be able to have breakfast during the build but at the same time that's not an ideal situation so and i i am more than happy to discuss this during the public participation as well but you know my issue

006is that yeah my issue is my issue it's i bill yes it can be on the agenda for the amount of scuttling and then at the september meeting for the supervisory union okay um christine i i just want to clarify whether or not you misspoke or not but i heard you say that drop off at some schools is 7 15. no seven if i did i didn't mean to okay i know that i know that some schools were trying to see if they had staffing available to drop off i think it was 7 40 instead of 7.50 so it was a 10 minute um 10 minutes earlier and and it's really about finding coverage for where those kids are and who's supervising them yeah yeah okay thank you amy and christine welcome okay um i

007think we're going to move on from the changes and additions to the agenda i will take a motion to approve the minutes from july 25th so moved elizabeth burroughs is there a second second nancy okay thank you nancy thank you elizabeth are there any changes additions clarifications corrections that need to be made to the minutes from july 25th hearing none um i will start with the online anne marie i didn't care about elizabeth hi jamie hi mark i nancy i rebecca hi nikki and oh i already called this one right so they are approved and we are now moving on to public participation on items not related to the agenda amendment and bill your hand is raised yes it is um does anybody know what the bus route is in um it got sent out

008today they just got sent out today okay thank you so anyone who is watching this meeting either tonight or in the future um it is july 22nd and the bus route schedule got sent out highest [Laughter] [Music] i'm sorry for that um are there any other um questions announcements yeah i do have another one that the bus route gets sent out to whom parents well i i don't know i i i received it i don't know whether it was as a parent i think it was as a parent i received it because i uh told them i was taking the bus um so maybe you need to let them know forward it to you bill thank you elizabeth i think that's just mountainous county which is it's yeah and and it should be on the

009website once it's final it goes on the website but it is you got to dig a little bit to get there so rebecca your hand is raised um i just wanted to make an announcement again next wednesday which i know is the first day of school between four and seven pm the town of windsor with other mental health facilities will be providing an informational session on drugs and drugs drug overdoses it will be on the green um it'll be from four to seven pm um and that's next wednesday in windsor great thank you rebecca and not hearing anything more we will move on to the administrative report thank you oh i didn't mean to do that i had to hit this one slideshow all right okay so katie's going to start us off tonight with

010some positive good news all right so we thought we'd share a couple of pictures from summer academy the folks you see sitting down at the cooking table that was the whole pre-k crew that came to summer academy we had quite a full group um and then the other students or the older students from the sixth or eighth grade classroom we had a full picnic um craig payne an amazing beast for all of us it was great and the weather held off and we hung out outside parents came for popsicles our goal for next year is maybe to do we peaked up from what we did last year to this picnic that next year maybe we'll also include parents so that was our on our wish list afterwards um and we had about 30 families show

011up which is great um and now we averaged um 80 students a day we had 100 students enrolled when all the dust settled of who was really really coming who wasn't um and which ended up being a perfect number for the staff we ended up having we had 33 staff and a few volunteers in the pre-k through 8th grade and representing each district so we had a little bit different than last year teaching staff all general teaching staff from all three districts represented and it was fun um we partly knew sometimes everybody was in the building because everybody just ran itself it was a it was a great summer transportation worked out even the one day the weather school bus broke down and we had to figure out how to get all the kids home

012everyone's flexible and super helpful so looking forward to next year again yeah okay um here are the hiring updates we are still uh down a few staff members you may have read the article valley news today we're not alone in our staffing shortage but we are still um we're still down to a couple support staff members in heartland one in weathersdale um in the mount of scotty school district we're down two uh special ed teachers and that is not for lack of trying to hire katie's really working on it um some support staff members we did not end up finding uh an additional fourth grade teacher for that bubble class so those two fourth grades will be a little bit larger around 22 or 23 students in each grade in each classroom six to eight

013teacher we were not able to hire but they um colleen has worked out a plan um for intervention it really impacts some of the intervention we were planning what what does what does that mean a six to eight teacher a middle school teacher they're just a general teacher or uh yeah and colleen can speak to it it was it was going to be um a teacher that it allowed the flexibility for some of the um time during a teacher's day for them to provide intervention and and um i mean we've worked through some things where there'll be some of that but not as much as we'd hoped before and colleen is here so colleen if you um if i didn't do that justice feel free to no you're correct i just wanted to say um

014it also was due to licensing because many of our generalist um teachers in elementary school have a license that goes up to sixth grade and our seven and eight teachers have a different license so it was also to accommodate bringing on our sixth graders into the six seven eight team um but we have enough teachers with the certifications and the licenses in sixth seventh and eighth to make it work as christine said it just leaves us with a few less intervention blocks that we were hoping for but we're going to um be very creative in our team approach with our certified teachers on the team supporting and teaming with each other and doing some of the intervention in the regular day it does it does help you to think outside of the box when you're

015faced with these kinds of situations um the health teacher we have not been able to hire i talked to kate ryan today or they've adjusted the high school schedule in the hopes that we'll be able to still find someone so moved health for high school which is a requirement to trimester two for the hope that we're gonna find somebody so if you know anybody send them our way um the french teacher we have not been able to fill we're still down a title one interventionist and the high school counselors is is pretty um critical that we find somebody and we haven't yet the middle school as you heard was a want we have one so we have two counselors at the windsor school full-time maury mulligan she'll focus on elementary just vivian will be middle

016through high school and then the counselor that was hired at albert bridge will come over one day to try to help fill the hole um at winter did i get that right yes i'm sorry rebecca you have a question i do thanks amy um christine when you talk about the health teacher um i don't know how if it's even possible but is that something that maybe um you can have a conversation with someone at manuscuttany i i know that there are um um requirements um but i also know that many times the state um will make exceptions when when there is critical shortage or when it's not easy to access teachers so is that you know something that the principals have even thought about i um at this time i don't know i i hadn't

017thought of that only probably because we think about the licensure required um and you're you're speaking about a health professional rebecca am i correct on that somebody that works in the hospital yeah i well because i know that they also um have um they also offer professional development and teach it um to a lot of the staff in the hospital so yeah i'm thinking about what is you know is that something that you can work with with the hospital i i'm not sure i'm just throwing that out that's a great idea we'll take any ideas because we are down so yeah we can reach out to mata scottny and ask about that um i think most uh pe teachers coming out of out of programs now are certified to teach health as well so you

018know anyone that's a licensed pe teacher so it tends to be a dual certification now or endorsement um we're still down to mental health clinicians although katie might have won yes and uh jim reports we're still down two part-time maintenance staff numbers so we filled one of those from last time i have a quest for a cop an additional comment about the uh counselors i i was going to say the very same thing as rebecca actually i wondered whether there was a way to um ask whether like mountainous got any professional partnership might have uh ideas about how to as a stock gap yeah um provide support yeah we can reach out we have some connections there see if they have any people who can't fail as a permanent thing but yeah intro yeah okay

019um so just um in case you didn't know we're opening schools very similar excited so we've had uh welcome back letters have gone out to staff to families our new teacher day is this coming wednesday we have around 30 i think that we're expecting on new teacher day is that about right okay youtube i don't know somewhere on that ballpark um and then the teachers have the um prep day is thursday so they have that day to work in their rooms katie and i are going to meet with the new support staff members on that day for uh to welcome them and and show them a couple of things and then we're going to send them off to buildings so that they have time to meet with their uh case managers and classroom teachers that

020was a big shift in the contract um a big hole that we've tried to fill giving them some time to talk about their kids before they are welcome them into the browser so that's um that is something we're pretty pretty happy about um and i know that the staff will feel that way too so we're welcoming everybody back on the 26th and then um what does lim stand for leader in me oh thank you so we'll have our building base days and our leader in me trainings um on monday and tuesday of next week and then the students will come on the 31st we're very excited and we'll talk a little bit more about leader and me in a minute so bring you up to speed on where we're at oh we're gonna do that

021now um so you heard a little bit about leader in me last year i know the consultants came and did a little bit of professional development with the board we feel that leader in me as a framework for implementing the goals in our strategic plan through a common language shared paradigms and accountability so at the beginning of the month we had our district design meetings with our district level teams actually that our coach came and met with the administrative team first and then had a day in heartland a day in weathersfield and a day in windsor and albert bridge joined the elementary meeting with the windsor staff here at windsor so we did some planning around core 1 implementation and this may not be a surprise to some of you but the core one implementation

022was tough last year um due to lots of factors copen being a big one just the staff were can you remind us what core one is yes poor one is learning about the the paradigms what they are and how we're trying to shift them and for one teaches the seven habits um so we get into being proactive and um what are the seven habits so the seven habits are are habits that are really good things to practice to be a successful human being so uh we can never name them off it's like being happy first things first seek first to understand and be understood so just really kind of common sense characteristics of people right that you that we we want to instill in our children so they'll be successful in life and the seven

023habits are they're not the seven habits of highly successful people they're higher they're seven habits of highly effective people or seven habits of happy kids for the for the younger grades so it is it is based on steven covey's work um and then they brought it into there was a teacher that saw the power of the seven habits and she brought it into the school and then franklin covey joined i think it was cubby actually joined in and then the franklin covey merged and um they put in student language and so the whole core one really is about theater and uh developing the habits so can i can i just dig a little deeper here for sure yeah uh how does that look for um i mean are all students encouraged to to develop these

024habits so the habits the way that it's been done the staff first learn about the habits and how they can embody them and then the students are taught the habits and that's core two the students are taught the habits in core one okay and and and they're also some of the other focuses in core one and it's really around student empowerment um that's the goal so they're taught about leadership roles so which is really something we already do in schools we call them classroom jobs right now but but but through the leader in me framework they're titled leadership roles and the students actually brainstorm what those might be in a classroom and they come up with their class mission statement so they work the students work together to come up with the mission of their

025class and how they're going to implement that so it really is a framework to help shift empowerment to the students but it's a framework that has a common set of um a common language and then there's some accountability measures built in okay now i have the three i have the seven i found it oh you did yes begins with be proactive you're in charge um begin with the end in mind as in have a plan put first things first as in work first then play [Laughter] think win-win as in everyone can win seek first to understand then to be understood listen before you talk synergize together is better and finally sharpen the sound balance feels best thank you you should be able to recite them what was that last one i have three follow-up questions

026real quick um what was the last one sharpen the saw in the saw balance feels best so it's a it's a balancing your you know working taking care of yourself okay that kind of taking care of your work life yeah work life balance yeah uh here are some questions okay the first question is uh what does this look felt look like for neurodivergent students um you mean in learning the habits or in trying to practice the habits in well okay let me back up okay first you said that uh it i'm not first of all i'm not trying to litigate anything here i don't mean to sound like i'm cross-examining you i apologize for that but uh you you said that um it's in part uh to to develop a common language so does everybody

027have to use words like synergize or the kids are taught but there are other words that mean the same thing and it's really about the practice and the and the shifting of the paradigms which angie's going to get into in a little bit um and you know it's it's a belief it's a set of beliefs so everybody can be a leader everybody's got genius right everybody contribute in some way um so does that mindset like when you are dealing in the classroom with neuro neuro sorry divergent favorite thinkers thinkers uh do the teachers and other people adjust their mindset about the students um as they're trying to encourage these behaviors and if so what does that look like sure i happen to see some initial lessons with a special educator and some students last year

028looking at i don't remember which habit they were talking about but it was something they integrated into their morning meeting and their curriculum and i think what you're asking is part of the what's developmentally appropriate for certain individuals what are we doing to modify accommodate using different words like synergize might be too abstract for some and you need a different word and and i think that that's people are doing that i think that that's from the lessons i've seen from the way kids are talking about it and then plus pieces that are a lot about action and how we're doing things i think it's like any other curriculum or approach or whatever we want to call it that's meeting students where they're at and well i guess that was one of my one of my

029questions is like if you're trying to develop a leader in every single student how do you accommodate the kind of leadership quality for students who really don't naturally have the ability to grow that on their own developing their independence first and then later and that where i think of a few kiddos coming to mind where the idea of them being a leader might not be something that others may think of yet but is there um and it's developed i see one of the major steps is developing their independence and therefore then they can get to that next level so in a little tiny i mean it's it's little things it doesn't have to be big giant things right they're leading in um and again in the classroom of doing something and showing something to somebody

030else is leadership so i think that that's how we measure that for each student will be very very different again i'm not asking from a place of skepticism i know ignorant so um no we want to be clear and transparent about it some questions are good are these linked to uh the transferable skills standards there they are and in a minute we're going to show you a slide that shows you a little bit of that [Laughter] okay i should take it offline is there a person that i can ask more questions of uh yeah angie's our lead leader in may lead with our consultant bar i'd be happy to i bet you can get right into the leader in me website which has some wonderful resources um they there's trainings on there and it's like

031from video to text like a whole variety of resources there that i could point you toward that would help you to understand it well i don't want to just to clarify i don't want to be trained in leader in me unless we decided that as a board we were gonna right but it would give you an overview so that you could understand what we're what we're doing i just when i when i hear um sharpen the saw which is for work-life balance yes um it doesn't connect forward besides it is the hardest one yeah the words don't to me do not they don't believe embody what sharpen the saw is and i've i struggled with that one and i've been familiar with the seven habits for 20 years that sharpen the song just doesn't resonate

032if there's something about that language but it's when someone explained it to me as being about self-care and work-life balance i was like oh why didn't they just say that yeah because i'm not taking issue with that i'm just trying to picture when that's kids um trying to understand it it's trying to understand it and and uh without taking advantage of it yeah um so so here is more definition i didn't scroll all the way down the page i'm really bad okay so balance feels best i take care of my body by eating right exercising and getting sleep i spend time with family and friends i learn in lots of ways and lots of places not just at school i find meaningful ways to help others thank you that's what that means balance sharpen this

033up sharpen your life cookies differently [Laughter] yeah we dove questions you know um and i don't i don't want to yeah but quickly um heartland i've just realized that heartland is ahead of everyone else in the leader in me because heartland started leader i mean like three years started exploring and we started to try to implement some of the habits on our own without yeah yeah um i borrowed a book um from heartland um that it was just really helpful and so to me having read that book i don't find the website is helpful um having read the book that i think they're using in the classrooms a little bit yeah um was just really helpful so is that the highly effective teens one uh no it was the kid one it was the happy

034kids yeah happy kids okay that's the level on that yeah i think yeah yeah seven habits yeah so maybe you can borrow one yeah we have plenty of copies um so going back to uh you had a hard time implementing core one last year as you might imagine yeah so that was at the staff level and at the student level yes okay in some schools so as nikki said some schools are a little ahead of other schools in the implementation of core one and they're gonna do a kind of a reset of four one and and some one one to two schools are are ready to move forward with with core two and they'll be trained in court two and and four two is about the um achieving growth through the four disciplines of execution

035which are i listed them there discipline one is focusing on the wildly important so what are the goals and it's x y by one so they're measurable and um clear based on data so that is uh something that's that we're going to talk about a little bit more what those are going to look like um then you're going to act on lead measures and those lead measures are going to lead you to fulfilling those goals you're going to keep a compelling score scoreboard which just means you're going to keep track of how you're doing and then you're going to maintain a cadence of accountability which is um being accountable for the work that we're doing so we're going to go into it just a little bit just briefly um yeah oh yeah question yeah absolutely

036sorry rebecca okay that's okay thank you i um well it was really interesting listening to the conversation in the last few minutes one because um there were lots of questions by school board member and also um it it really raised the point um well if if if if we're trying to figure out exactly um these habits okay um our others also trying to figu figure this out so you're trying to create through the leader in me a language that everyone is hopefully will um embrace um and um and and so one is i i just wonder how are you going about that besides doing it and i heard katie speak to um observing and teachers that were doing a really fine job which i believe but how do you go about uh making sure that

037all of the kids in the school and which is what elizabeth was asking um is aware that this is happening i and i and i had some questions i said so we are you printing anything on bulletin boards is there anything in the hallways um um yes yeah where is this information found and also how's about parents it would be wonderful is it access accessible to parents so that when their children are coming home and talking about this leader in me framework um parents can go to a place and find out a little bit more about it and and and have a conversation with their with their children and so i i'm just wondering it sounds like some schools have already gone through the process and seem to be uh not fluent but comfortable to

038a degree can we learn from their process what um they did to um as we move forward so that that's just some of my comments and and thoughts they're great rebecca and yes um one of the teams and and how it's implemented in schools is through it's called the lighthouse team so it's made up of staff members each school has two lighthouse coordinators or they're supposed to do not all schools do not scotty alvarez has one because they're a little bit smaller um and then they're action team members and they meet and that's built into there after at the end of the day meeting time they meet twice a month it's called the lighthouse team and they plan there are different teams there's one team focused on staff learning and student learning so making sure

039the staff are like we're talking about this regularly at our staff meetings and doing a little bit of education as the year goes along and how we're going to teach our students as well and then there are um two teams one is about uh they're the culture teams one is about the environment and their job is to make sure we are communicating potential worth of potential all students all over the place so that is one team's job essentially christine if you want to flip forward two slides you're going to let me get there hold on framework is right there two slides so i'm on the wrong tab so um there is the framework the culture team creating a leadership environment and then sharing leadership and so eventually uh we're all going to get there there'll

040be student leadership lighthouse teams helping to make decisions in the building and and representing the students in terms of decision making when we get to 4-2 then academics comes into play and that's where those goals come into um coming to the the discussion and what we're doing in our schools does that answer your question rebecca are your questions uh no i didn't answer the family one um so that is a goal of the administrative team to really implement and talk about what we're doing in terms of leader me in our newsletters and um on our website so that the community also has a deep understanding yes thank you yeah i'm sorry it's okay here is a good example of my quest my question about divergent learners or neurodivergent learners it's also my same sort of

041the struggle i have with um project-based learning and that is the student-led conferences um because i i don't know that student-led conferences work for all students yeah just as project-based learning doesn't necessarily work for all students and it can be really torturous for okay and that's really about um knowing our kids and being able to differentiate what they need what their needs are meet their needs so absolutely that um i mean the goal is to empower the students right so that they're setting goals they're reporting out on how they're doing in a student-led conference but there's always going to be kids that need something different so right that's what we're about is that it really makes you uncomfortable yeah you mentioned the adult workplace when you have employees working together as a group some are

042going to do better than others and some as we all know there will be more work done and less work done and some people getting really really frustrated and others just really achieving yeah and but also you know that's an example where uh somebody who is on the spectrum for example just as an example may be uh so completely turned off by a group project that they're just totally disengaged and what is the value in that what what value for that student other than uh uh shutting them down and possibly um shutting down okay so it would it would seem to me since we are looking at differentiating learning and teaching styles and how kids are learning that if we were to have that situation of a student who is just so totally just shuts

043down in a group situation then that person would be accommodated to work on their own project with adult assistance when and if needed ideally ideally that would be the goal i mean ideally this is all ideally um project-based learning is all ideal you know that that is what we're working towards um and um i just don't want i just want to assure i guess i just want reassurance that um that uh student-led conference is not the evidence that a student-led conference is not the evidence of uh of uh achievement of leadership skills or of uh of uh empowerment no it's it's one piece to a larger puzzle that might not work for some kids for some kids it might be just fine and they can grow their skills in leading their own learning and reporting

044on how they do it but there's never um a mold that all kids have to fit into okay there's just not there used to be a mold yeah and it was called rose right yeah and everyone taking a test and if you failed that test you failed so you know we're we're moving away from that and again ideal versus extremely non-ideal so i appreciate you all and i again i'm not i'm not coming from a place of skepticism i'm just asking yeah ask me questions sorry rebecca rebecca your hand is raised and then i i think bill's hand was raised before me i was going to input educationally and i don't think i need to okay i'll i'll jump in um i i do want to say that um i think that it it would

045be in our interest to um to look at the fact that um we are seeing more students that are on the spectrum um and that um we as schools should really begin to you know embrace not only look at differentiated instruction but really look at um that is probably going to be extremely important moving forward um in in terms of um [Music] most our students being successful um and and it's a wonderful opportunity if we look at it now and and just start and which i know already many teachers already do but i'm starting looking at it as something to um to continue to talk about and continue to look and look at different ways of implementing that thank you um i just i wanted to take a step backwards um to address some of

046what elizabeth was talking about i think one of the cool things about leader and me um while i'm not like all in i think that one of the cool things is that the teachers have to understand it first and a lot of the topics are all about the understanding the people that you're working with and like learning how to work with them and so i think in that aspect teachers learning this and having to embody it is helping with all that differentiation and seeking to understand people first before they preach at them and you know thinking win-win with everybody like all of these little pieces i think as they start to get ingrained start to improve um the way that teachers can differentiate with kids instead of moving from the model of having kids and

047girls not just having the kids learn this but the adults learn it first it helps a lot and then and i speak from knowledge of like the adults the teachers in heartland that did really did dive in i saw the out problem in the way that the kids the dynamic classroom it's a cultural shift it's a yeah it's a cultural shift from a very traditional education which amy was referring to to a modern education which is what we're trying to create so it is shifting the culture and it's shifting it's shifting the paradigms of the adults as well which is which is good i mean there's no no disputing that believe me in many ways it feels like when acts 77 or personalized learning was passed said boom this is going to happen and now

04810 years later still working on it there was so much pushback when act 77 was like what is this i'm not gonna do it and kids say that's never gonna work and um and so there had to be some building up and we're still building um you know it was a realization that'll not quite ready and so we're building yeah we're still working on it and some some districts some areas are a little bit further ahead and we can learn from them and others you know we're all learning from each other and i like leader in me i like it yeah and none of us so far have yeah we haven't perfected and we haven't failed miserably no we're gonna be challenged but i'm loving okay i'm going to go back to the slide it's

049okay and she's going to talk about what you get and a little bit about what we've accomplished so far um the cd get cycle is the foundation for leader in me and it's based on what these these three ideas and how they work together and it starts with your paradigm your belief system the things that you believe to be true and then you look for evidence in your environment that those are true so um in the the c to get cycle and leader in me starts with the paradigms and on the next slide we'll talk about that then we we actually go backward in order to figure out what we're going to do in order to shift our paradigm so what you believe impacts what you do how you behave the things that you say

050the things that you do the things that you um the the things that you create and the result of that is what you get so what you believe impacts what you do because we all do things based on a belief that we have and then the results that we get reinforce that paradigm reinforce that belief so if we go to the next slide you'll see that um this slide is the framework the leader in me framework and at the top are our core paradigms our core beliefs so we are moving in the paradigm of leadership from this um idea that leadership is for the few two leadership is for everyone everyone can be a leader and then the paradigm of potential is that not from we're going from not everybody can do this to everyone

051has genius and then the paradigm of change is that to impose um to improve schools the system needs to change first not that but change starts with me so we are empowering each of our learners to to believe that they are the change they can be the change and then the paradigm of motivation not direct and control student learning but empower students to lead their own learning and then the paradigm of education is not educators focused solely on academic achievement but educators and families partner together to develop the whole person so when we cho when we looked at leader in the it checked all the boxes of all the things that we were trying to accomplish with our strategic plan and the beautiful thing about this particular diagram is the first two paradigms leadership and

052potential go into the action step of leadership the things that we do to reinforce leadership and then potential change and motivation create culture and then lastly the paradigm of education and motivation are addressed in the academics portion when we get to core three which is next year we will be focusing more on academics student-led conferences and that sort of thing and i believe that what we will see is students coming to so at heartland we've done student-led conferences for years and years and they began from this idea that we wanted students to be empowered to show what they're learning to show what they're learning and to um to really be able to explain what they're learning and understand why they were you know being able to say i'm i'm performing this way this is what

053i'm not understanding this is what i'm understanding in order to excite and invest them in their learning so that's next year so our goal this year is to our leader uh leader in the core two is starting at heartland leader um this fall and leader in me core ii heartland and weathersfield maybe a little bit you're going to hear us talking about our wildly important goals as a system so the adults in the system are moving toward core ii which is wildly important goals goal setting and then in january the train our trainer is coming back and she's going to be working with weathersfield and um [Music] manas gutney school district both schools um on core two which is establishing um wigs with kids and so at heartland the kids will be setting their own

054goals and then in the um spring we should be seeing kids setting goals across the supervisory union so for us our success which we're going to talk about as we move forward oops i'm hitting my forward button as if i am connected to the thing so um so we this is just we have a few slides to show you of the work that we were doing so our coach brought us through the paradigms where we put up the paradigm not this but this so we put up the paradigm of leadership around the room on on paper and then we talked about what we had to um what we would get if we believe if we believe that leadership is for the few what is the result that that creates that belief creates the result a

055certain result and then what we um then went back to what are we doing in order to create that result so in essence we took the cycle and we work from our belief back to the result and looked at what we did when we have that belief we'd create this result so then we looked at the paradigm of leadership everyone can be a leader when we believe that what do we get what's the result we get and then um we looked back at the things that we have to be doing in order to create that result so we took the c duget cycle and we worked it backward in order to figure out what is it that we're doing to create that result so this is the ad team working then we walk through that

056same process with both teams at heartland and weathersfield and then the mountainous cutting teams and we even have we now have two high school teachers can bring johnson and um jeff baichie who are going to be leading the student team at the high school level so at the high school level leader in me is very much student driven there is a faculty component but it's very it's um it's it really is working alongside the student component so there um jeff and kim are going to be working starting with freshmen fresh actually i think a representative group of kids at a student council to start with just they wanted to just get their feet wet and figure that out so as christine said we were in various places last year due to you know the circumstances

057of last year it happened and so this year our goal is that all schools will be implementing or two by the end of june so this next slide i keep trying to that's alright okay so our wildly important goal we have two of them we have an academic goal and we and and pay careful attention to this because i'm going to be i'm going to circle this into the um continuous improvement plan which i have to talk to you guys about but these goals these wigs are in our continuous improvement plan this is our continuous improvement plan so i waited all month to get that continuous improvement plan written because i knew that by doing these goal statements our wildly important goals that we were going to be addressing we were going to be creating

058the continuous improvement plan so the this is our um wildly important goal we have an academic goal in each building an su-1 and then an academic goal in each building based on this one to achieve this and then we have a wildly important goal regarding implementation of the hearing and the teachers will be setting a wildly important goal for their classroom based on this goal and then the kids as well will be setting a goal that's so it all ties together see what we go the next time yeah that's our academic goal and that's our implementation and our implementation goal is that we will be all all in core 2 in various fashion by the end of june by by the end of the school year so with the core 2 training in january for

059weathersfield windsor and albert grade school then those students those those teachers will be equipped to work with students on developing their own wildly important goals elizabeth sorry what does mri stand for measured results assessment which is a survey that goes out to um all parents community uh students yeah students take it in third through twelve um she did put one out at the end of may or in the middle of may and may not remember that it was called i i i will register one complaint about all of this which is it seems uh really rife with um acronyms and buzzwords please don't hesitate to say we need our wildly important goal is um the way they talk about the wildly important goal is that they talk about the whirlwind and that's just life and

060that when you think about that whirlwind you think about the things that pop out of that like if you think about a tornado and then like the cow popping if you think you know like those things in order for us we're not going to stop the whirlwind it's going to happen you know it's it's coming at us and um our wildly important goal is the thing that we can hang on to it doesn't mean we aren't doing other things and it the resistance to establishing a wildly important goal is really interesting because people uh i think people think that if they're gonna focus on something like that that they can't do these other things and it's i think the wildly important goal is in service of everything else you pick the thing that you think

061is going to make the most difference for your students across the board so we have an academic important goal while important goal and then an implementation one so later when i'm talking about the continuous improvement plan i needed one we needed a safe and healthy schools goal which is we're creating safe and healthy schools with our implementation goal that all schools will be in core two but by the end of the school year this year and then we have needed an academic goal and if you are a teacher of reading you will be working on the reading goal to move our students from s-u-y we're at 56 proficient and above we're going to be working on moving to 79 so that's moving all our our students who are below proficient into the proficient so it's

062it's not that we don't want to be working on elevating all students of course we're elevating all students but we want our wildly important goal to be something that we can wrap our brain around so we focus on what is what are the things that we can do to move this just forward a little bit and this and this doesn't show that um kids will set their own targets their own goals and so our expectation is 100 of our students will make progress on their goals and that's not reflected here but now 100 of our kids that's the expectation we'll make some progress and they start all start in different places and the increments that they grow might be different over the course of the year but everybody's going to make some progress that's where

063that differentiation in that personalization of the goal setting process comes in and you will see that at heartland right away this year and at in our other buildings to the extent that our our um teachers are comfortable with it because it really is a core to that the kids setting their own goals their own wildly important goals is a core ii practice so and the great thing that we found out which we didn't even plan before doing the book study the administrative team the udl playbook and katie novak references the four disciplines of execution taken right from and while we import goals it was like we were like we must be doing it right we took it as validation yeah so that was yeah i guess validating we need to keep moving yes so rebecca

064and then elizabeth i i just wanted to make a comment um because earlier christine you said um you are going to be working on the um how do you bring the parents into this process and so um the use of acronyms sometimes just really loses parents so i as you move forward i think that's something you want to just um play i don't know how you you folks would want to um work with that but you want them to be able to not feel intimidated and and say oh okay that's that's educate educators language the other piece i thought would be a great um opportunity to um for those as you're moving from core one to core two um if you were to have because you're saying that you have students that are um are

065doing a lot of leading a lot of their their learning um in the high school level if at the end of the year um or even mid-year um can have a representative or a couple of representatives of students really speak to that what is it that they are experiencing processing and uh what is it that the processes and what is it that they're moving towards the other piece is also having the teachers who are the staff who are supposedly leading these um i would love to hear from them what their experience is and you know how is it that it's working for them um but it would help not only um a lot of parents but i'm sure would help everyone understand the process and also walk along the with the process as as you

066as your walk as you're doing this great great suggestions i wrote them down oh my god elizabeth my my request is really brief and it's not immediate but do you think at some point we could have like a matrix of how all these different things work together like i'm sure you have it in your mind if not already existed so yeah okay um like the the leader of me and the strategic plan and the continuous improvement plan and the well all the tss and all the different how they all yes yeah yes and i we took a slide out we're going to do it with the local media where the the lighthouse team had done a crosswalk of the core competencies and where those habits fit in with those so i it was in here

067but we have a poor change yeah okay um update on the equity audit so just so you know we're moving forward the administrative team met with um insight education we had our first meeting on the 11th we are in the data collection phase of the audit they are giving us until late september to upload all the data that they're going to need for the audit and then from there they will move into stakeholder surveys and then focus groups so we are on track we just wanted to let you know that the equity odd is in motion and we're looking forward to finding out what we learned from that um the next update is around the coordinator of diversity equity and inclusion speaking of acronyms say dei and diversity equity and inclusion and so just um

068just for clarity the wscsu school board charged the superintendent to hire a coordinator of diversity equity and inclusion and that is what we're working on the just for um transparency from the job description what this what this person will be doing they will be responsible for leading the district's equity and inclusion efforts and the implementation of the wscsu anti-racism and equity policies and procedures that were adopted i want to say about a year and a half ago does that sound about right so that would be the charge of the dei some of the responsibilities that are listed in the job description accelerating wsesu's advancement toward a goal of eliminating opportunity gaps and opportunity gaps are just so people are clear defined as the unequal or inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities they are not achieving

069gaps but they lead to achievement gaps opportunity gaps lead to achievement gaps another responsibility will be ensuring all district staff increase their cultural proficiency removing systemic barriers from students and families and collaborating with educational leaders and community groups to ensure safe and brief spaces within our community or our communities so that's those are the primary roles um another big piece of the role comes from our anti-racism procedures which is is outlined as follows all curriculum within all districts within the su shall be in compliance with vermont state law each um dot three or act one which is an act relating to ethnic and social equity studies standards for public schools i know that um under act one there was a a group formed they have rewritten or made a draft of the education quality standards

070that have gone to the state board for adoption maybe some edits but those are expected to be like expected to be um i think adopted by the new year that's what i've heard and then implemented and elizabeth might have more of an update um i believe that i think the act one group uh dissolves at the end of this calendar year i'm not sure about that but don't quote me on that but i'm i'm pretty sure it's sunsets and so all of that has to be done i do know that the the standards have been sent to the uh state board of education subcommittee and i think they're supposed to meet incept they're right they're on time target current on their target time i think that um state board of education is supposed to meet

071sometime very soon uh about having the subcommittee present the um back one standards and that will be um part of the role of the coordinator of diversity equity inclusion implementing those um so an update on the interview the interview committee met and we interviewed four candidates during the week of august 8th the committee unanimously moved one candidate forward i have checked references the position has been offered and we are working through the logistics of that um but i should have a name to bring to you next month yeah so exciting news um and then angie's schedule briefing yeah i i um realized that i probably should have put this on the agenda but it really isn't any different than what we've already talked about so the continuous improvement plan draft um the due date is

072coming out for the end of the month now we haven't done a continuous improvement plan for two years um and so what's the beauty of it is it's our well it's our wildly important goals those two goals and so can you link there and open it yeah this may or may not look familiar to you in terms of the if you can remember what it looked like it's just one of the many plans so it's um it reflects our strategic plan there's no grid so i think actually i think they simplified [Laughter] stakeholders are all the people that have been working on our um this summer in particular on our um administrative team and our lighthouse teams on our leader in me um work and so as we scroll down you will see reflected in

073the safe and healthy schools goal is the implementation goal and the measures which you might find interesting is the results of assessments will show growth in all areas so if they don't have a reading goal they will have a math goal so if our teachers of math and science can work together and focus on math goals as we get up to the departmentalized classet classes and our teachers of social studies and language arts can also work on the reading goal together but we really want to figure out ways for all of our um how does the pe teacher work on the math goal and how does the um how does the art teacher work on the reading goal and trying to figure out how we can really be working on those goals in little tiny

074ways even in all the things all the experiences that our kids have in school so we have that goal and then the academic achievement goal which is the reading one which i already read first we have elizabeth i know i'm sorry um uh i was wondering how this um how udl works with this or not udl that integrated studies it seems to me that all subject areas should be working on all goals that the math and science teachers should be also working on english goals and and vice versa we really are fully integrating um all of those subject areas so the um the way that we practice this this first year is one goal so we do have teachers that teach just math and and looking at the reading goal is going to it's harder

075for them to translate to their to their content area but i know exactly what you're saying because i agree with it's different though i mean science came easily yes but how how do we do that is like so we're trying to figure out the way that they can bet like what's the entry level for this goal setting process and this is like if we can make it look more like their content area i think that'll be helpful in terms of supporting the process because it's not really about the goal it's about the process and about kids identifying their own places where they're going to work to um improve their learning in an area but they're they're also getting back to that that mold of teaching you know there there were silos where a science teacher

076was here and a math teacher was here and an english teacher was here and there that they would ever meet except maybe bumping into each other in a hallway or something but you you can't just start and say you're going to do this it has to be incremental just like you can't tell a student okay you're going to avoid the class today and it's going to be great right you have to move incrementally i agree i agree however i want um [Music] the students also have to be taught about that at the same time so students shouldn't just be siloed in to thinking that english only takes place in english class because as long as they as long as the teachers teach that way then the students are going to learn that way and they're

077not going to realize that you know that your language affects all of the or you know everything affects everything it's like understanding that at a certain point in your learning you're learning to read and then you're reading to learn and a a student who is in a math class has to be able to read right so i mean that that math teacher also knows that and can help discuss the language of math because there is a way to read to learn now and and i think as opposed to a math teacher saying okay here's your assignment and instead they're they're going to be teaching them how to read them i think if we think about the goals here the implementation of leader in me and then the academic goal we're really teaching kids to look

078at something in their own behavior and and take control of that and empower them to see the connection to something they're doing to their outcome so the goal itself is probably i mean you could you could probably pick any kind of goal but to simplify it i think this is how the leader in me starts with an academic goal that's related to math or reading and then we also have the implementation goal kids would only set one goal like i believe so we'll watch and see what happens at heartland as they're doing this and and as um people across other uh teachers across csu as they embrace this um and start working with their students we'll see how that goes because i do think we have to um i think the idea of it is

079that students become goal setters and it doesn't matter what academic area they're focusing on well it's all they're going to see that i'm controlling this outcome i can set a goal i can say that this is what i'm going to do it to achieve that the things i can control my lead measures and then i'm going to track that and then i'm going to see my results so so this was there other questions yeah yeah so we really do i know i'm sorry i'm gonna so my question is how did we um get to the goal of reading professionally um and then i'm going to tell you why i'm asking this question which i think is going to be more directed at key um but my so my concern with reading proficiency is that based

080on my experience and research a lot of kids aren't really even ready to read until fourth grade and so if we've got a reading proficiency of almost 80 percent and not all kids are even ready to start reading just developmentally until fourth grade it seems to me like we can't meet this well so but it's not a proficiency goal it's a it's a reading um foundational skills goal okay so it's the foundational foundational pieces okay so it's not the no it's not the track my progress proficiency based it's the foundational yeah and we did a deep dive into the data and that was the area where we were most lacking yeah i think that's you actually so i'm really glad that i asked that question yeah about that those key pieces i just i worry

081like in the broader picture the reason i ask that question is i worry about um forcing reading down the throat of kids that are nowhere near ready in case it's just gonna turn them off and shut them down and they're gonna shut down and they're gonna act out yeah okay so this is an example that like fits so in the upper grades you're going to focus on vocabulary right and you can do whether or not you're a reader right you can still work on your vocabulary that's really helpful and i missed that word and that word is very important thank you um my question is um are you providing required not not just professional development for anyone to take are you providing required professional development for teachers so that they have a better understanding of

082how to teach this process to students there there's great research work done and and there's just great professional development work um that's available for teachers so they're just not working in the blind and and are you providing that and are you requiring it for teachers uh do you mean in in regards to goal setting or in regards to the reading foundational in regards to if you you're talking about um having a teacher try to teach um science um english in a mathematics class are you helping them get to that place where you know that they're able to to teach that because probably many of them were not taught that so we have identified what we're going to do as a like a at our level like christine and katie and i we have our goal

083of what we're going to do and then the principals are going to have their goal and then the staff are going to have their goal and then the students will have their goals and part of our goal is to figure out what's the professional learning that our staff need and then figuring out how we support the principals who will be often delivering professional learning how we need to support them in order to provide that support for their teachers who are then providing that support for their students so yes is the answer thank you all right one more slide sorry it's been very long all right just other updates i just want to mention we're doing the book study um and that is with our mtss leadership team as well uh procedures are now linked on

084the website you just have to scroll down under the policy so there are procedures in the policy there they're there i i look today to double to double check you do have to keep scrolling because it looks like there's a blank page just keep going you'll find them and then the vsva vsa annual conference at lake morris october 20th and 21st the theme of um how are our how are the students doing that is a conference that i think board members sometimes go to yeah so i'm just putting it out there it's not until october but just uh letting you know that's the date and that's the theme and then lastly larry just wants you to know if you were on the su budget committee last year he's going to be reaching out to you

085soon to set up some meeting times and that's it i'll stop sharing ask their questions [Music] we're going to move on to items for discussion first step is discussion on the bsda superintendent search and whether or not we are going to engage vermont school board association to assist in that search um are there any comments or questions before i state my opinion we did have them come speak with us yes bill i'll just be straight out and honest for a change um i have i have never been particularly impressed with uh vsba um i wasn't impressed with their presentation um i wish there might be some other options or even an internal review of applications but i it it didn't seem to me like they had a lot to offer there wasn't a lot of

086um confidence in what they did um that that's my take on it have you been on a board that is doing a superintendent search no i haven't okay well but yeah that that doesn't change my opinion though oh i know i know um i mean any search yeah i've been on boards with searches but um i've never yeah so having an organization or someone outside to be able to do all the um the betting of applicants at the very beginning um also someone to assist with the to be the moderator or a facilitator for teacher discussion for focus groups and also having an outside person being able to do all the background search information for us is going to be um highly valuable right i'm not i'm not disagreeing with that but i mean basically

087all we've looked at is i guess the only presentation we've had is from vsba and i've never been impressed with them on anything and i wasn't impressed with their what they would offer and basically what they said was well you know we participated in this and we can help that was their presentation i don't know if that's if that's the only option everyone wants i'm i'm fine but rebecca i think we talked earlier when we had this discussion about were there any other options um because i think that that came up we just didn't want to rely solely on one organization um i i don't know i don't remember if anything else came up i know the sba is something that we're familiar with um i think amy did mention in another organization that she

088has worked with and it didn't work out too well at all i i um so i i'm yeah i i know it's it's it's tough it's like rely you know just like getting one applicant for a position and then ex i'm hiring them because that's all you had but i i don't know what our options are so nikki i just googled superintendent search options yes that's good yeah and vspa is number two who's number one superintendent search services handbook and it's cabe which is cabb so they offer board members a workshop on how to do a superintendent search so it doesn't look like they actually do one i was just really surprised that bsba was the second thing when you searched that um it was having been involved in a couple of superintendent searches that

089were led by vsba they go above and beyond what their presentation was and you don't know their value until you're in the middle of it and then you say oh thank goodness we have someone and also the fact that they they know vermont law and or education law and they know a lot of the players so people who are applying people who could potentially apply they're if if someone would like to look further into other options and we can make our decision at the september meeting that is also that's an option nancy okay how much does the vermont group charge i believe it was somewhere around 8 000. rebecca i i i hear what you're saying bill but i i also would want um i i also take comfort in knowing that the folks that

090are working with us know the vermont schools know um who is what's going on are are sensitive to the laws in vermont um i i just i take comfort in that and maybe i shouldn't because um sometimes um you know looking at something different you know i'm sure will yield something different but i i'm leaning on um i'm going i'm leaning on going with vspa because they're number two as nikki just pointed out um and i don't know what else is out there another plus they know the difference between a supervisory union and a supervisory district which when we used a another service they they weren't as acquainted with how our governance works and the sba is very acquainted with all of the different governance in in the state of vermont well i just know

091of a particular search by a by a particular school district and i know the particular person that got the job and i don't particularly think that they should have hired him i mean to think that yeah i'm you're not going to change my mind but i mean there's rey in assortments i'm sure there's other companies that would do it but right i don't think they know the laws particularly well i don't think they know vermont particularly well i don't think they're particularly qualified that's just my opinion um well we can put this up for another month and well or we can we we can vote i mean i'm this is just my one this is my only one point of view and that's it um rebecca has you know as valid of a point of

092view i don't i mean so so far we've got input from one heartland member and two scotty members is there anyone else who would like to comment on potentially using vermont school board association to conduct our superintendent search or would we like to do more research and invite other organizations to give a presentation because that is also an option thank you so much already commented um i i'm just like um so i'm back on the internet and um the vspa is offering a price of eight thousand dollars um and other like the quote that i have here is there's no set fee for search terms depending on the district size and complexity the cost can be ranged from 20 000 to 150 000. um so i think to me that points to for vspa understands

093small and i i don't think i just would worry that other organizations don't understand small their cost may be through the roof i don't know i and i i i'm happy to start with and and it's also um when you go to different um again um around this state and learning size of districts and also learning that across the united states of america a small district has the same number of students as the entire state of vermont is considered as long so if you were to ask one of these other search services and say we're doing a superintendent search and they ask how many you know how big is your your your district your supervisory union and we say 1500 students they they could also just laugh us out of the room but but we

094like iron queen we are vermont we are we're a middle middle science district it's not like we're the smallest but at nikki you're right that has been afraid the school board association understands that on the other hand uh it's it's known that not all um supervisory unions use the sba to compete for searches right i mean there are many that don't so just to see burlington hiring somebody else well and uh hartford didn't use vsba and i don't i'm not sure whether woodstock used the sba um it's not searched didn't go well initially i guess i don't understand the harm in like fighting two or three other people to organizations to talk to yeah i mean i just don't i mean as an equity issue alone like you say we all thought these were guys

095were great it's still that whole idea of like we just haven't talked to anyone else and that's not how we hire anybody in our district um and so it just seems i mean i just looked up new hampshire's school board association and they do the service so you know like what else is other people what did hartford use who did woodstock use and maybe just i don't know who or when or how who can do who can do that legwork right now but um i mean a few phone calls and just maybe a quick search i'm just not understanding what the harm is in in yeah right um that's awesome so um would you beth and you bill be interested in working together and finding two or three other organizations search organizations that would be

096able to present because today was my first day of school so i don't have a lot of time and um and i also did not see the vsba presentation so i can't compare apples and oranges to begin with yeah i don't know yeah i don't mind spending some time on it but i'm supposed to work with elizabeth on something um i think that's even a higher priority yeah sorry um i guess my biggest concern is the fact that for that granted it's 8 for the vsba but they weren't particularly clear what we get for that eight thousand dollars i mean if we're looking for i mean n plus what are we looking for a service are we looking for someone to just to do background checks and gather applications are we looking for um someone

097to to to run the interviews to do the whole search i mean exactly what are we looking for i think i okay so if no one else can do it i'll figure it out but i'm not going to guarantee it's pulled together by next board meeting that's that's what my life looks like literally day one for me today so i'm not quite i can easily find out who did hartford's yeah i mean i can call up woodstock i don't have a problem doing i'm just saying i'm not sure that time constraint will work for me right who is what i will do i will look at what vsba proposes what their standard search is and then i will find two other organizations you know amy just pass on their like if you can just pass

098on to me what they can do i can make a call to woodstock and i feel like that might be enough yeah and what's well i mean you know what i can i can call both okay and that way there's only one person instead of trying to then catch up with you and so i i will do that i will call hartford so are you talking heartburn from um tom yeah it's been a that was a long time ago yeah because i was on the yeah it was back when i was i can ask my district i mean our superintendent's only been there a few years well what uh what district are you in beth i'm in rivendell interstate school district or vermont yeah but i i think we've got springfield is actively searching uh

099woodstock is searching lebanon is searching um and yeah woodstock just got a new superintendent didn't they so those are the recent ones i will call the zwork in springfield and i will call rivendell you know sherry's been there for a while yeah say that they just got involved in another search engine i would say if those organizations would be willing to present what they bring to a superintendent search and how much their their charge is and we will run that against what the sba brings and what they charge and then we'll make a decision from there and i think we can do that at the september meeting okay from my memory which is fuzzy as it is but um we were gonna get a a proposal from vsva correct we haven't gotten their proposal there

100it's oh my gosh um i believe it's on the website i mean i can ask them to give when they came to our meeting sorry i'm talking all over the place when they came to our meeting they discussed how they conduct a search i don't recall if they discussed how much they would charge but i i'm pretty sure that's on their website i can ask them to submit a proposal of all of the services that they provide when they conduct a superintendent search so that we have it all on one piece of paper our award is using pierce and jacobs okay so i will do that and that will be at our next at our september meeting and we're going to move on thank you you're welcome moving on to oh correspondence so for those

101who um might not have been here when we were talking about the change in the agenda we are moving the hiring employment policy to our september meeting so i think they'll be two items on our agenda in september that's perfect just being with that um instead of the hiring and employment policy we were going to discuss how our board is going to handle correspondence and in the past there had been an item i don't know where the item where how it evaporated but there used to be an item on all the genders called correspondence what i forgot about that yeah yeah it did and if we received any sort of correspondence it was brought up at that point for instance the recent emails that we have received so what i am proposing is that we

102reinstate that item in the agenda called correspondence and when someone sends us an email that if it is less than one page and it does not involve student or family names or involves a personnel situation then that email would be read at the meeting if it is longer than than one page then it would go as part of the record it would go as part of the record anyway but we would read it if it's less than one page if it involves a student or staff teacher etc then we would go into executive session to discuss that correspondence yes bill you are muted i'm going to speak so i'm you myself um so there has to be a section on correspondence or it doesn't have to be but if we have a section on correspondence

103then it's there if there's no correspondence then we say there is no correspondence this month um just like we used to do i i think correspondence there's there needs to be some weight on whether or not if it's worth sharing and to be honest with you is some of the correspondence is not school board related or i don't know i just that the the emails that that are received from school to school board members is school board related the person who is sending that email believes that it is school board related we read the email if it is less than one page and then we have a discussion and we say okay have you spoken to the the teacher yet you know of the situation or it could be just a question on overall school

104environment or it could be a question on our equity policy or it could be a question on equity diversity and inclusion just let's say and in that case that is a board discussion okay but we either discuss it at the board level or we send the person to the level at which they should start i yeah no yeah i i think there's a reason why we have school board meeting we have public participation i think some emails could be handled with an email and and um i i i mean this is a school board meeting it's not a public meeting and if someone does not feel strong enough to join us and discuss their issues um i i see no need to read emails during a meeting i no that that's my take rebecca had

105her hand raised and then it is elizabeth and then nikki and then mark and then colleen and nancy um i i i think that um i i think that um that it that we the school board does receive correspondence and i think that um i i don't know if if the intent of the writer um is to make it public that that was my first concern i mean do they want to make this public and if they do they have an opportunity to um to uh bring this up at at a board meeting and um and i understand correctly what we would do is we would um not necessarily address it hear it but put it down and and and come back and say you know we'll come back to this i i i'm just

106concerned i think as bill said um about becoming a um an environment where we're reading um emails which i think are important and and and valuable in terms of it's it is a presentation of someone's um thoughts and and um we want to honor that but um what's the best way to do that um and is it you know is it at the meetings or i i don't know um uh i think we should have a real process for it i really do because uh a sending a letter to the school board is making it a public document because if anybody were to submit a foia request we would cough up the document so it's a public document already um uh that's number one but number two some of these some of the i don't

107mean these some of the emails that we receive are not inviting conversation they're not uh they're not necessarily looking for a response from the board they're just saying how they feel in this document and uh so the question is whether um what what do we do with that i mean do we put make it as part of the record for the meeting yeah do we if there's a um i just would like i don't necessarily believe that we should have a an area where we um read out all of the letters but i think it would be a good idea to make them uh make them part of the record well just one compromise maybe rather than reading emails and meetings it's um you could at the meeting say these particular emails are entered in

108the public record you know that's true okay you could do that put them on the board portal yeah like anything else if you're if you're comfortable with that because yeah it comes to correspondence and i could say i that the board received an email from this person and this person and this is not personal and they are not personnel or student related they are part of the meeting record and once the meeting is posted you'll if you're interested you may yeah because it's not it happens my concern is is avoiding turning a school board meeting into a public forum right and because it's not but people are able to yeah people are able to uh make their make comments either verbally or by writing and they should i feel they should be acknowledged somehow right

109and nikki and then i'm going to go to everyone so as a board chair thinking about adding this to my agenda um there are some meetings that we may not even start um because i like christine knows the number of emails that i get um and i feel like maybe as a practice i will say if you would like to officially enter this in the meetings public record please send me a letter like and it can be an electronic letter but a formal letter because i get a lot of like sometimes for the moment rants that they're not i don't even think the person thinks about them and because email like i think that the as i'm processing this whole conversation i think the historic correspondence line is somebody taking the time and writing a

110letter like i get stuff that's written in 15 seconds and not worth dealing with and i don't like i'm happy to respond to that person and say if you would like me to formally enter something in the record please write a letter or attend the meeting but i don't think that this stuff is worth being just because email is so easy that i don't want to take voice away from people but i want to still have a functional meaning and i don't feel like if i go around this way i'm going to have emotional so not reading but saying i received emails from this person this person this person and this person yeah but my list sometimes will be like long before we get like every month i'm getting that many emails and some months

111i get zero but like you could have um on the bottom of every agenda say here's how you write a letter or get write a letter to our board and then say please indicate whether you'd like this to be entered into this yeah i think that let's make let's like define correspondence as a higher threshold than an email um yes thank you thank you there are the recent emails that we received i think crosses that threshold yeah and we just say is this like i would respond to them is this official correspondence like are you willing to put this in a letter well it also has to do with a a a security issue in that an email is not signed and a letter would be signed and so i can make an account in

112five seconds and be any one of you and then hi um i'm glad we're talking about it i've been wondering about how to approach the same thing um and i i think i agree that we're not we're not creating a public forum that we wouldn't read emails there's a piece of me that feels like if you have something that you want to get said that you would come to a meeting and say it versus sending a note but i think that sounds great i think the suggestion of putting out a procedure how to write a letter to submit for the record makes sense i i have struggled with this as a topic because i don't know what we you know under what circumstances do we invite um conversation and and maybe we don't like that

113maybe that's just not what our business is here like the conversation is a vote and we then we do the work i don't know until we're instructed otherwise because if somebody comes to a meeting they're going to take in a moment and you know public speaking say something we're not necessarily going to respond not much different from um you know sending an email that doesn't get a response back or you know i also wonder about the um if if there are any privacy issues i mean i'm sure we're gonna like nikki said have some notes that maybe don't belong in the public record exactly like you know except that they are when they send an email to a school board member they are public once it's done it's done yeah one's done it's done [Music]

114well i get that i'm fine with that but i also understand what you're saying mark and there's stuff we wouldn't read and stuff we would read i would think yeah i mean there's also common sense and discretion on our mark yeah i'd like to speak directly against this idea um i i don't think it's the place of the school board to be a sounding board uh or a megaphone for personal attacks uh personal feelings politics any other associations that can be just sent over an email i like where you started as far as if there's a question if you have a question for the board um i like the idea of that question if appropriate and it doesn't reveal personal information um about staff or students um i think that should absolutely be a part

115of the public record um but i think any emails that it's a valid part of the the discussion for the public um if you have questions about how things are done just like we're doing you know what is leader in me what is all the rest of that that should absolutely be part of the the public forum but when we go into these statements i don't think that's the business of the board to be airing that into the public record or to the public um i just i don't think that's what we're called to do as a board thank you mark nancy uh thank you i agree with all the people say don't do it and definitely do not list who sent any correspondence that would be uh that would be awful but my big

116question is when we get an email long one that we have received to the whole board does anybody acknowledge that um is there does the superintendent acknowledge that or do the board chairs just say thank you we've received this i i've always wondered um as a just the school board member i would never do that myself um the most recent it has been our fabulous superintendent who has responded but there's also it's also been superintendent and board chair thank you i was always hoping that someone was saying thank you for this and thanks as as a board chair of knowing how quickly people can respond and misspeak when responding to an email i often take a couple of days before i respond i i prefer to be more thoughtful in my responses beth um i

117guess why could we be cc'd on that on a response so because yeah the same thing as nancy was kind of saying um yeah only because then it's like it's nice to know because i always like with these coming in i honestly have felt like we're just being really rude in some ways of like not responding and it's just out there in the ethers and we're just not um you know so it just feels like there's like we just are like that didn't exist kind of thing it was so if we can be cc'd i don't know if we're allowed to do that but that would be really helpful in my mind um and then i guess my question is like what if there are legitimate questions in these emails like do we just invite

118them to come to a school board meeting to ask them in person um because if there's that could be a procedure that we [Music] communicate to our public a procedure for corresponding with the board and that depending on the topic or the question the concern that they're bringing forth that we will acknowledge receipt of their correspondence email however it may be and then ask them if they would depending on the topic ask if they would be willing to bring that in person to board yeah and i think i think making a very clear procedure that we can tell people what to do because these kinds of issues are equity issues as well because most people outside of the board circle does not know how to interact with us and so if they send off an

119email that they think was really really thoughtful and they don't hear anything in what's going on so i think really trying to play out there and really advertising saying this is how you connect with your board members i think is a really important thing to do just so we can really hear from more people and people don't get frustrated okay now i also think that a lot of people don't know who really the contact for example questions that would be more appropriate for the superintendent or principal um and they write the board why would we want to read that when it's really be like hey let's let's see christine and she can answer it or jennifer or colleen um i think having a very formalized process for individuals to write something to get into the

120record i think is a great idea but there really has to be a a process to make sure that yeah it just needs to be a process okay thank you so [Music] elizabeth are you willing to write which is either you or nicki or something something about creating a procedure or having something at the bottom of our agendas yeah we've um made a a good point in saying you know is there a diagram um when someone goes to our school site to to really look at um you know who who do you contact and i know that christine has just they and the principals have drawn up a schematic which um for the community to be able to look at and say okay i i'm going to reach out and to this one so i'm

121just wondering if uh if the order is anywhere in that scheme schematic and or should it be maybe it shouldn't be it's just my i was just thinking about it as bill raised that question we did just make one um for the staff handbook and she worked on it right this chain of command where you go first and you know one of the things that um a board member might say to an individual if it's about a particular incident at school or teacher have you spoken with a child's teacher about this and that's what i would do as a principal i would say i've spoken to the child's teacher about this yet i mean that's just following chain of command but we can put something a visual together it starts here and then it goes

122here and it goes here then it goes here yeah and and if it's something that needs to be resolved you know if there's an issue that um that's quasi-judicial the board is the last right yeah right i think it would i think it would um help feel help our teachers feel supported if we made it clear to parents that it's teachers who make the great help for their classroom and that they are the people who should be consulted with first i guess they often feel like they've been right they've gone over their heads yeah right yes no yeah but if they do go if parents do go over the teacher's head then the principal should kick it back down to the teacher yes right so should we get better at that um okay i think

123we have that one a lot um we are moving on because it is 844. oh my goodness no small matter has panel okay i i can i can answer both of these also the equity declaration okay so uh wearing my um my legislator hat i've been invited to participate this week in a legislative summit taking place in phoenix regarding sponsored by the hunt institute regarding early childhood child care [Music] and so i have a friend who worked on the documentary no small matter so i contacted him to ask about what the deal was with the hunt institute and in talking about talking through with him about one of those things it occurred to me that uh we bill and uh a few others um put together a a forum in i think january february about

124um about uh child care in our district mounis county school district um but uh so first we we talked about um the possibility of doing a public screening of no small matter and and having afterwards a question and answer session with one of the directors and uh one of the main participants in the documentaries itself so that would be completely online and the question and answer session would also be online and then a couple weeks later or some sometime shortly thereafter we talked about this is at the mount of scotty school district we talked about having an informational panel which would include uh what i learned at the hunt institute so it would be on the statewide level but also it would include katie and um uh who else dan crow our former ece person

125who now helps to um set up the actual systems in around the state for um creating high quality uh early child care and uh then there was also jim taft and uh um courtney mckay from the rhinoceros prevention partnership and a person from let's grow kids and uh um and what's the other one building bright futures building great futures and then possibly making sure we have the representation of one and just be teaching ctg right so uh we talked about we talked about all of this on the manuscriptny school board and then realized that it's actually a an su matter and so i'm pleased to say that uh i've talked to several of the people who could be involved in the panel i think probably about three-quarters of them and they'll all have committed to

126it uh i talked to let's grow kids and they are um i talked to the director of let's go kids today allie richards who uh we had a really nice conversation and she said that she can easily find funding for let's grow kids has funded this screening several times they are the people who funded it around our state and she said she wouldn't have a problem finding money to be able to bring it to our supervisory union especially if it was not just a public informational psa but also part of a broader discussion and uh we talked about um uh what the best practices actually are across the country right now for high quality uh child care zero to 0-5 and how to embed that in a not within but with a public school structure

127and uh so that is what all that is we would like to have a we would like to have it be an su-wide um series of events it would start with a screening of no small matter um and we'd like to have we as we mentioned on the manuscript but now it's um if you have any uh thoughts or additions or anything like that since it'll be su-wide uh i've already done a bunch of legwork on it but if you wanna if you have more that you'd like to add it would be a screening of no small matter we we talked about having uh a short questionnaire sent out to parents so that they could have questions answered at the screening no small matter um and then we would have a uh that informational panel

128and then followed shortly thereafter by uh a forum um where we can talk about so the informational panel would provide us with the understanding of what it would actually take for us to get something like this off the ground and then the that would prepare us for a forum where we could actually discuss whether we agree in principle what the details might be and and so forth so uh thank you beth your hand has raised yeah um it might be worth involving vital communities they actually have an early child care um an education initiative that was kicked off about a year ago and so they've been doing a lot of work and have been getting you know funding to work on that exact issue on both sides of the river thanks and i'm not sure

129who they they were recently hiring for that position so i'm not sure if they have her yet i'd like to lead that okay i will i'll track that down thank you uh what other questions are there i think it sounds fantastic thank you for all your legwork [Laughter] um when would we like to do this but i think ideally we would uh have that um i know it's just a couple weeks away but like the third week of september screen no small matter then uh a week after that so the fourth week of september do the informational panel and then uh and we'd have to have as katie suggested kind of a practice structural discussion among panel members in advance so that we're not um competing because that's not what this is it's not a

130debate uh but uh planning meeting like a planning meeting and everybody i've talked to about being on the panel has agreed to the planning meeting as well um and and they agree that it's a good idea um [Music] and then having the public forum um but not immediately after the information but you know not losing momentum on it does that sound like a reasonable timeframe sure um is there anyone who would like to be the head of this well i think katie and i and elizabeth have been tag teaming yeah okay so elizabeth is doing the contacting when when we get bored we we did a five kitty and i wrote a grant on i don't know friday through one day last week so we were no it's okay we were kind of waiting to

131hear if we got that before we moved forward with uh where did you apply whatever like you said okay through the last questions the timeline you just said it's pretty close to the timeline so yeah okay yeah good yeah right there i sent you two links one was for let's grow kids and moses for and i know they are like come home to do any sort of community conversation okay and then once we get that i think we work on a invitation to the public with the questionnaire that's going to go out with that right we've got a poster and yeah and lots of public flooding of uh yeah okay so uh yeah so keep your eyes open our eyes and ears open for more information if that is going to be the third week

132of september that will happen before our next september meeting all right so um i guess the correspondence will be through email so if anybody has any questions or comments will be invited to the event yep you will be invited for sure um but you won't have to leave the comfort of your living room because you're not streaming it at home right it'll be streamed that it will be streamed and not in person and it'll also be available online for a week or ten days uh after the event takes place right that's good thank you what that would be a lot of meetings for one month yeah it would yeah uh okay and then the next one is the uh equity declaration i can't i can just share it if you look okay so the venice

133county school district adopted windsor's uh uh equity declaration whenever we had our last meeting that should count at windsor yeah i'm sorry the district adopted the town of windsor's equity declaration whenever we had our last meeting which seems like a month ago so i think it was only a week but uh two weeks ago yeah uh this is this is what it says uh just does somebody want to read it just for the sake of posterity do you mind sure all right okay in alignment with the equity declaration of the town windsor vermont the mount of scrutiny school district works to support and uplift hard-fought civil rights and is committed to eliminating hatred bigotry and discrimination in all town systems and institutions in order to improve outcomes for all strives to create a culture in

134which racial gender and other disparities are openly acknowledged and promptly addressed urges all to denounce prejudice and welcome all persons regardless of race color religion national origin sex gender identity or expression sexual orientation marital status age disability economic or housing status or any other protected characteristics commits to protecting all historically oppressed or potentially vulnerable vulnerable persons to the fullest extent of the law and calls on all of those living visiting or working in our communities to ensure liberty and equity for all persons so that's what we adopted at our board last week and we um the week before whenever it was [Music] i don't know um uh i think it's really lovely and uh that's just my my own one person opinion um but uh we had a discussion over bringing to the seo board

135to see whether uh other members of our board other boards within our supervisory unit wanted to adopt something similar oh um can you put a link of the or can you look up the original declaration of inclusion it's based off of uh al wakefield's original declaration of inclusion which has been adopted by towns all over the state of vermont currently almost 50 percent of all vermont residents live in a town where uh the original declaration of inclusion or something similar has been adopted in the last two years and uh so we wanted to know whether we wanted to bring it up with everybody else to see if anybody else would be interested in adopting it thank you so heartland at our last meeting like two years ago we decided to wholeheartedly endorse the towns adopting

136so we didn't adopt our own specific one because we felt like it was elmo but um yeah this is the original yeah so we we um agreed as a board that we would fully endorse the town moving forward with this and that we thought it was a really good idea for our doctor so everybody handled it so so is your is heartland in process of adopting this has it has it been adopted i think the select board meeting uh will the select board approach the board yeah to i don't know if that's what board meetings happened yet it happened it was on the 9th of august okay so we're still waiting for this election to meet to discuss it okay but they approached the board so the assumption is they're going to talk um what

137could okay uh so that is heartland do we we want to so do we want to think about adopting the other one as a support declaration um i think if we can have this as part of the record of the meeting let people read it think about it and then we can okay all right uh what are the questions and comments so anyway that's what that that's what that is great thank you and scheduling regular policy review mitchell experience yeah all right there we go i want me to go to the top of the review sure so yeah the review is definitely okay so that was just our cross-checking of what policies we had so christine did a fabulous cross-check of all of the required and recommended policies that we have and what is part

138of from psba as they keep track of what the school the state is requiring and what's recommended and c70 reached straight and so then we've looked at what is older what's been updated by vermont school board association in their model policy manual and looked at where we are with our policies and there are some policies that are now not necessarily required i think we have all the required but they are recommended that we either don't have or haven't updated for a few years and so we put those first so in september we will be looking at restraint and seclusion to update that policy and once we get through this cycle we'll start our a little further in this cycle we will look at what will be the policies for next year and the following year

139so that we're looking at all of our policies within a three-year basis it's just a continuous not only to um make sure that we're up to date current with our policies but also so that we are all acquainted with our policies and our communities are as well good and elizabeth i just have a quick question and that is uh can this be made public so that um the public can see one we're going to be touching in the future i think that would be a good idea yeah and where's the best place to house it on the on the website yeah i would just put it under uh the suv like foreign uh yeah i mean it's the policy that would be under review would theoretically be that folder um but then people could see

140you know a couple months from now what we're going to be talking about that's what i'm saying i think maybe better so the three parts are the members it's called scheduled members and then the documents and since board is mostly about policy and maybe it should be between that it should just need a policy review they click on it they see that spreadsheet so they can click on it yeah yeah yeah it's really clear it doesn't matter what month it doesn't matter what day as long as it's before six of the plan yes that because then they would say well i came to this meeting expecting you to talk about why i wanted to talk to you larry this year with you everything yeah uh i'll take care of that and make sure i i

141didn't adjust the setting so that's it people can't edit it yeah i'll make sure yes i just want to say a huge thank you yes thank you when i know that the boards are supposed to be focused on policy and we are um but i have ptsd elizabeth david diane and i in a room with paper filling but you came to that it was there yeah there were a bunch of them oh my god yeah and so just have a like a coherent thought plan yeah like so that's still happening again i'm still overwhelmed by that yeah experience yeah yeah that was a lot but we did it so that we would have to do that again right yeah and some of the the later in march april some of those have not they're in

142review right now we're anticipating yeah but they'll be ready for us yeah so that i mean that's still kind of up in the air because they might not have been regrouped and they have to be it's a plan the model policy has to be reviewed by aoe legal team and then by the um the board of educate i believe yeah it has to be improved at this thing you took july up i hope that's okay with everyone thank you [Music] because we're not voting on superintendent search there are no items for action so we are setting the next agenda number one of those items being the superintendent search discussion the hiring and employment policy i think an update on no small matter and was there something else bill wanted um student breakfast types oh right

143okay and then the equity declaration and the equity declaration and that is it there's no there's a policy and i'm gonna do you want me to add in my report yes kind of where we're at oh and also of course the first day of we'll try to keep the reports um i've got a question yes did we ever decide on student representation on our esu board i only talked about it not scouting as i recall but i have a student asking so yeah um i said we've talked about it i've been working we're definitely going to talk about that but should we talk about it at our maybe support october okay budget time yeah let's turn it okay so so i'll put that on to every student [Laughter] okay in need of the executive session

144i want to thank everyone for the very lively discussion a good yeah um i think everyone i hope everyone was able to feel they their opinions were heard and that no one felt intimidated to raise their hand and speak what they they were feeling so that is what we want for our board we try to model that for our community i will take a motion to return so moved elizabeth okay elizabeth nikki and we are all saying hi everyone