SU Board Meeting - June 27th, 2022

001momentarily we are now recording we are now reporting good evening everyone i am amy mcmullen the chair of the windsor southeast supervisory union school board and i call this regularly scheduled meeting to order are there any changes or additions to the agenda i think we're good on our end um i need to take a quick break so i can turn off the air for me so that people of that degree i'm not sure yeah people aren't here that air handle sadly it's going to make that room a little warm but but if you can get one of the custodians they know how to turn it off no one's here because it's summer it's june it's summer so until larry is here you will have to put up with sounds of darth vader she's coming at

002seven and larry will be here at 7. [Music] um so no changes or additions to the agenda i will take a motion to approve the minutes from may 23rd second uh who was that second it was me davis it's me davis yeah if everyone can say their name because the person who does our minutes watches this recording and doesn't always catch who is saying what so it is are there any changes clarifications corrections that need to be made for the minutes from may 23rd hearing none i will do a roll call of voting starting to my right in a room elizabeth hi henry i bev hi colleen aye davis hi [Music] and rebecca hi should i miss hi there you are okay so the minutes have been approved public participation or announcements do we have

003any anyone if there's anyone online who would like to make some sort of statement raise your hand david i think it would be good to acknowledge uh that uh heartland as you know you know the the supervisor union board hired christine born as the interim superintendent christine's here tonight congratulations to christine but more importantly the what then had to get to work to fill that position so lindsey perkins who's on tonight i don't know how many of you have met lindsay but um certainly the heartland board will know who she is uh so we welcome lindsay as the interim principal at heartland elementary school and uh and also they hired her assistant to replace her it's been sort of a domino effect uh and elena marcus and and that name will sound familiar to the

004weber's field folks that is the wife of brian martis who's the principal at weathersfield she will become the interim assistant principal at hartman so if you all followed that then you're doing pretty good for a monday night at uh if anybody has any questions or thoughts i think that's uh i think those are two great moves on the part of those boards great thank you david and from the board this is david baker's last windsor southeast supervisory union board meeting and he will he will miss these monday nights i can tell but david thank you for the years and all of the um all that you have shared and your expertise and all of the work that you've done to help us be where we are today thank you very much thank you amy and

005let me see moving on we have a superintendent's report we're going to do this together tonight right yeah this is how we're gonna we figured this would be a nice opportunity uh to to show you how we're transitioning we created this little presentation together you'll see though christine clearly added her touch this this presentation looks uh looks a lot uh it's a lot nicer than mine used to look anyhow so uh but we will do it together and uh and uh um dean will work the technology uh and we will sort of trade off slides a little bit as we go through this so i think christine you're gonna start it off right now yes i am all right make sure the technology's working so um we wanted to follow up because there was a

006conversation about exit interviews i think it was at the w uh the su board level but it's come up at local levels as well and just wanted to let you know that larry is working on compiling a list of he thinks roughly five questions he has them he has given them to tina in hr and she will be doing the exit interviews starting in the fall of 2022 she hasn't been the questions yet so i don't have them tonight but they are working on that which we think is really important so um that is in the works that's a quick one um is there a question um thank you christine um who will be is tina going to be doing the exit interviews yes tina is going to do the exit interviews she's going to

007offer them i mean we can't force people but anybody that would like one that's leaving she's going to provide that opportunity does that make sense rebecca oh it makes yeah no i was just wondering how did how was it determined that tina i mean is tina hr i i i was how was it determined that tina would be doing the exit interviews she's the hr person so it made sense for her to do that she's done she actually has met with a few people that have left um in the past just to get their sense it's sometimes easier to talk to somebody who you're not reporting to about your experience in a school thank you christine by following you elizabeth yes okay um what what will happen with the information once it's gathered we will

008collect it and share it with you know the general themes of why people are leaving so that the board understands and we and principals understand and it may inform things that we do differently so you'll share it with the seo board and local boards we'll share it with the su boards uh the su-4 and we can share it with local boards but it will be su level um unless you want it disaggregated by school do you uh do plan to do it on a regular basis like share and do sharing on a regular basis i guess it will depend on if and when people leave you know a bunch of people that leave um which hopefully we won't in fall of 22 then we'll report out um i would anticipate it's more towards the end

009of the year but you never know because we have lost people through the course of the year this year so whenever we get um fair number of people exiting i think it would be safe to conquer that data and if you could share it with the individual board as well sure so that board has a sense of what kind of environment yep sure um david's your hand is raised yeah christine is there any concern about um if if the data were broken down into the individual school into those segments um i i don't recall off the top of my head how many people are leaving but are we is there any worry about it being de-identified if it breaks down to that level yeah i would be a little bit worried about that um which

010is why it might be you know when we have enough people leaving it would be easier to share it out without breaking confidentiality so we'll have to kind of figure that out as we go along i think britta thanks bill yeah um i just want to patch on what what david says sort of a question is the concern to that would be shared out to the public or it would be shared out to the board because as a board member we could go into executive session and have that discussion on identified on the data that could be identifiable because we have been right in executive session to be able to say this individual we know who it is this was their issue i'd rather know what the issue is than to in executive session than

011to worry about um identifiable individual yeah and i think you could do it in both ways i mean if you if you get 20 of people leaving because they're going to get paid a higher wage at a different school i mean i think we could share some of it that way but specific data absolutely an executive session makes sense bill okay let me go to the next slide um we are we're thinking about the year to come and we've devised a schedule for su board reporting just so that everybody kind of knows what's coming it's certainly flexible but thought it might be good to spread out the reports to make the meetings more efficient so that's what we've come up with with angie's support larry support uh kb support those are the people that most

012most likely are reporting in brittany so we've um spread it out and embedded things where we think it makes the most sense so that's just for you to what what does cia stand for curriculum instruction and assessment angie's department again we want cia we've got the fbi down below so that's the very official yeah the other thing we've talked about and would love your thoughts on it um at the local board meetings some of david's reporting has been redundant especially at madison i believe so we're thinking of switching the reports to administrative report and then the principals can be reporting out what's going on in their buildings and then the superintendent can tag on to those what hasn't been shared already if that makes sense that's wonderful good thank you yeah all right um the

013next slide is mine and then i think david takes some for a bit so angie and i met with mary gannon last week and we looked at job descriptions we had we had a great conversation we looked at some job descriptions for the coordinator of diversity equity and inclusion it is linked here and i will share this report with you so you have it uh we are hoping to host this job this position this summer and fill it by the fall we're very ambitious we know but that's our hope and our next meeting angie and i have another meeting scheduled with mary in a week and a half i believe her two weeks and she's going to work with us on the job posting the committee selection for the hiring process and the interview questions

014she's also going to work with us on planning some community forums for next year we talked about the first forum having a focus on our vision and mission which which was lacking as you all know that were those of you that were present at the last meeting so we're going to flush that out but that work is coming uh soon and i'll keep you posted on that process for the di coordinator i think katie will be joining us too and katie will show you anything else [Music] so it's exciting we're actually it was yeah she was wonderful yeah okay david you're on for the equity audit slide okay great um and and i want to thank some of the people here tonight who were part of this vetting of these equity audit proposals because the

015equity audit is going to be i think really important to all of us because that's where we're going to get the baseline data and and we were glad that we got uh you know we got four formal proposals we had six inquiries uh and i think we had sent out um we had sent out eight uh um it was sort of a closed bidding process you know we we went to the vermont school boards association superintendents association we asked them what are the what are some of the companies that uh that in fact um uh really do this kind of work and do this kind of work well so those are the ones we reached out to again there were about eight of them we got six inquiries we got four formal proposals back uh

016and then this committee spent time re reviewing uh the difficult part of this not difficult but the the coordination part of this and that's why i thank people for staying faithful to this was we were also working with springfield right because we we wanted to make sure that um that first of all we had more of a regional commitment to this but also that it might help us uh you know as as vendors were bidding that they might realize that they could do maybe a little bit better on the price than uh than if we just went out uh alone i'm not sure that worked as well as it did but i'll tell you what did work well is getting to know those springfield folks and getting to realize that you know our issues of

017their issues and their issues are our issues not exactly but i think that partnership is uh is is good so anyhow after all the vetting uh you can see on the slide um you know our recommendation um is uh to recommend uh insight incorporated they they are this is what they do for a living they do these k-12 equity audits all over uh the the country and and so we'd be looking for a motion under action items uh to in fact make a commitment to insight and i saw elizabeth's question in the text box that cost is to us right and um and springfield has uh an equal cost to them so the whole proposal was about uh 80 85 000 dollars but because because we are about the same size as as springfield so

018the cost to us is forty two thousand five hundred dollars we have uh we you know we've sort of saved a pocket of esser money you know so that we can so that we can do this work and that was only through the luxury of not hiring a dei coordinator in 21 and 22 uh and we may in 23 but we've already saved a little money there so i think i think we can figure out certainly figure out a way to pay for this audit i think it'll be really great for us so the next slide talks about the rationale for selecting insight i already went through a lot of this with with you but they come highly highly recommended and the other thing we liked we liked the fact that they have developed their

019own framework for this equity work and the framework really spells out some of the areas and we're going to get to that in a slide here pretty soon but um they also have what's called the trainer or trainer model so if you wanted them to do some follow-up work after the audit they could you're not locked into that there's nothing in the contract that locks you into that we also were able to see a report that they had written for another district and the report is extremely comprehensive with a lot of qualitative data and quantitative data that helps you really look at the issues that we might have around policies procedures curriculum instruction those kinds of things that are uh uh hiring practices all of those uh pieces um next slide christine and then if

020we have questions we here's the here's the basic framework that they uh created so this was the only company that we saw that did all that sort of hit on all five parts of this of this framework a matter of fact there were some companies that came right out and said we don't do curriculum instruction and and learning we're going to only look at your policies we're only going to look for procedures we're only going to do your staff around culture and so one of these legs was missing in some of those other other reports this company seems like it's it really uh does a comprehensive job of of of looking at the equity work that needs to be done both the strengths and weaknesses as we uh go forward um you want to go

021to the next slide christine or or is that the last slide on this that's the last um equity audit slide okay so i don't know if folks have any have any questions but i think in the interest of uh and again i'm you know i'm not here next year but i think that there was some thought with our equity task force not the audit task force but our equity task force that did all this work that both in terms of securing a dei quarter and getting this equity audit work off the ground um you know uh we would really appreciate if the sd cord would um would would embrace the recommendation and there are some people here tonight that were on that committee christine included rebecca uh davis colleen there were people that were that

022helped vet these proposals if you have any questions certainly but we just hope that you would you know trust that recommendation and vote to authorize the superintendent to engage in a contract with insight education group [Music] in the chat when we're done here and then um you can look through the inside proposal in more detail but that's why you you do this in committee because i will tell you the insight proposal i don't know what was it about 80 pages uh christine yeah at least so it's it's very comprehensive very thorough we also like i said looked at one of their end products that they presented to another district i think they'll do excellent work here and they want to get started uh with a with a planning team and christine will help set that

023planning team up with springfield because i think you want to make sure that that's why i think we're gonna you know we're gonna have some efficiency here you know they won't have to have two meetings we can just have one meeting to do to do that work they'd like to get that started the end of july early august okay all right david this one's you sure no well actually i i'm gonna ask for a little help on this one too from our legislator in the room uh elizabeth because i know that the legislature was anticipating uh this this uh this decision this main decision which effect which which effectively the supreme court if you haven't noticed has been very busy the last couple of weeks um so one of the one of the things they

024did is they took on this second amendment uh not second amendment first amendment issue around um around around public school tuition uh going to uh private religious independent schools and they were in favor of the uh of the of the plaintiff and they basically decided that uh that there is that any any any and i you can certainly read the decision but any attack once you start tuition to independent schools any attempt to deny that tuition to an independent uh independent religious school constitutes uh you know discrimination essentially and so we have to and we've been doing that this year on the advice of our attorney any requests we've had come in from our tuition districts heartland and weathersfield primarily well only um and we've had a couple this year where we've had to pay

025where we have paid tuition to uh religious independent schools but elizabeth my understanding is that the legislature the vermont legislature has been working on sort of this issue do you want to share do you want to share a little bit of what's going on at the state level um at the state level actually what's been happening is that the legislature has kicked a cam down the road waiting for this decision to come out and i i don't i can't say that the legislation i can't speak for the legislature um i would say the reason that they keep the can down the road on a number of different issues is because they didn't necessarily expect this outcome so they did not shore up a couple of questions which remain which are securing the rights of students

026to be accepted into a school regardless of their uh status socially racially ability um and there have been there have been a couple of schools across the state who have uh rejected student applications um likewise uh the same problem holds for staffing so um i imagine i can only speak for the legislators i've spoken with myself but we plan to get on it immediately to to ensure that all students and all staff have the ability to be their best selves wherever they choose to go to school yeah and and i think what elizabeth said um and i'm glad to hear that you think this will be certainly a big priority because you know for tuition districts you know like heartland weathersfield and there are others around the state i mean it's a lot of public

027dollars that goes into that because that goes into these the independent schools and certainly would go into these independent religious schools and i i said to elizabeth she and i talked off offline the other day around you know i know one of the big players in the chittenden county is rice memorial high school and this and that's a huge uh huge vendor up there that uh certainly uh you know uh much of what elizabeth said will have to be taken into uh into consideration we we've been following the advice of our local attorneys and that's why we've been paying the tuition bill right now but i think it's going to be really important that we that we that we do this really carefully next year with the with the with the legislature as as elizabeth

028said i was just going to add a couple of little things um one is that you know not just rice memorial but there there's a school over in bennington um grace elementary school which was taken to task within the last five years or uh having specifically in their parent handbook that they they don't accept certain students and uh but when called to test on it they said oh no no no that's not that's not our policy or our practice however when a potential student is looking at the parent handbook um it discriminates a you know it's kind of uh uncloaked discrimination um right there um overtly so uh these are things that definitely will have to be addressed i'm told that when i um said to my colleagues well we'll have to address this right

029away it's kind of low-hanging fruit they said not exactly so it may take a whole session to or more to to get legislature through that that legislation through that will address it but we will we will definitely get it addressed coming right out of the gate thank you amy help me to understand how this affects um our supervisory union because i'm i'm not i'm i i i don't understand completely i understand that if a student comes from a sending school the parent has the right to request that the student attend any specific school is that applicable to students that are in windsor high school no that that would not affect that would not affect uh at least right now moniscutney school district it would only have an impact on weathersfield and heartland but i will

030tell you under act 129 uh you know which is quote right now worded as sort of a public school piece under act 129 a windsor high school student could or a windsor resident or a west windsor resident could request to go to an alternative high school under act 129 and right now it's another public school but i bet you on this type of a supreme court decision it could get extended to to a school for example we've had a couple of winsor students who went to woodstock we've also had a couple of kids from outside of windsor and west windsor who've come to to to windsor under under that act and no tuition gets exchanged there's no payment kids do have some level of high school choice on under that act i uh but certainly

031for weathersfield and heartland which is one of the reasons we're mentioning it mentioning it tonight is that they they they are the ones that would definitely be the most you know liable for tuition because all of their high school kids have freedom to choose i will tell you much to elizabeth's point the the superintendents that i've spoken with uh there's no there's no deep-seated opposition to having those independent schools part of the independent cadre but as elizabeth said they need to play by the same rules they need to play by you know you know the constitution you know and and they can't discriminate in the way that they staff in the way that they accept students in the way that they evangelize or proselytize i mean those those are the things i think that i'm

032most concerned about and it sounds like elizabeth and and some of the legislators that's the stuff i think they have to they have to address and i think they i think they will uh in the fall whether it'll take a whole session or not i don't know but right now there's no restrictions on anything so you know we we could yeah thanks rebecca the way it affects the entire windsor of southeast supervisory union is the fact that some of these schools that if they're now approved they might charge additional tuition than what some of the public or other independent schools are charging which would then affect weathersfield and heartlands budget which also affects the svu budget and the assessments because if they have to pay too much in tuition than the only and we keep

033the assessment as it is then the only place that they have to control their budget is at the individual at the local level if that makes sense yes it does it yeah it also raises other questions but yes it does make sense thank you and if if public money is going to be going to an independent school we absolutely want it to be playing by the same rules as public schools correct okay i think we can go to the next slide christine i see anne marie's got her hand ready i just i just wanted to say i think that the the um the religious schools would have to ob abide by um you know the uh the cap that our other private schools have to abide by like we only give up to a certain

034amount so they can't raise their rates above that and expect us to pay it yeah yeah i think you're right all right next slide christine case britney ready yeah britney uh brittany is is uh our data point person and she works with angie uh and patty and one of the things we had we had reported out on on a fair amount of su wide academic data over the last couple of months but not the student wellness report so brittany uh offered tonight to do that to just share what we've got so far around and brittany i don't know whether you want to talk about how we collected this data but it's all yours yeah hey no problem um can everybody hear me okay yes okay um so we had some questions last time i reported

035out on very basics around the panorama data which is the survey that we give students around wellness and um we had some questions around it so i wanted to give some clarifying answers to those questions so if you want to go to the next slide christine um so the first question was around how do our results compare to the national benchmarks um panorama is really great about that they are a nationally normed assessment so they're able to give us kind of where we fall compared to the national average and um how we interpret this chart here is um we have four different categories challenging feelings emotional regulation positive feelings and supportive relationships the first uh column of scores here the 55 35 69 and 89 is all based on how they responded to the survey

036positively so giving a positive reaction um to to the questions that were asked and uh when we compare those to national benchmarks when we look at challenging feelings for example 55 of our students responded positively and that falls within the 60th to 79th percentile nationwide so you can see i highlighted in red the area where we were below the average national benchmark so emotional regulation is where we fell um a little bit lower on for third and fifth through fifth grade next slide please here's um the same exact uh um sorry chart for sixth through twelfth grade we were a little bit lower on challenging feelings and emotional regulation for compared to our national benchmarks next slide so this chart another question we had was how can we break this down by school obviously i

037was not able to report out on abs um the lower numbers would make confidentiality a little bit harder so i did report out on hes weathersfield and windsor school district here so you can see how everybody fall i mean they were pretty close across all schools um you know you can glean glean from that what you will but uh it was nice to see that we can kind of similar um similar things across all schools next slide and here we have um for sixth through twelfth grade again abs they only have go through sixth grade so definitely not enough to report out on um but included in here for windsor is our high school next slide the other area that i wanted to address is what we're going to be looking at from an s-u-s-u-wide

038standpoint um third through fifth grade we obviously pulled out the emotional regulation in sixth through twelfth grade we pulled out challenging feelings in emotional regulation as areas that we really wanna target um and then i wanted to go through what we're currently doing or what we i made this like a month ago but what we're doing towards the end of the year there with that data and then um what we're going to be doing moving forward into fy23 so our school teams did review the data and identify students who were in need of support i did that work with mainly with our school counselors and our administration and then they worked with their classroom teachers on making sure that they understood the data and what the plans were going to be for select students the

039other piece was really using this end of the year data to support our counselors and getting familiar with how to navigate the system um and then identifying trends so that they could start uh putting some of that work into their sel curriculum uh so if you know a particular grade level is really struggling in one area they might go in and do a lesson in that area um and then for next steps moving forward we are currently we're going to be working with counselors we have general testing windows for next year's setup however we want to work with our counselors to make sure that those are fitting in exactly where they would like them to then um we're going to be scheduling grade level and building and sui data dives to really look at that

040data and start setting some goals around it then we're going to work with each building's wellness and mtss teams to identify needs and make some action plans to move forward we're also going to be using the mra data from each of the schools which is what the what they do as part of the leader in the program there is some overlap with those however panorama lets us drill down by student and mra does not currently do that um so this is emma or panorama really gives us an extra set of eyes i guess on our individual students then we'll be creating kind of a wellness communication plan so that we can continue to update uh parents and the community around what the data is that we're seeing and then hopefully giving some suggestions on how

041parents can help at home support some of the skills that we're working on in school that was the end of it right christine that's the end are there any questions rebecca yes thank you amy um thanks brittany this one very informative um it's definitely an eye-opener into um some of the issues that students are experiencing um and so i have a couple of questions um one is um has this information been presented to the teacher i see the counselors um are clearly have been part of the process and i'm and i'm not sure it says school team so i i suspect that that's probably some teachers but i i'm thinking has it been presented to all teachers that's my first question um also has is their way that you're looking at where you're obviously going

042to bring parents in um and and i'd be interested in you know i don't know if that's been decided yet but hearing what that's what that's going to look like um and um and this just is it would be really good you know here we are in june um to look at um some sort of um timeline on reporting out and kind of letting us know where this is going what's been offered to students um and have you thought about that thank you sure um so to address the first question so all teachers have access to the panorama data for their classroom so while we haven't really delved deeply into it with teachers they have that opportunity at this point um there was a lot of things going on this year as you can imagine

043so we really didn't want to overwhelm anybody by by forcing the issue um however we kind of left the the counselors at the head for that to be able to use it and then attend some of our students success meetings or mtss meetings to to use the data and help encourage teachers to use that data as well to inform plans for students so next year we also i'm sorry we also held a training that was optional for teachers anybody who wanted to join was able to join that was run by panorama just to get used to the system and how we looking at data how are we using data um so they did have that option and we hope to run more of those uh this coming school year but for now that's kind of

044where we left it as we played around with um you know what are we going to use the data for what can we get from that information uh we we ran it twice this year and we plan on doing two or three times next year i'm not quite sure yet we want to get some more input from staffer on that but um next year we hope to utilize it a little bit more so that's the first question hopefully that answered that one um in terms of parents as of right now we don't have a formal plan around um utilizing with parents however the data is accessible to teachers and so as teachers we encourage them to be uh talking with with parents about overall information however the the way the information is collected you know

045we want students to be really open about it and and very honest with the data that they're given so um families certainly have access to the original questions this is what we're going to be asking your students um and then we're kind of working through okay what if a parent wants to see the exact answers that their child gave um one thing we did do is instead of giving free responses for the second round we just gave multiple choice um because we were concerned about some of the confidentiality pieces what about what if a student says something specific a parent wants to see that information and now you know we get a little bit of a tough spot so we're working through some of those and we're actually working um with panorama around how other

046schools have handled some of those situations because we want parents to be able to see the information and be able to utilize it and help support their student at home however you know we do know that it's it's a trust thing with students if they want if we want really honest answers so it's tricky it's tricky and um like i said we're working with panorama around that and then the last piece was a a timeline for releasing data correct so the data the overall data meaning sui data is going to be put on our dashboard similarly to how i presented it tonight so well actually the last time i guess where there were charts around the four different areas so it's very broad in order to protect confidentiality for students um so that's going to

047be put on our data dashboard all the time and then i'll report out on it christine has developed a timeline of her own for board meetings for presentations for next year so that i know exactly what data i'm going to present when um based on the availability of the data so it should be i believe three or four times a year i'll do data presentations and panorama will be one of those depending on where it falls along those meeting structures thank you i i i do want to just comment i know that this past year um both you and um and angie uh did some community forums and um and they were very good i i know that there wasn't a lot of um attendance but they were still very valuable and um i i

048hope that those maybe can continue this time it's not going to maybe be on our um or sr but um that they can be around these sort of issues because i think the way that you presented this particular um assessment um is is i can understand it i i think that you know most parents would be able to understand it it's not very um involved it's not six pages it's a couple of pages um and so um it also is an uh an excellent topic to just you know bring to the community and to parents and let them know this is what's going on and this is a direction that we're heading in but thank you very much for for this presentation you're welcome all right thanks brittany i think it's i think it's also

049important to note that um to rebecca's point you know what what britney shared because panorama is pretty new to us it's baseline data it really is baseline data so when you get those reports next year you'll be able to do a little bit of comparative work right so where were we in the spring of 2022 where are we in the fall of 2022 and you'll be able to look at look at that and i wouldn't expect given the sort of where we are in our interventions and our mtss you know i wouldn't you know expect that we're going to move mountains early on but i think that the the attentiveness to this and and and and figuring out how to share this with staff and parents and kids in a safe way so everybody feels

050safe i think this is really going to be critical i'm just glad that we are you know we are paying attention to it so um i think i i think that was really helpful brittany i appreciate it so let's go on to are we ready to go on to the next slide okay um the middle level uh we're gonna i know it's on the agenda later on and certainly this is going to save one of the agenda items later on because i think i want to kind of get into this now for a couple of reasons one because there's a fair amount of information here and also we have we have michael butts with us tonight michael uh uh yeah you can wave michael so everybody knows who if you can't see michael he is

051there he's a teacher at heartland elementary school and i know when we presented for for very different reasons when we presented a preliminary form of this middle level presentation at the mount of scrutiny school board meeting one of the questions that came up was uh so so in a practical sense what's what's going to change what what's what's new about this and and so one of the things i hope at the end of this presentation and we'll move pretty quickly through it but that michael can certainly talk from a from a practical standpoint as a middle level teacher who's going to have a relatively new middle level team next year in elementary school what what what are the you know two or three things with with with this focus on middle level and the decisions

052we made have impacted heart and have impacted his team as we uh move forward so we're just going to move through a couple of slides here christine do you want to uh yeah i will i just wanted to also share that michael is one of the leaders of that middle school team david but he helped lead the team the middle level teachers this year yeah we had a task force as you know we'll talk i think that we might talk about this in the in the first slide but we we had a we had a task force uh that looked at this um you know uh and and michael there was there were three people one from each district that helped coordinate some of the work in in that task force level and and michael

053was one of those uh people so he's pretty invested in this as well and also very committed to middle level i mean one of the things we talked about on this middle level task force is that there are some teachers who end up getting caught in the middle in other words they're high school teachers they want to be high school teachers but the only job they could get was a middle level job so they they you know again think thankfully we don't have a a a a lot of those in in our supervisor reunion and i think the couple of folks that we might have had that had that mentality uh seem to have after all this work this year seem to have kind of moved on and and they want to do something else

054matter of fact a couple of them got high school jobs so so um so i i think that uh you know it really is important that people who who work in the middle teach in the middle want to be in the middle and want to deal with this age group because it's a very challenging shall we say an interesting group and it's where i spent most of my time in my teaching career so i happen to love middle school kids and that sounds like an oxymoron but it's true um okay first slide christine [Music] we just talked about this this was the uh the middle level task force made up of middle level teachers and administrators it began the spring of 2021 i think we had one meeting and then it continued throughout the year

055we probably had six or seven meetings throughout the year um uh the middle level overview we're gonna share this powerpoint with you uh and um you can you can certainly click on that middle level overview when you get to powerpoint and i shared some of this at the last meeting not in any detail but that's where we we sort of outline the things that we agreed to uh and also some action steps as we as we move forward but to the point about what specifically has happened in our k-8 buildings and in our k-12 building um and and that's that was the interesting part of this work and the good part about uh this work um uh we uh we we didn't we didn't have to worry about uh with with three of our buildings

056you know having to having to necessarily take somebody out out of the building and we're not looking to set up a separate middle school in another facility somewhere this will be contained within our k-12 and 2k8 buildings for sure but the essentially what we did uh we decoupled the five six teams we talked about this at the moniscutane meeting we basically said to the sixth grade who had partner teams at five six we said we're going to move sixth grade uh to more to the middle so that some of the things that they do including things like advisories field trips assemblies artists and residents those kinds of pieces we're going to include them we're not going to start mixing kids up certainly not right away because there was some real hesitation around that on the

057part of the staff but certainly we would identify those people at that grade 6 7 and 8. um we identified staff who needed the middle level endorsement we'll talk about that in a minute uh because there is a middle level endorsement in vermont and we'd like everybody who works with our middle level kids to have that middle level endorsement because it requires some expertise in middle level and some concentrations on content areas across more than one content area but we'll we'll there's another slide where we address that uh and then the commitment and the action plans were really centered this year and going into next year around you know more integrated units thematic units the advisory programs we're going to try to beef those up next year flexible groupings more electives for students so that

058they can explore more this is a time for exploration instructional strategies to meet the standards and middle level to meet the needs of middle level students as as stated in the interview and i think i saw a question mark in there about what was the representation by a school and uh i can i can certainly or christine can provide a list of the people who are on that course um i will tell you that i said like i said all three districts um had representatives uh who were helping to lead this michael from heartland j j from uh from weathersfield and patty parmelow from uh uh from montescutne um but i will tell you all of the middle level teachers at webb's field were part of this task force and all of the middle level

059teachers the current and by the way we had five through eight for the for the task force all of the current five through eight teachers at wethersfield heartland and and and and and uh and mount scotty were were uh were were a part of this let's go we'll we can um ask uh questions certainly at the end you wanna go to the next slide why is middle level so important we'll keep going there mostly because you can see what those kids that's why it's important because of the kids the kids at that level are important that's a great picture next high christine [Music] um when middle schools don't respond to students social developmental and academic needs and the research is incredibly clear there that the students are negatively affected and impacted for a long time

060there are a lot of correlation studies between kids in in in those in that range of five through eight uh who don't do well it's very hard later on to recover uh in one of the earlier studies it was called turning point middle school was was was called the turning point it's where kids either invest in their schooling and want to stay in school and want to do well in school or it's where they start to be begin to disengage from their education so that's why the emphasis really on middle schools is is so critical uh there's a national study that mike nichols shared with some of us that shows that disengagement as kids get older the research clearly states that success in the middle grades is strongly correlated with completing high school on time

061next slide christine middle grades play a huge role in closing the opportunity gap right as kids start to slip through the cracks if you've got a vibrant middle school and you've got advisories with small number of kids in those advisories and everybody's kind of following those kids and staying close to those kids everybody sort of becomes a mentor everybody sort of becomes an advisor everybody to a certain degree becomes you know a little bit of a counselor in those in those advisories um because kids at that age level can get very lost and can slip through the cracks next slide christine i'll let you read through this one i won't go over this one but again specifically the difference between a junior high model and a middle level model you can kind of go down

062that list and again we'll share this powerpoint with you and uh i think rightfully so the boards and our stuff our uh portrait of graduate work and our our our swot assessment strength weaknesses opportunities and threats and we'll see that later on it's on a slide clearly highlighted that we needed to spend more time paying attention to uh to middle schools why six seven and eight uh and i know this question has come up um uh you know again we were looking at the research between an age range of 11 and 14 which spans five through nine and we tried to look at what was practical uh in our buildings um certainly the pbgrs the proficiency-based graduation requirements for the state of vermont are broken out k-5 6-8 9-12 so the independent thematic curriculum work

063that can go on with kids can sort of be part of that grade ban because we can look at those proficiencies in that grade band of six eight the middle level endorsement includes grades five through nine and that's important in the state of vermont middle schools are generally the ones that are separated from building are either five eight or six eight um but certainly within k-8 structures or within uh you know k-12 structures the general emphasis is in that five through eight uh range in our portrait of graduate that swot that i referred to and again when you get this powerpoint you can click on that current state analysis many of you might remember it it really did indicate that middle school was a weakness in our in our district the parents in particular indicated

064through some of the surveys that we gave that um that they really wanted to kind of you know to beef up middle school and in the end really was made by the task force the teachers made the decision based on the current configurations in all four of our buildings with the observation that sixth grade students develop and mature quite a bit during that sixth grade year and by the end of that sixth grade year they start looking a lot more like seventh and eighth graders not so much at the beginning of the sixth grade year but certainly at the end where fifth grade students because we talked about going five eight to be perfectly honest uh and i've worked in five eight middle schools and they work but i will tell you that fifth graders

065don't develop over that course of the year where they start looking like middle school students by the end of the fifth grade year they need a little bit more a little bit more prompting and uh and and cajoling as as we as we go through it um next slide christine it's my turn so christine i think you've got this slide do you want to talk about this one yeah um so i'm just going to go into the the needs of middle level students and we know that the middle level year or the middle level years represent a time of accelerated change for adolescents in these areas that are listed physical intellectual moral psychological and social emotional developmental needs so in terms of physical needs we know our middle schoolers need opportunities for movement and physical

066activity throughout the day along with time for rest and renewal throughout the day it's very important for them intellectually um the development of these kids is really important students at this age are often less intere less interested in traditional academic subjects at this time in a student's development opportunities for engaged engaging learning experiences are priority you can see some on the screen here these should i think they must include real life and authentic experiences and opportunities that are project-based hands-on and student-led the moral development is also a priority during this time kids are developing attitudes beliefs values that will shape who they are as adults and we want our middle level teachers to engage our students with opportunities that require teamwork consensus building and democratic principles to give them opportunities to develop these attitudes and

067belief systems psychological development we know that during the middle school years kids are developing a sense of who they are they're developing a sense of individuality and uniqueness and we want our teachers to be able to support this development through curricular experiences instructional approaches and opportunities for exploration social emotional development comes into play as well we know that students at this age level really have a strong need to belong to a group and peer approval becomes way more important than adult approval they care about what their friends think teachers recognize the importance of peer relationships and friendships and promote opportunities for positive peer interactions that's really evident during advisory and you know flexible groupings and enriching activities why don't you go back christine to that slide just quickly and then we'll get in we'll get

068into the next step i just wanted i just wanted to give one quick example uh and then i want to let michael take a couple of minutes to just talk about the impact at heartland after all this work this year but i i want to tell i want to tell a weathersfield story first first and why this was so important to the staff that we decide on a on a grade level band because what what sometimes happens is the middle level can shift based on funding and staffing patterns and what was happening at weathersfield is you know one year they'd be six seven eight like they were last year or two or two years ago and then sometimes they'd be five eight or they'd be seven eight because the the the students uh either the

069numbers weren't strong enough it was tough to staff it at that level and really what they wanted to do was to build this team that christine just talked about and have some level of consistency as they move forward i think heartland also has confronted that and monis got me as well where sometimes those grade spans and the emphasis shifts you know based on either budgeting or staffing patterns so it was really important to this task force that we define the grade structure we build around that we plan for that we staff for that we budget for that and we move forward in that in in that way um so i'm going to stop talking now and and michael i don't know if you want to just take a couple of minutes and talk about based

070on our work what kinds of things are going to be a little bit different at heartland next year sure um i think you know i'll do a little bit of past and future uh especially since some of the slides dealt with what we did this year uh we really jumped on the bandwagon for the idls and um we worked hard to try to incorporate uh every aspect of our four core classes into an idl and so some of those shark tank examples uh initially were supposed to only be about a comic book and we realized that we really needed to give students voice and choice and so it changed to where they made pinball machines where they uh some made cookbooks and recipes and they just did another person um who did the overall presentation

071to the board created a shirt for people that were disabled that wouldn't be able to use maybe both arms at the same time and they went into these different avenues that we didn't expect uh because we allowed to this mindset that a middle schooler should be able to have that um interdisciplinary learnings uh elizabeth so uh that allows every uh so that allows all all of the teachers to be able to have a little bit of a say in what's happening in there but also to be able to incorporate some history as to why there's uh you know what whatever that project is that they're working on so that was one of the things that happened there but then of course then there's the math aspect and the writing aspect um and then for a

072few of the people there's the science piece um one of the guys that was in there working with me on building uh that was actually his end of the school project which again morphed from what they were supposed to do which was about outer space he said can i make a vertical jump uh tester that was the most involved he'd been in the class all year long and it wasn't just something that he got to create others got to ask questions about it and then they got to participate on it that's the daily one we need to have this beginning and end piece that's sixth grade to 8th and what it did is it shifted things 8th graders became leaders not of a school where they were just kind of there you know they've been

073there and nobody really cares but it was one where they knew it was 6th 7th and 8th graders were specifically looking in as to what they were doing engaging with them especially with the seventh grade and interacting with them and there was a change they went from being very immature to starting to be become more mature more responsible but also they realized and one student is uh at graduation pointed out she was like i'm gonna miss our sounding board conversations because i would use her as a sounding board i'd say hey what do you think of this idea and she would present that idea and then i'd usually end up going to christine saying hey we've messed up this is a way better idea than what we have we need to go with this student

074and it was neat to do that but again it was one because i was in the behind the scenes approach for the middle school concept and mindset to where it really gives the students more control of their growth and their ideas in their school and when we started to implement that uh especially when i started implement that in my advisory groups my behavior issues with the students i had dropped dramatically but not only that they started to find out that uh one one discussion that we had that completely went off topic i allowed it to go it was started with leader in me and it ended with uh students that uh had their grandfather pass away and it was a few moments where i got teary-eyed but i allowed them to continue the conversation to

075where the students now knew that they had other people than teachers to become a support system for and that's part of that middle school ideology is where we allow those students to take control of their environment and to be able to grow and we become more facilitators than teachers and i think that one of the big things that um with this new group of teachers that i have because i get three new teachers this year uh is that two of them were already working in the middle grades institute and one of the biggest things that we looked at was how can we focus in to make sure that we're being purposeful about our time together when we're planning lessons but that we want to make sure that it impacts the students overall so we're all

076looking we're already looking at end of the school projects based on things that we incorporate throughout the year and still keeping our minds open that we're gonna have a student might go completely into left field and we allow them that grace as long as they're growing and they're showing their strengths and i think that's something that doesn't happen in middle school as they get hammered and bashed about s back and test after test that we forget those things that they are good at and when we can focus them on that it changes their mindset on all those other tests and things that we're looking at for data yeah thanks michael i i appreciate that and christine i don't know i know you've got the last slide but um but you know i i i know

077that you know michael's got that new team and i think are all of you going to that middle grades institute uh well right you know unfortunately uh three out of the four so jeremy we already know he already knows that he's on board with whatever we're doing and he's gonna get caught up but uh he works during the summer so he wasn't gonna be able to make it there but uh that's great creative floor is not bad and the and the work that we're doing is going to be meaningful and i think that's the key is that uh we need to make sure that teachers have time to prepare these lessons so that we can incorporate things and so that we can allow for seventh and eighth grade advisories which is what's going to happen

078next year so that again we can make sure that those students are learning how to become leaders and that they actually have younger students with them that they can learn how to lead and mentor so um we're excited yeah no that that that's good michael um christine do you want to just take that last slide then anybody wants to ask any questions i it was important let me just say one last thing it was important that we do this work on the su level because as as we've often said and it's been my mantra since i started 10 years ago we don't want the nature and quality and opportunity um you know for for for students necessarily uh to depend on what district they happen to be in right so that if we're going to

079do this exciting stuff we want to do it across the su and we and we and and christine's going to speak about this in a minute we were very aware and very cognizant and by the way you know albert bridge had a staff member on on this team that you know we had a very separate issue in in west windsor about the sixth grade because that's one building now that has a sixth grade there that um you know that we're either going to have to accommodate somehow in these kinds of activities and opportunities and field trips or we're going to have to have these conversations with the community about whether or not uh there would be a need to uh to move them but christine do you want to just go through those steps because

080this is going to be your work i think going forward yes and david i think you started the conversation um and it does one of the steps we've talked about is engaging the westminster community in this discussion and helping them have a level of understanding about what we're trying to achieve and then allowing them to determine whether or not you know albert bridge 6th graders join join the middle school model at one of the other schools or whether they are joining your particular events that we're engaging our middle schoolers in so i think that's the work of next year in west windsor so that's a big so planning those forums and letting the community be part of that discussion and then we really um as you heard michael say i think he's there with two

081he is there with two heartland teachers there is another teacher from the su there as well um from windsor but we envision sending all our middle level teachers to the middle grades institute by the end of next year fy23 that's our hope because we know how impactful that is and how important that is and you heard michael speak to that they have time to collaborate and talk about with their priorities and you know just that time together to develop teaming and yes elizabeth can you uh i i'm sorry i didn't ask this um during michael's presentation but can you explain what the uh middle school institute is middle grades little great institutions it's a three-day institute where teachers gather and i have not been so i might not be the best person to speak of

082it they gather as teams and they you know talk about the middle level model and then they have time to work together on units of study or michael i know michael had talked about before leaving their team time they were going to work on developing a strong robust advisory program so what does that look like within their school i guess what i'm asking is uh what scale i don't have a sense of what scale it is is it for our supervisory union is it for our state is international is it the state i believe is that your constitution is is sponsored by vermont association middle level education they've been doing that for years with the middle level endorsement came into place i don't know it was it had only been in place a few years

083before i was endorsed which is like 17 years ago yeah probably about 20 years oh yeah it's um so that they run uh theme-based institutes every year for a week and they really encourage teams to attend because the power of the institute is being there with your team thank you for three days this year what they what they've done lately is they've also regionalized it a little bit so they look at the they look at the registration list and and uh and then they'll see you know well maybe we could hold one in chittenden county we'll hold one in windsor county will hold one down in you know ben inking county over or down that way and so they try to spread it out a little bit but vermont you know the truth is vermont

084has been a leader in middle grades for for a for a long time probably 20 25 years and and this institute sprang out of some of that leadership that started the university of vermont and kind of moved its way moved its way through and um you know it's a great opportunity and you know we had we had a fair amount of turnover you know people are exhausted at the end of this what was going to be our recovery year everybody didn't recover but so i'm just glad we got 405 going but i agree with christina would be nice to have if we could get matter of fact if we could get all of our middle level they'd probably come here and do one just for us they're they're in white river i think michael's cohorts

085in white river so not too far from here south or south florida yeah um they're virtual i think they're very it's a hybrid they can be it's in person yeah i think my uh michael's the heartland team is there in person i believe um and we do want to create an assessment tool to measure the success of our middle level program to see if we're getting the results free yeah thank you and with respect with respect to that last bullet too christine i know the vermont uh the vermont uh league of middle schools um has some great assessment tool models that that that they'd be glad i'm sure to share with us michael might even be able to glean some of that with that with that team and or our people who are attending they'll

086have great resources around you know around that okay i think that's the last slide but it looks like there are well we do have some research uh linked in the presentation we'll share that with you rebecca has rebecca thank you um all right i think um the presentation on the middle level approach um sounds sounds great it sounds i i believe and um and in my experience in education that that's exactly what's needed um for that group of students yet i have seen a middle school model and what i found as the high school guidance counselor that the kids that were coming in from the middle school model model and i'm not saying it's everywhere but i'm just saying that's what i've seen that um although there were supposed to be teams and students would

087come in with um accelerated or showing growth in specific areas that wasn't necessarily the case what i found was that the top 10 um in terms of academic at the middle school level became the top 10 at the high school level and and and and i always and that really concerned me and you're right david the research says that middle school does that that developmental time does identify whether um a kid is going to graduate from high school or not and and i believe that's true because i've seen it so i i hear the stories and um and i see that you need to be purposeful you need to be intentional um but my question come goes to and i think you attempted to address that in the last bullet how do you hold um

088schools accountable for what is it that um you're going to do you're you're saying we're going to focus on this group we are going to focus on their individuality um we're going to focus on their learning plan um and i i'm just wondering do you have in place some sort of assessment tool and david you said that this vermont is ahead um so it should be really helpful to have that information um now before just jumping into the model and saying to teachers okay this is the direction we're gonna go in i i i support middle school this middle school model i want to make that clear but i support it when it's purposeful when it's intentional when folks are held accountable and are doing exactly what they do i would love to see um

089our high school teachers evaluate those students coming out of that model and saying wow they are they are i would like to see our high school teachers identify whether they are beginning to see a change um as a result of a change in the model that it's being used for middle school students yeah no i think that's i think that's a good point rebecca i will tell you many of us were part of another group that met monthly this year um with mike nicholson that's a that's a name you'll remember because he he led us through the portrait of a graduate right and and his group was a group of mostly middle school teachers who um and principals who were doing a lot of focus on student self-directed learning and how to get kids engaged

090in their learning um and and those were pretty powerful uh powerful uh presentations we had some really expert uh people come and and speak and then we'd break into small groups and discuss but one of the things that was interesting and and christine may want to comment on this too is what these what these middle schools that had embraced some of this self-directed learning and this integrated you know integrated unit building and unit development what they were finding is if you can get that student voice and that's a big part of our a big part of our portrait of a graduate strategic planner if we can get that student voice active what they were finding is that as those students went on to high school and again we lose a lot of our we lose

091a lot of our kids they don't all go to windsor right so it's hard to assess what's happening at the high school level we could certainly reach out to those but what they what they were finding in these self-contained school districts where the kids went from the middle school right on to the high school that those kids as ninth graders were starting to challenge you know they were starting to challenge the teachers a little bit about student engagement student voice interdisciplinary work hands-on instruction and quite frankly all the stuff that michael described and all those developmental needs don't go away in grade 9 10 11 and 12. so so the bottom line is if we can get kids excited and spark in their learning then hopefully you know uh as you said rebecca it'll it'll

092transfer to them being much more successful uh in high school even if it means putting you know a little bit of pressure on the high school staff to also talk a little bit more about about that kind of engagement i see mark's got his hand up uh would it be reasonable to expect this new model to be looped in with the equity audit now that that's a great point i hadn't really thought about that and christina you probably don't think you've thought about it either but uh yeah i'm just looking at developmentally appropriate steps that we take and i mean to me that would seem to be a part of the of the equity of the entire system giving it's what they need based on where they are developmentally and it sounds like great things

093are already happening so i just like to see while they're looking at everything else comprehensively it seems like you're going to loop them in on thank you yeah now that that's a good idea mark and um uh the other thing i think that's important to note is that for weathersfield and heartland in particular uh and and and to some degree windsor um the idea of involving sixth grade in some of this six seven eight it's been kind of ongoing it wasn't it wasn't a huge shift it was a shift to make that decision kind of at least for the next three years in in the timeline but but uh but i think that idea of equity came up a lot in our task force meetings and i don't think there's any reason not to include

094some of that as we're looking at instruction and curriculum you know across across those grade levels [Music] uh and it's katie's report so katie is there we go katie's going to report on stepping changes what's the resource resources page yes yes that was the last slide and you'll get that yeah we're going to put this in the chat elizabeth [Music] is katie here i can't see okay are you ready i saw her okay here it comes do you have the did you embed my slides in it christine i'm pulling it up right now okay you're great thank you katie's on vacation so she's joining us from somewhere vote the beach is that the ocean we hear in the background or is that still that air handler and michael don't feel you have to stay on

095michael thanks a lot for for joining us thank you michael all right katie you just tell me when to advance and i look at you so i um outlined all the staffing changes for all the different buildings because we've had some additions and deletions so um with new hires that we need to accept for new hires so um i think a couple of meetings ago i had mentioned that we would bring it to the june meeting next slide christine so there's a lot of information a lot of people listed albert bridge there are no changes right now there may be an additional support staff member hired but no professional staff were needed no changes there heartland we have some changes but no resignations from heartland the additional staff added mindy mindy moskowitz is a special

096educator who will be in the fifth or eighth grade that was a um unfilled position from last year jennifer westoby um provisional special educator who's going to be at heartland for three days a week and provisional means they're on a they have two years to finish their requirements and that'll tie into some of the mentoring and grow your own special educator programming we're going to be doing over the next two years um jennifer is replacing tyler graves who's staying but tyler's switching to a different position to work in all alternative elementary classroom which will have a groovier name they're just all still trying to figure out what it will be and i'll explain that a couple slides in gene morse that name is familiar to many of you from heartland has been the school counselor

097for many years he is reducing his time and because um and that we're trying we were hiring a part-time diagnostician so it all melded really well together so what it means is gene will be doing all of the special education assessments he's um school psychologist by trade he has he's reactivating that license so he has all the qualifications um to do so um he will be doing that as well as counseling and this means our other two school psychologists will spend three quarters of their time on assessment and at least a quarter of their time with counseling doing mental health services um we're hoping it's more as we um get a better handle on our assessment needs over time so we're really excited about this um and the hires i thought it would be important

098just to mention our support staff hires we have four of them right now at heartland kelsey carbono ashley wheeler lindsay polito and heather white will all be support staff in weathersfield we had one resignation uh ryan lol bella who's our board certified behavior interventionist um he so i will share he is going very locally um and we'll probably still see him and um but to get more training in being aboard sort of a bcba so we're pretty excited he's been excellent and i think in some capacity he'll be still around we have been unsuccessful hiring bcba replacement so we have hired peter aubry as a social emotional interventionist and aaron rockwood who's the bcba from windsor will also be supporting weathersfield as well we've got a pretty good idea of how we're going to structure

099that but that's the way we're going to meet the need for weathersfield at this time jennifer westaby who you saw earlier will be spending two days a week doing speech language services that's her background and which brings which will be great because we have a need there as well for support staff right now we've only had to hire one individual there's probably a need for another behavior interventionist but tamara kinsman actually has worked for us and is now returning so we that's pretty cool windsor looks big windsor had the most changes for various reasons i explained at the um mount scuttany board meeting we had several people um resign emily ercart just osler chris keefe and fiona moynihan who is early childhood special ed and the hires are a lot elizabeth feinberg will also be

100a provisional special educator in the elementary grades linda sampson is taking the sixth through ninth special education position and that i just realized i forgot to put because jackie crawford will be taking one of the case manager positions which i'll be explaining in the fall when we have that all rolled out caitlyn wells is one of our new early childhood special educators which was an unfilled last year position we have a direct hire for speech language barclay shaw for another hire jessica langletts will be coming on as the early childhood teacher just to recap we now have two full-time early childhood classrooms we now are up to fire code carpet code anything else we were supposed to be up to we've got um so that we will have pre-k the same length of time give

101or take five minutes on each end because of dismissal of little people and arrival um so and i believe at the last count both of those classes had 15 students in it each which is pretty amazing we're really excited about that um there will be another tb determined special ed interventionist coming um r2 um rachel eisenberg is replacing an unfilled position from this year as well in the ace program kathleen mclean will be the coordinator of the ace program and the teacher and support staff right now so far we've only needed two rachel ladue and holly fernandez um and we have one more pending for early childhood um so those any questions on those on the school ones katie do you want to just say what that acronym a stands for yeah that's our i

102actually my last slide explains it too um that's the academic community excellence program which some of you may remember two years ago we started a very very small life skills program for 6th or 12th graders it is now morphed and i was going to bring you up to speed on that two slides down the kids came up with the name by the way they had a ton of um adjectives and they played around with putting them in a certain order and they really liked ace because they're number one and that's what they plan on being um thanks all right okay su wide we had a few changes um sarah wellman who was the previous assistant director of student support services um took a position much closer to home so sorry that's going around david um

103and so uh they both are way up there as well um we have hired sabrina brown um who is currently director of special education but she is coming on as our assistant director of student support services um and julia barackian i'm have to definitely make sure i get her last name correct um the she is going to be our school does home social worker as well as a mental health clinician she is coming from hcrs and has worked closely with um the springfield schools um most recently so we're really excited and that was a position we have been advertising for for months and months and months because we could have had it last year because it was our esser funds no not our esser our idea b funds i messed that up christine i'll fix

104that in the slide um special ed funds are the id b funds so we had our special headphones elizabeth you've got your hand up sorry yeah no i've just wondered whether she is in addition to kieran zito or yes okay so now we have two which is wonderful and and julia is a licensed mental health clinician and has all of those credentials so um she'll be able to function slightly a different way as well as the school to home coordination which we desperately needed another person um and the goal is that we roll that into our fy 24 budget once we start planning that in september um so those are the changes so far any questions before i um so what i mentioned earlier the ace program is based at the windsor school we have

105students from all from weathersfield windsor heartland and students who also come from albert bridge from west windsor so i just realized i was going through that we have we'll have everybody represented um somebody raised a hand i can't see who it was yeah it was actually elizabeth was congratulating you on all those new hires and i i i will i will second that elizabeth i will tell you including where i'm headed in the next week or so uh not easy to find special ed folks not easy to find behavior folks and katie's worked really hard at it so uh we don't have them all filled yet but i think we're we're in pretty good shape so i agree really well well done thank you it's i'm really thrilled with the caliber of people we're getting

106it's not a ton of the volume isn't there but the folks that we've we've have i'm really excited about working with um so in the ace program we're going to have pods of five students each rotating on a rotating schedule so that most of their learning will be done in a small group and that'll enable us to do community integration academic skills lifelong learning we're looking at social emotional instruction as well as the individualized nature some students will be at hactc the tech center some students will have internships other students will be taking classes at the high school so it is very individualized no not one student's program is the same but there were some themes we wanted to solidify which was the integration of our mental health services occupational health our ot speech language

107and physical health for all students so our professionals in those areas will be rotating in teaching things that some of our students need small groups for and that'll be on a regular basis including having a designated mental health professional um a lot of people at first thought this was just going to be a program for students who needed like life skills sort of the the developmental services things along those lines post high school and what we found is we stopped thinking about it as anything categorical because that's not my jam but also that limits us about thinking about what a student needs and we've really pushed teams to go back and define what is it that a student needs in order to access their education and we found some themes the themes are alternative curriculum

108students need something much more significant than generally that's available in the classroom small group instruction we've had students who have have no learning disability per se accessing academics but being able to function in a larger classroom is really difficult at this time and we're building back up those skills so that actually is a huge one community integration or lifelong living skills with inter-agency involvement has been would be another criteria social skills the need for integrated mental health adult-supported internships that we're very excited about we have five students who will be in the ninth or twelfth grade looking at how that balances with flexible pathways um these may be students that in a different setting would need a one on one or a two to one meaning two students one adult support we're finding in this

109five to two model students don't need the adults as much it's really cool to see kids that they're supporting each other and they need their have far more access to each other and supporting and growing their independence um than within a classroom where an adult may really have to lead them through a lot so um we're balancing the program with the tech center the high school classes um the other factors we're trying because we've had some students who've had difficulty with school engagement what david was talking about um attendance we have all struggled with every building with students with high truancy rates it's been exceptional this year we're also looking at for some of those students to get them back in in small supported environment and then back to the classroom as well as any

110short-term intensive support that might be needed due to other factors that may go on in a kiddo's life so we can help support and then it's kind of that support release kind of program so um the cap right now is 20. we have two teachers kathleen and rachel who will be core people there plus um it's four and a half support staff um depending on which day it is we have a little bit of um job sharing going on so that's the big that that and kate and colleen have been fantastic about spaces we'll have one large class one medium class and two small spaces plus we have a whole kitchen redone for our program with a washer dryer stove um refrigerator everything there um and we're starting to pick up jobs in the school

111for kids who need the community jobs so then we'll try to translate them outside of the into the larger community as well so any questions on ace uh katie just one quick one um do you see and i see that it's really morphed into something much larger than just developmental disabilities but do you say we're a pro i know right now we do send a few of our kids to the rrc program down in hartford it's a tuition-based program do you see that eventually you know we we a student might be able to do this program rather than have to go down to hartford um since i've been here we haven't referred a student to either hartford or odp because we've been able to meet the students needs with us not to say that we

112would always be able to um but we actually don't have any students left at the rrc everyone has graduated and we do have a small number of students who have been at odp the occupational development program which is very similar to this at springfield who are upper high school so neither one of those programs starts students at the sixth grade um yeah no that's right we we have we had a pot of kids who um that was the best fit um for the students but our goal is to build our own and and this came i will many of you might remember three years ago way before writer's cove had started came from a parent who said really i d who has a great student awesome kiddo parents said i want my kid to stay

113what can you build what can you do yeah well that's that that's what i was going to say katie yeah i was going to say thank you for the work that's gone into this because from a parent perspective i know that you know sometimes those programs you know they just take they take the kids out of their peer group they take them out of the community they take them out of you know and so i think that as we've often said the closer to home you not you can't always do it there are just times you gotta look outside but i i think building your own capacity here and using staff creatively uh is is really going to pay off for those for those parents and for those kids on the other end the alternative

114elementary classroom which is an sui program as well it's currently going to be housed at heartland um so many some of you may know that there are a couple of clinics in the area that work with students full-time who are on the autism spectrum that their students receive or individuals that receive very intensive services up to 40 hours a week some of those kiddos um it it is their pre-k program for example and sometimes up through k or one if a parent chooses one clinic is a school and the other one is not is a medical clinic we are seeing an increase of students coming up through the early elementary grades pre-k up that have had significant clinic-based services which is awesome it's incredible we partner with them to provide special education services for students

115on ieps what we have right now is a pot of students coming through that have received significant clinic-based services full-time and in meeting with all of their teams was determined that we were looking at the best fit for how to come to then school how to do this and um what we've decided is as part of their program working at a bridge and we toyed around calling this kind of the bridge kindergarten and first grade program but looking at the opportunity to intensively work with students on the school skills that they need in a small structured classroom with highly trained staff supervised and supported by a board certified behavior analyst that will integrate into the k or the one classrooms right now that's the age group that we have um it's not to say we

116will not have other age groups at some point and the teachers are all committed at heartland they've been fantastic the the ktk and the teacher who will be tyler graves are all going to collaborate in curriculum things like forced fridays all the opportunities for social emotional integration as students learn about being in a larger classroom one of the largest barriers for many students on the spectrum in addition to language barriers is sensory needs and if you just imagine that your entire educational career to date has been small group highly controlled highly sensory controlled we need some time to for those students to get used to school imagine kindergarten it's not exactly sensory friendly all the time um just by the nature of all those all those kiddos and people and what's happening so um the

117collaboration the bridge the goal is inclusion we've been really clear all the kids have plans for an inclusive um program but we're taking it at their pace and based on their needs so we're pretty excited about this it's taken some time to build and we will be working on it over the summer um and i already explained the mental health piece um and just to give you a glimmer for the fall i will share i've alluded this couple times our case manager model that we'll be rolling out we'll be communicating this to teachers and parents um and letters and flow charts so that people understand what we're doing um we're basically separating out the paperwork from the teacher um because of the heavy burden right now on our required paperwork it's um quite weighty um

118and getting not getting any less we'll have we have a mentoring grant that i will know more about in the fall and i started with heartland the other day and will be doing the um a special ed circuit at the different schools to talk about act 173 and what that really means for the changes for our special education approaches some pretty neat changes and good opportunities for us to do things continue to work on doing things that benefit all students in a way that we may not have thought about before or have been able to do before so that'll be in the fall i haven't talked this much in like three weeks so [Laughter] ugh and that will conclude the superintendent report i have one extra slide but it's not really it's just a reminder

119for david and i we will move on to items for discussion um the hiring slash employment policy um we do not have one to show at this point no no no no we looked dave and i searched we did find um what did we find david i linked it uh i think it was called um it was called the let me pull it up you want to click on that link yeah i mean not for everybody but well it's on the website it's not it's not secret but um it's called personnel recruitment selection appointment and criminal records check that was the closest we would come yeah it's pretty thorough but if somebody really wanted to tackle a hiring policy i mean we would probably need to do some work on it and look and see

120where the templates are see if the sba has anything um so if that's what you want christine to do she's more than willing to do it and come back with a draft [Music] i would be glad to help with that kristen i think that would be great and i think you know i was thinking about our our equity audit is going to inform a hiring policy so not that we don't look at it but we can bring something and it might be tweaked right based on the audit i think the the other thing christine and i have talked about um is you know sort of this whole idea of policy revision and and keeping up with policy and i i i don't know whether or not and we don't have to talk about it tonight

121but i think that might be a good summer retreat agenda item for all of you just to kind of decide how because i i know when we try to pick apart policies at the at the at the meeting like this it's really difficult because it's there's just so many people i mean if we could have some sort of a like we did two summers ago you know a subcommittee of folks who like policy work who wanted to do that both in terms of revising policies on a three to five year basis and so that's my thought on that what should happen is that there be perhaps a quarterly report on a given set of policies and you know creating a schedule to look at the policy so that every policy that we have gets reviewed

122every two years or so so that a meeting we're not eight different policies we're only looking at one or two elizabeth sorry i didn't know whether do it where do i look where uh um since we were talking about policy i wondered whether um at some point maybe at a retreat whether we can talk broadly about policy governance or our rsu board we could okay because i've looked into a little bit about how i i mean i think you did and i did in the policy governance yeah the fba thing i have attended many policy governance meetings and i have a pretty good understanding of what needs to be done yeah but it's it's a lot of work and yeah i mean it certainly wouldn't happen when it couldn't happen in one year yeah it

123would be a five-year goal um but i mean it would necessarily be a five-year goal but uh we might wanna just talk about it on our esu board to see whether there's an interest in moving in that direction yeah because there are certainly other schools that have made made the jump and they are functioning and things are going well policy government but it is it's something that is we would still have all of these policies like what we're talking about but there would be a whole set and a separate set of policies as far as who is responsible for what and how that gets rewarded now and then there would be a series of metrics for each of those those uh pieces and then the board meeting would consist mostly of during updates on the

124metrics and then talking about you know what other policies need to be uh constructed in order to to address any metrics and it's worth at least discussing here [Music] review yes okay yes um next we have our school board portal yeah all right so i'm just going to share my screen i think he needs a drum roll that's pretty awesome so there's two uh main complaints i've heard from the general public and then from board members about uh the current way we share board agendas find information about the boards board meetings etc etc and the first from the general public usually parents and community members is um because we're an su it's a little more complicated than because we have multiple boards so they go to the weathersfield school website and they're looking for their

125board but what they're really interested in was going to the su board so they can't find the support they find the su board but they can't find the mouse cutting board it's really complicated to find out which board they're trying to find uh and then they go they expect something to be on the agenda for the mass cutting board and to find out it was supposed to be at the su board meeting et cetera et cetera and um so that was something you know uh ryan and mike and myself were going back and forth trying to figure out look at other schools websites and see how we could solve that the second piece mostly uh from board members is um you know one of the good things about sharing out things with google drive and

126google docs everything is you can be sure of who's getting access to it because if they don't if you share it to a particular google account and um it's not their account then uh that another person can't access it right but one of the drawbacks is it is a little um if those if those permissions aren't set perfectly yeah sorry about the how nice it is in here i think cool um the uh we'll have to get a key in that closet yeah so uh is one of the issues is is those permissions aren't set correctly it can be hard to access it so we have board members who even though they're logged into their gmail can't access it we got to play with the permissions so we wanted to come up with a way

127around that one too so those are the two main things i'm going for and then separately uh i wanted to create something that was very clean very simple that answers both of those issues i think we came up with that which basically you're looking at it's a web it's a website but it has other features so you know for example right here under meetings right at the top you click on that and um i'll share this tab instead and lori and i went through and we added all the meetings for all the boards at one link just on a spreadsheet everybody can see it we highlight the ones that are you know where they should be so for example december 19th like you wouldn't meet on december 25th so usually that one would be moved

128uh from the actually december 26th sorry that moves to the 19th and again this can be updated we have a little disclaimer down at the bottom future me days are subject to change and then we link back to the board page um so let me go back to the board page and show you how i got there that was just for the meeting schedule so that way there would be no confusion you could go to one page click one link and you could see where heartland meets the dave weatherfield meets from one place again trying to answer that community involvement issue and concern we got all our board members here if i click on it it drops down it shows all the board members and emails i can go through you know uh weathersfield you

129know again we're we're trying to launch this uh july one um so we've still got some things we're working on but basically that just shows the board members we're hoping to watch this friday but i want to give you guys a sneak peek but so that's the main thing is meetings and the board members but the heart of it is down here and you can see we got all the boards listed here by board we looked at other sus that combined multiple boards and uh we want to put everything on one page so so when we launch this if you go to the weathersfield school and you click on board you'll go here if you go to the heartland school page you go to board you go here and wherever you go you'll end up

130here so there's one place to find everything and if you it just works as you expect it would if i'm interested in the su board i click on it and uh it loads and you can see previous school years again it would be my fiscal year so this folder right here which is the meeting we're at today would go in that folder for 2122 because we're closing down 2122 and your first su meeting in july will be of 2223 and that's where that's gonna go and if you click on here you can see what would typically be in the board packing so you have your agendas your draft minutes really simple really clean my simplicity is uh what i was looking for i didn't want to complicate it i think it's um you know when

131community members and parents are really interested in a hot topic in a school board meeting they don't want to search around 18 different pages and levels to find what they need so we're going to try to make it real simple and then get back you just go back it works as you expect it would you go to heartland and i can go down i can see these meetings again these would be in the previous board meeting when we closed out 2122 that would be under here under previous school years uh the only thing i wanted to make sure the board was aware of if we go to this um july 1 the only difference that you're going to see as far as the website is concerned because it's more for you and the public is

132that the board packets will now go here now obviously if there's something confidential you know it would go through email but if it's uh policy readings um agendas which are always been on the website in minutes which have always been a website there might be other things like letter of resignations anything that's a public document that would normally go in the old style board packets which we used to print out a bunch of them and now everything's digital that's where it would live if there was financials that were going to be reported out at that meeting that's where they would be housed and it would be incumbent upon the board member uh to go into this page and look for the their stuff rather than having to deal with emails and all the email traffic

133from lori lori's job is put everything in here and then your job is to go and get it um the first couple months july august we'll send email reminders with the link uh of this website that lori will say hey for this su board meeting coming up in two weeks everything's there go check it out here's a link and then eventually she'll just stop the reminders question elizabeth i have three questions okay all right uh the first question is um have you thought at all about for parents who might be interested um have you thought at all about putting a subscribe button on it so that if uh if a parent wanted to subscribe to uh it would just send a note to them saying there's there's minutes that just got posted to the uh

134whatever board was testing board or um we do that for news items but i wanted to keep the simplicity of this i didn't i didn't want to uh make this a news item so i know what so that's the difference is for a news item it would have a blast out to everybody but this would be an opt-in so for parents who really want to keep informed on what our boards are doing but don't always remember to go out and search out what the boards are doing would be an easy way to yeah i don't know if uh the program we're using to do this has as an alert function my second question is uh the search folder on school board documents does that search all pdfs in that folder well let's find out so

135if if you find out yep it does okay so if you don't go into policies and you just go out all the way out yeah and you like do a search on act act 46 yep well we only have a couple years in here okay that was going to be my last question yes uh is there any does it does the manuscript school board pre-date monis got the manuscript is there an archive anywhere of uh there is an archive as a central office but that it wouldn't be on the website everything is archived there i think um laurie could go back two years as you might remember there was some turnover in david's secretary position there was three employees three years or whatever and uh we lost some of the stuff we haven't lost it

136but as far as the website pdfs are concerned uh from 1718 so i think we have i think we have 20 21 21 22 and uh i think i get 1920. so there's no archive going further not digitally okay not visually um i used to keep everything up to date on the website the old website an iteration probably five six years ago in my google drive files that i've now unshared so i might i might have it um that diane used to throw this up in there but yeah right now i think for for launch we're only going to have the last two years three years because i count this year now look into the alert button and it looks like it only searches the folders that are in there right so if i went

137to su and if i do for dm here it shouldn't work sorry but if i go here and i go into policies so when i went when before that mary again last may again a meeting and i tried desperately to find the mission for the supervisory i mean i looked through everything i looked i've tried to search it's not pos i don't think it's possible to search minutes but i looked at minutes for the su board going back the last two years and yeah so i could so uh so for heartland's a good example because we have artland in here pretty much ready for launch so let me go uh i can search for minutes so that what you're saying is this would help you because if i go here um let's try this so

138now i'm in heartland and i go i don't know if it's gonna do it if i gotta sit search on that yeah so i gotta go into the the pdf so we can do it a couple ways to make it really searchable i could um i could for previous school years one of my biggest questions yeah one of my biggest frustrations is not being able to to i mean truly it would free me so tremendously to be able to i wouldn't have to take all of these notes if i could actually search minutes going back and find an issue if i wanted to look at budgets just but um budgets going back for the last couple of years and look at minutes from all of those yeah so it seems to me that this could

139be very very helpful for you it would be awesome yeah so the only thing the only thing is we also want to make it clean yeah right we just want to have a bunch of pdfs right so uh one thing we could do is for previous school years i can talk uh and see how messy it would look if we put all the previous school years so once we close out 2122 and we close out 1920 we would just have a folder that said 20 1920 you open that and all the pdfs will be listed and you can search just like i did yeah right so you can search a year at a time so i could definitely do that that would be fantastic because it looks like the search works really well like if

140i go to policies the budget is a good example actually because if you look at that i mean we have refined the budget process the actual process over the last few years and it would be nice to be able to kind of so i just went to policies and i just found any policy that deals with budget and i thought three of them grant writing uh fiscal management and general financial accountability and financial report statements so any any policy that has the word budgets right there any policy that has um i i found the travel reimbursements there by searching for dean which i knew was a rare word um and you could see substitute teachers and that would get your name too can you do a boolean search a boolean search and i can go

141uh where i guess does it require a boolean search like quote per plus dm unquote or does it or can you just do i think he did it i think he did it because i know pretty much written correctly in that it does it either way so it's no difference okay um what would be interesting if they did uh i did it this way pretty is a bad example actually that's so rare uh i did um resource would be good work yeah so i can look into that and you can download the pdf right here with this one click of a button if you want them personally uh so i can do that i can look into uh previous school years putting them all on pdfs so that they could use the tool to search

142it that would be great um the alert thing is gonna be tough because this is a this is a software thing that's it's more built for like as a website it's not built for alerting like news but i can look into i can see if we can do that um and then it wouldn't necessarily i mean nobody every for goodness sakes every parent in our supervisory union doesn't really want to get a notification when when our minutes are up but there are parents who might be well i think for those for those parents that are that interested in it um and want to keep tabs on it i think you know we're making it real easy on them yeah we're putting everything in one place there's not multiple boards to look at if it's amount

143of scuttering issue or what s u issue they can go to one page they don't have to go and filter so we're trying to find a and uh you know as par far as like website design sometimes simplicity is the ultimate sophistication so you want to keep it simple and clean and we can add to it but i did at launch i didn't want to make it too uh busy thank you so much for doing this this is going to be really good and there should be no more emails other than reminders that she's put the stuff in from lori with with pds unless it's a confidential thing that only you have access to everything will be in those folders and then eventually you'll kind of train yourself to go to the website and she'll

144say hey this everything's in there for mouse cutting everything's in there for heartland um she's got all those email lists but you don't that way you have to deal with the pdf going back and forth because you might just want to go to the portal and see one or two things you don't need everything because you're more interested in one or two things right and just trying to search through emails for the current for the current agenda yeah and especially i think too at launch what we're going to do is we're going to make it really easy for people to find it right on the su front page where i was waiting for this meeting you know to to do this we're going to make a work we don't know exactly how we're going to

145make it look but it'll be right here on this bar and it'll be it'll be go to the su board uh the boards page not su board the boards page so again that way they can get to it from the front page they can get to it from the sc website if they're at the album bridge website if they click on boards they're going to go there they won't have to deal with you know all these different boards everything is right there on one page and so that's why i have to go back because that link is not live yet does anybody have any other questions i'll look into the alert thing that's the only one i don't know about just that it's really awesome it is it's very exciting thank you thanks davis i

146will stop sharing my screen like i said uh we're looking to watch this friday july 1. great thank you thank you next we have people privacy rights and people privacy rights procedures and that's the second are reading any questions or concerns clarifications that are necessary just to clarify we don't have to we don't approve the procedures we just uh like we approve the procedures but we don't pass them right yeah it's not correct it's not like the policy that we have right has there has there been any input work has our board received any comments from parents on this to my knowledge i'm trying to think with the exception of the anti-racism policy the equity policy and the the gender policy that is back in revision on the state level i have never received questions

147has anyone else on the board has anyone approached um here's a question um i think in reading through the policy it seemed uh i mean it's it's very readable it's very specific um but i wondered whether it would be a good idea to include specifically in the policy that a parent has the right to opt out of a questionnaire but not the right to opt out of curriculum because grouping them together in the policy makes it implies that that's a possibility and i don't know i'd just like to kind of talk about that point so this is where it would be really handy what's that yeah yeah that's right yeah it's very um now you have to go back and search for laurie you should keep the right lorry right there's that too i mean

148if you if you look at i when i read both the policy and the document and the procedure document it becomes clear through reading the procedure that it doesn't apply to opting out of hill but i don't know it seems to me including the curriculum in the policy it might be a good idea to just stay explicitly is that any curriculum does that does come up parents ask i know i know there are teachers who who uh adhere to the wishes of parents and i don't know if they know that they don't have to do that yeah at this point we let them opt out of um wise comes we've let parents opt out of those of course those classes but it does make some parents feel like they cannot doubt them no other person

149yeah so it would be nice to have something in a policy that states that that is not the case so that's my comment about this policy okay we can look at it one more month so you would like the policy itself to say yeah i'd like it to say specifically that that they that the opt out includes opting out of questionnaires but it doesn't include opting out of curriculum surveys yes your base questions elizabeth can you [Music] point out where it suggests that parents have the right to opt out of curriculum are you talking about it doesn't suggest that and and my my point is that by having it but my point is two twofold one is uh by having it grouped with surveying and questionnaires that it kind of primes the mind to think

150that it's going to include an opt-out for that if it's if the policy isn't read very carefully the procedure is done then further you know guides you to understanding that it's uh for surveys and questionnaires but by having the curriculum be by having the rights of parents to inspect curriculum i don't have the document open right now but having the rights of parents to include to inspect curriculum i think it i what i'm saying is that i think it should say specifically that parents have the right only to inspect curriculum and not to opt out of it as it has come up and it comes up it's you know ever since i've been on the board it's come up so that would be part four the right of a parent to inspect upon request and

151the instructional material you used as part of educational curriculum for the parents child and any applicable procedures for granting access to such material within a reasonable time after the request is received is that what you were yep so adding something to that saying i i don't think anything should be added to that i don't think that has anything to do with pupil privacy rights whatsoever i'm not sure why number four is even in this it has yes i agree and so the other possibility is just taking it out because it's really that it seems to me that the policy is really more addressing parental rights versus uh privacy and you know maybe maybe it would be a good idea to put four in a separate policy but that also includes um specifying that curriculum curricula

152um are are at the um that's not possible to opt out of curriculum that those are that is at the under the discretion of right so i i i think i think that's a completely different yeah i know a completely different a discussion i don't think number four should be included in this whatsoever i don't remember anywhere in the procedure which i have to say off the bat the procedure is a hot mess but i mean i i think it's pretty good but grammatically and it's i don't know if that's going to go through an editing process the procedure but that's a whole other topic um i don't remember reading in the procedure anything about the procedure how a parent gets a copy of the curriculum i may be mistaken though well why don't we

153i mean i don't know what beth wants to say but i think we should consider dropping for and putting it in a separate policy [Music] yeah so i'm thinking like i agree i think it seems like an odd thing to be putting in a you know a a privacy policy because it seems out of context there but i also think i'm not sure i agree 100 elizabeth because it's there's also situations with like sex ed and things like that that come up that regularly we will put out a opt-out option for parents if they decide not to do that that's part of the curriculum um so i think we just need to be careful i mean i may not agree with opting your kid out of that but it's it is um i know that's

154something that i believe we regularly do already well i think that's in policy someplace else for example hartford has a policy about opting out of uh animal dissection i don't know if yeah kind of idea but it's part of the curriculums you would think so i'm not sure right so that would be part of a curriculum opt-out policy not part part of a people privacy rights um i think that's definitely something worth exploring in a completely different policy right and i i believe it is in a policy that's more targeted for curriculum and short of opening one more tab to search for that curriculum policy i'm sure i'm there i don't i only see curriculum development does not have that no it's not it's um [Laughter] maybe it's under instruction other people privacy that's right

155the current people we are we are going to table this for one more month we will bring this back next month with item number four out and bill what were you saying about the procedures um within the folder i created a um a um and amy i think you're in i created a google doc of the pupil privacy rights procedure and i just highlighted a couple things grammatically that were i'm wondering if by before next month if we can have someone edit this because the the grammatical mistakes and the spacing and so forth makes it difficult to read and understand i think there's some good things in here it just needs to be cleaned up so i don't know who would do that i mean i could but david right off the bat laurie do

156that david yeah i mean laurie has great editing capabilities i mean i think if you gave her that direction she could easily date it i can't hear you you can't you still can't hear me bill yeah we can hear you david okay my volume yeah my volume keeps getting turned down so okay yeah no i think that could be a an easy task for laurie to take the first slice at it um and and uh and and one of the things on procedures because our procedures we don't have procedures bundled anywhere yet and we we really want to bundle them uh and the truth is the vsba with all the required policies and the recommended policies they've also now given us templates for procedures that should accompany those policies so somebody's got to kind of

157start christina i've talked about this kind of start to go through that a little bit anyhow but this would be a good place to start on cleaning up at least these procedures and then i just want to make sure i understand the conversation so christine has clear direction on i think taking four out makes sense but given the comments that beth made and and bill to a certain degree um do we want to start building another policy that talks a little bit about opting in and opting out is that what the decision was a curriculum of curriculum curriculum correct but amy thinks we may have one all right yeah so i i'm pretty sure it's somewhere else okay so so christine you know that that's kind of the next step here okay number sounds good

158and then i'll ask lori to clean up the procedures though if you share your version with me yeah and to elizabeth's point i think it's good for the board to take a look at procedures but there's no you know there's no necessary approval of those procedures those are really internal documents that guide the administrators so elizabeth was absolutely right there but it still should be a document that is readable and and and isn't that choppy and i think what happened is that's just a template that we grabbed and we need to it needs to be cleaned up has this board set a date for retreat this summer that may be a stupid question but no no no jumping the gun because i'm just thinking about setting next agenda with christine and getting getting that clear

159on whether that's a retreat agenda or whether that's an actual board meeting agenda um yeah we can talk about that when we come to um so we will hold off on this policy and i will find the other okay that'll be us because i am so uncomfortable [Laughter] oh okay so next i i think we really did go over middle level update thanks to a lot now items for action is the equity audit and i will take a motion to approve the equity audit with insight education group at 42 this is elizabeth and elizabeth burroughs sorry second colleen okay thank you bless you were there any other questions or comments on that before yeah and just for the purpose of being clear on the minutes yeah the motion would be to you know enter into

160a a contract with insight education corporation at a cost not to exceed forty two thousand five hundred dollars um for the purposes of conducting an equity audit in the windsor southeast supervisor reunion i think that's i just wanted to get that motion clear and it sounds like it was made and seconded um and christine it's great because springfield board meets two weeks from now so christina if this gets adopted tonight she'll reach out to the new superintendent down there who was a part of that final decision and and um and and i think they meet on july 19th christine and if they say no we can still move forward is that that's i was just going to say that i think if it gets delayed down there for some reason and one never knows i

161think i think you you could enter into a contract based on this authority tonight christine i think we want to get going we do yeah okay um without any other comments or questions i am going to take a phone call starting with ann marie hi beth i bill maybe he muted himself i i dropped my mouse colleen i davis i saw his lips move i didn't hear anything though your volume might be off is that possible can you hear us davis i think he's typing in the chat chat he said i'm joking he put it in the chat yes elizabeth hi mark thank you thank you so much this is some really really great work yeah and we're ready for it yes um i don't believe there were any other items for action no i

162think that's it amy um [Music] okay studying the next agenda we should look into having a retreat um let's see our our next meeting let's just start there next meeting is monday july 25th we could start that meeting early and have a retreat um perhaps have it outside we have we have the bonus got you retreat that week we do oh okay okay so never mind do we have that one schedule yet yes is somebody sending out calendaring i thought we'd reserve two different nights but i haven't seen any it's not night i think i believe it's during the day that was okay july 28th that thursday during the day let me check the board and i can't do daytime during the week i'm all out of vacation time it just says the date and

163the date that we landed on was thursday july 28th and it doesn't say it says elizabeth did not give me a time for the meeting but i assume it would be late afternoon slash evening so that's in the board portal in the board portal i have july 11th and july 28th yeah board retreat meeting on the 11th so that we can conduct whatever business there is um but it won't be so i'll just make sure that uh just touch base and glory and make sure that that's a separate meeting that she did i mean it's gonna be outside so it's the assumption that's gonna be a person no google me if it's outside yeah okay so just a normal retreat yeah okay so then we don't have to we don't need a google meeting like

164that no yeah no all right that's right late afternoon 11th meeting okay so we'll talk to you about it okay i'll just put a placeholder okay so for the su board it will be a regular meeting on july 25th at 20th sorry no 25th i'm sorry you're right here at 6 30 it will be a regularly scheduled meeting it will be hybrid and if it's there for your blanket i will be outside i'll get a i'll give you thank you um so as far as the next agenda we will have people privacy rights um probably equity audit update i think it'd be good to carry that in fact i even wondered christine i don't know how you feel but the gentleman that spoke to us about sort of the comprehensive nature of that audit i

165wonder if he'd come and spend 10 or 15 minutes talking to the whole board about what that could look like i i think that might be [Music] i'm not sure he's available but i think that might be great and then just because it's july and need for a short meeting if we had those as the main items with a superintendent's report yes yeah that sounds good and and and the other thing i and i've got a lot of opinions here tonight and i won't be here but the other the other uh the other thing you've done traditionally in july and i don't know whether you want to do it at that meeting or not but just kind of especially if you're not going to have a retreat and maybe i missed that discussion but just

166sort of setting a couple of goals for christine so she's clear on her her mission you could make that part of your report christine just in terms of your thoughts and then get clear on there's no base evaluation to base that on but but it would be nice to have an idea of what what that works going to be [Music] and i think we will have a retreat that just won't be in july okay sounds good yeah last year it was in august yeah and maybe it'll be good to let those local boards have theirs first and i know some of them have already and then have the su retreat at the end yep [Music] so i think that's our agenda i do not believe we need executive sessions [Laughter] i just wanted to ask

167um david just even christine i just want to find out on what's happening with the alice training i had a question from uh some people about it and just was wondering um when that was going to take place and who was involved in it and where but we can talk about that after the meeting if they want to just stick on for a minute it's going to take place during the opening in service for staff and all staff will will be taking it again they took it in 2019 i believe we took it off working on making sure we can track it making sure we can track it all yeah so they should have that training before school starts they will have that change before school starts and we have a plan for new staff

168each year making sure they get that training as well which we haven't had in the past so for that thank you yeah um with no further questions i'll take a motion to adjourn this is elizabeth thank you elizabeth and a second second it's best and [Music] um i believe we are all in unanimous agreement sounds that way so thank you very much thank you david yeah thank you so much i will stay in touch that's for sure christine we'll touch peace tomorrow yes we will at some point thank you everybody