SU Board Meeting - May 23rd, 2022

001first order of businesses changes additions to the agenda at 6 45 which is in four minutes we have someone from the vermont school board association actually we have two people from the vermont school board association the director as well as a search consultant who is going to join us just to give us an idea of what to expect should we engage the vermont school board association in our permanent search for for the superintendent um let me see i don't think there were any other did you put a point interim superintendent on here um items i put it as an item chat okay thank you so i'm under items for action we will vote to appoint our interim superintendent um let me see we have three minutes until bspa is joining um i will take a

002motion to approve the minutes from april 25th so moved okay and nikki seconds faster online now than i am in person and i am going to go through with our roll call vote um are were there any other changes or addition um clarifications to the to the minutes from our last meeting okay we will start with our roll call vote um anne-marie i davis hi mark hi nancy hi nicole hi rebecca hi elizabeth hi and i am and i the minutes have been approved and it is now 6 44 and i um saw where sue sieglowski from the vermont school board association and i believe jackie wilson who is a um superintendent search consultant and i welcome you to our school board meeting and to let kind of give an overview of how a superintendent

003search is conducted thank you very much uh amy and i think what i'll do is ask jackie if she could provide that overview because she is the one who works directly with boards on it if that's okay with you jackie well that's fine um so hi david how are you good jackie how you doing david could probably do this for [Music] you because i've worked pretty closely with him over for a couple of months well for about so um the process um really throughout the process um it does get tailored i can only speak to you from my experience but there are some basic if you look at the components of what vsba guarantees there are basics that any consultant would provide and um what we do is really work alongside the board from the

004from the get-go some of the first things that happen is that we work to help you develop that job posting so that might sound simple but sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't because you really want to capture what are you looking for in your next superintendent so at some points i've been involved that we have gotten before before we even posted that we um did go through some process of getting some engagement from other stakeholders so that we had that clearly defined as to what we were looking for so it really depends on where a board is and what the and you know do they know that already and is that a pretty simple thing or not and um one thing i want you to start thinking about um sooner than later i think

005it's really important and i've and i've learned this over the last year because the the market is very competitive you should have be pretty clear going in um as a board what you will pay that person so i'm asking um folks i would be asking boards to post when they do that posting here's our salary range so that is something you can start to think about now um so that that's the first step and once that is established um i work with the board to present to you a timeline of what i think the process um how long it should take and we rough that out and then also what will be included the things that we will do and again um i can always share a draft with you from some from another place

006i've worked with but um the the components are similar but it will vary again depending upon the needs of the community and what you're looking for and so we develop a timeline that usually is probably two to three months long that's ideal i think that's from the beginning to the end of the process is about you you want to have that wrapped up within a within probably eight weeks or so eight to ten weeks um and we the approach um i've used is the board really one of your first charges is to identify a screening committee so that screening committee is given a charge and their charge usually is to um to go and to review all of the candidates that apply for that proceeding to do some um rating of those candidates and to

007decide who to intervene and their responsibility is then to bring to the board viable candidates for boarding you so they do a lot of the leg work so they are the ones really digging you know they're the they're the ones really carefully reviewing now those resumes they are put a lot of thought into interview questions and um and then um all of the we decide who after interviews who are the viable candidates to move forward to the board and when those candidates go to the board they are not ranked they're not saying this is our top candidate this is our second candidate that's not how it happens i'm i'm sorry my phone's hold on wasn't sure who that was okay that was me i can't have you know how it pops up on you if

008you're talking to the computer i apologize um and um and then so they again those candidates will not be um uh ranked coming to the board but they will hopefully will bring two to two to three folks to you to say we think that both these people are highly qualified as superintendent candidates and then the board starts their process and that and so they would go through an interview process and again it depends upon the community you may want to have other stakeholder stakeholder opportunities i've done some virtual forums with candidates and then we've done survey questions after that and and community folks have weighed in um and so it really it really depends on the community as to how you want to involve your community and at what level you want to do that

009and the i help the board through the whole process with with reference checks um this past year the folks both folks groups i worked with um they cho they preferred that i do all the reference checks instead of parsing that out so um that's the approach i used and i conducted all of the reference checks and then when the board was ready to deliberate after interviewing the final candidates i shared um my findings from those reference checks so i'm there the whole you know as a consultant you'll have them there the whole through the whole process there to support you answer questions um we do on the screening committee it's really important to have a a couple of board members and whoever is elected as chair of that screening committee will really become the lifeline

010for the consultant that's who you communicate with all the time and it's almost disappoints almost every other day or so when you're in the midst of it working through the process so that's that's a big job and i recommend that if you know it's good to have the screening committee chair be a board member because it's really nice to have that continuity because that person then moves on to um being part of the board process so you know i i i've talked a lot ask me any questions that you may have that you know things that you're thinking about i am happy to answer them so jackie this is amy and hi i was part of several search committees for superintendent from when we went from four superintendents to one and what you were saying

011was bringing it all back to me i started feeling kind of twitchy so one of the part of the process that we had done before we used we did have community members on the and teachers community members and students be part of that at least at some point in the process with that still be something we could do would it be up to us sure that's up to you absolutely you can do that so um you can decide that i mean usually your screening committee is it's good to keep it to a size or you know around 10 to 12. so you can decide to have representation that represents all those groups so you that's a good thing to do and the other thing you can also say let's just do a little um you

012know we're going to reach out to those groups and now everybody is so used to virtual it's kind of nice um what i did with one with one district is we had three questions that we posed and we put those questions online in a google form and we and we were seeking input into what they were looking for what they felt the strengths of their district were where did they want to see things you know what do they feel as an area for improvement what qualities were they looking for in their next superintendent and we put those three questions out and we did have them identify if they were a student if they were a parent if they were an employee and it was really helpful so we gathered all of that information and that

013information then i shared that information with the screening committee so that helped them as they were working through um looking at candidates and trying to you know determine who might be the person that we're looking for what are other stakeholders saying so there are some ways to do that now and i think it's probably less cumbersome because folks are so used to that virtual option um so you can use that makes it a little easier to navigate that thank you [Music] are there other questions i have a few questions elizabeth first of all amy would you mind um showing where the number 20 was showing who all is here um here just borrow my do you want to throw them no i just wanted to see who who's here okay oh you mean you want

014to click on that little participant yeah okay sorry that's why i loved him i logged in so i could see it now you can scroll down yeah and sorry for people who are seeing my face too close good yeah thank you you're welcome uh okay um my first question is uh what is what exactly is involved with a reference check what kind of questions do you ask uh do you do you simply ask whether you are the reference that the person gave or what what's involved with the reference check so reference checks um are i do um i do some the folks i do the folks that they've given me but i do way beyond that so um i will check with always include board members some teachers um and uh you know principals somebody

015from central office so usually around seven or eight folks and i have a pretty set questions that i ask i'm pretty tight on my reference checks um so you know i will ask questions about management style leadership style how they handle conflict i would share and again i share with the board i can share that whole document with you here are the things i ask and then i take i take that information and when i'm ready to share it with the board i do not um if if the board has asked me to do the reference i do not hand out paper documents of what folk said i just i'm not comfortable with that and i let the board know that right from the get-go so instead i will say here's what i heard for

016strengths here's what i heard for challenges um and here's some quotes that you know that did really resonate here are the trends that showed up so um i shared that all verbally when we um when the board is ready to deliberate about the candidates okay thank you can can i ask the other one yes uh so um uh that's all right uh have you had any supervisory unions ask you for blind uh blind participation and if so how did you go about doing that no i have not and i don't know what you mean by that i mean uh taking names off of resumes and taking removing addresses and really uh making it so that a person coming to interview doesn't have any pre predispositions um based on totally superficial uh identification okay i haven't

017i haven't been asked to do that and i haven't done it okay and my third question is and it's a it's a little bit tricky it's a little bit of a tricky question and that is um how how would you go about expanding the diversity of the pool and what i mean by that is all kinds of diversity um we tend to get you know um i well i should acknowledge first that uh i've never been through a superintendent search before but uh the full candidates i think can be diversified in a way that um we don't necessarily see all the time does that make sense i don't i'm trying not to use i'm trying to be specific but i mean uh it doesn't necessarily mean that a person comes from a particular social class

018or race or gender or ability disability i also mean you know um uh [Music] the other things that that form our makeup that there's uh lots of lots of ways that we could um diversify our our candidate pool well i think that one place to start with that is that's why i i spoke about the importance of identifying what you're looking for when you post that position so i think that there needs to be clarity i mean and agreement as to what are you looking for in a candidate and that may attract folks that may ordinarily not pay attention to that posting so i think the postings are incredibly important and um most opt to use school spring um i suggest you do but there are other places you can go if you want to

019expand um if you want to expand that you know that search um and i can check i have not done that but some of my colleagues have and i'm not sure if they've had a lot of success they've used education week i'm not sure if if that they that has yielded anything for them or not then we could definitely you know reach out to folks and find out about are you speaking in terms of uh going beyond school spring right okay so you really generally just use school spring we generally use school spring it seems to be um it's been my experience i mean it's well it's people know about it i mean we get applicants from all over the country and you know in international so it's it's two people are tuned into that

020so i think it has it has a wide audience okay thank you um i don't want to hold sue and jackie up more but are there any other questions anyone has is beth um rebecca um to tag along on elizabeth's question um i i would be interested in um other options other than school spring and looking at um as you mentioned your colleagues have looked at other places um or other um environments but i i would be interested in really trying to get that um much more wider uh um [Music] i mean mark was there for what is it that we're looking for all right um yeah and like jackie said that could be part of our discussion before we even post the position of determining all the places that we want it posted um

021just who it is that we're reaching out to are there any other questions for vermont school board association um elizabeth might have won i'm just looking back at what beth said last last meeting um yeah beth was her question had to do more with the sba itself and [Music] how to when the vermont school board association is doing hiring for espa staff um if there is an equity policy or what sort of equity work the sba is doing internally yeah oh so i can definitely answer that question it's not often that the sba is doing hiring we only have four employees including myself we don't have a written hiring policy but we have we have been doing a lot of um equity work which i can tell you a little bit about um we have

022we do have a model equity policy um for school boards which i'm sure you have seen we have received a grant from the vermont community foundation to do diversity equity and inclusion work and through that grant we have been able to do look at several of our model policies through an equity lens we just issued a library materials selection policy that was revised using an equity lens underway is the student activities and interscholastic sports policy um and we're also right now working on a model policy on school branding that is required by h139 so um we're we're doing that work we've also done a lot of internal work um to build our capacity on equity we have done um implicit bias training with the kerwan institute and also with cq strategies we've done the whole

023um staff has done that in addition the whole staff has done a beyond bias course through the center for creative leadership we've done a three-session series with outright vermont which was offered to school board members but also required for all of our staff and when we attend the national school boards association annual conference we focus on the sessions that address educational equity through the vermont community foundation grant we've also provided mini grants to districts to support work that's innovative in the field and we've done equity problems of practice which is looking at analysis of our internal processes and documents etc we've revised our staff handbook with equity lens we are recruiting right now for a student intern for the summer which is going to focus on educational equity we've been very active on the act

0241 eqs subcommittee the task force on equitable and inclusive school environments let me if there's anything else i can think of um we have an educational equity webpage the the sba board has done a retreat with the arizona school boards association um on on equity and on training school boards to have this skills that they need for diversity equity and inclusion so um that's some of the work that we've been doing in the past couple of years on equity thank you soon welcome elizabeth sorry it's okay one more that was beth's question by the way yeah um another question and the other question is what's the best time to begin a search what's the best time of year do you want me to do that sue i was a superintendent i've been retired for a

025couple of years but um i think your best if you are positioned and ready to post that ad on mid-december early january and you've done the leg work um you know that by then you're ready you know that ads ready to roll you know what you want you've decided on that salary range i think that's a good time i think i i sue may disagree with me but i think much earlier folks aren't really sure they're still that's when they're kind of looking that that window is really from december through the end of february when folks are thinking about if they want to move on and do something different i mean do you think sue has that been your experience too with other searches yes okay um i i have a question to go along

026with that and then i'll i'm done with my questions so in terms of the the school board the whole community deciding how we want to post the position what it is that we're looking for so having community forums and having assistance with that would it be unreasonable to engage in a search consultant earlier let's say in october to assist us with a couple of community forums or so i'm going to put that have you done something like that in the past i think typically we've seen the community forums happen later in the search process not not before it really gets rolling okay yeah okay so you have to think about that and what i mean what are you what are you exactly looking for and what role do you want that person to play you

027know i mean i i don't i mean i can just speak for myself i don't think it's like a hard no but but i think you'd um i think it you could have a conversation i mean and with the consultant and see you know what are they what are they what what's their capacity and what could they contribute to that so i think it's an option yeah i think we could build into the contract um if it's going to be much more time consuming than the regular search then it would probably increase the cost right and and that's yeah understandable i was just thinking since we have not that we we've had david for 10 years so our community has not been through a superintendent search for quite a while and prior to that we

028had a i don't know how many community forums as part of looking at the physician description and how the community what qualities we were looking for in a superintendent so that all voices were heard uh we did have quite a few community forums many years ago and then and that's all i was wondering is if we could and it's possible that prior to engaging a consultant we could have that conversation on our own and then be ready to roll when we engage vspa one thing that is fortunate for your district is or your su is that um you have you have time you know you're not in a rush which is nice yes yes that is very that that is a positive for us i'm very grateful having experienced the other side of that [Music]

029are there any other questions or comments i want to thank sue and jackie for coming to our meeting and we will certainly be in touch when we get to the point where we want to engage a assistance in our search thank you thank you good evening bye all right thank you everyone are there any comments in the chat box let me see i cannot see me and that reminds me do you want to leave the chat box open oh no no no i think that one is the agenda right it is i can still post but i'm the only one now they can okay so going back to our agenda thank you everyone for um that moment um change so we have approved the minutes we are now on to public participation and board announcements

030are there any is there any um public participation on items not related to the agenda and i see misty putin has her hand raised hi thanks i won't take too much of your time oh is that echoing on your end no you're fine okay um i just i missed the windsor board meeting i was at my son's baseball game but i just wanted to make um just one note um i got to go to the self-directed learning um informative meeting a few weeks ago uh it was for parents and uh david was actually in my group and we got to talk to principals and parents and people from all over the place there were people from ohio and um it was it was awesome and i'm like super really excited um for other parents in

031the community and teachers to learn more about this self-directed learning and um anyway i just wanted to make that note i just wanted to say how awesome of an opportunity it was and i really think it's something that windsor should you know look into even more um it's definitely it was a fantastic meeting um and so that and then also i just wanted to say something really quickly um i've been talking to a lot of teachers in the community mostly here in windsor um some of the support staff um and they're tired they're really really tired and um and you know i'm looking at the agenda and i see a lot of stuff on here about equity which i think is great i you know i have i always have a little bit of a

032different opinion than some people and i think we do need to address equality but i think that we really need to start looking at what's happening in our school as well as far as our teacher burnout rate and i'm a little worried because someone you know i don't know if the staff always addresses some of these issues with um you know the superintendent or the principals or administration but some are saying to me like they're ready to leave and um they're just saying i gotta get to the end of the school year i don't know if i'm gonna come back next year and you know i'm kind of like a busybody in the community always asking questions to the teachers to the principals anybody i see i'm like how's it going how are you doing

033are you holding in there i'm always asking and it's such a common theme right now with our teachers and i don't know if they just don't feel comfortable addressing these issues but i think we really need to have more conversations about it and we need to figure out the core problem that's happening because i really don't want to see us lose some of these we have awesome teachers we really do we have i part of the reason i love our school is because we just have such amazing teachers and support staff and i don't want to see us lose any of them and so i just wanted to put that bug in your ear as the school board to maybe have some more conversations with each other with our staff and just come up with

034some ideas maybe try to do a survey surveys are hard because teachers don't always feel comfortable being honest with them but trying to get a better understanding of where they're at um i don't have the answers for that i only know little tidbits of what they say and i just concerns me so anyway i just wanted to say that to you guys um i'm excited with some of the stuff that you guys are doing i'm super excited about the barbecue i really want to learn more about the future of windsor and its education but i also want us to focus or hope that you'll focus a little bit more on what's going on with our educators because it's concerning to me as a parent because i don't want to lose these teachers they make my

035kids lives better so anyway um on to you guys thank you thank you misty are there any other comments are there any announcements from board members i can tell you as a legislator that uh um governor scott signed the equalizer pupil bill today so that's exciting yeah that's good nice big change yeah yeah hopefully leading to more right i see anne marie's got her hand up um ann marie um i have an announcement that um weathersfield this thursday is going to be having a community dinner and everybody in the weathersfield community is invited to come out and uh see the school get together talk with neighbors and friends um it's thursday from i believe 5 30 or 5 to 7 um somewhere around there this thursday thank you um colleen deschamps i would like to

036echo anne-marie's comments we also have our community dinner on wednesday night from five to seven in windsor so please come out and join us as well heartland's this morning and when is harlan the heartland's is wednesday yeah the 25th prize yeah thank you nikki i was just about to chime in thank you we're all there we're all barbecuing if you're a heartland resident of dessert you have to get your reservation in today though yeah [Music] great and there's one here in windsor yeah and anne marie women's weather's built thursday night okay great thank you it's exciting lots of barbecuing going on hang on craig were there any other um comments from the public or board announcements heartland drama pulled off their annual drama show and we did uh one of the candidates mentioned collaborating with

037other schools there were a whole bunch of uh weathersfield kids in the production as well um and we're now just knocking on wood that it wasn't a super spreader thing we'll see asking was highly encouraged but it was hot but the show was amazing three times in a row amazing yeah that's great and marie's got a hand hey i also forgot the um weathersfield and yeah we there were students in the heartland production and that was great and also weathersfield is having weathersfields got talent on june 6. you can come out and see our talent show [Music] oh and also uh on thursday at six o'clock is our next meeting with mary gannon right so it's open to the public although it's support focused correct i'll mention that again okay thank you thank you we

038are moving on to our superintendents report david okay let me let me share my screen on just a second here taking a little longer to start there it is yeah this will this will be brief because i know we have a lot of stuff on the agenda but let me uh just kind of go through a couple of things for everybody um this is nice because i could see some people while i'm presenting um yeah we've talked a lot about the equity audit that we're doing in partnership with springfield it'll be two separate audits but we felt i have one consultant team come to this area one time or work with one set of folks might help us to save a little bit of money we sent out 10 requests for proposals then we got

039four back i think i've mentioned this before we do have a process now we have a joint springfield uh and uh mount scotty uh supervisory union team set up we'll vet those proposals next week i had to wait for the springfield uh for zach from springfield to appoint their team they now have it i just got the emails today i think i sent out i think i sent out a pre-announcement to our folks who are on our team there are a couple of board members a couple of principals uh a a teacher from the equity team um who will vet those uh proposals so be ready to hear from me probably as early as tomorrow uh and rather than do a doodle poll we're probably just gonna pick a couple of dates and then see

040which one works best and then move forward because we really want to get going with this and have this done uh you know before june leaves and then we can set up with that company uh sort of a timeline of how the how the equity audit will actually uh proceed so just wanted you to know that we're a little bit behind but not much june 2nd we we mentioned barbecues we have barbecues all over the place so you heard that all three communities are having community nights uh the supervisor reunion is also having a community night part of a community forum on june 2nd the planning is well underway we've had a couple of meetings it will start in the lowest p white theater in windsor at 5 30. uh the the forum part of

041it will focus mostly on our strategic plan and the community's role in that plan and the board's role in that plan and then there'll be a good q a after that there will be child care provided for school age children k to six during that first hour and then we'll immediately move outside of the auditorium for another barbecue so there won't be much cooking that needs to be done in any of these households uh over the next month or so because you'll be able to barbecue out at all of our buildings especially uh we want to make sure we get a good turnout at that june uh second community forum more information will come out on that some of that's coming up from my desk but also angela du is putting some of that out

042from her desk as well and uh thanks nikki and davis have been as board members have been a firm part of that planning committee so we really thank them for that uh mary gannon we mentioned that uh those sessions are in process the next one as elizabeth mentioned is this thursday at 6 00 p.m i'll send out the reminder i'll also be there we're trying to work on the logistics because i heard that there was a little bit of uh technical difficulty at the beginning um i don't think i i just this was the rumor just a little bit so a little bit of a meltdown lori and mary are working on the technology here and uh and not that i'll make a tremendous difference with the technology but i'll i will certainly plan uh

043to be there too these are um these are virtual sessions uh public is invited but they are board focused so a lot of the interaction is with the board but the public wants to come and and and observe please feel free to do that they are public session meetings since the majority of the board uh will be there um the equity task force that's the internal equity task force uh or anti-racism task force has been meeting all year long uh we took a little bit of a break uh um partially because of some of the some of the work that was going on in getting ready for the equity audit distribution of those proposals uh but there was a lot of work that went on and this is the group that worked uh with dr

044crum over the course of the year came up with a great action plan some serious uh and and specific goals we're going to review those goals one more time we've established a meeting tomorrow night a matter of fact i noticed that many of you who are on that task force accepted the invite uh that will also be all virtual just due to the time of day and uh and the uh and the logistics um but we'll um hopefully also be able to transition to our new interim superintendent once that's uh voted on tonight and and and and we'll also be able to kind of outline the review the work we did this year and then outline the work uh going forward with that task force i think a lot of what that task force will

045focus on is expanding the task force first of all because we've talked throughout the year about not having good student representation on that internal anti-racism equity task force we'd like to make sure that happens and then also we're probably going to wait a little while for for the equity audit to get off the ground and start to get some preliminary information back as we start to prioritize some of those action steps but everything's in place and um uh and and that was a very vibrant group that met uh all year long with uh with melissa so thank you for those who participated um are we is melissa still on the book for one more meeting she is a matter of fact she's on the meeting with the task force and she's also one of the

046people who submitted a a proposal for for the equity audit yeah absolutely so we're not going to lose melissa we're going to stay in touch uh with with melissa and and i've made it very clear to her that that task force and this board would like to stay in touch with us she was i mean i can speak from every member of that committee i think she was an incredible resource and her ability to guide us through some of this work and to help us with the definition of of some of these terms and and and also as well exactly that whole conversation was was very powerful so yeah she one form or another she'll be with us uh next year uh the interim search uh was completed and will be completed here in just

047a short period of time when the board of uh votes uh for the new interim superintendent um and then last but not least uh this is kind of interesting uh our amazing uh tech department uh and by the way on the next agenda if anybody wants to make a note of this larry wants to unveil uh just as a as a pro prototype uh what he's what he and his team have set up as sort of a new school board portal so that people any information anything you want to know about what your school board's doing or how your scoop was doing or what information or announcements are coming from your school board they'll be able to go directly to that link and and and pull that right up so he's gonna he wants to

048demo he wants to who's meeting when and where's you know where's the agenda and where are the minutes and and what do you mean what are the announcements he thinks that this is going to be front and center and will lead people directly to all things school board and uh he's pretty excited about it and he wants some feedback so if there's any last minute tweaks before it goes live he can hear that directly from all of you it's also as larry will point out very consistent with our strategic plan right because we talked about better communication better you know so this will go along with the entire website update but but this i think is a is a big one but that's not that last bullet that last bullet is also our wonderful tech

049department who has figured out a way um through some piece of software that anytime a 911 call goes out from any of our buildings or the central office um the principals are immediately immediately alerted on their cell phone no matter where they are they might be at a conference in you know in burlington but they'll immediately know when that 911 call up and i'm also i get a backup response so i would immediately call the principal say have you checked in is everything okay and we kind of go from there so so far um and by the way it's a relentless call it will not stop because you can you can hang out you can you know you get your notifications on your cell phone you can wipe out the notification within seconds it's gonna

050until you until you respond and and and admit you've received the notification then it's gonna keep bugging you so that keeps everybody in that in that loop so 911 still goes to the 9-1-1 operation yeah it's a notification yeah it's a no yeah yeah there's the phrase good clarification nikki yeah no i am not getting 9-1-1 calls i think it could be a great part-time job but no but yeah but we in the event that the 9-1-1 center gets alerted that one of our schools has called them we get a notification so i i just thought that was pretty slick really when you when you get right down to it i think that i think that's just oh sorry christine it has to come with a school phone not from a cell phone that's correct

051that makes sense that's did you learn that one good good okay thank you all right i think that's it unless there are any questions i will stop sharing and um but i'm certainly open to questions there's a lot of good work that's going on and again as much as i feel terrible about having to leave and the wonderful relationships i've made and i know we still have one more meeting together before i make the final goodbye i'm just very optimistic about this entire supervisory union the quality of the school boards the quality of your administrators the work that's going on you know you're you know i i know the interim will be able to carry this forward and and you've got every reason to be extremely hopeful um uh for for the work work ahead

052davis yeah thanks amy i don't want to be premature in doing so but um i'm really looking forward to seeing this uh the school board portal um i think that's the kind of thing that we that we need just to make the information that this board does and the work that we do accessible to community so i'm really glad to hear that larry has worked on that um and i'm very excited to see how it goes and i don't want to i want to extend congratulations just yet but i'm sure that it's uh that it's incredible and i'm looking forward to it yeah you need to see it first it might be i gotta i gotta see it first and i and i i like to give feedback in this kind of thing that's great

053so happy to hear that that that was something that time and energy went into thank you any other questions or comments for david uh yes well i was going to ask you about graduation and um whether you could tell us uh when can you just announce when the different schools are yeah all the grant all the graduation dates have been set uh i don't know if i have them memorized i think they went out my last email blast last week but uh windsor senior high school graduation colleen is june 10th correct at 7 00. 7 p.m it's a friday night uh i see heartland is here heartland's eighth grade graduation eighth grade graduation june 7th at 6 pm 15 15. it's good thing we did this june 15th at 4. uh and then uh weathersfield

054anne marie do you have the graduation a date and time yes it's uh the 14th um i don't have the time but i know it's the 14th it's probably around five or six but i'm told i'm told 7 p.m so oh okay and then uh west windsor has a sixth grade uh graduation um and that is june 10th they tend to go on the same same day as the christina and i i believe that's at 9 00 a.m do i have that correct i think so yes does that sound right okay good and that's a nice little that's a great little ceremony too uh in the morning and then did i leave anybody out june 13th 6 p.m eighth graders in windsor yeah they do a little uh i don't think they call it graduation

055but it's sort of a step up or past passages passages passages thank you that that happens that's a really nice ceremony too but those are the dates and times it's a busy it's a busy time june is an incredibly busy time sorry colin can you repeat what time the passages ceremony is 6 p.m thank you nancy never mind i just found it thank you and it was mentioned okay any other questions bill um i i just want to quickly ruminate on this and it is a question david i'm wondering if uh the su office along with the administrative staff could put together um and i'd be more than willing to help what the school board has done um and this may be an interest what the school board has done and what the administration has

056done to assist students and teachers for next year um because i know we've addressed this i know we've addressed you know a lot of the tensions that have happened with students and and parents um and uh really a lot of more money that we're spending for new staff this year and next year address that yeah yeah we can try to put a book put a little a little something together maybe for our june meeting but just to kind of outline that i mean certainly you know one thing right off the bat not because you're mentioning this bill but you know we had a lot of success in negotiations in terms of building good supports into uh into salary schedules for the support staff and for the teachers i mean trying to be as competitive as

057we can in as thankful as ukraine we've used you know we've used some of our testimonies towards some of that support we you but we'll we'll kind of list it out and and you know uh and bring some of that to you um uh next week uh next month rather at our su meeting thank you rebecca um this is connected to bill's question um i know that katie david this is to you katie did an incredible job in in um in hiring a lot of support staff mental health staff and that that sort of information would be valuable because we really tried to address some of the mental health issues um overall and and spent quite a bit of money on it so yeah if you can include that information that would be appreciated that

058that's good we will and you know the other the other piece that's really important to remember is that we've had david melnick who's probably one of the best trauma consultant coaches and therapists in in the you know in the northeast if not certainly in vermont um you know he has met uh monthly with with staff with what we call our trauma champions team uh you know sort of providing that level of support for uh staff sometimes it it just never see and we're gonna we're gonna engage him again next year but i think those are the kind of things bill's talking about and providing those opportunities uh for uh for for teachers with some of the top professionals that are there and available and all the way from the employee assistance program which is always

059available to teachers to these other specialists who have come in over the course of the year uh to to work with them and uh but yeah i mean it's it it's it's never too much i think it's gonna be even as necessary next year we thought this was going to be our recovery year i think you know we it didn't turn out that way i think next year we'll hopefully god willing will be our recovery year and we'll keep going with a lot of these supports that that are in place and the last thing too i didn't put it on my on my list but uh but bill triggered it when he asked that question we also plan in june to give you an overview or an outline of what's going on at the middle

060level too i know bill asked talked about that last time but we'll we'll we'll get something out ahead of time so you got a little time to chew on it and look at it and then we'll address it at our june ssu meeting and maybe even have a little time at our individual meetings in june because that's another torch that has to get carried you know over the finish line over the next you know two to three years so i just didn't want you to think that had fallen off the table it's still there this is a good segue and we're also planning on um doing the su new hires yes that in june as well yeah in june we'll give you all the su new hires right which because katie has been working incredibly

061hard as somebody said on hiring support staff hiring paris hiring slps ot you know these are not easy positions but she's she's working hard to do it and we'll we'll give you that list next because you have to technically on the professional license side you have to appoint them but we weren't quite ready tonight we're still in the in the believe it or not even though it's the end of may we're still hiring okay thank you any other we are [Music] circling as well yes we're moving on to the hiring policy items for discussion yeah and and i think correct me if i'm wrong but i think this uh a hiring process i think this is part of what bill's working on in terms of um and maybe i'm wrong you know maybe i'm confusing

062two different items but i know that bill was going to be working with the negotiating team kind of looking at comparables as well as we're reaching out and hiring uh especially administrators and at will employees uh is is that what this item was about or was it was it something else well no this is really first this is for something else but i think you know listening to what uh our presenters had to say today i i think this could you know basically transition into to that piece to be able to come up with that salary scale offer i i asked to have this put on as an agenda item because i thought this would be a really great time to take a look at a hiring policy so that for example if we wanted

063to have blind uh applications we could put that in the policy and uh you know it should start at the top the hiring policy should start with the top so that was quiet with the board yeah with the boards well with the superintendent and the superpower yeah exactly yeah it should be so you're saying this would be a good yeah i got you okay this would be a good time since we're taking a closer look at all this stuff that this would be a really good time to you know start with something that we can implement as we're through this process and there is a question rebecca um i i had um chimed in when elizabeth reyes raised this question last time and i i i wasn't sure that what she was talking about specifically

064but it sounds like if correct me if i'm wrong but um she just explained that but one of the the concerns that questions that i had when she brought the issue up was also um the fact that we apparently had people that were leaving and so my question and my um i wanted more information on why why was it that people were leaving i already know that a resident a community member alluded to the fact that in her conversations with community with teachers some are talking about leaving i also wanted to know if there is an exit pro a policy that is used in our school um when when someone does leave that sits with them and asks them why is it that they're leaving so on and so forth yeah i think the simple

065answer to that uh is that there's no policy around that or even standard protocol we've done it and each sometimes individual buildings will do it based on you know the level of of the employees so it it has happened some board members have sat on some of those a but it's not codified in policy and i was just looking you had a hiring policy at one point i just went to the website to look i don't see a hiring policy right now i think we do have a hiring protocol that i could get out to everybody right but if you wanted to if you wanted to you know i know hartford has a really you think it's gonna be amazing um i'm trying to find it right now because i didn't bring my computer uh

066but they have a really a really good one bill do you know what the hartford hiring policy is i don't know why you would off the top of your head but uh well i'm sure given the work they've done over the last couple years they've probably built a fair amount of equity into it and and uh you know but it would be good we can we can certainly get i think it's good for the board to discuss this and to know what you want in there and but it's always better as we know to work from a draft i just misunderstood this agenda item i apologize but we can we can get that protocol out we can try to find hartfords or elizabeth canuck and then we'll get it out to everybody and then we

067could just put this back on the uh you you know given your conversation today with the vermont school boards i mean not that you're gonna necessarily hire them but you've got some time to really sort through this it might be a good retreat item for the summer to kind of talk about some of this uh stuff as a board and i agree with elizabeth i think where you can model those hiring procedures and protocols would be with the superintendent higher right i mean that's a that's a good you might as well start it right at the top yeah i think so are there any other questions on them that can be on our next agenda to have um those at least examples of hiring policies okay um and it could be that because i i

068know in in response to rebecca's question that we have had exit interviews unfortunately they've been inconsistent um well and i don't know what our employment policy is but we might consider building into our employment policy regular reviews [Music] how do you mean regular reviews of employees or all all employees are allowed to have enough the option of having a annual review or semi-annual review talk about that you're reviewing their performance or they're talking to you guys about giving feedback about how things are going but not that the board would do a review but that that every employee has the option of asking for a review so that they can improve their job so i mean i think it's really helpful so you can set goals and su employees i've been we do have our supervision

069evaluation system that we're yeah that we currently have and that we are you know we're going to talk a little bit later about how we might revamp that to make it a little bit more individualized for our staff so that they can be doing some more goal setting and things like that so i don't know if that meets any part of that need but good good because teaching staff has a regular review it's a it's a cycle that they go through the only i thought they only did it for the first no there's a three year cycle afterwards the first two years are their initial kind of review where they're they're being evaluated they're being observed um throughout the year and then after they get through the probationary part which is two years then they

070move into a three-year cycle where they have um goal setting an observation year and an action research year and they just followed that same cycle covered broke it up it was a little bit trickier okay so then they reviewed at each point of that cycle yeah or every three years why their supervisor yeah they so they do the goal setting where they would meet with their supervisor and talk about their goals and then implement their goals and then they meet again there's an observation here though where the principal actually goes in and does a formal like twice a year they go and do the observation um and document all of that and get that so it's um i'm happy to send you the the document with what what that i'd love to look at that's

071like yeah and then like i said we're looking to connect it needs to be remade yeah well you know i was thinking that um i mean do you mind talking about this for just a minute for just a minute i was thinking about the way that we we reviewed dr banker last year because and and that is something that the asu board does have that is one of our um jobs jobs yeah because i'm your director is the superintendent evaluation but we do not evaluate oh no no no i was not i was i certainly wasn't suggesting one two uh i just didn't make no mistake i wasn't suggesting yeah to use that um that word evaluation we're not we're not professional educators i know but but that's what you were saying was have a

072regular evaluation of employees okay i'm sorry i'm not i misspoke if i give that impression i did not mean to give that impression that is not what i meant yeah i just meant that all employees should have the opportunity to be reviewed by their supervisors oh yes that is that happens that is how that's right that's what i was saying yes and what i was also saying about david's the way that we reviewed david last year we had these different standards so if the review process right if we were going to like if we're talking about the hiring process we should fold in some of those standards that we used to evaluate david last year and so that when we go back and review the superintendent it'll still it'll all kind of work together and

073then if you're going to update any of that stuff maybe consider taking a look at those standards we actually use the danielson framework um for evaluating teachers that's the that's the model that we use um there are standards built into that yep and there are standards and rubrics that are built into that yeah well maybe we should do it the other way around them maybe we should take a look at those for administrators or whatever yeah yeah yeah what i mean it makes sense it makes sense to me to have the system via a whole system alignment what i think would be helpful to the administrators this is what i thought we were talking about and i know i i'm sure both amy and elizabeth were not implying you will start evaluating people i got

074that but but [Music] other hands are up but i think one thing that could be helpful one thing one thing that could be helpful to the administrators i think would be an employment policy right that sort of states some you know some overriding principles that we're going to follow when we're hiring candidates we we talked about these in the past i think there is a protocol which we can find you know we talked about nepotism at some point we and we talked about you know those things came up yeah you know and just equity and some of those over i think that would be nice if hartford's got a good one or we can look around to see if there's any good templates out there and i think you could include in that like rebecca

075said i think we could include in that uh you know exit interviews you know and and trying to make sure that we knew that's what i was that's what i was getting at if we're going to have a hiring policy it should cover everything we have an employment policy exactly there's all of that exactly that is why that would be high and it could be an employment policy that has hiring yeah yes exactly supervision right exactly every person that's what i meant exit interviews the right to be reviewed annually by their supervisors that's what i meant that could be helpful in putting it all in one employment policy i apologize if i we'll look for examples if anybody finds any good ones then i'll send you some examples that would be great yeah that would

076be great it looks like pietro did a presentation about it last year uh at vspa i think so i forwarded that to you guys great thank you to the administration too nikki or no no not just at least to me so i got it yeah uh i mean it's it's got it looks like it's got the beginnings of some model policy in it but right they don't have a model i'm sure we can do this i i have i'll send you what i have i have a couple good i think it's always easier to work from a template we get something drafted then we kind of look at it larry your camp has raised yeah i just let you know that um when i started back in september for finance and operations i discovered that

077there was not any reviews going on so i did interviews for all the department heads and then um and i shared this at the april board meeting with the timeline it's my plan is to uh to um implement a framework for those peop department heads and then uh kind of um show that to them so that the hope would be that uh they're gonna give annual reviews to their employees too so it should all uh filter down the chain uh so i think that'll be there um i want to roll it out slowly because people who haven't done are not used to the cycle of annual reviews like the teachers and brittany spoke to that they all get them um it's gonna be a surprise to some of them but you know not a surprise

078uh it's gonna be difficult for them uh and then um and i do accident we have less turnover for our 40 50 employees for finance operations but uh i do i offer exit interviews to anybody who leaves um if they want it i don't make them obviously but if they ask i'm happy to do exit interviews and it's always pretty enlightening that's all i have thank you okay so higher right policy will definitely be on the gym thank you yeah thank you um we are moving on to other policies um number one is see 28 transgender and gender non-conforming students and this is the initial yes it is [Music] um rebecca thanks amy i just wanted to know if this um policy um i didn't get a chance to read it all but i wondered

079if it came straight from the vermont school board yes it did yes it's there recommended i mean we changed some of the you know to make it local but yes it did uh okay i have a couple of um is there anybody who could take down i'm i'm scratching those right on the camera uh just tell me the section that's all right this is a comment that was sent to me um a one sentence concerned me slightly a student or parent in the case of a minor student who is currently enrolled may request retroactive changes to that student's record including name and gender this be used by a parent as grounds to change a record back to birth name and gender assigned at birth to essentially undo a record change requested by the student is

080there any reason to allow a parent to make the request versus limiting that action to the student themselves i also think there's a type o and paragraph preceding that sentence looks like an extra word yeah i'm looking at it now the word education is stuck in there can you summarize that again uh so i so the i'm gonna paraphrase about that so i think the person was concerned about the sentence that says a student um or parent of a minor um who is currently enrolled may request retroactive changes to that student's record including name and gender but in the above paragraph which is concerning that a parent might choose to change what their student wanted but the above paragraph says where a student's record may not be changed absent a court order due to state

081and federal law efforts will be taken to maintain those records in the strictest confidentiality in order to preserve the student's transgender status so it seems like you can't go back into the records unless a court of law says you can although it does say you have to remain consistent with state and federal guidelines right you see if you read right through that paragraph yeah so there's there's some real technical and legal implications with this the basically what the state of vermont has said and i may just i'm just trying to summarize is that a student's gender is based upon you know what they have chosen okay and it also means that they can then re-change it they can choose their gender the the technical difficult piece is that when when uploading the slds state reporting

082that data file only takes male or female it doesn't take any other data piece a little behind on that yeah yeah so basically what you have in in and this is this is something that i'm working on is that with when my sis which is different than your sis but i'm sure it has the same sort of issue is i have a legal gender and then a a legal name and a a chosen gender in a chosen name specifically preferred name because you can't change that legal id the legal name the legal first and last name middle name and legal gender without a court order um i'll let larry kind of see what he found for a solution here uh yeah i don't have a great i'm sorry amy um larry patty has her hand

083raised first sorry and then larry thanks amy i was just wondering if someone could please put a link in the chat box so that those of us who don't have access to that can do that policies so that we can read them thank you david and larry yeah i don't have a great solution but bill's exactly right and that's what our charge was told from the state um we have a legal uh in power school you have a legal gender and a gender and you have a legal first name and last legal last name and you have a first name and last name and we were told unless there was a court order to not mess with the legal fields um that doesn't affect that does not affect uh what we saw what the student

084sees in power school it does not affect what the um what what the teacher sees in power so they see the chosen name um so there's no solution i have perfectly with the state system but bill's exactly right i have nothing more to add okay thank you larry amy i have a quick question i took care of that double i have not read through the entire thing but i'm wondering is is it saying that a student a minor so not a team right can can acts ask to have the record change no so then there would not be a situation where a parent would override a student's choice in that way if a student can't request that change right like so a minor can't request the change so then therefore a parent can't go in

085and retroactively change it back because that would never happen correctly right it's written awkwardly here i don't like the way it's written but but it's written illegally it's written in legalese because i'm sure it came out of law office to the sba and essentially what it's saying is a student or a parent in the case of a minor student right so a student who's a minor cannot do any of these changes or legally change their record or there but a parent could a parent could you know ask not without a court order but yes because it says down below such requests will be handled case by case uh with consideration and um and must be consistent with state and federal mandated reporting requirements for the school's ongoing efforts to maintain blah blah blah but a

086student can change their name and they can change their gender identity legally without apparent permission yeah in accordance well that's fairly new though right well gender identity yes it is new that's brand almost brand new yeah yeah well what's up already outdated yeah what's the um what can someone post the new law because you know you can't you can't just change your name you can't change your legal name no one can do that that's you have to have a legal name change that's what i'm saying right but a child can't do it however unless a child goes to the court and does that on their own a minor right so you have a 16 year old there's an agent or two yeah yep 60. but unless they go to the court and they actually do

087that they would not be able to make that records request change at the school because they would not have a legal name they'd have to go to court to do it a parent would have to go to court as well a parent can't change a student's their child's legal name not without not without seeking the court to do that that's right that's right a legal name chain requires a court it now that that doesn't mean that students can't have a preferred name this is our first reading that's a different story right bill so katie has her i'm wondering if this isn't updated already given that legislative session yeah that's interesting that's already it has been signed into me too yeah okay so just doing quick because um life experience with us but it's a right

088now according to the judicial website and the forms which haven't been updated since june 2020. so anything's newer than that but according to the old forms um the consent of a parent still is needed early the league name i think that just changed this session right so just changed the session we're waiting on new maybe it's as of july one that that's one of them um uh i can't imagine that it doesn't let it that it doesn't go along with the age at the age of emancipation i don't think it does i i don't think it does but i think that was the intent i think that's why that legislation you know was was they wanted inflation was to allow transgender students to go back to their birth certificate and change their that's correct if

089they were a certain age 16 or older right i think so okay okay we need we have a little more work to do on this significant amount of information is necessary to see if this policy is up to date with a lot of something and i have two people with hands raised um rebecca so well my question is and i think it's been answered already uh is that um if a parent called up um regarding their child john willie um there would not be any problem or confused confusion in terms of there is no john willie here do you know what i'm asking david that if a parent called up that nothing would really change without uh involvement from a family member and so you know they would not be calling windsor's school for john

090willy um who does go to windsor school but the name has changed and um yeah no i i hear what you're saying you know i mean that that that's that's my concern it's like weird as where does the pair you know how does that connection that family connection is made to right to ensure that everyone is on the same page well this is this is i i don't know if larry has the same basic policy as i have is but to change a legal name within our sis a student information system we require at hartford and probably at any school you have to have a court order and we actually need that court order we upload it into the system so that any administrator can see the court order but to change the legal name

091to change the preferred name we have a process um there there's a process that a student goes through they they they meet with the counselor they they uh they discuss the process they get the parents involved and then you know if all the eyes are crossed with this procedure then we change the child's preferred gender or their preferred name and that as larry said that is what is visible to the student to the parent what shows up on the report card the only thing that's required by law is a transcript must because of the legal document a transcript must have a legal name um that's the only thing that's required i would think that's true you really do have a responsibility to keep a legal name for historical reasons i mean people use these school

092records for all kinds of stuff so it is a serious legal name but you have a way in your system to do the preferred name and have that be web larry is that true for us too yes our process is very similar to hartford everything bill said is what we do um there is a legal name yeah and there's a first name and last name and you can change one and not the other and the faculty and the student and the parents only see the the the non-legal name we require corridor because of law to change a legal name um yeah so yes everything we do is like hartford does so what what i did just so everybody knows what i did is i i'm going to send this policy back vspa gets most of

093their template policies from pietro lynn from the lynn from from the pied was our attorney i'm going to send it to peter just say is this outdated are there going to be some changes to this now based on you know based on uh the re the most recent legislative session uh and and get that information and then i think we can read through this one more time i also find the legalese and the footnotes to be incredibly distracting i mean i think we need to make this more readable and and more language friendly but we will work on that and bring it back in june this was only first reading tonight yeah so so david another thing for you to ask to highlight is there's there's a difference between a legal name change in a

094birth certificate change and and what would we need to do if if there's a birth certificate change then um especially in an adoption a lot of times you want to wash the database in other words things become retroactive and with a name change you just change the name with a new identity in the system okay but you have that template you don't need to go in and and basically whitewash that that that that person's name was here so i i i think this i think you're absolutely right i think this really needs some legal help yeah so we will do that we will do that we'll consult with pietro and vspa on those pieces and i think the legislation you don't have the number of the no idea the act okay i think the legislation

095was addressing the last part of what bill said which was changing the birth certificate right absolutely so so we'll kind of sort all that out needless to say complex policy complex issue but right now we do just so everybody knows we do have an internal process of like larry described we do you know you know we do a lot of preferred names preferred pronouns we've worked through all of that but we need to get this understood in policy as we as we go forward beth your hand is raised thank you good evening um just a question about our our process around you know so our internal process of having their preferred names um you know it sounded like you needed to have parent permission and i think that's where it really comes down is that

096it's not do do we require parent permission in our current process even for preferred names um if so i think we maybe need to reevaluate that um and be able to change that and the principles can correct me on this because again it's not codified in policy but in practice i think from seven this is my understanding from seven through twelve you know we respect the students confidentiality we if they want to prefer the name so this is sorry i i i'll say if jimmy john comes in one day you know and says i want to be called katie and he's a third grader and repeatedly keeps saying that and mom and dad say no no no you know like what's our policy on that because it sounds like we're saying no we won't call

097them katie and that doesn't seem you know like what's where do we stand and why is the seventh grade the line um and not you know when do we when is that that drawn and so i think think being very clear on that um and why we have that i think would be you know to be able to explain that to families really clearly yeah and uh in the hartford process it doesn't need parental approval for for some student this is mostly applies to high school they're the only ones using it this far but it requires parental involvement so that parents know what's happening so they don't get a report card that says spongebob squarepants um on their child's report card because that's now their preferred name that's totally what i would do is change

098mine the only concern i have for that is just if that if there is some safety issues around you know maybe they are still residing and that child is still technically residing in the house but not really you know and you have to involve the parent so i mean there's i just think there's there's there is some potential issues with with that and i think you know if there's ways to move forward and not have making sure that that staff and faculty are really genuinely following that policy and using people's preferred names um all the time um i think is really important well i i remember what i was saying was practice not policy right we don't have i think that's part of the absence of policy i think that's why we need to that's

099the thing it was it was explained to me as a as a great example that you can have it you can have it in you know on the changed for the student's request but if it's not changed in at least to some degree in the whole school record then uh a substitute teacher comes and looks at the class list and absolutely calls the student by their dead name absolutely and i think the other question is really beth's question and i would defer principles in terms of practice but i i just always thought there was a grade now i'm not saying there should or shouldn't be but i think right now we do have a you know i don't think we would allow a third grader this is my thought without some sort of parental communication

100if his name was john to come in or their name was john and come in and say i would like to be called katie from now on i don't think that would happen with a third grader right now you know and i think the board should discuss that because you reflect the morals and and and convictions of this community what christine's here says i understand that if i am 17 years or younger and must have my parents permission that's what our protocol is at this point so you read that from oprah with our protocol yes so it's not even seventh grade right now our protocol is 17 or under needs parental permission to uh now i know that i can just tell you that that's not the practice right right now because i know that

101there are students in middle school and high school uh that that they're asked what's your preferred pronoun what's your preferred name it's not being changed in the records but in the classroom with their classmates and with their teachers it's being used yeah but it's not it doesn't go on the forum that the super that's correct the substitute teacher that's correct yeah so that's why i think this is a critical policy to and then determine what ages do you need parental you know as you go through the policy parental awareness there's a lot of ways to to navigate and then there's the informal what happens in the classroom versus what's formal right especially with younger students or older students as they don't want it as a permanent yet so how do we respect that too i

102mean this is a journey so right nancy your hand has been raised then rebecca then bill and then we are moving on to our next item okay this was just a quickie for bill because we changed the name of my youngest son when he was about nine and it became his new birth certificate that's interesting that's gonna like tonight's children that's also happened with my family as well when the name change triggers a change on the birth certificate and they reissued them in the state of vermont automatically that was part of the process was that in vermont nancy no it was in rhode island but and his birth certificate is on one of those blue sheets that legal documents are on with his reasons so that's it thank you rebecca i i just want to

103go back to what beth um raised and um this is we we really want to be clear we want to be respectful we want to engage those who um who would be part of the conversation um and and really and i know it's it's a hard conversation but we we want to make sure that it's it's understood why we would move forward uh in the in the direction that we're going but we really should be clear for the sake of the student first and also for the sake of the family thank you rebecca bill you're muted of course i am i was unmuted and then i want to talk so i mute myself it's probably a good thing if i just mute myself before i talk but anyway um it's my understanding in the state

104of iran as as being apparent that um legally students at the age of 14 gather significantly more rights when they turn 14 one within the custody cases that um and students have a lot more influence in the courts to choose um residence between split parents they have a lot more say um with medical decisions you know i had two 14 year old daughters and when they went into that when they turned 14 and went into a doctor's appointment i was ushered out of the room because i no longer needed in there i'm no longer wanted and so that's sort of a you know that's sort of an age of of change and i think that's one thing we should look at that particular age and how it influences other legal stances thank you we will

105do a significant amount of research before we bring this back to the board thank you yeah this is going to be worth taking the time yes indeed um next we have policy um c14 section 504 and 88 grievance protocol for students and staff so let's see where we are on that um yes it does appear so we have done a first first reading was done in march second reading april 25th so we can put this as an item for action unless anyone has yeah katie you've reviewed this pretty carefully right i can speak to the changes that's ending based on our last conversation i so the last time we met um we talked about splitting out that i think it's an employee the employee would make the complaint directly to the 504 coordinator which is

106my position um instead of the building-based person which would be up here we tried to separate that out because in effect tina and i have done all the ada and 504s for staff um and the other is we took out names was the other piece because i i will use kidnapped by aliens versus hit by the bus analogy this time um but that's important so it's like you're kidnapped by alien sub things that's how um it's the same thing with policies we should refer to the position not the person yeah um so those are the that was the that's all step two was to just split that out employee may file and it looks like a word was left out may file a written complaint and be submitted to district 504 coordinator student complaints may

107be submitted to either district 504 coordinator or um appropriate school specific private board coordinator what section is that kid is well that's all on step two and it looks like some words were left out but it's supposed to read um an employee makes it that a employee may submit a written complaint to the district section 504 coordinator which is comma windsor southeast director of student services that's um multiple titles i get um so i just think the change would need to be just cleaning up the grammar there i apologize for that i we we've gone back and forth a few times with lori to make sure the changes were made okay i move we adopt the policy that as incorporating okay do i still have time to make a request of a change yeah yes

108and i may have missed it someone i i would really prefer and i think david would back me up on this because we had this issue in contracts um he slash she be replaced with day okay yeah because not everyone identifies as he slashes step three uh the first sentence okay thank you i see it got it okay i'll make that comment okay and let me see misty putin you have your hand raised yes sorry i really off topic but i don't know who's letting people into the meeting but i do know there's a few parents who have been trying to get in um just a heads up i don't know if you see them on there but anyway just wanted to let you know thanks i'll keep looking i i haven't seen anybody missed

109you but i'll keep up i'll look on because it pops right onto my screen but i'll keep looking i wonder if they're on the right link yeah they could be on the wrong one i'm going to resend the link i believe they have the right one but i'll send it again okay thank you thank you so with the correction that there'll be a little bit of correction in the the language on okay and correcting for um he she changing that today um with those corrections i will do a roll call of what of votes of people in favor of approving this policy starting with ann marie i bet i bill hi colleen i davis hi jamie hi mark i nancy i nicole hi [Laughter] [Music] and i am a m and i so this policy

110work 504 and 88 and we'll make those changes because yes with those changes thank you um next up we have a third policy policy on people privacy rights and that's another one i don't seem to have i can put it in me i can put it in the chat [Music] let's see okay so this again this is another first reading so if people haven't had the opportunity i know i have read through it i just for whatever reason i cannot find it this evening which is why larry's updating me thank you um so does anyone have any comments or questions on that right now seeing no hands being raised thank you nikki for sharing your screen so we will move on um policy on pupil privacy rights will be on our next agenda for second

111reading okay next we have item c and items for discussion curriculum updates we have brittany angie and patty so can i share my screen yes you can the best way to do this yeah right from your laptop if you want to come up to the table you can but i think that's fine um i probably should so that owl will pick me up yeah voice wise yeah good point good point i have to log into the meat first [Music] [Laughter] all right here we go look at that i love that cia team it always sounds covert it is i like it yes don't you hear the music [Music] sorry about that one oh that's easy did that flash another screen i'm good because i was closing tabs and i had a tab on there then

112i didn't need somebody i was like oh shoot i'm closing it fast but it was a working tab then yeah we got it are we ready we're ready okay so um the curriculum instruction assessment team has put together this end-of-year report to update you on our fantastic progress that we made this year we are going to talk about differentiated professional learning frontline the mtss model curriculum update the day a data update grants progress report other cia work and i just want to point out to you that down here in the corner you can see on each of the slides we've aligned the work of the team with the um strategic plan goal so that's what sp goal means okay so the team uh coming at you tonight is patti gray our our title ii instructional

113coach uh brittany preston our esser two and three recovery coordinator but really the mtss of data coordinator we like that title better and myself as the grants manager director of curriculum and then lori small one of our teachers from weatherfield is going to be here to talk about um work with the differentiated professional learning team so all right so i'll jump in um i've been working with patty and angie on the differentiated professional learning model um and we wanted to gather a group of amazing teachers to join us in that work so i've listed them all here um if you're having a hard time reading it uh you have jen driscoll karen carl zach o'brien christy keaney tori muller kim gogan lori small stephen malloy patti gray myself and angie and this team is really

114working on rethinking how we're doing professional development for our staff trying to model the idea of voice and choice for our staff just like we hope to do with our students and self-direction goal setting all of those wonderful things um very overwhelming tasks because there's a lot that we have to do um kovid kind of put a damper in making sure that staff are really all kind of up-to-date on the baseline of of trainings that we really need such as collaborative problem-solving things like that so how do we move forward get everybody on the same page and then make sure we have a differentiated plan moving forward that's really aligned with our strategic plan and the goals that our teachers have moving forward and then considering you know this this visual that we have here

115is actually going to go for a final review with the team but i wanted to share with you what we came up with just to model um our vision for pb moving forward i know it's super small i apologize but um the idea would be that we create a strong base with a new teacher academy making sure teachers are coming to us and they have all of the information and all of the training that they need to be successful then um followed by ongoing growth with alignment to our kind of core areas that we really want to make sure that all teachers have cps leader in me trump informed practices curriculum and instruction and then in the leaves there's a variety of different ways that they can access that information whether it be plcs external

116sources we have um kind of them being mentors also um workshops coaching i mean just a variety of different things all leading up to kind of developing their own specialties um which all falls under kind of our circle around the outside mtss diversity equity and inclusion so it's a lot going on there but that's because we have a lot to do so um just tell me oh yeah you can go on sorry i'm clicking on mine um so our goal here is reimagining professional learning i created a little bit of a timeline so you can see a summary of where we hope to be in a few years this year we worked on creating a pd inventory what do staff need moving forward developing our new teacher academy and then we're working currently and we

117will be through the summer kind of revamping our mentor development um our mentor plan to really bolster that and make sure that staff are getting what they need throughout those first couple years that they're in employment um in fy 23 we are doing we are going to implement our new teacher academy frontline i'm going to talk a little bit more about that later but um we have some really exciting new stuff to kind of go from what larry kind of brought frontline in with absentee and we're going to be absentee management and we're going to be bringing on some additional things with frontline to really help us move forward with professional development right i'm sorry sure is front line the name of a program yeah frontline is what we're currently using for time cards and

118um employee employee absent management um and then it's it's a much larger system than that so thank you we're gonna get into that yeah um developing mentoring coaching getting kind of our teachers up to date on their prerequisite trainings um developing some train the trainers so we can build some capacity for moving forward and then our evaluation process which we talked a little bit about already in fy24 we're hoping to be all good to go on frontline and really rolling that up with all staff new teacher academy should be completely up and running the new supervision evaluation system should be going which would be connected to our professional development and then really getting our individual professional growth track moving forward that's the whole that's a very tight timeline but i think we can do it

119um i'm gonna let patty chime in she's been doing a lot of the work on the new teacher academy so patty if you're in there somewhere all right i'm clear so one of the things that we've really been talking a lot about is um bolstering our induction program or what we would are calling now our new teacher academy and really supporting them far more than we have been able to previously because we know that teacher retention is a tremendous issue right now and attrition of teachers it largely comes about due to stress and a lack of support around curriculum and instructional practices behavior management all of those things so we want to not only start them with the essential trainings that they need at the onset to really understand and be able to navigate the

120systems we have in place but then to bring in our mentoring program uh which we are revising and tweaking to make it even stronger um angie's been running this amazing mentoring program um and the more we can make the best use out of that the better and then bringing in for the first two years instructional coaching so that they have um alongside their mentor that new teachers have someone they can sit down and look at curriculum and instructional practices with as much as they determine they need and of course that's self-driven but there will be at this point we're thinking monthly meetings where they can have that support and have an additional person to bounce ideas off of i have a question elizabeth sorry i need to just quickly interrupt with a question about when

121when you meet a new teacher when you say new teacher academy is that for teachers who are entering the profession for people teachers who are entering our supervisor reunion that's that's a great question you said differentiated is that what is that what accounts for the difference and then some of it correct i think this business would be for both um and the supports that we might give a teacher brand new to the profession could or might look very different than what we might give someone who's coming in from another su and really just needs support around um learning our systems and programs and curriculum if that makes sense and that is something that we're going to be talking about at our next meeting which is coming up this thursday to talk about what does that

122differentiation look like for staff um but one thinking one piece of thinking that we want to really implement here is if a staffer comes in with like collaborative problem solving training or something like that we don't need to redo this we don't need to keep you know like doing it over and over again and having them sit through trains that they don't need we want to make sure we're taking them from wherever they're at and giving them additional support so that yeah that's the goal that everybody would have kind of like a professional learning profile that's individualized just for them um thank you sorry i apologize for interrupting nope that's perfect yeah so i'm going to turn it over to lori who came and was so so patient i only picked her up yeah i

123owe her a lot like lots lots but she she's a member of our team and um they are doing some amazing work on this process and developing it moving forward so i wanted to give her an opportunity to chat about what we're going to look for yeah come on up here that way you can you can be on the outside here's steel david's chair know what you go forward excellent yeah [Laughter] that's right wow um so brittany has kind of briefed you anyways but as far as uh from a teacher perspective looking at this particular slide i started from the bottom and one up um because most of the teachers have um at the end of the year beginning of the year even at mid-year they're saying oh i've got to do something different here

124or it's a different class or the content isn't rolling like i thought so there is a lot of reflection and it's a it's a major benefit for a teacher to do that um so what happens is that we try to think of what we need to improve ourselves for our growth and for our needs and that's when we go into asking for help getting that professional development that we individually need then from there we can actually and i'm hoping this might be a goal is um having the culture and peer support of our you know veteran teachers and people who have so much experience and expertise to maybe even have a directory of saying you know behavior classroom management or maybe i need verbage for some trauma-inflicted students you know to call upon those particular

125people who have expertise and you know help support your need for that then we'll go on to the differentiated put my glasses on based on the teacher's needs and this is when the teacher has that individual need that she or he needs help with to give them that flexibility to focus on the training um and to get support from administration to either um embed that in our in our curriculum or our professional development or call upon the needs of our peers and then lastly as i'm going right from bottom to the top having that goal in place like you've mentioned with our front line um with our evaluation system to have that goal and then show the accountability for our growth so that's kind of where we're at as a teaching perspective and hopefully this

126will go well instead of like reiterating things that you know most teachers have already gone through um some of the courses that they've nailed and now they can actually bring it to their classrooms and then those teachers can actually help the the newbies or the the wannabes you know to to improve themselves thank you you're welcome um we do have uh one final meeting this this week actually and then um there's an optional one day uh work day for for that same committee to come and join on um june 21st where we're going to be kind of mapping out hopefully we'll have next year pretty much set with just some some tweaks um but starting to think about what what are we going to do how can we create a committee and have those committees

127the dpl committee differential professional learning and evaluation system kind of work together to develop a new evaluation system and then really looking at the following year how can we now actually start to move past just getting the basics done for everybody getting everybody on the same page to really differentiating learning for our staff so that's that's the plan it's really exciting and laurie you're amazing for being a trooper thank you coming out here with us thank you it is exciting though it's something that we all have an interest in yeah yeah it's a very passionate group they're amazing absolutely you're welcome to stay okay so now i can talk a little bit about that frontline system um um i can talk a little bit about the frontline system so we decided we did a lot

128of research trying to figure out like what can we use um what platform can we use to start managing some of this professional learning um so in looking at that um front line which larry has talked quite a bit about with you all has professional learning management system that is pretty awesome it's very customizable you can actually create a bank of professional learning opportunities and a schedule so staff can come in and sign up for different learning opportunities staff can request learning opportunities staff can say hey i want to offer something they could offer it it all gets linked to our strategic plan which is pretty exciting as well and then it tracks it for staff the other thing that it does is we can put in mandatory trainings you know really simple ones are

129bloodborne pathogens or mandatory reporting and it alerts staff when those things are due and then alerts administration when they need to be done it also does an approval process so if staff want to take a course or whatever we just went through and did all the linking so that it goes to the right people at the right times with the right documentation and then goes back to the staff with all of the information that they need to be able to take course um so that's really cool the other piece that we are going to be um implementing next year just with our current evaluation system to start um is the employee evaluation management system um that again can be linked to our strategic plan um you can put in you know the principal can do

130an evaluation they can recommend certain trainings that are in our professional learning management system so all of that gets linked eventually we hope to like i said we're going to redo the evaluation system and so all the goal setting will be tracked in there and everything it's going to be super excited the other great part about it is obviously having just one place for staff to go so with professional learning for example a staff member can say i want a certain training oh i need a sub for that and then it all goes through the same system so now they're requesting themselves and tracking absences as well one-stop shop that's the goal so make it easy for for staff but it'll be a slow roll out because it's a lot um but they're already kind

131of in front line right now doing the kind of cards so hopefully it'll go smoothly and it is possible because of esser funding just so you know yep can they take as many classes as they want so yes i mean so if they're offered by us or if they're free trainings or whatever yes um they still have their pd funds which they would have to request access for whatever but within the system there's no limit to what they can take so i can i mean one very basic thing is i can create a whole bunch of video trainings and put them all in the system and people can take them i need a refresher on mtss here's a video training or i really want to talk to brittany directly i'm going to request the training

132you know those kinds of things so yeah there's no there's no way yeah i think it'll take a while to get everything in but it's going to be fantastic so really exciting rebecca you have a question brittany um i i was wondering um with the front line system um if staff um participated in selecting that because i know you mentioned larry um it sounds like a great system and but i was wondering if um if staff participated in selecting frontline so i i don't know about it from larry's side of things i know that um when we talked to the dpl team there was a need for how are we going to track this i attempted to do it through our current evaluation system which is um vector formerly known as teachpoint and it just

133there was just no way it was going to have the capacity to meet our needs um so larry suggested we looked at frontline as we looked into it we did have i brought it to the dpl team the differentiated professional learning team they reviewed it and then i had a staff member participate in our first configuration meeting with frontline so they could give their input as to what this might look like what are some things that we need to um put into that system so yes but it was a system that we already had in place except for we're just we're just adding it and using more components of it all right any other questions so far hey great angie if you want to go to the next one so um i'm going to talk

134a little bit about mtss we've done a lot of work with our mtss teams this year and we are looking to build upon what we've already done so far um the first box here talks about well this is a new leadership model kind of we're gonna expand on our leadership model we currently have mtss coordinators um which have i could not do my job without them um and those are there's one from each building lindsey perkins is at heartland bridget farial is at um windsor amanda yates is at albert bridge and kristen huebner and melissa cole are doing that work together over at weathersfield and their jobs really have been okay how are we taking the common mtss systems protocols documentation systems that we put in place this year and making sure that everybody knows

135how to use them knows has enough support we're looking at a lot of the data at with the mtss coordinators to adjust our practices and then we're currently looking at okay what are the pros and cons of some of the documentation systems and the organization systems and adjusting those so that they're all set ready to go for next year and one way that we're kind of building capacity is we're going to be training mtss team leaders and the difference there is that every pod in every building will have one teacher teaching staff um some of them are interventionists some of them are classroom teachers who will be trained in meeting facilitation data practices and our documentation system so that they can facilitate those meetings and really keep tabs on how those are going and they're

136going to get support then from myself the mtss coordinators angie and patty in order to be able to keep the system moving so the idea is create as many leaders as we possibly can so that the information kind of flows down um data leaders are rolled into one or both of those mtss coordinators or mtss team leader positions our goal next year is to have uh data practices happening monthly with every pod currently i think staff are looking at data but there's not a formal process in how to do so so we're gonna we're gonna put a process to that to make sure it's really organized and people know how to use data effectively in their instruction um so that's that's another exciting thing we've got a couple of people already jumping on board with

137that that team so keep moving that forward um i talked a little bit about effective data practices patty and i have both gotten trained in the data wise process so that is what we are going to be using to train our data leaders and mtss coordinators in and mtss team leaders everybody's going to train um so that we are really making the most of all of the data that we have we have a lot of it now and it's organized in a couple different ways we have the dashboards we have data spreadsheets for every class and then we have performance matters which is the system that i use to organize all the data so really excited about that we're going to be doing our mtss coordinators are going to shift a little slightly to doing

138more sui data review and support planning so really looking at our overall su data and then talking about action plans and what we're going to do moving forward with that with that information and then i talked a little bit about the team level monthly data meetings which is our data practices that we will be implementing and that will be run by our mtss team leaders talked really quickly i apologize but hopefully hopefully you got the gist it's just really late are there any questions before we go on to this portion okay thank you you're welcome no angie or patty one of you was gonna do unless you want me to do this i think okay yeah so this year we have um put into place some different stretch some new structures for reviewing curriculum we've

139created a curriculum review committee process so the steps that we take when we're looking at a particular curriculum say writing which we did this year and then also we've come up with a curriculum and assessment review and adoption cycle which we won't show you right now it's um i think it's i think it's in its final form of draft but it's a seven year cycle and you can see it here so the first year would we would study and evaluate a program or curriculum which this year we looked at writing and we actually piloted um a program we had some really great teachers who piloted that and we met several times during the school year and came to a final determination that it was not the right fit for our su and that was a

140little frustrating but it was well worth the process so that we could really determine what what we need in a program that's really going to impact the learning of our students um next year we are going to continue to look at writing we are going to be piloting an updated version of eureka maths it's called eureka math squared the eureka math folks took feedback from thousands of teachers nationwide and they have updated their program to make it much more equitable inclusive user-friendly student-friendly much more accessible and so that would be year two where we would either design in this case we're not really designing but we're going to adopt and pilot and actually i wish that was switched piloted and then adopted but that's okay and then the third year is full and full implementation

141and of course we'd provide professional development throughout this whole process in supporting staff in using these programs and then years four through seven are really continuing to do that work but tweaking however we need to do it refining and continuing to get better in our practices and using the curricular programs that we do adopt patty chime in with one more thing the other thing that we want to try to do is um you know teachers you get a curriculum it's never perfect there is no perfect curriculum so you're constantly supplementing or whatever and we want to be able to take the curriculum continue on with our teams and make sure that we're providing guidance as to what supplementing might look like for our different programs so that we continue to have consistency versus a teacher

142who might rightfully i mean go and grab something that they they've done their research and they really think it's a great thing we could take on that and maybe share that out with the rest of the su that everybody's using something consistent all right so that's what we want to do and then um working on taking all of this information and putting it into curricular maps so that teachers have a really good okay here's what we're doing here's when the assessments are going to happen here's about the timeline where you should be at certain areas just to give some very clear guidance around that which i think will also help over time us look at our data and really have some consistent information um moving forward and know that we're the data that we're looking

143at is because we're using the curriculum with fidelity and its research base and so on and so forth so that's the ultimate goal that's good you totally just stole my lines how bad i was going to mention that yes and the ultimate goal is to have that fidelity and that consistency so that we can look at the data and and decide where we need to go what our next steps are so as i mentioned this year we looked at writing we did an intensive deep dive into the science the research behind what makes uh you know an um sorry i'm drawing a blank on the word that i want um equality writing program effective writing program we've done the same thing looking at the eureka math we looked at all of the research on the

144original eureka math we took feedback from staff what's working what's not working is it you know we had all of the criteria if you look at the research behind an effective math program we took that those points those data points and collect feedback from staff on all of those and so that's how we made the determination to go forward with the pilot for next year and we are currently collecting uh volunteers for that pilot process angie next slide i think all right we're back to me um the data angie did you share with the board already the i have pdf of this so we do have a pdf of this that will come to the board so i'm going to kind of go relatively quickly because i know it's late we can also post it

145on the suv on the curriculum site yep and if most of it almost all of it is pulled from our data dashboard anyway so it's already public but um so i took our recovery plan goals and just added some data points here so um attendance for the last in terms of engagement truancy attendance has been a little all over the map and of course um absences have been relatively high we know this i think the data really follows the trends of what we're seeing in our schools especially right in december as you can see at all the schools um and then i think here albert bridge is the only one who did not spike here in the spring although i only did through april so made a copenh tracker i know i know it really

146is i mean it's telling and i mean it's it's not surprising so um moving over into academic achievement i updated these charts with for math and ela with their tmp results so you can see all the way back from fall of 2019 to spring of 2022 in both areas and um we are certainly recovering and continuing to recover but i am i am pretty happy with our progress and our growth rates i know i reported on this last time i didn't put it in this slideshow but the growth rates continue to be really high um compared to the national average so that's amazing to see our students are recovering quickly can you remind us again what a growth rate tells us yeah a growth rate just says um whether a student is progressing at an

147average rate or whether they are progressing um higher and so on i think last time math was around uh two no it's like around the three something um progress rate and the national average is one nice so i have to ask this every time and i apologize quite all right but these are supervisory unified yes and uh are they the same grade tracked over these years or are they so are they sixth grade in 2019 sixth grade this is all grades so any grade who took the track my progress this is all grades if you want to see a breakdown of like let's say the current sixth grade um and what their scores were back in fall of 2019 all the way to now yeah that's on our on our dashboard which is on the

148website so those say it'll say current sixth grade and it'll track just that sixth grade all the way back to fall okay so yeah it's okay it's all there but this is just for sd yeah all right so this um again an academic achievement i broke it down by free and reduced lunch status non-terrain reduced lunch status um so those are all color coded there and then i also broke it down by gender um so you can see there there actually has not been a ton of change um from one year or from fall of 2021 on but some especially in math actually so moving on um goal number three was social emotional learning mental health and well-being and that was our panorama survey and we gave that in the fall late in the fall

149and then again this spring and so you can see i compared um december is actually winter i guess to april so you can see the answers um and how they compare supportive relationships obviously continues to be our highest um and so on i mean keeping in mind april we're coming up on assessments and things like that which is tough it's a horrible time to give a mental health survey or maybe it's a good time i don't know but all of the scores are all it's yeah it's based on how they responded positively yes yeah thank you i couldn't tell from the category yeah rational regulation yeah emotional right it's tricky but it's it's based on positive comments yeah yes we do yep and the kids recognize they have some work done yes yes absolutely yeah

150you all said uh yup i think it's on to you the essers sr1 um is uh i'm not going to read through the amounts you can see the amounts those are pretty bold but as r1 we um finished up the total grant was used was was expensed and it was summer academy 2021 mostly taken out of that house supports transportation and some other things um including substitutes and in the year of fy21 um esser two uh we probably will have a few more amendments before that we're finished up with that one uh again that helped us with summer academy teachers and a 912 peer mentor that's a small investment school nurse support for weathersfield our recovery coordinator our leader in knee investment the panorama survey for the social emotional learning data that we just looked

151at we were able to purchase and we are hope um support transitional kindergarten that entire program is funded through esser and will be supported again in sr3 there were technology upgrades to our network the electronic electronic time card system and the professional learning and supervision evaluation software that we saw that brittany was talking about earlier um sr3 i'm happy to report that it is probably in the final stages of getting approved um i just had to do one little tweak thing which i was very happy about and um that was basically most of the same uh investments that we had in sr2 with um no schoolnet supports um and then some tech uh upgrades that include access points um and then of course at summer academy for the next two years and the investments for

152the um teachers are for the next two years for fy 23 and 24. there any questions okay title one and title two um title one is uh our these are our consolidated federal programs grants and title one is uh its primary intention is to support student learning we have investments of family engagement homeless support we have two interventionists at windsor two interventionists at heartland and halftime interventionists at weatherfield unfortunately the two positions at windsor and weathersfield went unfilled this year um we're hoping again to get the uh the weathersfield one is not happening next year but the two windsor positions we're hoping opening opening hoping um after school tutoring and um that there was some summer uh maybe some summer school i can't remember i don't think so anyway um the uh support title ii

153supports teacher and administrative learning and that is my position as well as paddy's uh sometimes in title ii i'm able to uh invest in things like mentoring uh and next year we're going to be able to put monies towards um training new mentors and giving our um current mentors more training in the danielson framework which is the framework that we use to improve instruction this year we had four english language learners join our supervisory union we uh this timeline gives shows you a little bit of we had a little bit of a rough start um we uh hired a consultant rachel rosenblum who has been fantastic she has is an ell teacher in essex westwood school district she helped us get a teacher hired who started in december and then for personal reasons left a

154few weeks later um then we had stephanie come on and in february stephanie has worked in the area as a as a preschool teacher and then she tells me how much she loves this job with her lovely students so she works half time and rachel administered arweda access assessments those are the assessments that determine whether or not a child is eligible for english language learner services and this spring we created uh the ell program documentation that's going to be part of and included in a student's file and part of the mtss process in each building each year this time of year right now our kindergarten class for next fall is being screened and those um uh home language surveys are very important for helping us identify students who may be in need of english language

155learning supports can i can i just ask a quick question because i sure got an email about it earlier this evening or just before this meeting and it has to do with kindergarten screening and it says uh uh why is the cutoff um september first when the state law requires january first for the for what for the age yeah yeah i don't invade it we went through this in heartland a few times yeah i thought it was a fun thing oh i know a lot of districts did want to back that up a little bit until the developmental readiness uk and the state allows up to january 1st for cutoff so it you know you'll see them some most or about most of september first i'm talking statewide now when i say most that's anecdotal

156but summer october 1st you know it's really up to the board policy right now you you you we have a policy you decided somewhere that september 1st would be the cutoff is it is it's in policy isn't it yes and along with that just related we did for tk last year because we had spots we set up to december 1st if they were considered tk if we had students so that there is a little bit of that wiggle room um in part because what is what david said kindergarten readiness for a four and a half year old is very different than the kindergarten readiness for five-year-olds in september because right there's a significant difference yeah and developmentally and especially with our kindergarten standards um and do we have vk at all horses tk is still

157only in heartland as an suy program and provide busing from the different schools we've managed to do that from students coming from windsor and heartland we didn't have a weathersfield or an albert bridge tk student this year but that's an su-wide program eventually if we'd love to have tk in every building but right now we don't what we do have though for next year is two full-time pre-ks that will have any student or have the eligibility to have access to in windsor school two full-time pre-k classrooms that go up to age five any student who's not eligible for kindergarten is eligible for our pre-k three and four-year-old program so we're building capacity for those younger students but at least it doesn't it's it's related because i imagine that the question probably rooted in my child

158is going to be five by this state wise as it could be that so we are able to meet some of those needs whether it's that would encourage that family and to reach out if they're interested and connect with parents of students recommended for tk and then if we don't fill the spots we'll open it up thank you thank you sorry to wait like for a second okay our mentor mentoring program that we talked about earlier i just wanted to let you know that we had 17 new teachers those are we in the mentoring program we classify a new teacher as a teacher with five or few years five or fewer years experience they also could be somebody that has is returning to teaching after some time off we had 15 mentors for those um

159mentor for those new teachers and that's 21 hours of observation i mean 21 hours of meeting including an observation that the mentor teacher does of the mentee twice a year mentor guides are for our experienced teachers who have more than five years of experience those are teachers that come to us from other systems have been teaching for a while or teachers um it depends if we have a teacher in the building that changes grade level if they're just making a small uh like a few years grade level they may or may not need a mentor or they may get a mentor guide so we do have some flexibility with how the mentor program um meets the needs of our teachers those mentor stipends are played locally in each of the buildings as well and just

160a final thank you and contact information if you have any questions you can also access our website the address is there you can also address access that through the su website if you go under um curriculum it'll bring you there okay thank you thank you that was a lot that was good i know it was a lot we've been very busy lately stop presenting all yours now katie baby what's summer academy yes so i'm going to try to present can i follow you in the next couple days let's see if i can do that one yesterday hold up to my email um no motivated to go home yeah i'm with you it's great so i'll talk i'll do speed talking so summer academy 2022 uh termed fun in the sun in part because we were

161struggling to find something and we want to have fun and want to go outside so that's the i think that's how brady's brain went to after this weekend um it also gives us some flexibility for themes so this year um wait that went right to the wrong slide which is weird it's all out of order is it going backwards that's not right no um so sorry there's there's a whole there's christine was sitting next to me she saw it it was all there um let me stop sharing for a second find the right tab find the right tab and why what program did you use again google slides um did it stop sharing it did i apologize um escape out of that no it's really that's very odd okay so i'm going to try the

162slideshow again well so if you can see here there's actually other slides um there's the one i want to show you because it's pretty relevant to um how many kids we have coming so i'll try one more time if not you'll just have to prep with my voice um i even am using the computer that cancels share a tab that tab share okay and slideshow it's trying again yep well it's trying i'm not sure if it's going to work again all right so let's see if i tap once if it gets to it it doesn't like it is weird so i'm just going to go to not um the slideshow i saw the slideshow looking for yeah so we could do that and see if it comes so this is uh so that's the main

163stuff that i want you to see we have 91 stu 92 excuse me it literally changed by three students today um it's a moving target so i should have put you know warning temporary uh tentative numbers um but sugaring out right now two from abs 39 from heartland yes christine's building won the award for getting more kids registered um weathersfield is 17 which is pretty much exactly where it was last year and windsor is 35. we have with the grades entering it doesn't equate to classrooms right now because what because of the numbers and where the students came in we have a couple of entering k-1 classrooms we'll have one entering second entering third class because grade for example six through eight is actually going to split up um and it's just because of how

164student number sugared out the only class that will have two is the k in entering first students with a couple entering seconds we just had a bubble not enough to make two but certainly developmentally it made sense to have the range um so some of the challenges we faced in planning this year we're gonna um support staff we only had nine support staff apply to participate and last year we had five hcr sbis contracted and i think it was 14 in-house support staff we significantly had a different number and it shifted to we had a lot of classroom teachers or related arts teachers apply which is great except they're also more expensive so um budget wise it didn't come out as well as we would hope but we have enough staff to do what we

165need um the six of those support staff will actually be one-on-ones for students with more intensive needs that are coming to summer academy as part of their esy um with the exception of very few were under eight all of the students identified um have been so 80 plus have been through our mtss system um either were identified through the tmp scores or by teacher recommendation afterwards and which is great so that shows our systems working what to say yes why stand for extended school year in special education thank you i throw my acronyms out too much um so the classroom teachers outnumbered applicants which was a good problem to have so it means we have in almost all the classrooms two certified teachers in each one and administration wise we're going to rotate like we

166did last summer and with the exception of the admin retreat so that's another plus so how much does this cost and okay that's probably smaller than any of you would really like and this actually did work for the slideshow let me see if i can show it so it's bigger hey we got a winner all right um so these are for taking so i want to pouch this in this is taking into account that staff show up every single day last year that did not happen so this is well it didn't people got people got sick and it's a time card thing so if they don't come they're not paid so that's so this is the extent of what we're going to end up costing us i'm sure it will come in less we already

167know a few teachers will said that i'm going to be out this day or what so 12 classroom teachers that are will be working with students directly in the classroom we are still aiming to keep class sizes between 10 and 12. adhering to what we did last year which is really that small group intensive instruction one school counselor who also serve as our float to sub um because we need somebody that's other than the administrator who's around which we did that too one school nurse because we found with covid that definitely helped plus regular school nursing stuff that happens um three support staff and supplies that all comes out of esser what angie mentioned earlier our budget for esser for that is exactly 90 000. so we're right at 91.4 i am sure we'll be

168under that um give or take you know people taking days the other part of our summer academy is also paid through the american rescue plan so our idea b like our arp esser we have an idea b which is special education funding only one as person will be our new mental health clinician we have a new school-to-home mental health clinician that i'll tell you about next month once you signed your contract yay um sorry i'm so excited about this as you can tell she will be here part-time during the summer one bcba because we still need those supports during the summer for all students six and a half special educators or pre-k teachers because our early childhood program technically isn't covered under esser but i can cover it under arp id b is how we

169did it last year too in special ed so our pre-k could also run um and six support staff will be a total there oh and i forgot i'll just go back up for a second transportation last year we had three buses because we did have a bus coming from albert bridge this year we're going to have two buses and we're working out band transportation for the albert bridge students because there's only two students and it just didn't warrant the cost of a bus um and we have school what we advance so we'll be doing that um so this 32 staff total so our total with all of our different funding sources right now comes to two 143 fifty um and i remember correctly last year of elizabeth sorry sorry i i just have a i

170have a very quick i swear the cold question and that is uh so mental health clinicians are classified in the same category as special ed that's it's being paid for out of our bodies of funding it's a funding bill yes it's a funding source and technic with there's a whole piece of um that's our current school to home coordinator is actually funded out of special education as well okay um so fitting in with our sss supports and with our change with 173 it all makes sense um we've made sure all students have access it just sometimes gets a little creative this would be less creative next year which is good um last year it was 180 000 and change i think 180 669. i remember correctly for my notes because now i'm on full screen

171um plus another approximately 30 000 for special ed so we are coming in significantly under but servicing about the same number of students the students who've accepted this time were we were very clear with families they need to come for the four weeks if they're only coming three weeks as long as we had room and that worked out okay we have a few little classroom spots if someone um a teacher still sees somebody that was off the list or came in that we may be able to fill with our current staffing levels um that could we could do but we are doing this with significantly less funds from last year um so we're not we are hope is not participating but we do have the mental health clinician and the school counselor being able to

172be available to float so we sort of did that swap um the hrsbis was i think close to 9 800 last year we're not doing that but the need isn't there so um that was a cost savings plus less we're down one bus um so that all helped um with this so pretty it's excited about it um there will be some students who will just come in for special ed services for example but the the vast you know 90 percent of it is all summer academy and supporting all students we'll be meeting soon with the staff to give their assignments and their kids we did have a community member reach out making sure that we which we learned last year um teachers reaching out to the students that they'd have so parents know before the

173beginning of the year beginning of the summer it was one of those oh yes moments so there's some of those things i mean it's an obvious one but um when you get caught up on it so that's that's where we're at and it's from july 11th till august 5th um by the dates so that's awesome any questions that's an odd question but it's it's me um have you ever considered putting it out there as a paid service so i know districts that have done that um that the academic portion in the morning is school funded or grant funded and the afternoons where it is more experiential different workshops things along those lines so for a whole day program then they you pay for the half day um i think there are other options out there

174but we could and i think sustainability over time we should discuss that as being an option to for families to do it there sometimes and this is where i've found it before students who are required or need it as determined for by different measures not paying versus individuals who would like to who students could participate who parents want them to and it's more to benefit because that's why what they want and how we just do that in an equitable manner but as we just figure out how we're going to sustain this past essa funding in 90 and 2019 wow that was bad in the summer of 2024 will be the last summer we can offer this um we'll i think a year in advance need to have that plan because we could put it into

175play then so it's definitely worth coming back to and exploring it's actually something summer 2020 is next year then yeah meaning the funding does expire september 30th 2024 but we only planned for three years right after two kills last year in an ideal world we'd also be doing enrichment and things like that as well because that would be right there's some pretty cool school options that they do with one planet and other that i keep hearing a couple of them in particular just heard about one this past week that i think it's worth us exploring how we can expand on what we're doing and making it a full day in-house but more sustainable long-term [Music] right i mean for those of us i mean i'm i'm thinking of myself as a parent you know the

176simple fact that daycare and child care has tipped off a little bit now that my you know he's in school full-time and i'm actually struggling because i have way too much money put in to my you know tax-free account so it's just it it i think it's a great opportunity for one parents to have this enrichment to parents who can afford to pay for it but it's also a great opportunity for those students who um could use a diverse peer group within the [Music] that area i mean my experience as a state street windsor special ed kid um is quite unique the the peer group that i interacted with during my special ed um time was less than diverse let's just put that's a nice way to put it and one of the great benefits

177that i got from going to state street school was the fact that i interacted with students in a far lower socioeconomic um and in a a racially diverse group than i would otherwise if i wasn't in the special ed or went to some place other than state street school which was a very unique you know genetic grouping so you know with that experience i'd i'd be excited to have my son go to this program just so he could experience that like i was experienced experienced and if if we know so that would take some pre-planning for us to know the open spots and planning for staffing um far beyond far before what we did this year and brittany was instrumental in helping get this all coordinated because we don't have coordinators this year that was

178the other big cost savings as well but i understand the the idea of broadening those horizons although we do have students that we was at 30 brittany was the for 35 so we ended up with a far greater range of students that far exceeded just students that we would typically see as not performing and then students beyond that so we also had quite a few referrals this year too for a variety of different reasons um that was a really nice option for teachers it's not that we didn't take them last year but i think it was a little bit tighter and this year it was like okay they didn't qualify via tmp so show us well what's that what else you got you know like what other data do you have what other classroom measures

179have you have you used um behavioral data things like that um attendance was one that gets a little bit tricky because a student who's lower on attendance during the school year likely won't attend during the summer time um and then you're paying for staff when a student might not come so that gets a little tricky but we did have quite a few referrals and all of them ended up being you know given an opportunity to attend so that was that was great with the exception of some of the truancy issues yeah because we wouldn't we didn't want to give a spot away for a student who would attend and then but then we're also if we then now have spots we're revisiting that and we'll open that i think that's for almost all of those

180as well this is two have been open so i think so yeah so i hope that my comments in any way um disperse what you've done so far because this sounds absolutely amazing this is this is a really bright spot in a dim educational year um and i don't mean a dim educational year as just people at work but you know we haven't been in recovery and i want to thank you katie for for you know leading this and and putting this together and the fact that i think this is a fantastic place for students to get another opportunity to to have success and something i didn't mention we have staff from all four buildings this year which was not represented last year as as well and certainly represented this year and many returning staff

181from last year um and everybody gets you know whatever their summer plans are and i hope people are taking lots of time off and doing what they want um but that that's been nice to be represented that way um across the studs they really really liked it as a staff it was fun last year so um shorter this year only four weeks and versus five weeks that was the other because of where fourth of july fell so all right great thank you that was really good and it is 9 35 so we are moving on [Laughter] which is an update on equity proposals that happened during your report equity yes i items for action we had our vermont school board association discussion they joined us and so we are to a point to appoint the

182interim superintendent okay so i am going to do the roll call um i guess a comment is um it was phenomenal getting to know all of you better i thought it was just really exciting that everything that you are currently doing and continuing to do as we move forward so i want to thank everyone for for coming to all of the interviews and putting up with one davis aye nancy i nikki hi rebecca hi elizabeth hi and i am it is unanimous and thank you for seeing again thank you all of you and for all the work and it was also very obvious in this meeting that your team and i appreciate it it's just really exciting to see our administrative staff working so closely together and with a sense of humor and grace working

183together thank you thank you very much so that was our one item for action i know we had another [Music] and our agenda is set we will be talking about our hiring employment policy that'll be an example for that school board portal larry will report on that we will have a more in-depth conversation on the transgender gender non-conforming policy and the another reading of people privacy policy and can we talk about the hiring slash employment policy that's number one that's right on it we got it i must get to that distraction sorry there must have been a hole in the screen yeah look at the table jumping bugs everywhere yes sorry that was distracting me katie that's that's what happened when david was closing the windows yeah i don't know how you were focused [Laughter]

184unless of course [Laughter] yes jamie hi mark i nancy hi nikki hi elizabeth hi rebecca hi and i am and i and i want to thank all of you and there has been robust conversation discussion on all of our agenda items and that can lead to lengthy meetings but it's all very good and our next meeting just to be so everybody's clear it's the third day i think it's june 20th 20th june 20. i think that invite is already out is there a reason it's not on the 27th which is the fourth monday yeah that's what i thought it was yeah we can certainly make it that we are the fourth monday maybe [Laughter] june 27th so thank you everyone fabulous evening we'll see all of you at graduations yes indeed