WS Board Meeting - January 11th, 2022

0011000 2022 at 6pm 607 pm and we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance um i did not bring my tiny flag so we'll just have to i don't know anybody have a flag we'll just have to pretend okay i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice okay and then um does anyone have any changes or additions to the agenda okay i don't hear any so we'll move on to um approval of the minutes of december 14th which it looks like um bj has put up on the computer here um does anyone want to make a motion to approve the minutes mark moves to adopt the minutes okay i have a second this is jamie

002i'll second okay um does anyone have any comments or discussion changes no okay um all in favor of approving the minutes from december 14th um 2021 say i i okay um i heard everybody except for jackie jackie did you say i or i yes yeah okay that's unanimous then okay actually i think i'm supposed to take a roll call but it's only five of us it's not theoretically but we'll let it go um okay now we have public participation and announcements is there any members of the public that are here that would like to discuss anything not on the agenda no okay so we'll get right on to our principles report then brian is he he's here right yep i saw him before he is here he's just oh there he goes technology together here

003technology there we go all right can everybody see it yeah it actually looked better before when you had the full screen sharing but that's fine like that no i can do that still again oh just slideshow there you go that looks good all right so welcome to the lead learner report for january 11 2022. so first off we're going to start back with our s we didn't do any student presentations this month we've just had a really short month from the time we got off for winter break until now but we do have our student holiday sing-along that went out so since we weren't able to do a traditional holiday sing-along and invite our families to the school we brought our sing-along to them so thank you to mr and mrs shambo for organizing this

004holiday sing-along um it was a great way for our students to be able to share a little bit of the holiday spirit and i know it was definitely enjoyed by our community and so there is a link there that i'll share with everybody later on so that you can hear it if you haven't already had that opportunity to see it and hear it it was great so leader and me is always our focus so we're going to be meeting with members of our lighthouse team and the our leader and me coach on this friday january 14th so we're doing a zoom meeting at 12 o'clock on that one and then miss cole has been doing her sel lessons um using all the leader in me lessons and she's been focusing on habits two and three

005and then eighth grade is working on some service projects we're trying to figure out how the students can do those with um our covered world that we're living in so that they can come and volunteer in such in classrooms so we're trying to figure out how we can safely do that with them mixing pods enrollment attendance for december 15th from our last board meeting up until today so our total enrollment has not changed we have 236 students our average daily attendance with everything going on has been 86.4 percent and we had zero new students from december 14 through today we have one hop in the book so coming up um so covet update so we have had six classes that were affected um one again last night we've got it down pretty good with the

006robo call and all the information that goes out directly to that classroom so it saves quite a bit of time for bj and emily and kerry because they're the ones that were making those calls on the weekend and now we can just send them out a call they get to hear my voice and then it sends them to an email that also comes to them and gives them all the information but we've been able to test to stay and keep children in school we've had six positive tests with the test to save but it didn't in fact or affect other students out of 132 tests we did 47 of them today alone um there are new protocols coming into place from the state so those are coming down and we'll figure out exactly what those

007are going to be 40 percent 46 percent of our students are fully vaccinated the one thing that we did find out the other day is that a lot of our eighth graders because they were the first round of students that were eligible for vaccination now have been um it's been past the six months since they've been vaccinated so they're no longer considered fully vaccinated by the state so they are getting those booster shots ready for those students to be able to get those so our numbers there are about the same and i would like to give some special recognition to our covid team in the morning so emily stevens our school nurse has been doing an amazing job she works on the weekends she takes calls and takes care of a lot of the stuff

008and bj and kerry as well have been doing that and then we also have meg shambo who's been helping out and then chris uh christian hubner has been helping out so thank you for all those people helping out with the test to stay plus everything that's been going on with kovid um building community so we're continuing our monthly conversations with chief spalding regarding fire safety and one of the things that him and i spoke about the other day was possibly doing a vaccine vaccination clinic on january 22nd rescue incorporated who's out of battle borough vermont they would like to do one at our school site on january 22nd from 10 to 1 30 and they would have all the booster shots plus they would have the first round of vaccinations and the second round of

009vaccinations first for people that are interested so we want to talk a little bit more about that if that's a possibility um chief daniels from the weather excuse me from the weathersfield police department um he was able to give an extra presence at school because of a non-credible internet threat which was great to have him there before school during school he was pretty much there the entire day just to make sure that everybody was safe i'm continuing to communicate with our town manager brandon golnick him and i have been talking about the town report and i know that the select board did decide to do a virtual meeting for our town meeting so that's coming up and then we do want to talk a little bit about our service award nomination and then um they

010reached out to me about the town challenge so i'm going to be working with mark richardson our local librarian to come up with how we could virtually do the town challenge because that hasn't been done before so that seemed pretty exciting hopefully it will help me learn a little bit more about the town of weathersfield here's a picture from our community dinner at weathersfield this is actually at our last board meeting so it was a huge success we had santa there bj was there heather was there our pto was there we had john ayers in there as well passing out meals we had about 200 meals so we passed out to families for our first event um i know the board got the dinner that night too but it was an excellent good event it

011was a little colder than i thought of it's going to be not quite as cold as it was today but it still is cold so it definitely will dress warmer at the next one and then we had some holiday visitors at school um one of our kindergarten teachers threw out the challenge for me to step it up a little bit she saw some principal that um was dressing up for the holidays so i did dress up as a reindeer one day in front of school and then i was the principal on a shelf as students were leaving and my daughter is shaking her head at me right now because she thought it was a little freaky but i stayed there and then you can tell you're starting to get old because if you've been sitting

012someplace for 20 minutes and your feet start to go numb you realize that you need to move a little bit more often so but it was just a little holiday fun for the kids to be able to uh see it was funny how many kids didn't even notice at first as they walked by we were able to do some community outreach we were able to give fruit baskets to our neighbors we're trying to be good good neighbors and work with our neighbors all around us so we were able to give them fruit baskets and they enjoy that little bit of holiday spirit and then i know our third grade classroom gave christmas cards to our neighbors at the scotty house as well lead issue at weathersfield we did have a slight little lead issue with

013certain faucets so i think 18 faucets were affected by them um the faucets were tagged we had signage up on them saying that do not use them for any type of human consumption for cooking or anything else all the faucets were replaced over the winter break and then we're waiting for the state to come back to retest so hopefully that lead issue is gone but they felt it was just in the faucets because it wasn't widespread throughout the school um staff recognition we've been trying to work on that to make our staff feel appreciated they're doing an amazing job and they're working really hard and tirelessly so january 4th we had our 22 2022 we had our staff participated in our staff development day there was part of it that was su that we looked

014at the strategic plan as a whole group and then they got to choose their own learning some of our staff did go to specifically design classes that they got to do but it was an opportunity for them to collaborate with their grade level or grade level above and grade level below and then we also gave out weather weathersfield swag to all of our staff members i'm all about the brand as you guys know and i thought it was important for our teachers to have and are actually all of our staff to have some swag so that they could be able to sport the weathersfield design when they go out places and then we did have this really fun team building project and then i talked to my wife who's a teacher at windsor and she

015said really brian she said they've been on vacation they're coming back you know they want to work in their classrooms and you're going to have them do something for an hour so after we gave them the gift of swag i gave them also the gift of time because i know they have been working so they ended up having that 45 minutes team building would have been important but at the same time with covet and everything else i figured the gift of time listened to my wife it's always an important thing to do mission vision core values timeline so this is our update so we are um going to be meeting actually with some community members tomorrow we're having our coffee with a lead learner and so we're going to be getting some community input and

016then trying to pull those kids out without crossing pods so we'll be getting that information out to them and talking about them or talking to them about what we're doing and then we will hopefully be able to have that prison presentation at our next board meeting next steps to create a makerspace we've been talking about that so we have been meeting with facilities to use the existing computer lab we've started to talk to some outside companies and looking at they're giving us some designs on the spaces we're waiting to be able to visit other maker spaces because nobody wants visitors and there's campuses right now and then we did match an existing staff member tara smith who is our librarian would be the perfect fit to do both roles as a librarian and also the

017makerspace coordinator and we've sent her on a couple trainings before covet things started getting a little crazier so she was able to do some of those and so we have some planned and then we're looking at utilizing some of the resources like the hicks nichols grant to help fund some of the makers space and then upcoming events like i mentioned we have virtual coffee with me tomorrow january 12th from 8 30 to 9 30. also there's no school on this monday january 17th um observance of dr martin luther king day and then january 28th is our next early release day and that is it for the board our board minutes or board report for this month i think that's the quickest i've ever done it well thank you very much brian and uh i do

018have a couple of uh donations for your makerspace i talked to my sons and we're gonna donate a raspberry pi and a 3d printer oh nice thank you very much we appreciate that we will gladly take those okay um okay next um we have the superintendent's report yeah i will uh share my screen here unfortunately my presentation is never quite as exciting as brian's or interesting no no elf on a shelf no dressing up like a reindeer um but uh clearly can everybody see that okay i assume everybody can see that right yeah it's fine thanks all right good um let me and i'm going to try to go quickly too and some of these things might prompt questions if you want to save the questions for the end that might be that might be

019good uh general updates uh staff had the in-service as brian said uh i want to thank angie and the administrative team for the way they organized that in-service at least the first part of the day certainly and then brittany put some self-directed work together for the for the afternoon but i i i think it was productive and we tried to balance it as brian said between giving some people some time and space but also providing some content the strategic plan i mean we have to remember that you know there are staff members really throughout the su quite a few actually who weren't around when we developed that strategic plan so we felt it was important to do a dive into into that uh plan uh it seemed like everybody enjoyed the much-needed rest over the

020holidays get to see family friends it's always i know people sometimes uh you know criticize educators because every now and then we we do get those breaks uh including february break coming up here in april but i will tell you especially in years like this it was well deserved and and much needed sub-degree temperatures today everybody noticed that i bet uh and even brian said he probably would have to put his gloves on uh he had brought some of that southern california weather with him but i think it is slowly going away supposed to be a little better tomorrow uh and uh and we just get so nervous about um we have a lot of walkers especially in one of our districts and also those kids that are at the bus stop so we made

021the decision or i made the decision with the support of the administrative team to start a little late this morning hopefully that worked out for everybody we don't like to do that we won't do it very often budgets we're going to talk about this tonight they have to be ready for print soon hopefully we can finalize the expenditure budget tonight i see ed is on the line brian has a short power point and then ed will share the numbers and some of the tax rate implications uh so we can make those final decisions i think at some point we have to talk about maybe we've already done this but which board members are up for election i think according to elizabeth uh one of our board members in another district who's also a state legislator

022that there is a move afoot to suspend having to get signatures like we did last year um and so we'll keep you posted on that but in the meantime if a board member is up for re-election uh they probably should be at least trying to get a few signatures here until we get the official word does anybody know anymore about that anne marie have you heard anything about first of all who's up for reelection do we know i'm up for re-election and mark and kristen are up for reelection um i haven't heard back from them though if they are planning to run so i i asked them in an email but i didn't hear back um so uh i have um i've i've gotten my petition for um school board three year uh and i

023had but i just got it today so i haven't gotten any signatures um i i was actually really uh wondering today how i'm gonna get all those signatures given you know how everything is going online now uh so it would be great if they could do that again this year if not i'll have to just i guess drive around to some people's houses or hang out in front of the transfer station one weekend um something like that yeah i know i know it's it it's hard kristen and uh and mark do you want to go on record tonight are you uh are both of you gonna run again i am not running again oh christine that's very sad because you have a professional coaching career i know that's just that's going to be starting here

024duke needs a women's coach i know that so pay attention you're going to leave us huh i know i feel bad i've done it for years but mark is also posted in the chat that he is not planning to run for reelection either although i think we could probably beg him to do it because i talked him into it last year so we could try again i'm saying i'm an easy mark anne marie yeah yeah i think we can work on you [Laughter] i don't know about kristen i've never heard her say she wasn't going to run so i don't know how easy she is to convince people though no you never know you never know we'll give it a we'll give it our best shot i think members of the public would like to

025uh submit applications too i i think they'd be welcome yeah yeah i mean this is probably a good it's a public meeting this uh this uh i always send this uh video uh a recording to anne marie i think you posted on facebook so anybody out there that wants to run for the weathersfield school board that would be great uh this has always been a strong board and a board that focuses on kids so if uh if you want to run uh just uh you know contact anne marie she can tell you how to how to do it i am pretty certain you're not going to need the signatures um but elizabeth said she'd keep us posted the next day or two uh and and i'll let you know emery as soon as uh as

026soon as we know but uh okay yeah that's sad we may come back and beg both of them but in the meantime if anybody is interested uh feel free who who was our moderator last year uh anne-marie um i want to say campbell i forget his name his whole name um john campbell john broker campbell yeah okay and as far as you know is he doing it again bj yes okay as far as i know yep so we don't have to worry about moderator and the town of withersfield and i assume we're going to follow suit they've decided they want to go uh like we did last year virtual and elizabeth also tells me that the state is going to allow that again this year so i'll i'll keep everybody posted by email and usually

027at our february meeting we once we adopt a budget that's when we talk about how we're going to present the budget you know how we're going to market the budget so we'll we'll we'll set that up for uh for our february meeting covert update um certainly brian gave you the local piece of this uh uh many of you know if you listen to uh the governor's press conference today or read the vermont digger over the weekend there is a state shift and focus from school-based tests to stay and i want to give a shout-out certainly to our nurses and that team that brian just spoke about uh they've done yeoman's work um but you could see from the numbers that brian gave us tonight uh it it is cumbersome it does take a good part

028of the morning to get all that test to stay uh those pieces done um and i think the state was recognizing that this omicron strand is uh in incredibly contagious and it seems to be again it seems to follow the unvaccinated pattern but they're vaccinated at getting getting the virus as well and so because of that bulk and if you've been looking at the count lately you know you can see that that's not you know what whatever we're doing is not working in terms of we seem to be able to control things in school when we do the contact tracing it looks like the transmittance is usually outside of school but the bottom line is it's still getting transmitted whether we do the contact tracing or the or the test to stay so i think

029what we want to do here um uh yeah that's the average antigen test but we want it we don't want to pivot too quickly uh i i think so is anne-marie i think you listen to that vermont uh from our public radio press conference today uh i think there's a couple of things if we're gonna make this pivot um and i'll keep in touch with the board chairs because i wouldn't do it without the authority of the board chairs at least but i think if we're going to make this pivot we have to make sure that we have the family kits available and on hand because what the game plan is both for somebody who tests positive for covid and for a close contact who's unvaccinated the the the game plan is to uh give

030uh give the person um a family pack of test kits so that uh they'll be able to on days one well for the one for the close contact it would be days four and five that they would test with the antigen test and for the person who is a uh uh did test positive uh it would be right from the start of that positive test would be days one two three four and five and again with both of those you'd need two consecutive negative tests and uh not have any symptoms if you do uh if you continue to have symptoms or god forbid you test positive again you know in that antigen world then you'd have to stretch it out to six days seven days eight days the maximum is 10 days and then you

031can return as long as you're symptom free we're trying to learn this new guidance and we're not gonna do it like yesterday or today or tomorrow uh you know we're gonna wait and make sure we've got the test kits ordered the families are on board uh and uh and it's gonna be it's it will be somewhat of a change um there'll still be some contact tracing because let's say a fourth grade uh we we get a call from a parent that says that child tested positive we've still got to identify in that fourth grade who's vaccinated who's unvaccinated uh we still will probably look a little bit the close contact world because we've got to decide who we're going to send the test kids home to in order to get those those tests done um

032and i know this is a big change so if anybody did have any quick questions feel free to ask them now we'll keep you posted um good news i mean we're getting that we're getting more concrete data in right now across the su um and it does vary a little bit school to school um but if you go to a whole k-12 population including our through 12 population at windsor we're averaging about 60 upwards to 60 percent of our student population at the elementary level less so you know we're probably between 45 and 50 at the upper level at the lower level at the upper level we're starting to push into that sixty percent seventy percent range but when you average it out and you know that's what it is we'll we're going to get

033a more accurate count the nurses are putting that together now and i hope at the su meeting i can give you a better update on that uh there are some concerns i mean i don't know whether brian mentioned it or not but on any particular day the principles of probably the first uh half an hour if not hour of the day is deciding how we're going to provide coverage in what areas of the building because you have to have supervision and you want to have some teaching and learning going on right so i know there was a day i don't know whether it was monday brian but you had you you came very close to not being able to operate because of the number of staff that were out kids are a little different we

034have a 50 threshold with kids and as long as more than 50 of their we can count that as a school day and so far we've we've been okay but with staff it's about the ability to keep the kids safe to be able to monitor the programs and supervise uh uh accurately and we don't have we don't have a mate a metric for this in other words but you know we're talking about it but it switches so much day-to-day and everybody's job is different right i mean so you just have to look at who's out you know and how long they're going to be out and whether or not we can sustain it so far we've been able to keep all of our buildings open but that is a big shout out to our principals

035our administrative assistants uh bj kerry i i know that they do that work they cover classes when they have to they supervise and chaperone when they have to uh you know they cover classes when they have to and um and so do teachers teachers are are helping each other out so that's a big shout out to uh to the staff we'll talk more about that at the su meeting too athletics seems to be going well i know jessica's online is that a separate item on the agenda um anne-marie no it isn't it isn't actually we don't have athletics on today i can speak um it quickly if yes why don't you just talk about what's going on now so we'll use that as an opportunity yeah so all all of our teams have had at

036least their first practice as of tonight um except for our kindergarten first and second grade which will start on saturday everything's going really smoothly and well with the help of emily and bj we're just figuring out you know tests to stay in what kids can participate or not but we had a successfully had our first game last night for grade 7 and 8th grade girls and it was live streamed on facebook there was a lot of people logged in and i think a lot of parents were super appreciative of being able to see their athletes playing at the streaming was good i watched the whole game i am home with covid and it is no joke so um alicia stepped up and did wonderful work yesterday running the clock and filming and the book all

037at the same time so she did really really great yesterday but um i'll be back back next week um hopefully with some more home games but i think for now at least our streaming works we know how it works and we know it works well so we'll get parents to be able to watch their athletes that way and we'll just keep going and moving forward with practices and games as planned for right now yeah and i i want to thank jess and all the ads it hasn't been easy and i know there was a little bit of controversy about spectators at games but we just felt with this omicron surge that it might be better to just try to live stream if we could and keep as many adults you know still out of the

038building as as possible we're having the same conversations at the high school but but the ads have worked really well together and uh and uh and sorry to hear about that jessica hope you feel uh hope you feel better and from what people tell me no matter what the age it's not a joke i mean yeah thanks david it's been um i'm boosted vaxxed and i'm still knocked out so it it doesn't discriminate that's for sure so everybody just stay safe yeah yeah good good good point excellent point um negotiations um were there any questions for jessica before i move forward okay almost there negotiations uh jackie and tom antonovich is our board member that represents weathersfield the teachers settled with the board right before the holidays it's a three-year deal we ratified it right

039before the holidays and all the associations have ratified so we are now going to be collecting signatures soon we're trying to commit the document to a docusign document just looking over the last of the typos and you know you try to make it as right as you can before you put signatures on it but it'll be nice sadly the first year of the three-year deal is this year but we do get a two-year break uh from negotiating which is which is great but that negotiating team works hard uh and they represent the boards well the esp negotiations which is basically our support staff uh we've had one meeting we're going to have another one tomorrow uh and uh from the initial meeting we're feeling pretty optimistic i don't think we're too far apart uh in

040terms of um and i see a typo there but in terms of uh salary and uh and and uh some of the stuff there weren't there weren't a lot of there weren't a lot of items that were placed on the table i think both sides want to get get it done and they would also like a multi-year deal if possible and the support staff does have a contract this year so if we could do a three-year deal it would mean one two and three where we wouldn't have to be negotiating anymore and last but not least the equity task force continues to meet we met with melissa crumb to review the action steps and we're setting up a possible partnership with springfield uh i've been in touch with zach down there and we've got a

041meeting a matter of fact tomorrow morning uh to put together a request for proposal an rfp for our su and the springfield district to do an equity audit because what we want to do in our equity work and in our anti-racism work is we want to make sure you know we're we're not we're not solving problems that we don't really have we have to decide what is our baseline how are we doing with issues of diversity and equity and uh and then uh if we have a baseline you can you as we do these different action steps we can decide are we making progress are we are we getting better with with those areas that demonstrate where we demonstrated a little bit of weakness so again melissa crum has been really great uh louvelle brown

042has been part of this part of our initiative some of us are in his workshop um and i i know some of the members of this board have stayed close to this initiative including mark youngling hopefully he'll continue if he doesn't continue as a board member he'll continue as a citizen but that's it for me if anybody has any questions uh i'll take them now if not we can move on if you want to raise your hand in the chat if you have any questions i don't see any um i guess we'll move on to items for discussion the first one up is town meeting and um we sort of briefly hit on that a little bit um the select board i believe has decided to do theirs entirely online and we could do like

043we did last year and join them on that or um we can do some kind of we could do in person totally or we could also do a hybrid where we had some in person available and mostly online so if i'd like to hear the board members opinions on those three choices i personally would be fine with a hybrid uh or remote either one would work for me okay jackie i feel the same way i think that uh we may have more participation if it's virtual and so i think that's a better the best option yeah i really liked last year we really had a lot of participation and um yeah i think it was good kristin yeah i would say the same i mean i think it goes both ways though like there are

044definitely some people who go to town or you know to the school part and i wouldn't log in online um but i'm happy either way yeah um david g or brian do you know do we have to um like can we have a hybrid um and still you know join with the uh select board or would we have to be totally virtual no i i think brian i i don't know how you feel about this but i think you know i think first of all we've just got to make sure the state you know does give us that and i somebody must have the inside traffic i think that i i did see something that at least the legislatures had passed it i don't know that the governor has signed it yet but i believe

045i did read the legislation past that yeah elizabeth thought for sure it was it was going to happen but anyway to get back to your original question um because we separate out those meetings as kristin said right the usually i think the school meeting is in the morning right and then we break for a little soup or whatever and then we then we do the the the town version um i think we we don't have to do exactly what the town does we could set up uh much like we've done with other meetings you know we could use the two owls and sapper and uh and all of those pieces and and and go hybrid um i i don't know what the advantage there would be because i bet you if you do go hybrid

046most people are going to come in online i mean i i really believe that but i mean i mean there are some members of the community that um that you know if you don't have the in-person option they're going to complain that they didn't have the option of coming in person but they might not show up anyway i don't know um you know we haven't seen a lot of people at our meetings when we were doing them hybrid over the fall there were yeah not many people coming um so i don't know uh i mean i guess to answer your question we have the capability to do hybrid if that's what you want to do i mean i'm fine doing it that way as well um either way uh either a hybrid or a remote

047i definitely do want to have some form of remote available to people though because i think a lot of people aren't comfortable yet coming out to things like that so mark we should definitely have a remote access for people that might be at risk um just we want their participation and we don't want the risk so yep and you and we have to keep in mind too right much like the rules for our other hybrid meetings that really you would only need you know one or two board members in the room i mean you don't everybody everybody else you know we just need somebody at the building to open the door make sure the heat is on make sure we've got the table set up uh i imagine if we did it hybrid uh we

048could use i think we don't have to get out of the gymnasium i don't think i think we could do it right in the activity space but i i think we've got a little bit of time to think about this i don't know that we need to we will need to make the decision before the town before the school report goes out though because on the warning it has to say whether you are totally remote or i think that's pretty soon though right bj like they need that info soon yeah we need it within the next week actually yeah because we're going to work on the warning once you adopt a budget tonight let's hope you do uh then we'll put the warning together and uh and then that comes with all of our letters

049and reports to bj and uh and and then the report get gets put together so i'd say we need to make a decision you know probably by the end of this week if not the very early beginning of next week well i think we can make a decision right now um i just would like to hear more from kristen if she really if she thinks that it's worthwhile to do the hybrid kristen did we lose her i mean i don't have a problem with doing the doing it hybrid so that people have the option um i mean i could be there it's not a big deal um so mark mark has his hand up i would volunteer to be there in person as well uh if that's what we need um would we need a

050motion for this is this something we adopt separately than the budget yes yes separate so yeah we need a motion for i guess for a hybrid town meeting may i make a motion that we adopt a hybrid model for the town meeting for the presentation of the next budget for the weathersfield school i have a second i'll go ahead and second that okay um i guess we can take a vote uh we should probably do a roll call um i'll start off with uh jackie since she's up on my screen right now in favor actually what i guess one by one hi okay uh mark hi kristen i and um jamie i okay that and i also say i so um that is unanimous that's unanimous so we'll be doing a hybrid meeting um i

051don't i believe it's march 1st correct or or no would we do it the saturday before uh it's this it's on the same day right the annual meeting is on the same day as the town meeting right or no yeah we've always done it what what day what day is it it was always on the weekend that we did the town meeting itself no it's on the saturday and i believe it's february 26th okay february 26 but then the voting occurs that following tuesday yeah yeah the voting is on tuesday but the meeting is on saturday no so wait that would mean voting is no let's see if it's voting's on the second tuesday that would be march 8th no it's on the first tuesday i believe this is march 1st march 1st okay first

052tuesday yeah my one son has off uh woodstock for uh so february 26 is the meeting okay okay february 26th and bj we'll just have to make sure that when laurie puts the warning together that uh that we have that clearly marked out we'll use these you know the school address and remote option much like we do for board meetings all right that's good that's a good decision to make and now we have the fy 23 budget which from what i saw looks pretty good to me so uh let's see um brian did you want to start off yeah i'll go ahead and start off i have a short presentation and then i'm gonna let ed do all the number part all right everybody good all right so our fy 23 weathersfield school proposed budget

053so our budget goal is alignment of the budget with a strategic plan continuous improvement plan in education quality standards so goal for student success and engagement so we're using leader me comprehensive assessment plan development of the middle school model co-teaching interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning student driven learning universal design udl for implementation goal two culture and student wellness so we have student advisory boards and councils diversity and equity work restorative approaches trauma-informed schools and collaborative problem solving mtss multi-tiered system of supports health and wellness team mental health services with our school counselor hcrs clinician or we are hope coach and panorama child nutrition at no cost to families and then our school schedule being great for kids information and communication so we're trying to engage the community through weekly updates and newsletters website and

054social media our data dashboards is coming soon community events and then our leader in me and then this is actually i i stole this from my last school that i used to that um and it's just sort of a great visual of how we work together so our model my last school was gears because we were a steam school but just about how everybody needs to work together and all these pieces need to come together to be able to be successful all right so the priorities for recovery at the school level so we need to be able to assess what the students need we need to ensure that the supports for social and emotional learning are there we need to develop continue to develop stronger relationships relationships are the most important part emphasize authentic and

055culturally responsive learning provide expanded learning time establish community schools and wrap around supports and prepare our educators for reinventing schools because school's never going to be the same okay so we need to make sure for assessing what students need that they have the time and the tools we're prior to prioritizing assessments they illuminate student growth and learning we're supporting acceleration of learning not remediation so we're really going to focus on students accelerating invest in teachers knowledge we've got a great knowledge base with our teachers and use those skills for formative assessment and move forward or move toward with more coherent systems of assessment so make sure our system assessments really matter for our students ensure supports for social and emotional learning so we're going to integrate social and emotional learning sel into the life of

056school is essential to mitigate the pandemic's impact on lifelong success and learning so the more we work with those students because it's it is impacting our students for sure and we want to make sure it has the least amount of impact so we're trying to implement a comprehensive system of support we're ensuring there's opportunities for explicit teaching of social and emotional skills at every grade level not only by the teacher but by our counselor we're infusing sel and instruction in all classes we're instituting restorative practices and enacting policies that enable sel and those restorative practices so we want to like i said before continue to develop stronger relationships so trying to create structures that foster health and safety as well as personalization and trust among children and staff so really working together being out there

057with our students you know i'm trying to be out there every day with them at recess trying to build those relationships i've been riding the bus for the last three days because we don't have enough staff to cover um so i've been that bus person 6 30 in the morning having the bus meet me at the doorstep is a little early um strengthening partnerships with our families trying to build that community cultivate support environments filled with emotional safety and belonging that's weird there and then enact policies to support relationship and centered designs we're emphasizing authentic culturally responsive learning we're offering guidance for how schools can restart by focusing on authentic learning and assessment strategies we're providing curriculum tools and professional learning for educators to support more authentic learning and assessment we're ensuring that the authentic

058learning is also culturally connected and culturally sustaining we're trying to build capacity for inclusive identity safe culturally responsible practice and we're redesigning assessments to emphasize applied learning and complex problem solving so we're providing expanded learning time infuse high quality intervention quality interventions within and beyond the school day expand high quality after school programs create high quality summer programs expand the reach and duration of early learning programs and then enact policies and access funding to support expanded learning time so establish the community schools and wrap around supports so we want to enact local policies that support well-designed community schools enlist regional agencies that can provide technical assistance and help coordinate local services great reliable funding streams to support community school needs and then create children's cabinets at the federal state and county levels so that we

059can coordinate and get all those services that we need for kids across all the the different agencies that are out there so we really utilize all those supports that are out there for our students and then preparing educators for reinventing school so in invest in high quality education or educator prepare preparation transfer educator learning opportunities to match current needs support mentoring and new teacher roles create collaboration time and then take the long view so here's some areas after meeting with the bac as well and then meeting with our staff of where we need some additional support so for learning development academic social and emotional programs we need the world language something we're looking at and then after school programs to be able to develop our students more after school at weathersfield specifically we need our

060base to really look for a world language teacher we need to make sure that we're able to get some extra support staff we had two general ed paras that we lost this year and so we've only we had four but we've only had two so to make sure that those are put into place and then actually set aside some extra money for emotional support staff to make sure that our students are getting those needs and then more at the su budget wise to look at that school the home coordinator social worker maybe and then our bcbas i know we're looking for some of those one additional one is needed for sure we share one right now with windsor but to have that person on site full time would just really help out our school and

061then we always like to say that we're better together so utilizing those mtss positions that we're sharing resources and data discussions intervention work across asu and those physicians being hired the bcba and sel team collaborating and giving those flexibility so almost like if we had that trauma type of situation that they can move over and help out at different schools and then again that home school coordinator social worker and then so what i'm going to do now is have ed go through i know that was pretty quick but i'm going to have ed go through and he's going to present the numbers and then the tax implications as well but all these things that i mentioned it's hard because i'm not seeing your face is the way i'm presenting is what we need at our

062school with our budget so i wanted to give you the the background any questions on what i presented so far i know that was fast so i once i go i did have one quick question i've never heard of panorama what is that panorama is a survey and angie do you want to touch base on that a little bit more it's a survey that we're finishing up right now um for students to be able to see what those needs are for that did you want to add it's um it it's through our esser funds and marie that we um for social for gauging where our students are at with social emotional learning and so we did our baseline survey our we were hoping to be done before christmas but i mean before break unfortunately so

063many student absences were still not quite done we'll be finishing up this week we should be finished by friday uh melissa cola our school counselor has been working on that and so she's got one class that was out and a couple other kids here and there so she's got just a handful of students that needs to finish up so our goal is by friday to get that done so yeah well i'm glad to see the emphasis on the social emotional because um just from i mean i don't see it so much in my own kids i'm kind of like wondering like am i missing something in my own kids but um but i have heard so many stories and um just listened to a program on vpr that um interviewed some students around the state

064and it just sounds like it's i mean i know it's been tough on all of us we're all kind of battered around by the pandemic but it really sounds like it's a real problem for the students so i'm glad to see that we're focusing our efforts on that it's definitely an emphasis for us to be able to really because my philosophy is kids if they don't feel safe if they're not comfortable then they're never going to be able to learn anyways so we want to put that emphasis first and we want to make sure that they feel safe and that they are in a safe environment at school yep awesome okay um looks like oh becky you have your hand up i have to get my mic on i just wanted to say the same

065as you and marie i really appreciate that that presentation that part because to me that's the well for me anyway i think that's the important part we have to talk about the money but that part's the essence and i i like that i hope that's going to be at the beginning of the presentation i really like it thank you and it's important i mean the money obviously like you said is important but to know what we are doing with it and where we're going is as i feel is the emphasis for it because it's all about the kids yep okay um so we will move on to the numbers with ed ed connors yeah can you hear me yep okay great um i think last friday or saturday maybe uh brian sent out a packet

066of information and what i'm just showing you is what was in that packet so this first one is an excel spreadsheet that just outlines the stats that are important to weathersfield and they're analyzing their budget for this year so the first one shows you that in in comparison to fy 22 uh your budget is up 5.64 or 370 598 and then the second two equalized people and common level of appraisal are numbers that are sent from the state and those numbers are used to calculate the tax rate and as you can see the weather field equalized people went up significantly which has a very positive effect on the overall tax rate the higher your equalized pupil you're taking that number and you're dividing it into your cost of education so it's going to lower your

067your cost per equalized pupil and it's also going to lower your tax rate um the next one is your common level of appraisal like every other school in the in the su um and every in the state i would imagine there's been a decline in your in your common level of appraisal that's because of the in the large amount of home sales that are and people moving to vermont have driven up the cost of the excuse me uh the cost of homes and your appraisal hasn't kept up with that so what happens in those instances is that a hundred percent would be your appraised at the perfect number anything below it means that you need to do a reappraisal or it points to that and anything above it means that you're over appraised so in

068weathersfield's case as it is in all the all the districts um right now you're under appraised and that's why it's gone down um your ed spending per equalized pupil is uh gone up it's gone up by 3.49 which is above the excess spending threshold which in a normal year would trigger a certain penalty so any money that was any any amount of money so that 715 dollars would get tacked onto your edge spending so it would get added to this number and that's what go into the formula and it would drive it up but we're in a two-year moratorium on that so it has no effect in this year it's something to keep an eye on though because the higher that is as you can see that penalty would be added to this right but

069and what it would do is drive that number up to 21 and that's what would go into the formula which would then have an effect on your tax rate it would raise the tax rate even more okay so anyway we get down here and i've given you two scenarios there's a scenario a in a scenario b so every year we get a letter from the tax commissioner the tax commissioner makes recommendations for property yield and income yields which are both very important to uh the tax rate property uh ed um you're going in and out a bit are you i'm sorry okay i'll stay closer to the microphone area scenario b is the scenario where the the ed fund right now has a 90 million dollar surplus and that 90 million dollar surplus is the

070legislature is going to have to decide what to do with it so if you look at the two scenarios a is the scenario where they're going to take the 90 million and they're going to use it in this year's ed fund so it increases the property yield and the income yield so that those two increase that lowers the tax rate okay scenario b is where they don't use the 90 million so a is all of the 90 million b is none of the 90 million and if you go up you can see in a given our tax given the the expenditure budget and all your all of your uh local revenues that would and that it would equate to a 10 point 10 percent decrease in the tax rate or 20 cents lower so you'd

071be an fy 22 it was 1.9482 in scenario a it would be 1.7529 in scenario b where they don't use any of it it would be a 3.71 decline or 7 cents less now the reason it's less is because your equalized pupil and in either of these scenarios the property income the property and income yields are both significantly higher than they were last year so both of those work in your favor so that's why you're seeing even in scenario b where they use none of the 90 million you're seeing a decline in the tax rate uh does anyone have any questions scenario b is the one that i'm using because that was the recommendation by the aoe and by most of the people that i uh my colleagues in the business mary business managers world

072but we we could choose to use either one or you could choose to yeah but i i the legislature has to decide how to use that 90 million yeah they gave us a and b recommending we use b uh last night the question came up well you're saying an a they use the entire 90 million and in b they use none of it well could there be a c where they use some of the 90 million and of course there could be but it it would be i could i don't know how to figure that in i know how to figure in additional local revenue into your budget but i don't know how i would figure it into to generate a property yield if i said oh say they use 45 million okay um i

073had a question about the equalized pupil um because that has really gone in our favor this year um how like why is it in our favor this year when like the other two three years i've been here it has not been in our favor well in the last year they they they froze it okay i said last year they froze it okay so what you're seeing is to to this year is the culmination of two years and it has been in weather's field if you take a look at the number 326.88 that's pretty close or it actually is a little less than what their actual count is but because the equalized pupil is a three-year moving average you don't see the increase until as as you move across you might have some low numbers in

074the beginning the first year and as we're starting to push out you're starting to see those numbers increase and brian i don't mean to put you on the spot but i i think you guys are at like 335 actually correct does that sound right bj for students yes total student k-12 no no k-8 i'm sorry 236 236 yeah okay i'm sorry i was thinking something but yeah i think you're reflective that number's more reflective of your actual count yeah yeah yeah and remember your high school kids are in that count and we talk about those high school kids and we we talk about it on the negative side with tuition right because we're a choice town but also if those kids are moving in over the summer you know because of choice they you know

075over a three year average you know like ed said it doesn't catch up right away but you you start to see an increase and i think i think that's what weathersfield is experiencing you've stayed pretty constant at k8 or even gone up some but your high school population is strong as well so that's good but i think in the the tax rate piece and and ed's estimates on the tax rate it's one of the reasons why the board essentially because those are estimates and we don't know what the legislator is going to do so really the key tonight is to adopt the expenditure budget right and and once you adopt that we put the estimates into the town report but they're only estimates and usually when the tax bills go out i mean it's usually

076in the ballpark but it's not exact yeah um also i was wondering if um figured into this is the um the x the what's it called um yeah no so the the amount of the surplus is a hundred thousand three oh five eighty nine okay so if so um i mean it's sort of been our policy uh we'd have to vote on it though because it's not like set in stone but um to give that money back to the taxpayers how does that or you guys send it to capitol reserve yeah you can do either one yeah i i know we can do either one but um it it had been sort of a uh i mean i know jamie's new and i think mark is new since we sort of had that but um

077kristen and uh jackie and i and the previous board um it was kind of our thinking that the money should go back to the taxpayers um we don't have to do it that way of course but uh if it was done that way what would the effect be okay so to do that i just need to switch screens here real quick so i'm going to call it 100 305 okay and i'm going to go to this and i'm going to add this in here yeah while ed's doing that calculation anne-marie the other thing to keep in mind is we have rolled in that surplus in years past because we've been tentative about that tax rate right and i think that i think that right now that tax rate even without rolling it in looks good

078i don't know what's in the reserve account right now but i know you know the building is still fairly new but it's going to continue to need neat things i i just think it's worth the board having a good discussion about this yeah and then making that final decision yeah well that's why i wanted to um to know the figures just so we had some idea of uh you know what it would do before we made that decision good okay so there it is it would low it would uh take the seven cents and make it ten cents okay so that would be five okay all right um did anyone have any other question any questions for ed other than myself okay i guess uh my other questions were more uh aimed toward uh brian

079um as far as the uh some of the increases that we see in the budget and then um i also was wondering about if we had anything in here for a regular ed uh summer a summer a building based summer program for next year um for building base summer program i do not have anything in there okay and then the changes in the budget we're adding the [Music] world language teacher and then putting the paras back in there as far as those are the major changes in the budget okay and the pair is they they had like la they were in last time's budget you would take them out because we couldn't fill them and then we decided with the bac's recommendation to go ahead and put them back in there and also with the

080staff's recommendation to put them back in there and so it was in there but then it wasn't so i mean it's we would have had an increase um i don't know if this would be for brian or for ed i just noticed um for our uh this was this was on sort of the not the summary sheet that ed just went over with us but the next page um where it's the sort function sort general fund and um it starts off at the top with elementary and um this so for fy23 we have 880 000 um for elementary but for fy22 we had 962. i just was wondering where we were losing that hundred thousand dollars there what was the savings well there was a teacher at the uh elementary level that left and we

081also used uh monies or one of the positions that helped with that was a esser position that will be funded next year i think that's correct right brian yeah that's correct and then we also moved um one of the teachers that was actually a curriculum person into the regular spot cause she wasn't a regular general ed teacher okay does anyone else have any questions um could i make a comment ian marie yes sure yeah i mean i think the summer program is a good question because that became a little bit controversial last year i mean we do still have us esser monies to support sort of the recovery and academic end of this but i know that the summer program at wethersfield when patty parmelow was running it i mean it it you know it

082was very much activity-based and uh and one of the things i think we've we've talked about with a couple of the other principles and and brian is that maybe you know maybe some of the uh some of the actual recovery and academic work that focuses around those really needy kids because this was supposed to be our recovery year guess what we're gonna we're gonna need a recovery year after this year but if you recall we wanted to have activities for those kids in the afternoon and those certainly could be school-based so i mean i think if you wanted to take i think in the past you budgeted anywhere from 10 to 20 000 for a summer program i think if you wanted to do something like that and you had a couple of teachers or

083people who are willing to do that kind of work i think that would be great uh kristen yeah i would like to see just my thought would be to put the surplus into but you know back in and um create our own summer program like just because we heard from so many community members last year mark uh i was going the same place as christian i think a portion of that should really be earmarked for that building-based summer program that's important to our taxpayers yep i agree um logistically brian um how are you feeling about setting up a summer like i if i never took part in it my kids were older when we moved here um so i don't know if if anybody wants to describe it for brian or if he knows what

084we're talking about if somebody could describe it that'd be great because i've had different summer programs in different areas more enrichment type programs that we've done but let me know what we've done here and we can build upon that and bj do you want to fill them in a little bit i knew i should have clicked off no i'm just kidding so it starts with uh it was a theme based each week with a different theme that somebody led and we did focus on academics but also having fun making it fun we use track my progress sometimes to monitor beginning middle and end of the the program so there was some assessments there and um the kids just came and had fun and we found out uh it worked better i think during the middle

085of the week and just for the month of july with attendance yeah starting after fourth of july yeah and was it a half day program or was it a full day half day half day yeah yeah so it's not it's not super um i don't think it's would be too hard to find some people to staff it but uh jackie people enjoy it yeah um and correct me if i'm wrong bj was didn't that get to come uh with some of the funding through special ed and so the cost for that program was only between what eleven and fifteen thousand dollars i i think um special ed was involved but i'm not sure about the funding with them really to be exact jackie sorry that's all right oh sorry i think it's something that um

086you know maybe we should budget a little extra because i don't know that with the um i'm just thinking that with the su having this the special ed thing that maybe we wouldn't get those same kids so maybe it wouldn't have the special ed budget money bro uh david do you know yeah that that that's what i was trying to say i mean i think you know whether it's academic and enrichment or a combination of the two it's a if it's a half-day program uh you know whether it runs in the morning or afternoon we can work that out but then it would still give an opportunity for those parents who did want to participate in something more regionally that was maybe more special ed based or interventionist based i mean we could we could

087still do that but i i agree with you anne marie i think you ought to put a little more than you have in the past in there uh just to make sure you can compensate those wages and run a good program for as bj said four weeks or so so i i i i think we can make it work either way you just got to get the money in in the budget and then maybe we could tie it in with our new maker space as well yeah and make it more of a steam-based summer program that would be great and then we're utilizing something new and showing the community already what we're doing with this new phenomenal space that we're going to have i like how you think the wheels were turning as soon as

088you were describing when bj was describing what it was i was like okay let's go steam on this and let's see how we can do it yeah and also some of the parents did mention that they would be willing to pay too so um you know we could definitely offer you know i mean you know if we needed some extra money or something we could um have it be a pay thing but then also offer scholarships for those that can't afford it or or just make a very small amount of money um but that was one thing that some of the parents had volunteered that really wanted this program for the summer time they had offered to even pay for it uh angie i just i just wanted to say that to to remind you

089that um summer academy is for all students um based on criteria for students i mean particularly students who are struggling academically and it's it wasn't a special education program it was a general education program there were special education students in it by nature by virtue of the way we just we qualified students for the program it would make sense that those students would be some students on ieps i would suggest that we talk invite that perhaps you invite katia hearn to your next meeting so that she could speak more thoroughly about the differences between the program that you're proposing and the and what our summer academy will be offering and we're just starting to think about it and it will probably look very similar to what it looked like last year but um i i

090uh i think it's it's a it's an opportunity the program at weatherfield could serve a different population and different need so it would only it only benefits students that we offer um these things yeah uh ed yeah my only thing was and i think i put it up on what i was presenting i just want to make it clear that if you you have a 341 000 balance in your capital reserve uh if you wanted to have maker space you could put some of this 300 100 305 in there so that you could do the project for the maker space and still keep us balanced i think it's important that you have a balance of that magnitude and a building of your size i think it's it's a good idea to have at least i

091in my world i'd love to see it have a half a million dollars in case something big happen okay but what you have in there is adequate uh the building's fairly new we have had some issues with the wood burner nothing major but we had to make some repairs and with brian becoming the new principal and him advocating for a maker space i do know that they can get expensive and if you put some more money in there that you'd have that money to add and augment what he wants to do so the capital reserve can be used to buy things for the makerspace yeah okay i wasn't so i thought it was just for like building and building maintenance okay that's good um okay does anyone else have any other comments um i'm thinking

092that um if we took 15 000 and put that sort of tentatively for a summer program or do you think it would need to be more than that how many students are we hoping to serve i think typically well bj will know better but i believe it was around between 20 and 30. it's not a huge amount of students yeah if you make it really exciting we might get more but yeah i mean i think since you've got that carryover it might not hurt to go a little higher maybe 20 000 if you don't spend it you don't spend it but at least you've you've got it and especially with it as ed said it's going to cost a little to set up some of the the makerspace equipment resources the space itself so yeah

093so what we would do is we would add we would if i understand we are proposing anne-marie we take let's just for round numbers say 20 000 of that surplus put that toward you know summer programming or whatever and then you can take the balance of that surplus and maybe put it into the capital reserve um i think we need to talk about that then um i mean okay um so how are people feeling about the other 80 000 um kristen i would like to see it go back to the taxpayers personally okay i mean i don't know that it's i understand having something in case but i don't know that that's our oh yeah um ed good yeah i just wanna as i did for all the other places anytime you use surplus as

094a local revenue you have you're you're making it sound as if uh or you're you're setting up a scenario where if you don't have it the next year it could increase your tax rate uh-huh jackie i like people better i just want to note like for the makerspace we actually chances are pretty good that hicks nichols would be able to give a considerable amount toward it so we don't necessarily need to focus on putting the money into there what are your thoughts jackie regarding the 80 000 to go back to the taxpayers or to go into the capital reserve or some split of it seems like each time we have it we split it so our splitting's getting a little bit a little bit smaller each time but um my general feeling on that is

095it is a surplus it is taxpayer money it should go back to the taxpayers and we have to worry about what we have to worry about the following year um there will be a scenario c so we might see some sort of in between on the on the um the property yields so so wait you're shooting around okay um mark and jamie i haven't heard what you guys think with the 80 000 the other 80 000 i think i'm gonna have to echo jackie on this uh my thinking is pretty much the same okay and jamie what are your feelings i think i agree with everyone else that it should go back to the taxpayers okay i mean i'm torn a bit i mean i see what ed's saying as far as that you know

096we do want to save for the future as well um but we do have quite a bit in there we have 341 000 um so uh i don't know i'm sort of i'm i'm a little bit inclined to maybe you know put another 20 to the capital reserve and then give the rest back to the taxpayers but if i'm overruled on that i'm i'm fine with that as well so if everybody else is feeling like it should all go back to the taxpayers except for the the 20 for the summer program um that's fine with me so uh yeah so what if i'm understanding you correctly ann marie what would happen uh and tell me if i'm wrong here but what would happen is we would budget the 20 000 for the summer program we

097put that back in the general fund budget and really what you'd be doing is you'd be moving the whole if this is what you want to do you'd be moving that whole uh surplus in as a revenue right because you can't spend you can't earmark that money to a certain line item you have to ed has to ed has to book that as a revenue on the revenue side so you'd have to book that whole surplus if that's what you want to do is give it all back to the taxpayers then you would budget that 20 000 right it would be it would be an offset but ed would budget at 20 000 for the summer program if that's what you want to do okay um does the 20 000 summer program does that affect

098our uh education spending per equalized people it it would but not very significantly okay because it will and i can tell you that right now it would go from uh let me see so now it's 2998.74 and this this scenario right here i've added in so this number this 6964 if you look over here down here this is what we started with tonight right we added in a summer program so that's there's the 6964 not 373 okay so when i go to that i have to stick that in there's the number that we the new number there's that surplus right and over here it creates a tax rate of 1.8469 right and it creates this okay and if i go over to this right here so when i when i'm looking at this the reason

099why this is lower now the new one is because you added 100 grand so yeah so it did change it it changed it lowered it okay so you did the two things simultaneously you added the revenue right surplus and you and you put the cost of the summer program in so what does that do for the tax rate ed it it takes it down adding twenty thousand dollars in because the scenario i gave you before it just had the additional twenty had the additional surplus local revenue right and that that lowered it to one point eight four six one or two adding the twenty thousand dollars raised it to one point eight four six nine okay and that's about a ten cent uh and remember that's only an estimate that's about a 10 cent decrease

100in taxes okay i mean i i feel really good about taking this to the voters uh five percent decrease in taxes sounds good to me um i am i do worry like ed said about the um the fact that we are still about a thousand dollars over the excess spending threshold which um doesn't affect us this year dollars and 21 cents over oh okay that's not well i'm sorry you're right i'm wrong so this would be equal to this minus 1997. yeah you're right a thousand dollars yeah and luckily there's a a waiver on that um so that is something that future for our future budgeting we're going to have to how much longer are they waiving that ed is it this year and next year or just this year this is the last year

101unless they change something you're going to see that formula probably change a little bit next year this was the last year for the waiver so angry what you'd need tonight is you would need a motion uh first to take the fy21 surplus of one hundred thousand three hundred and five and use that as revenue in the fy23 proposed budget so somebody would need that david i i don't think you need a motion for that uh you don't think so i okay i think the only thing you need a motion for is to put it to a capital reserve i think that if you use it if you use it as a local revenue you don't you don't have to do anything no that's fine i just didn't know if we wanted to be on record

102with that decision since they talked about it but i agree i mean it could just be as long as the consensus we can do it i believe we have consensus if we don't speak now mark i just want to make sure that there's some way that we can record the changes the line item changes that we've made as such that way we have some kind of visceral representation on what exactly it is that we're voting on because i think i agree with you i think we all have consensus i just want to be able to say okay this screen that we're looking at now that ed is presenting is what we're voting on i believe he has made all the updates to it david i just want to be clear what what i don't know

103maybe i overstepped here when you were saying you make a motion you're not saying you have to make a motion and put it in the town report right now i'm just saying it might be nice for the board to be on record that that's what they wanted to do with the surplus right okay well that's that that's a different and i apologize i thought you were talking about the end no no nobody has to vote on that the voters don't vote on that i mean that's possibility but i agree with you that i think it would be a good idea to make that motion then okay so mark just to answer your question uh ed has made all those changes so your expenditure budget now is just what's in front of you six million nine

104hundred and sixty four thousand three seventy three so once you decide you know and again i would suggest a motion you don't have to uh i would move a surplus first from fy21 to fy23 and then the second motion would be to adopt an expenditure budget of 6 million nine hundred and sixty four thousand three hundred and seventy three dollars uh for the fy twenty three uh budget so it's two separate you decide to go that way is there any other discussion on the budget are there any other line items or anything that anybody's concerned about i know there was some talk about the uh the perez um originally brian had uh said that we well since we can't fill it uh and that they've been getting along without him um but uh you know

105i do think that uh you know to help support with the social emotional and everything it is good to have an extra teacher in the room to help when some one of the students is having a problem uh so i i think it's a good thing to have if we can fill the positions does anyone else have any thoughts on that [Music] and then i know the other thing was the foreign language teacher which i believe were all in agreement that we did want to uh we did want to reinstate that position it was when we had to we sadly cut last year and uh it's good that we have the money this year to put it back in okay so everyone is happy with the budget as it stands then i guess i'll take

106a motion to um the first thing was to move the surplus from fy22 to fy23 so moved i have a second i'll second okay christine out kristen seconds and i'll do a roll call uh jackie hi mark hi kristen i jamie hi ann i okay so that so becky will be um it's one hundred thousand three hundred and five dollars surplus from fy22 being moved to fy23 and then i need a motion to appreciate that's an fy21 surplus oh sorry sorry you're slightly using you're using it in the fy 23 budget as a local revenue oh okay all right so fy21 surplus being used in fy23 correct becky do you have that motion you okay i have it okay do you want me to read it back to you or if you want to just

107for austerity um mark young youngly made a motion to move the fy 21 surplus and the amount of 100 000 what whatever it is 100 305 to the fy 23 budget and uh christian secondary perfect okay all right so then i need a motion to approve the budget as it stands for six million nine hundred sixty four thousand three hundred and seventy three dollars for fy23 so moved mark made that do i have a second and i will second again kristen is seconding okay and i will do a roll call jackie hi mark hi kristen hi jamie hi and i'm also an i do we have a budget yay and i'm really hopeful that uh the town is gonna like this one okay so um i guess that's all did we vote the expenditure budget

108we did do that yep okay great that's the 6.9 million that's the one yeah we just did okay um we one thing i was thinking about i know in the past we've um we've done mailers uh i don't know how people are feeling i don't i don't think we need to sell this one um so we can maybe save that money but then is it weird that we only send it out when it's a bad budget or not a bad budget but uh you know one that's raising taxes uh i don't know what how that looks to people oh ed you have your hand up yeah i just wanted to know should i just i'm gonna shut down the presentation is that okay yeah that's fine thank you okay thank you does anyone have any

109opinions about um you know because i mean the mailer also did have other things like it kind of talked up you know the cool stuff that we're doing and things like that so it does have other purposes um but it is costly uh i forget exactly how much it cost last year but um mark is there anybody that would be comfortable possibly doing a short video read up of the current budget that we're looking approval for and then just basically posting it as a small video because i've gotten some input um from community members um that exceeded my own level of confusion about how education funding occurs um i had people insisting that we need to stop raising the budget all the time at the same time as we increase services um and all kinds

110of all kinds of crazy things insisting that we should have the same yield as norwich uh on our property taxes and um i i just feel like if if there's a the kind of thing where somebody could just go through this budget um in a short little video presentation we could probably put it out there on social media or on the website just to let people access it and not to volunteer somebody else for more work but i don't think i'm the one to do that with my knowledge base of the budgeting process now i mean i'm definitely not the one either because like i was totally surprised by um the fact that we have a bigger budget than last year yet less taxes i don't i don't get it um and i know it

111has like yeah so if somebody does yeah welcome to vermont right yeah i mean i think that's what happens right because all these other factors play into it your equalized pupil your you know your cla you know i mean i just think it all makes a makes a difference um i think it's a great idea mark i think it should be uh probably one of the board members and brian i mean i'd certainly help i i would help do that but i think it needs to come from you know the board really yeah i'm definitely in so we can figure it out yeah because you've already got some slides you know that we could simplify those slides around what are the goals around the budget and then just you know with the sheets that ed

112has given us i mean we just could easily and we could get i'm sure either mike or or ryan to help us set up for it i mean if you don't you know maybe brian you know you and i could take a point on that and see if we can get it done in the end we'd i know for you you work but i mean i think it would be good if if you're talking from slides you'd have it all it's pretty much like you do a town meeting right yeah yeah yeah i could do that you guys make the words for me well keep it short and you know some people are making good money on youtube so if this really you know if we add a couple of songs we you know kind

113of you don't want me singing though budget season the musical there's gonna be a smash david i i think you need to tell people here that you do play the guitar and you do have a song yeah thank you jack yeah i appreciate that um yeah so you and i brian we can talk about it and then we'll fold anne-marie and i think it's a good idea mark it's just you know we got to just make sure we got the bandwidth to get it done that's all i just before we move on past the budget i just wanted to say thank you to the board and to the bac and then to and um and to gene murray too for helping out with it so i got through my first budget so i'm excited so

114i just want to tell everybody thank you and and too as well of course yes yes thank you to all those people um this year's budget went what is pretty well i think we did a good job this year um so does anyone else have any thoughts about a flyer um do you feel like we should send one or we shouldn't i think that um i think that we now do a very good job on a monthly basis um and weekly basis ryan really puts out a lot um in both the newsletters and at the meetings and well i see your point with you know only sending one out when we when we need the vote being the yes votes it's going to be a difficult time at the at the same time you know

115it's one less one less expenditure that it's helped save for next year right yep um and i did have another thought on that and i just i just lost it the only thing that that would be cool is that is you know you do say how it highlights good things that are happening at the school and and um in maker space is something that's pretty cool so maybe we don't do that flyer right now but maybe it's something for the future or um maybe we just do more of a social gathering to when that becomes when it comes to fruition and it can be more of an open house type situation or even a virtual open house but um i don't think it's necessary for us to do a newsletter a flyer this year okay

116um brian do you want to talk to um brandon about uh i know we do need to get out there the web address for the online portion of our meeting and i believe uh they had approached us last year about um and they did uh send something out to everybody uh with both the town and the school uh google or whatever meat addresses yep we can get that set up okay okay uh no other thoughts on that um i think we did all we made all the action we needed to do today we did a good job on our items for action um so we need to set the next agenda um though we need to work on i guess our town meeting presentation j uh jackie sorry and i did forget to ask so

117is there going to be a letter in the town in the town report as it usually is have you done that yeah um i have i have it about half written i wanted to wait for tonight's meeting to finish it up because um you know i knew there'd be i was hoping that there'd be some exciting developments tonight and that i wanted to include um and luckily i will have some good things to put into that so i will finish that up tonight uh get that out to you guys first thing tomorrow morning is that good and then if you guys can get back to me asap i can get it to bj hopefully by the end of the day tomorrow or um or maybe by first thing uh thursday i know they need it

118they need it by the end of the week so i will finish it up tonight get it out to you guys and then if you can just get read it over really quickly tomorrow and get any comments back to me that'd be great yeah that's great if you all have any thoughts of something that you really want included in there um go ahead and send it to me but i was mainly just gonna talk about the uh the fact that we're uh you know uh jean-marie left and you know we hired brian and you know it's been a successful transition um and then also uh for the budget i wanna wanna put in there that we're putting back in a foreign language because i know that was important to people and the uh summer program

119and uh i don't know if i i probably don't want to put any actual numbers in there so i won't say anything about you know five percent but uh yeah um will you share that as a google doc so we can just add our comments on there um i i'll get one of my kids to help me do that you're gonna get you're gonna get hooked okay um anybody have anything else um okay so for the next agenda um we need to get ready for town meeting um what's the date uh um anne-marie our next meeting it's the second tuesday let's see look at my calendar so that would be february 8th okay got it i'll send that invite out now it's 6 p.m 6 p.m has been our going time yep um so uh

120i don't jackie i know last year you volunteered to um work on the powerpoint for town meeting is that something you're willing to do again sure okay um so i guess if brian if you can if you guys want to get together and work because he you know he had some stuff today that he showed us maybe you can work that into a presentation like we sort of did last year i think we kind of combined stuff yep well um maybe bj if you'd be kind enough to give me the final version of what last year's was we can go from there just because i want to make sure i have the the actual yeah we did yep that'd be good um yeah and then if you can just you know just have something rough

121i guess for next meeting and then we can kind of talk about it see if there's stuff we want to add or take out or whatever um because that'll be our only meeting before town meeting so wow unless we add another one in for some reason um and then i'd also like to um just uh go over our radar list um next meeting just to sort of see how we're doing on different things uh i know brian sort of goes over that with his principles report he kind of checks off a lot of those things but it'll be good to see how we're doing on the radar list [Music] um anyone have i guess do you think we need athletics i guess we left it off this time but i mean i usually make it

122part of my report but i think it wouldn't hurt to put it on just give me a very quick update okay and of course brian and i will cover the covert updates so i wouldn't worry too much about that uh-huh i'll be glad when we don't have to do those anymore read our report and town meeting prep so you might just want to read them one more time so becky makes sure i have um town meeting preparations um a look at our radar list and athletics i think that's good because we'll spend some time on the town meeting yeah yeah i thought so so okay do you remember anne marie or anybody on the board do you remember whether or not when brandon did the the link last year i think we did use the

123same link because it was all virtual was it a zoom link or a google meet link or was it one of those crazy microsoft links do you remember i kind of think that they were two separate links yeah which might be good because we're so used to using google meet and we've got all the compatibility with google meet so yeah i think it was something with that that they had they were they're they use zoom i think now they've switched a few times but i think right now they're using zoom okay okay we'll just need to make sure that our warning has our our link at the top that's the key yeah and we should have that warning done too board members who haven't done this before i think most of you have but lori

124will let you know at the central office when that uh when that warning is complete usually i think she sends it to bj so the board members can come in and sign that that warning it needs to it needs something last year yeah we either we went in or bj came and found us and tracked us down it might cost you dinner this time no i'm just kidding she knows where we live so brian just so you know the board there's a warning basically calling all voters you know to meet and blah blah blah and then the different articles are there the basic article this year will be the budget article and then the board because they're the ones that voted on that budget they signed that warning and then that goes in that school

125annual school report we went way too easy on brian this year with budget though we've gotta we've gotta we've gotta change that next year i i yeah i didn't wanna jinx it by saying wow this is the easiest budget that i've been involved in i don't know what it is but brian i don't know he he carries that luck of the irish with him i don't know what it is he's got it well done i i do worry about when nesser funds run out what budget's gonna look like i know it but we're gonna be able to tell everybody that because brian is so frugal the taxes are going down dramatically yeah just fall madly in love with their new principles um okay so uh do we have any need for an executive session and

126we can work on beating up uh mark and kristen and executives no no we don't i see ed has a question though oh ed yeah becky i just want to check the number that you have for uh the motion thanks and can somebody actually send me a like copy just i'd like to make sure i'm actually typing these i have six million nine hundred and sixty four thousand three hundred and seventy three dollars yeah that's right okay but yeah so i i don't know that hard copy when i'm typing yeah it could send you just that that that that one okay thank you all right if you want to send it to me i can send it to ed either way okay uh jackie you have your hand up yeah um ann marie i was

127just going to mention maybe in your in your letter you want to just put a little plug in there that will have a couple of board positions open i know that it's stated someplace else where our terms are but maybe you just want to put a plug in yeah and along those same lines i mean we've we've done well recruiting good board members i know that's how we got jamie i think that's part of how kristin came on board i mean i think that any board member that you know knows somebody friends with somebody i mean it it's it's it's just nice to have people that share a similar vision and this board has been very kid-centered and community centered so i mean it's just it would it would be it would be nice if

128we can't beat both of those board members up to reconsider then let's just do our best job recruiting because this has been a great board uh to work with could we meet real quick for like five minutes for executive session i said sure yeah okay do we need a motion to do that yeah we need him mark made the most of this sure i did okay do i have a second i'll be different in second it okay all right all in favor say aye aye okay um we're gonna go into executive session at 7 59.