SU Board Meeting - November 22nd, 2021

001have as normal a season as we can but uh needless to say it's a little bit of a of a challenge um we've had a couple of chances to use the test to stay kits already keeping kids in school it's working uh we haven't thankfully we haven't had a lot of opportunities to do it and we would prefer not to have those opportunities but that's where we can use the antigen test uh on days one three five and seven if we've had exposure in a particular classroom and we have some unvaccinated kids so um that's good news we've had successful vaccine successful clinics for the kids heartland kicked it off with vaccinating over 80 80 80 children uh in windsor we had over 200 uh vaccinated and again it says children but i'm not sure

002they had a public clinic in the afternoon but there were certainly over 200 vaccinations and overall i know at least 110 uh pick pediatric vaccinations so uh that that was a successful and weatherfield had over 40 children vaccinated today this was this morning and uh and it went very smoothly i really just want to i want to thank uh i want to thank um the principals the nurses the volunteer support staff who [Music] you know provided the kids who had to wait for the vaccinations something to do brought them you know either reading books to them or bringing books down to them or you know just sitting with them while they were being vaccinated but it seemed to be successful my feeling is you know that's uh you know well over two to three hundred

003kids that were vaccinated now that weren't vaccinated the second doses will be coming up uh in december i'll send those dates out um after the holiday uh yeah within the next week or two uh yeah great job the nurses and administrators anti-racism equity task force still continues um the uh [Music] and i can't see the screen but if anybody has a question we can i have a question david i i've got a question uh it actually if you could back up to the discussion over the covid update um so when we when we uh when we passed the the vaccination mandate we agreed that we would do um regular and pretty frequent testing on people who claimed exemptions correct then the um the testing through the schools stopped so how have those uh people who

004have claimed exemptions continued to be tested and with what frequency yeah so uh they are they were doing surveillance testing if i recall exactly well we were we were going to offer obviously when they were if we if we had offered surveillance testing then um they would have been part of that but but because we are not offering surveillance testing just given the the the amount of uh of workload for these other programs so they're getting tested on their own they submit and it's weekly and they submit those weekly results these are the exempted people there are i think now 11 of them there were 12 i think we lost one so there are 11. 11 exempted employees who are getting tested weekly and submitting those results to our hr department um and everybody else

005in our uh supervisory union i think we have 300 employees give or take so 200 of them give or take our uh our i'm sorry 290 of them are vaccinated so it's weekly and it's hot and they're on their own it's and it's just part of the deal do they do they um are they pcr tests do they do they submit a record of the test yes they submit their pcr they submit their pcr results most of them are going amount of scrutiny because that's the closest they're most available and they have to go on their own time and they've been good about that and they've also been good about submitting those results okay thank you so the anti-racism work we've got a sort of a two-prong approach we continue to work with uh level

006brown and a cohort of people that have decided that have signed up for his uh his webinars and workshops um uh and also we continue our work with melissa crum and the anti-racism task force uh uh worked on uh building some action steps from the 10 areas that she pulled out of our work over the summer and we're going to meet with her again uh right after the holiday right after thanksgiving uh to go over those action steps and and also maybe ask to seek a little advice from her on on the dei position and then as rebecca pointed out we we're doing the marigannon uh follow-up uh and so here's where we are with that um mary is putting together a draft m-o-a regarding the work with our school boards and this is the

007scope of work that i thought we talked about and if we want i can certainly get back to her she did not have time to put it together before the first of all we had a hard time playing a little bit of telephone tag but early last week i finally got through to her but she did not have time to put up an mla together and maybe it's good because if we want to add something to that scope we certainly can but we were going to ask her to facilitate a discussion around the dei job description and outline the essential purpose and job responsibilities for this position i think among the administrative team and some of the board members that i've talked to privately there's a little bit of a discrepancy around what this job

008should entail and what the breadth of this work should be and do and also the timing of the implementation of that job and i think mary could help facilitate our way through that and the other thing that she was going to do is develop and implement a set of board professional development activities uh that could be um done either at board meetings or alternate times to sort of help the rest of the board unpack this whole notion of of racial inequity and and uh and how we definitions terms uh and how we want to how we want to move forward but i think at this time if there's anything else or if people want to comment on this because uh i want to be able to get back to mary because she's working on that

009scope of work right now elisabeth thanks amy do you think we could have mary facilitated a worldwide discussion of our policy and procedures i think that was part of what we're going to be doing with her okay i could that could come under that bullet too but i could be more specific uh with her i think the the problem is that there are certain board members essentially our board chairs and and one or two others who are very intimately involved in that work we did with melissa crum over the summer when we unpacked that policy not so much the procedures but the policy but that wasn't all the board members and i think what elizabeth is saying is do we want to open that up that kind of discussion up to the entire board not

010just those who worked with uh with melissa right my i would think that we would want to have the professional development activities done first and so that we're all speaking the same language on something of the same page and then partly so that we can discuss the policies and policy and procedures right my understanding is that it will all kind of kind of be together that that will be part of the professional development activities oh no it's not going to come up it should be i mean i i agree i mean i think that's going to be i would be surprised if that's not where she starts to some degree but i will make when i talk with her again elizabeth i'll make sure she knows that that's that that could be a part of

011the priorities any other comments on making the work with mary and then you know what she's going to do too is i don't know whether she charges by the hour i sort of suggested she give her a should give us a per hour rate but you know we will have to look at the cost and and make some decisions but we do have a i know i say this a lot but we do have some money in positions that we budgeted for including the dei coordinator uh in sr1 and two that we haven't spent any of that money yet so so i think we're going to be able to uh you know handle her rate when she gives it to us okay colleen spence hi i i think i have kind of a dumb question

012but i i don't remember when we decided about mary using mary versus melissa or even if that's what you're doing but are we doing that and if so why [Music] well mary did come to the last su board meeting and sort of talked about the kinds of things that she does which are very similar to what you know what melissa does and what uh you know she's just she's just more local but i i thought i thought that what would happen is once we had an moa on the table from her and possibly another moa from uh from uh melissa you know then this board could decide how they wanted to go forward um i guess i just wanted that a clarification on if we were making a decision about one or the other or

013yeah well i saw i i see that you know i kind of see three tiers of work here right you've got the work at the board level and then you've got the work at sort of the administrative team level and the implementation level then you've got the staff working community work right and and um and and that's a lot of work for any one person to be navigating through and and when elizabeth brought mary gannon's name to the board as somebody that you know she had met through the equity caucus a lot of the work she's done is with boards around the state uh including some close to us and so i thought she might be one to consider to do the work with the school boards and then melissa would continue to go uh

014i thought if we could if we could do both melissa crum would continue to work with the with the task force what i call the internal task force and then we can decide with you know whether that work into sex or i i don't think it's either or i think i don't have anything against mary i just didn't understand the shift and um and i know that i know that um elizabeth introduced her and yeah i'm not opposed in any way i just wanted to get some clarification around what we were doing yeah i know the people who worked with melissa crumb uh felt you know that she was incredibly good at what she did and she also produced a really good work product that helped that's helped us get to the action planning stage

015of this and i don't think she'd be opposed to working with our boards but i think at some point we have to look at those moas and decide my understanding is that board members felt like even though a few board members had unpacked all this work that not all the board members had unpacked all this work and as we begin to move forward with the work i think we need to know what our policy really says and what those definitions are and and what's the scope of the work we want to do in the district over the next two or three years and and and i think that outside facilitation of some sort and i know colleen you're not saying anything about mary it's really just a matter of you know who we want who

016we want to work with we we would have to do procurement anyhow so i would have to get a proposal from melissa as well end and then and then move move forward thank you thank you somebody else raised their hand amy elizabeth elizabeth did um the other thing that i thought we were going to talk with her about was uh helping because it's not necessarily something that we should ask melissa to do but i thought we were going to ask her to help us develop a time frame for implementation for mary yeah yeah i just wrote that down uh because i think that would be important to to certainly have a time frame any thoughts or comments on that from anybody else that's what i remember too is in regards to uh dr crum was

017several months ago um that she was um named in this setting as perhaps it was her recommendation that she she really had the finger on how to how to time this work the best and and to engage the community the correct way and at the correct time so that's what i remember yeah well that that's the difference to some degree between melissa and and mary right mary gann has worked locally uh understands vermont uh and uh so i think she could be really good at at doing some of that work now i've never worked with mary quite frankly so i don't know i've i've had a couple of occasions to be at meetings with her but i do know that the folks at hartford speak highly of her she did some work with them um

018but yeah i think she'd be good at maybe helping us get through the timeline we only have one more meeting with melissa under our old contract you remember you approved that back in the back in the spring we started that work with with melissa we have one more meeting to review the action steps that we came up with and then we were going to ask her i think going forward what she thought might be good next steps for us and i think that would then we'd either use her for some of that work or none of that work or maybe bring those those ideas to mary and then just see how we would go forward from here i mean this the scope of this work is so big and potentially you know as we've said

019to each other many times you do this work wrong and it's not good it it doesn't turn out well at all and so we just want to and i think it's been great the way we've proceeded you know carefully and methodically and trying to understand the work ourselves before we start you know doing a lot of release to the public and so i i think we're on the right track but i think it is really to go slow to go fast because it's it's from what we've seen around the state and around new england and around the country it's not it's it's not good when you don't do it well and i think that's why you also need consultants because you need to have people that really have done this work before i never have

020and neither has really i don't want to judge anybody but i don't think nobody on the administrative team has done it and i don't think there are any board members that have done this kind of work so we need we need that help any other comments before we move on okay let me just talk briefly about the middle level task force all middle level teachers and when i say middle of at least for now we've got grades five through eight are on a task force uh they've been meeting every couple of weeks i've been facilitating uh but actually just recently the last two meetings we have a staff member who actually two staff members but one who's in particular who's taken some of the lead and i work with those leaders in terms of moving

021this task force forward better understanding the middle level research better getting a grip on what's what what really are the current trends in middle level curriculum instruction middle level adolescent development middle level assessment procedures and of course most of what you read in that middle level research is very consistent with our strategic plan it talks a lot about project-based learning collaboration student voice student choice so we've been unpacking a lot of that as a team but as we go forward we'd like some continuity across the su so that the quality of a student's middle level education doesn't depend on where they live but they're all getting a similar if not the same opportunity so to that end we're just unpacking that research at the middle level and we're also trying to you know survey staff

022who have been working with these middle level students and in very different configurations one year to the next what they think are the best configurations um so so the configurations aren't based on budget or staffing like right now one of our schools middle level some years is seven and eight of the years it's six seven and eight other years it's five six seven and eight and they call it the middle level program and it changes year to year based on staffing patterns and uh and student count and student numbers budget and we're thinking that the research really covers a certain period of time and it would be nice to build some continuity so middle level teams could you know build a collaborative climate at the middle level and it wouldn't be well this year this

023person is part of the team next year they're not part of the team and then the year after they're back being part of the team so we're really working through that uh i hope to right after the holiday by the holiday i mean the the december holiday by january to have a recommendation certainly uh to bring to the administrative team around the best of configuration one of the reasons why i think and elizabeth you certainly can clarify this one of the reasons why i think elizabeth wanted this on this agenda is because if in fact we come up with a configuration other than seven and eight you know two of our schools or three of our schools have grade levels k through eight right within the building albert bridge does not so if we decided

024at some point that we wanted our middle level opportunity to be grade six seven and eight or and i think that's the way the staff is leaning quite frankly or if we wanted it to be five through eight it could ultimately at some point mean moving a grade level from albert bridge to uh to windsor uh and so but that's not really what this task force is they're not talking about that right now if we get to that point that's going to be work that has to be done i think with the amount of sputnik school board uh not this task force necessarily this task force is really just focusing on on the middle level research any questions on what's going on right now with middle level and we felt commissioned through the strategic plan

025and through the school boards at the different districts you know to really engage in this middle level conversation and to really uh to really look at good solid middle level programming now i will tell you covert has put and we're going to talk about this in a second too kovitz put a challenge on these kinds of initiatives because the staff is feeling quite stressed quite beleaguered and they've been very good about meeting as a middle level team maybe because their superintendent's facilitating it but but again they've asked us to go slow to go fast and quite frankly i don't i don't blame them you know we'll talk about that in a minute any questions on middle level and where we are with that it's about a 24 25 member group david we have elizabeth and

026then rebecca okay thank you um uh i'm sorry i i was probably writing something else down when you said it but who will be surveyed well right now we've already done a survey with all teachers who are working with with students in that middle level uh age range so that survey is already done um um and again we haven't analyzed the results the reason i'm saying 6 eight seems to be because 75 percent of the middle level staff felt that six eight was the best configuration 25 percent felt 5 8 might be the best configuration um so we have to talk through that work through that put that survey up against the research base um and uh and so that's who's who so far has been been surveyed are you planning to get any input

027from the communities at any point before the decision is made well i think i think that they're there this is like a two this is like a two-tiered issue right one i think is more technical around the educational research associated with middle school and best middle school programs and how to organize those and then the second one which might i think need more community dialogue in one of our districts maybe in all of our districts but certainly in one of our districts would would be the uh what would be that configuration uh at mount scotty because right now whether it's five eight or six eight it's not going to affect heartland it's not going to affect windsor it's not going to affect uh weathersfield because they have all of those configurations within their building it

028does affect albert bridge and i think if if we decide from a technical standpoint and a research design standpoint that that's the best way to go then i think we have to go out to that community and and and get some feedback around around that so i i have another question and that is why is it only five eight or six eight and not including seven eight uh well that's a good question and seven eight um when we looked at the research you know the research seemed to indicate that you were gonna you had you were looking at students between on the young side 10 and a half years old to 14 and so when you restrict it to just seven and eight you're really just dealing with you know 12 and 13 year olds

029essentially well late late 11th and 12th you're not including you're not you're not including enough of the kids that are contained within that developmental uh period of time in their life you know and seven and eight also in the research tends to be a fairly older junior high school model um and and uh it doesn't include some of those kids who are really starting to think and reason abstractly who are really starting to develop emotionally and physically you're leaving a group of kids out if you just post seven eight that can actually handle and should be able to handle a middle level experience so that that that's that's what we've been talking about i guess what i'm wondering is why i if you're going to set up site age group research you should provide it

030yeah so i i guess what i was wondering is why you didn't why you didn't survey on grades adding in uh seven and eight you it seems like you've only given two choices when there are really three [Music] elizabeth this is we already have three schools that have seventh and eighth that that's already happening so what we're looking at is creating more of a middle school that it usually includes sixth graders when you thought i guess i didn't understand that i thought that uh i didn't realize that uh weathersfield and heartland already have a middle school as seventh and eighth well they have a junior high yeah they actually they've had both weathersfield has had a you know what they call a seven eight middle school more of a junior high than than they've had

031matter of fact this year they have a six seven and eight and they go back and forth and fluctuate heartland the same thing they've had six seven eight and then they've had seven and eight and getting that feedback back from from teachers you know again based on some of that current research it seemed like you what you want to try to build some consistency into the organizational pattern most of the middle schools in vermont are either five eight or six eight you won't find many of the seven eight and the middle level endorsement vermont has a middle level endorsement and that middle level endorsement goes from grade five through grade eight and and again that endorsement was created a set a fair number of years ago and there was a purpose for why they went

032five through eight i guess what i'm wondering is why uh if if weathersfield and heartland flip back and forth between sixth year eighth and seventh through eighth but they've never even considered fifth through eighth i wonder why seventh and eighth isn't one of the options on the survey you mean as in status quo yeah well what what you don't want to do part of it was was uh it's not status quo because he just said they flip back and forth between having it and not having it and so uh i thought that the whole purpose was to make it consistent across the supervisory union is that not the case yeah no that's the case but what you don't want to do it at least in my work what i don't want to do and the

033administrative team seem to agree with this you don't want to put an option out there in a survey that you don't believe is is well balanced in the research you know that there's that there's good evidence that that's a that's a good model you know and so that's why we didn't include it um and i think that probably yeah it just what it just wasn't included because what we what we wanted to do and we also didn't include for example uh because there's some you know there's some concerns in there you know in in the research about that configuration i mean we were trying to look at what seems to be the most consistent and common research-based configurations and these were the two um i'm not saying that you can't do seven eight i mean

034i suppose you could in the end do seven eight but that doesn't that doesn't allow some of those kids who aren't most of those kids who are more than ready by in into grade 6 to to to encounter those those those programs but it's still early in the stage here and we've still got a lot more discussion and again we're going slow rather than fast i thought by now we'd have some decisions but um you know we could certainly with this task force we could have a more robust conversation about you know what would seven eight look like but in the feedback we we're getting back both in informally and formally you know that that didn't seem like something that you know that the staff wanted wanted to embrace nor did the administrative team want

035to embrace that now that doesn't mean david in the chat anne-marie says that at weathersfield in the three years she's been there they've had sixth seventh and eighth except for one year when one of the fifth one of the fifth grade classes rotated in with the other middle school grades due to class sizes so they there was only one year they included fifth or at least one fifth grade class in that group right so again it's a matter of consistency and what we want you know the educational opportunities that we want for our kids um we need to keep moving here so let's keep and and there you know you know there are there there aren't any final decisions yet i'll keep reporting back certainly to this board and the local boards as as we

036move forward it's very complicated because much like anything else in public education as many as many public are there other there are there are certain opinions and i can also i think i i didn't see it in the chat but if somebody's asking to share some of the research you know we can certainly do that or i can do that um rebecca has her hand raised and then bill [Music] i just wanted to make um a couple of comments um most of the research does recommend five through eight or six through eight um but i also wanted to comment on this is a great opportunity to invite the community into this conversation and discussion so that as you move towards making a decision the community understands that the decision is based not only on on

037on research but it's it's based on um what developmentally is best for students at a particular age so the idea of inviting i don't know how that would work i i see that you have a lot of teachers on this task force but inviting even if you have a few um parents in some way to be part of this conversation i think now would be would be a good thought it's and so it's not like you're going to spring it on people down the road but um it's something that they'll understand you've been talking about and and a great opportunity also to educate and inform parents um about the developmental years of students between those ages i know that that's a good point rebecca i wrote that down and i'll bring that i'll bring that

038back to the task force in terms of when you know when we think it might be a good idea to get some some parental input or community input yeah i think that's that's that is true i know a lot of times the discussion gets tricky and i think that's why it's a little tricky in montescotny i've seen other districts that have this conversation when they have k-6 elementary schools then they have a 7 8 either a 7-12 or a 7-8 you know junior high school or whatever and then they they start to look at this middle level research and they start to talk about including sixth grade say in that middle level but now they've got to take all those sixth graders out of i mean this happened in hartford at one point the sixth

039graders out of those elementary schools and bring them up to the middle school and that can become that could become you know somewhat contentious or controversial at the community level i just didn't think we were there yet but maybe it would be better to have those conversations i don't think it matters as much to two or three of our communities because they've already got those grade levels in those buildings now but maybe the way you're organizing the curriculum uh maybe that would be of interest to parents it's just so hard in this climate to get good parental input but because you know people are just so busy was there did bill have a question yes bill oh thank you for yielding the floor david i do appreciate it yes okay so i just want to

040clarify a couple things um and i don't know if david if you're misspeaking or if um you don't understand the difference between middle school and junior high has got nothing to do with grade levels it has to do with the actual structure of the scheduling in in the focus of the curriculum so even if you have a seventh and eighth grade and um it can be focused as either a junior high or middle school if you have a five through eighth grade it can be structured as a a middle school or a a junior high it doesn't matter the grade level what it is is what sort of you know middle school tends to have larger blocks and more um more innovative workspace a place-based structure as far as grade levels within middle school the

041research is really mixed for example there was a duke research project that showed that there were higher test scores for 6th graders in elementary schools and more behavior problems especially with boys in um a great six seven and eight middle school setup um yet there's more uh opportunities for programs for sixth graders at middle school so it is a mixed bag so i would be very careful about saying the research shows x and the research shows why because um if you think the research shows that then you you probably haven't read enough research yeah well you know and again we i i'm certainly you know open to uh these kinds of conversations um and maybe we'll just leave it at that i mean i i i know that david i was not looking for input

042from oh that's good i'll just administration yeah we'll we'll just keep going with the task force and i'll bring these thoughts about you know the community pieces back to them and i i i don't think there'd be any problem with opening opening that up this is this is uh it's a it's a it's a rich topic and i also think that you want to hear from your other administrators you know i i don't want i don't want this to just have my name planted all over it i mean this game this came out of a lot of work we've done over the last few years about building good solid middle schools so you know i think sometimes don't shoot the messenger i'm just trying to bring you the work that this team has done so

043far this year that's kind of where we are we good i think we're good okay budget overview um again no i'm sorry negotiations and then covet yeah okay that's coming up too but the budget overview i'm just saying that but the local budgets are in development and the su budget we'll talk about later on tonight uh i do want to talk about the esser recovery data and summer academy uh because that that was uh you know asked at the last meeting um you know did you get a little bit more detail on that so i think we've got brittany and katie and kate i'm sorry and chief brittany and katie uh with us and i think they can kind of take take it from here and just do you need to share your screen i'll

044stop sharing and then i'll come back and they are done [Music] sorry i forgot there's an l in here picking up my voice um yes i will um [Music] so kate is going to start us off uh with summer academy okay katie just tell me when to okay um this is a big kudos out to brittany who helped pull together the tmp data um and so one of the important things to note and it's in small letters on the next slide the tmp data only reflects grades first through eighth grade of attendees so we did not use tmp data for pre-k and k because they don't take it um so that's why our numbers are different than our attendance numbers so um next slide angie um just for attendance data we had pre-k through ninth

045grade students um there's the breakdown of students and we shared this in 2000 in august so approximately we ended up with average daily attendance of about 100 students and then we didn't track tmp um for the high school students because that didn't apply so our next slide we assess students in the fall tmp data and just to remind folks students became eligible for summer academy if they were in the bottom 30th percentile on tmp data in either the winter or the spring tmp scores plus there were some students referred for other reasons um truancy um the did okay on tmps but we weren't seen in the classroom things like that there were a few outliers but in general um we had students identified through tmp scores so what we did is and i've got to

046show see my whole screen the percentage and we did looked at math and ela uh percent of students lost five percentage points or less between winter 2020 and fall 2021. and so our scores ended up being um students who did not attend summer academy were 52 um the percent of students that lost us 50 uh those five percentage points and we just we chose a percentage there was um we could have gone with different numbers but we just stuck with five percentage points uh total students who qualified but did not attend and we have those numbers um on the next slide um and then total of students who attended um summer academy so actually students who attended summer academy lost less than others in math um as compared which kind of tells us anecdotally and

047probably more noticed that we did know we did a lot of math that was incorporated into many of our activities math and science um and our data shows that um on conversely um the ela data uh showed that we had 55 percent of students lost five percentage points or less 58 for literacy and the students who attended summer academy did not make the gains or they lost more um and that could tell us lots of things that was um we were still unpacking that data um that is that one of the areas that was significantly deficit is that also an area we can improve on for next year and and that was part of the feedback we did receive this summer was that it was hard to get everything in we had a short amount

048of time um between breakfast and lunch and making sure we were doing hands-on learning with students to also which i think the math and science was more hands-on and more accessible as we planned versus literacy so it's it's data we can use to help inform next year there was at least a couple people's hands up you know do you want me to answer questions now before i go to the next slide is that who is is it scott [Music] scott had left the meeting in return but i don't think he had a question okay so the name came across my um so katie i i have a quick question just clarifying so these two there's math and ela so this is only the percentage of students who lost five percentage points or less it reflects

049all perce yes all students who lost five percentage points or less so that the orange is all students the total number of students who didn't attend and the total students who qualified but did not attend and then total students who attended um summer academy so we just we stuck with the five percentage points or less okay so i just so total students who attended summer academy i think i'm seeing 59 percent lost five percentage points or less i can clarify because it is worded really confusing but um we wanted to figure it out kind of consider the fact that we assume students are going to lose a little bit over the summer i mean whether they go to summer academy or not they're not getting a consistent education all summer long um so the way

050you could read this is for math the total students who attended summer academy retained more information than those that did not on the other hand in ela yes yeah i just had i wanted to get that five percentage points in there because we did configure figure out that band um with with the idea that students will lose i didn't want you to think that all of the students on here retained or made gains right so they lost less than other students okay that that was and that was our goal to lose less for which um and we did that in math but we didn't lose less in language arts um that so in comparison and one of the things i'd love to go back through is and brittany and i started to do this but

051we could not carve out enough time to really dig deep yet was we did a surface level were students more deficit in language arts than they were in math entering this even though they were still at the bottom 30 percent and if that was you know how that might be impacted so um and we do know that just anecdotally we did probably spend more time on on math and science than we did on language arts because of the hands-on nature of the program people were writing kids were reading no question about it um could is that an area of improvement for next year i think so of how we systematically can do that so um and that's what we needed we needed data to help us inform that practice um safe to go so we

052had 70 students that was the number looking at i was looking for um summer academy coordination we're planning on meeting i think it was february angie united we'd already tentatively scheduled a meeting to look at our data um to determine the criteria for next year um look at our continued emphasis on math and increase the opportunities for focus literacy instruction um those were just even based off our anecdotal meetings we had at the end of the year to debrief with the coordinators that our data is helping us support the conversations we already had um so um angie did you have so i have um the final reports for the um for for what summer academy came in at um approximately 153 thousand seven dollars and 69 cents was spent on personnel that would be teachers

053and our parent so on this slide i said we had 19 teachers our paraprofessional accounts were a little bit more fluid um we had some paraprofessionals come in and work part of the program and not the whole program so it was hard for me to get a final count on the number of professionals we had the nurses on site that was also pieced together from a couple different people the bcbas we had five different vcbas offering support that was for behavioral support we are hope and hcrs also provided additional support um and then our coordinators uh this reflects um the what we pay them which in my estimation was far less than what the work they actually did because katie there's no way katie and i could have pulled the summer academy off without without

054that help for sure katie do you have anything you want to add to this slide i just want the what's not reflected um are direct costs that were related to extended school year for some of the students that were there that were direct special ed costs there's approximately 45 000 dollars that would have normally been spent on esy extended school year for students who needed more intensive programs they may have been also attending summer academy as part of the program but they those costs were already pulled out um so we had those are paid through either the general fund or through one of our grants the idea b grant if it was uh for example early childhood was completely paid for out of our idea be grant because that's how that typically is paid for

055um so um rebecca has her hand raised yes um i i i don't know maybe this question is for both katie and angie is it possible um that next summer you can increase the amount of students that you take in i i know that you were specifically focusing on certain students that probably left out other students and so i'm i'm wondering although they probably could have benefited also from some of the services so i'm wondering if this is an opportunity to maybe gradually increase and bring in bring on students that can benefit from the service also we we offered it to almost 150 students in the su so um i think we what we need to concentrate on is those that we're offering to convincing them to come um we could have had more students

056we had the capacity to have additional students we had the staff we we teaching staff it would have been a little interesting a few other places but um i agree we would have used could have had more students and that's part of we're hoping the um positive end to our summer and what we the feedback we got from parents and from students at the end um without exception were as tearful and disappointed it was ending um that that carries over to next year to to the coconut telegraph lack of a better way of putting it that the community members are talking and that we continue to grab more so um our intent was to have closer to 120 um but um and we can also look at our criteria um since it was aimed for

057recovery the bottom 30 percent was actually pretty a pretty big chunk of students and um from significantly students with significant deficits in areas to some with that you would consider more moderate it isn't even the bottom 15th percentile so um but that's that's good feedback it is our goal i do have a few more items that we paid for for the program transportation enrichment camp fees we did have scholarship uh available for parents who needed to send their children to the enrichment camp in the afternoon and only one family uh took advantage of that and then we have our the supplies so the total cost of the program through esser is not reflected on that slide i sorry i do not know why but i sent in your email let me stop sharing this i

058sent in your email three um pdfs with um this is the spreadsheet for summer academy and the amount 180 000 two hundred fifty three dollars and sixty nine cents approximately there may be it that might be a little bit off but that's approximately i am noah connors and and presenting these reports is much more challenging than you would imagine so um that's uh that's the summer academy are there any other questions okay great thank you at this time brittany is going to give us a recovery plan update and then when she's um done i'm going to just talk to you a little bit about the sr2 amendment that i submitted and give you a summary of that amendment as well all right i'm going to go ahead and present my screen all right can everybody

059see that okay yeah let's see so how i organized this information is based on our recovery plan goals that had actually that were actually measurable there were some goals within the recovery plan like uh that we're going to implement leader and me for example you know i don't i haven't figured out quite how to put numbers to that yet but some of these other things i was able to do um so you'll see the goal there at the top and i did was able to pull some the first one is about attendance just trying to increase our student attendance um from last year to this year and i was able to pull a couple of different data points to show you the first is unexcused absence risk factors and that is defined last year when

060you look at a full academic year you'll see fy20 is 170 days and a risk factor was determined by saying students who missed eight or more days that were unexcused so we were at 4.7 percent for the entire year last year of students this year what i did is at the time i ran this data we were 44 days into the school year and so i basically determined that that was a quarter of the school year so i cut the eight unexcused absences down to two and we are at eight point six percent of students that have two or more unexcused absences at this time um and just to so that in case the board is not sure um an unexcused absence is basically if a parent calls the child in sick they are considered

061excused um you know there's a variety of other different things that could be excused as well but basically if a parent reports hey my child is homesick they're excused unexcused would be that they did not call um the other possibility for an unexcused absence um is something that they're doing that is you know they're not sick and it's something that can be done over a break and if a student is missing more than 10 days of school they are required to have a doctor's note in most of the buildings if they don't provide a doctor's note those future absences are considered unexcused so hopefully that gives a little bit of context the other data point here i broke up by by school and it is students who had at-risk attendance for this school year lower

062than meaning their attendance was lower than 90 percent present at this time i'll just keep going and then maybe amy you can shout at me if there ends up being a hand raised or something the next goal there are several slides here um you know i'm certainly going to send out the powerpoint because you know it does tend to get to be a lot of data but um the the goal was that the percentage of ninth and twelfth graders with at least one course failure would decrease by 20 percent and then you'll see in later slides it's divided up um by free and reduced status this i just this slide i just want to you know make note that it is not by cohort so it was just ninth graders in fy 20 compared to

063ninth graders and fy21 and so on so that data was actually a little bit harder to run and i don't have this years obviously because we have not gotten to a term yet but certainly when i do have some data to compare this year too i will do that um this i ran a little bit differently it's broken up by fra20 for one one chart and fy 21 for the other [Music] 9th through 12th graders with at least one course failure and you can see the free and reduced status in each in each year so we are you know as you can see we're a little bit higher this year than we were last year or um sorry last year than we were the year before all right as we move forward um so last

064year because we did not do as many assessments just because it was a crazy year uh yes yep absolutely i can do that for you uh the next round bill so last year we did not have as much data so when the recovery plan was drafted my understanding was that it was based on a teacher input survey so you know their feelings based on the data that they did collect you know how many students [Music] are reaching grade level benchmarks uh we're lucky this year we have the data to put to those numbers so uh you can see where we're at across the su for exact path that is a much more rigorous assessment than tmp which you'll see it in another slide the sbac data is still embargoed for this year and of course

065we didn't take it sorry last year's s facts is still embargoed and we didn't take it the year prior so i only have the 2018 2019 to compare to but as soon as we get the s back data to release i will have that information as well fantastic bill awesome so we have the tmp math scores you can see here i was able to go back uh quite a ways um we have the fall 2021 obviously our red and yellow is a little bit higher than previous years which is to be expected given given our what we've kind of gone through this past year this is our reading from exact path data and then our fmp data and our fmp was only first through fourth grade and i sh and the exact path was k

066through eight um brittany f and p is that fontes to know yes it is sorry about that yes exactpath also gives a language arts scores um and then i can i have the ela scores on here from aspects as well through ninth grade for 2018 2018. all right so um here you can see the tmp ela as well same it's the same trend as it was for math so for social emotional learning we did not give our uh panorama yet and i do not have the mra which panorama is our social emotional learning skill or tool that we are going to be using coming in december so i will have depending on how that's reported out i might be able to report that as long as i can um you know ensure confidentiality for our

067students but i was able to pull some david had me pull some behavior data i have substantiated harassment cases substantiated bullying cases and suspension events from fy 21 and then compared to fy 22 you know i know it's pretty pretty surprising how high some of these numbers are compared to last year but you know we're certainly dealing with some difficult situations in school and just like we are all stressed students are just as stressed and have had a crazy couple of years here so that's not too surprising to at least those who are working in the schools currently sub means substantiated meaning uh that it was investigated and determined that it happened all right and i think that's all i had for you tonight does anybody have any questions rebecca your hand and then bill

068thank you um brittany has have you had an opportunity to share some of this data with the teachers yeah um so each school has their own um data dashboard which which i've shared with the board the su data dashboard but they have their own data dashboards that the principals have and can use however they see fit some of the schools are at different levels in terms of looking at data and really using it with intentionality heartland is one that we actually just met with i met with the interventionists and we kind of made a plan for the next i think it's coming up in a week or two we're going to be working with each team looking at exact path data and identifying some goals around that data so they do have access to it

069the sui data is posted in our curriculum and instruction newsletter every two weeks or so thank you well i'm assuming with the panorama you're going to do students about schools and students about students are you planning on doing staff about schools so that's a great question i was not on the committee that developed the survey because in panorama you can you kind of look at it and determine which questions you want to ask and what you want to target so angie was working with the counselors on developing that so i can let her respond to that question we have no plans to survey the staff right now in this cycle um the letter for our communities is going out tomorrow and telling them about the survey and it is uh questions about students um social

070and emotional um well-being related to school right there's this student about schools survey that within panorama there are some set survey blocks in which you have uploads that you create and you put in there uh what's neat about panoramic there's no there's no rosters it's your upload and then goes out um but i would be interested in it i understand you may not be doing that i would be interesting especially um before the next rounds of negotiation um to to look at some of the um the the staff about schools survey information not on an individual basis because that would be but if we get a general idea of staff feelings about the school in general and there's two survey strands there there's one for teachers which is for um staff that are within a

071um a instructional role and then staff that is not in an instructional role um i'd be really interested to see the staff and the structural role data to see how that data and and get a general feel of how the staff is doing amy i can i jump in and clarify a little bit of bill's question too oh certainly please brittany um so the mra data and i always forget what it stands for but um that's through christine you got it you got me on me measured results assessment there we go so um that is an assessment through leader in me that does assess not only students staff and families and it reports out in general on kind of school culture leadership responsibilities how people are feeling in school and that kind of thing christine

072did that at heartland already i don't know if you have anything else to add about that christine uh yeah we did we did our baseline data we worked with our leader and me coach to use the data to set some goals around culture leadership and engagement um i can i can certainly share the data with the board if they're interested in checking it out i know the other schools are um are planning to give the assessment as well to get a baseline and then we'll do it again in the spring see how we've progressed i mean i don't know if that the board would be interested but i think that the negotiating team would be interested i i think the board would be too and we i guess i can only speak for myself but

073i can um hardly imagine that the board would not be interested in learning more about how the school culture environment is right now um let me see elizabeth and then rebecca thank you please thank you for not having my camera on but uh i'm not at home in my internet it is a little bit uh dodgy um i since since this falls under esser funding um i am really worried about the amount of money not being spent to help teachers um this year and during the sr presentation i think the only thing that was brought up was the um leader in me program and i have some questions about that when we get to the curriculum section but um i'm not sure i understand how leader and me is helping the like the welfare of

074the our teachers and staff members who seem to be really very stressed um is there anything else that we're doing for them thank you i do want to um discuss that but i would um like to discuss that separate from this so um because we had a meeting today to talk about that so um yeah we have some ideas elizabeth you're exactly right leader in me does help create a more positive school culture where students are leading their learning which takes um which that's what teachers want to see is their children being in charge of their learning and it helps with behaviors which would reduce stress but there there's much more going on than just what's happening on the day-to-day with our staff in the classrooms so um we that it's sort of a separate

075conversation okay thank you rebecca i just wanted to comment um apparently it seems like heartland is um creating these baselines um utilizing the data that's being collected and so my question is and i think christina alluded to this is that the other schools will be following up also in in terms of creating their baselines and moving forward with with some sort of plan is that is that part of the plan here yeah so there's a couple of different different kind of areas um one is looking at the data right and the the data that i presented the academic data and things like that that is through our mtss process um heartland was using the format that the entire su is using now uh for the past well last year and then you know we kind

076of built it over time but um so they're a little bit more practice in that already whereas the other schools are kind of learning the the ins and outs of that those new expectations um you know different meetings different way of reporting out on plans academic plans things of that nature so every school is in a little bit of a different place um i have to say windsor has a team as well that's working on data we meet every every week we look at student success plans which is like an intervention plan we look at kid talk plans which is a different layer within the mtss process and all of that comes with data and those discussions have been really rich as well so every building's at a different place weathersfield does a really great

077job of using data as well um i have worked specifically though with heartland unused data practices already um so that's that's just why i brought that up but yeah we're all we're all just working at a different different pace different level in terms of the mra data heartland rolled that out first they have been looking into leader in me for quite some time using some of the language already so their staff is a little bit more familiar so it wasn't a big stretch to do the mra whereas some of the other schools are really getting familiar with what leader me is how are they gonna you know embody the practices within leader me and and what the next steps will be so that's everybody's just at a different level working in the same direction though

078thank you thank you was there more brittany on this uh no not for me okay so i'm gonna share my screen to just give you an update on at the sr2 um updated budget so in your email i sent you a uh the june which was the original esser um budget and then uh this sr2 rather this is esser ii i also sent you sr1 but that's mostly summer academy i just wanted you to see the final numbers what you're going to notice there is that i have been able to move i was able to move the bulk of summer academy transportation into sr1 from sr2 however that sr1 grant had not been approved before i submitted this sr2 update so the transportation is still reflected in this um in the november uh edition of

079the budget so sorry about that i think you can um i didn't realize that would go like that but oh there we go um so this was uh social emotional i mean instruction oops i'm sorry um social emotional mental health supports what we found was that our permanent subs ended up not um not taking jobs and also we had local funds to pay for that so we were able to redirect those funds into other investments um the panoramas social-emotional survey with along with some professional learning for staff is um was reflected in the first edition the the original um application school nurse support unfortunately our school nurse that we did have that was going to be split between weathersfield and windsor um one day at windsor and then four days at wethersfield resigned so we

080were fortunate to have medical secretarial support for the weathersfield school nurse which i'm sure was extremely valuable during that time when they were having quarantine upon quarantine as we know our school nurses are bearing the brunt of the quarantining and the testing and having that additional support has been really key in helping that school nurse do her job mental health services supports that we are offering in this is we are hope and an hcrs school-based commission um we were able to repo re-direct funding that was um originally set up for a halftime interventionist at weathersfield um in the with the lack of applicants uh there was a request that we use those funds to pay for um school-based clinician and we were able to cover most of that with um with that from that position

081the way we had included it this also that line also includes the special ed survey that was in the original application we have vulnerable populations equitable and inclusive education this is professional learning and it is oh i'm sorry the special ed study is in this line i knew it was in this section somewhere um that 25 500 reflects work with dr crum work with the green mountain equity network with lavelle brown and then the special ed study this strategy is in for instructional support as you can remember our three pillars of recovery academic achievement is one of our areas and we have the summer academy amount and that number reflects the updated amounts and then in the first original amendment i had missed transportation and so i had to add that in for our transitional

082k program and that 23 000 reflects the whole budget for supplies and transportation and then instructional support this is where the bulk of our sr2 funds are being spent and that's on teachers and our paraprofessionals we have um actually eight staff that are hired through esther ii and that's two at heartland two at windsor two at wittersfield and the teacher ampera for the transitional k program this final strat um collection i think say is really about it's comprehensive it serves the whole supervisory union that is our leader in me initiative or leader in me framework that we're using we did add classroom materials that were purchased for we purchased teacher editions and student additions guides i think for classroom use and then our recovery coordinator you may recall that at the beginning of our work

083with the essers we were calling britney's position assistant recovery coordinator she is assisting no one she is the recovery coordinator so i just wanted to note that we changed that title it to be more accurately reflect that she is doing um the bulk of the recovery coordinator work and or facilitating it shall i say she's not doing a lot of work she's facilitating that so are there any questions not at the moment thank you if you have any questions after looking at the um the detail please let me know great thank you i just have two more items as part of my report amy okay okay yeah so and i i i don't think i'll share my screen again just in the interest of time but it does relate to what we just talked about

084and that is the fact that the administrative team is definitely getting feedback around staff stress and and the mental health of our staff i mean that's important i think it's related to a couple of things uh one of which probably one of the more important things i think is the staff shortage right i mean we've uh we've got several positions that are still unfilled we are advertising we refresh those advertisements but uh you know two special ed case managers at bcba three perma subs a school counselor four teachers three interventionists and sixteen support staff that we're not able to hire which means that puts additional work on everybody else in those buildings from administrators right on down to support staff people are covering people's classes they're filling in here and there they're stepping up for

085certain behavior issues that maybe in the past they would have had to uh and it just is adding to that stress we've also had helpless to 30 resignations since july 1 2021 and i think that's partly due to uh some of it is new staff that get hired they try it for a couple of days and then they leave i don't know whether that's because they can't handle the pace and stress of what we do we think in a couple of cases it's because they take the job because they have to do that to continue on unemployment and then they leave um there's a lot of different reasons why that's uh why that's happening but the bottom line is we're trying to address this really in two ways because it is serious and by the

086way you'll hear it across vermont you'll hear across new england and probably across the country uh and uh certainly in in vermont uh we're hearing that from our colleagues very close to us that this uh this this is an issue um so we wanted to do two things basically uh to help with that stress level and uh i don't know if any of the administrators want to want to embellish this at all but essentially we feel like there's just you know too much work in a day and not enough time to get that work done and they're also perceiving some of these things that we talked about tonight like later in me the mra the panorama all those new those new assessment tools the anti-racism work the middle level work they're looking at that as

087new initiatives in the middle of a very stressful time so one of the things the administrative team would like to do between now and you know the month before the holiday maybe the month after the holiday at least until february is just put a timeout and a pause on on these initiatives and allow more time during that 45 minute block at the end of the day for just collaboration and preparation that they have to do in terms of working on their own curriculum units their own work that's the feedback we've got from them they'd appreciate that uh i hope to be able to announce some of that uh tomorrow in my letter to the i saw a happy thanksgiving letter to the to the staff i think if we can reduce that load of of

088of what they've received to be new initiatives and quite frankly our new initiatives i think that will help we're also starting to brainstorm with we have an eap person we also have some clinicians on staff and clinicians in the area we're at the very beginning of this but we'd like to try to you know maybe contract with some of them to provide that kind of that kind of clinical support if staff want it they do have it through epa to our employee assistance uh eap excuse me an employee assistance program anyway but we want to be able to make that even more known to the full staff and more available to the full staff it is an incredibly difficult year it's more difficult than last year because last year we were in our pods we

089were experiencing in those pods a configuration that that required a real dependence on one another now i think what we're doing in an environment that's very similar to last year is we're trying to go about the day like we're like it's just a regular school year and it is not a regular school year it's a stressful school year um we're also continuing to add as much as we possibly can attention to the behavior supports um because the kids are stressed and families are stressed and that's resulting as you could see in some of the data that was reported in increased behavior issues and suspensions and uh and so anyhow we sort of taking that three-pronged approach reduced the workload to some degree in those perceived new uh initiatives b to work on mental health supports

090for staff and c to work on those student behavior issues that are increasing that stress uh uh in in the buildings i don't know whether angie or any of the other administrators want to add to that but we are very aware of of this as an issue this year i just want to say that when britney shared with me the we had been hearing about the suspension data when she shared with me that we have 38 compared to four suspensions at this time this time last year compared to last year um i i thought that's a pretty compelling piece of evidence that our staff so the suspension data only tells the tip of the iceberg it doesn't tell you what our staff are dealing with on a regular basis in the buildings all the problem

091solving that they are doing with children um and supporting each and trying to support each other and um so our our thought was how can where can we where can we release the pressure valve and one of those things was to take some administrative expectations off on the table for now and hopefully that will allow our staff to have the opportunity to work on the things that are most important to them in the in their buildings amongst their amongst themselves with their team members and support each other that way amanda gates thank you as a staff member i love hearing this i think that's um thank you for listening to some feedback um but i would also like to say that thinking about the staff members especially our support staff members that are in the

092building that are doing incredible work um of usually more than you know two other people if we could consider ways that we could um incentivize the work that they're already doing i know there's hiring bonuses out there but i think that would be really important to consider how to retain these staff especially our support staff that are amazing through growing them professionally through financial incentives we want to continue to keep the staff that we have right now [Music] thank you amanda one of the things oh amy i'm sorry can i just continue i just have one more thought to add is that um we had our collaborative practices time we had a lot of things that we were um working on and we there was no way we could have anticipated the level of stress

093that has occurred in recent months but we think that giving we don't want to stop lighthouse teams and some of that work because those those staff are counting on having that time to do that work but we want to build in some more choice for staff we also want to build in some more time for planning so while we might not be moving forward on on some of our choice committee work we when we resume we want to think about more long-term planning and how what we can put in place this year to help support us next year which i think is another way that we give our staff the support they need because we have a lot of staff that like that information they know where we're headed and they know that when we'll

094have time to do that work okay thank you david on your report on the agenda there's one more item negotiations did you yeah that was what i was going to finish up with i thought i saw larry that was the end up but no i just uh i would just say that i think this is a great idea and i think it's important to uh hear the staff and uh in this nysa staff i mean everybody from you know up and down uh the staff members that could use this also to recognize that uh the most important thing is that we do keep the school in session in person as much as possible and anything we can do to do that that should be what we really focus on and everything else it's great and

095it's important and it will get done but not to the detriment of keeping the kids in the building because we all know the pros and cons of remote learning and uh and having kids in halftime so i think it's important to uh keep school open in person in the building every day and whatever we can do to do that i'm on board with thank you larry yeah thanks and amanda i wrote down that you know a couple of suggestions in addition i mean the financial incentives certainly are are important as we all know we're a union shop so whatever happens has to be negotiated we can't just um we learned that with the uh yeah we learned that with the with the hiring bonus that we can't just offer things that we want to offer

096we have to negotiate it but thanks for that input that i think that's important um yeah last but not least negotiations this is really quick uh december uh we have our mediation session uh on uh december 8th i believe it's the week after the week after the week after we get back um and uh and that's with the teachers and i think that's adding the stress too not having a contract not having some surety of of of where that employment's going to come from and where that where i think that's i think that's also uh this is the latest right now that we've gone without a contract so we'd like to try to work the satellite i think the board has some plans to make offers that will also not just be a one-year contract

097but maybe more than a one-year contract so we're not back at the negotiating table because that negotiating is also stressful and then the support staff their contract is up in june uh and uh they we have a meeting an initial meeting with them on december 15th and uh and i i know that the board also has some uh some good solid proposals for them i'm hoping it doesn't take that long because it would be nice to settle that contract as well i know that that that definitely wears on the employees but that's where we are right now and uh i thank bill and scott and uh and jackie and conovitch for the work that they've done on those teams that's it for me for my report sorry it was so long but i wanted to

098put a lot in there so that would cover some of the items for discussion too right i was going to say we took off a couple of items for discussion so that's all very cool um moving along so let me see we are two items for discussion and first up is the special education policy first reading hey amy yes this is scott um i just wanted to suggest maybe a three or five minute break i don't know that's quick just a quick suggestion i could use it sure we could take a five-minute break because actually i could too so um let me see it is 8 26 can we be back at 8 30 sounds good okay camera's off here we go i'll set up the out camera can you show off the old camera

099you're welcome scott welcome back everyone yes right colleen deschamps has a couple of announcements that got missed and i told her that she could do those right before items for discussion [Music] colleen are you ready yeah can you hear me i need to be a little louder can you hear me yeah that's better yes do you hear to hear my volume okay i just wanted to apologize sorry thank you i just want to apologize for my delay in the announcements i was having technical difficulties so i just wanted to um reiterate what amy said we wanted to congratulate our student athletes our varsity field hockey team and our varsity football team won their state championships their coaches they played really hard um we we had a wonderful season for all of our athletes they've made

100it to um pretty far in their rounds in soccer and we had some standout cross-country um athletes um a couple other announcements i wanted to share was that our i have mostly high school announcements our juniors and seniors are at a very important part of their year right now our seniors have begun their capstone november forums so they're presenting half of their data for their capstone presentations that happen at the end of the first semester for most of them so that's exciting for them um getting to touch base with their advisors to share what what they've accomplished so far and our juniors have gone through their first phase i think the majority of them have done their um irb panel discussions their institutional review boards for all of their science fair projects so that's another

101um big step in the direction of their science fair um presentations at which usually are spring time i think i don't think they're right around january like the end of the semester i think they are a little bit later because of science fair dates and i also wanted to announce that december 8th 9th and 10th our theater department will be performing macbeth and we're really excited about that we will have limited seating so um any school board members who would like to see the show please um contact kate or i or one of our main offices at the high school and we will work out a plan to have you see the show our students have limited tickets for their families so thank you so much can i just piggyback that a little bit and

102say in addition to the championships on field hockey soccer and football they had specific athletes that were selected as all estate seniors so they all played in north south version of their game in their respective sports um so we had some pretty fine athletes that were recognized and selected by their own coaches in the leagues and got to play in additional games beyond with our own team um and just anecdotally it's the season as acceptance let us roll in and i have to tell you i had the pleasure of seeing one particular student who walked in the door who couldn't hand me his letter fast enough to say he basically got almost a full ride to his number one first choice and that was pretty fun yeah oh my gosh that's right they're starting to

103get acceptance letters ah so exciting yes and i also forgot to announce that our national honor society did their annual grateful for our custodians thankful dinner on friday night very nice [Music] thank you we will now move into items for discussion and top of that list is the special education policy which is the first reading did anyone have any questions or comments on that bill this is all pretty boilerplate stuff um it's basically saying you have to follow the law correct yeah exactly can i give a little background for a second certainly why we have to follow the law so um as you know we have special ed monitoring and just about every single school district that was monitored net this year last year because osep was really looking at how we were in or

104in this case out of compliance for addressing formally in our policies about providing state for students specifically having to do with suspension and expulsions that's how this policy came about and that we have to have proved to the aoe that we have adopted by january 1st um as part of our monitoring um so this model school boards policy just came out with three or four weeks ago it was i think right after uh um and so that's so that's where the the language came out we some of it was slightly we had um our special ed administrators group had looked at it with council as well so that um it's an important thing to do but that's that's sort of the back story of why this suddenly came out of the blue okay thank you

105so at our next meeting december or january as the case may be um we will do the second reading and possibly adopt so thank you the next item on the agenda is library materials policy and i put that on um just in my job i have heard more and more often of um i think we have all heard about public dissatisfaction or unhappiness with some of the things that are happening in schools and that is also beginning to happen in with school libraries and public libraries as well but in school libraries across the country there have actually been boards that have been um overactive or reactive in terms of saying well i'm not sure that that book should be in our curriculum or i don't think that that book should be on the shelves of

106our library and we've there's also been increased um challenges of books in school libraries and public libraries and currently we do not have a policy for library materials or anything [Music] in procedures on what to do with a book is challenged and that is very um strongly spelled out in by the american library association as well as the american association of school libraries and i at our next meeting i will have put together a a template for a library and instructional when there's challenges to instructional materials but i just want to let people know that we'll be talking about that at our next meeting more bill um while you put that together if you want me to take a look at it um what you've done i'd be more than happy to yes that would

107be fine and i'm also going to um so i i will share it with you and david and then um our school librarians as well yeah and amy i just sent you and laurie a draft of something that we found so take a look at that see how it matches up with what you've got for a template okay we'll get something out by january for sure i mean by december right um there is a very um let's see [Music] it's it's a policy to consider in the vsba model policies and it's selecting library materials but it doesn't really go into um it doesn't have the student right to read information or the um library bill of rights so it um an american library association and american association of school libraries strongly recommends those two documents

108being at least addendums to your policy so that there's that foundation or certainly reference but i think yeah that's the one i think i sent you the vsba we we edited it a little bit but you can look at it and see what you want to add okay great thank you and that's all i had on that so moving on to our next item is the s-u-y oh yeah s-u-y curricula i think that was elizabeth put that on there it was uh can you see me can you guys see me can't see you but we can hear you huh oh we see you now okay uh obviously i have a few a few um questions about su-wide curricula um my first year on this board we with the assistance of the administration picked out um

109picked out uh math and ela seoi curricula and i found it to be a really exciting moment um i couldn't understand why including our own town anybody would ever want to send their any of their students anywhere other than windsor if we were using a k-12 um curriculum because it would go all the way through but i've i've recently learned that um maybe uh now seven or eight years later all of the school isn't using our esee wide curricula and i wondered whether we could take a look at why and what we should do about it i also sort of i have some questions about uh the other one what's it called later in me i have a question i have some questions about leader in me and i wondered is it a curriculum that's

110being instituted all the way across the supervisory union it seems to be a leadership program um if it's a curriculum is it something that the su board should have taken a look at am i misunderstanding the role of the su board as far as su-wide curricula those are my questions thanks [Music] yeah i i think those those are both good questions i i will tell you that one of the things we had planned to do this year was to revisit uh curriculum because it has been six or seven years both with math and ela and then uh and then also look at the other two areas just to sort of outline those k-12 you know proficiencies in all four of the major disciplines but but again it it it has been it just hasn't turned

111out to be the best year to do that kind of work because it's very taxing work it's tedious work it requires staff a lot of staff input so we we we really have we really haven't done that what we did find out what we did am i right in thinking that we don't have an su-wide writing curriculum in fact we don't necessarily have a writing curriculum that that that's correct i mean there are there are pilot programs that have gone on over the last couple of years but angie could probably speak better than that but no we do not have so i think that's kind of important yeah and all those areas all those areas quite frankly uh most of our people use uh the national science standards and most of the uh people are

112using the 3c social studies curriculum but we haven't codified that in in our that was our that was our plan this year and you had a whole system set up to do it it would have it would have been part of the work we were going to do from that 2 30 to 3 15 but we never we i'll be honest with you just didn't get off the ground given the bandwidth that everybody had and now given the fact that we're thinking about putting everything at least temporarily on pause it may it may not get done now leader in me just quickly and then angie you can correct me if i'm wrong leader in me is a leadership program it's not a curriculum it does have some suggested curriculum materials that are much more around

113morning meeting and and and social emotional work that you would do with your classroom but it's not per se a curriculum so uh so so so again that that hasn't been vetted by you know from a curriculum standpoint it's been vetted more from a programmatic standpoint i i guess i don't really understand because i keep hearing it being a um a part of the student's curriculum and i don't really understand why we i i understand from some uh staff members that it sort of supersedes as far as sel goes that it sort of supersedes uh collaborative problem solving and some of the other initiatives that we've um instituted all the way across our supervisory union at great pains um and i don't really understand why we would like throw another thing into the mix that

114uh negates uh the use of of collaborative problem solving since we i thought all understood that it was uh one of the tools that we were using yeah and i think collaborative problem solving and trauma reform classrooms those all fit into that program category right and that's why we we really look strongly at leader in me because it did seem to enhance some of that work around building those seven habits within even kids lives and and and and so that that that's sort of where it ended up but quite frankly and i don't know what staff members necessarily would be would be saying that but we haven't had a chance really in most of our buildings right now other than maybe heartland to implement so it's not like anything's replacing anything right now because we

115haven't been able to get that lighthouse team strongly off the ground and get those things happening yet so uh again i'm not denying that feedback but it's a little it's probably a little bit premature uh and it certainly will be premature since again we're gonna try to put things a little bit on pause with leader in need for at least another month or two here but i mean again those are programs i don't think they're curriculums but angie wanted to say something too sorry collaborative problem solving is a philosophy it's an approach to having conversations with children um that is a win-win which is one of the seven habits thinking we win so when we looked at leader and me we chose it because it has all of the things that we are trying to

116instill in our system it provides us what we um what we call the operating system for us to get to be able to move forward with our strategic plan to provide student voice and choice to provide um mental health and well-being uh the data and communication piece it's helping it's helping us with there are so many things that leader in me provides us with this just in terms of having staff um practicing the seven habits in their own in their own practice in their own work in the buildings and perhaps outside of the buildings as well and so it was uh leader in me if there is anything that leader in me may replace it could possibly um become a replacement for uh pbis uh but that's a decision that lighthouse teams will make with

117their staff that is not a decision that the supervisory union would say you must do that because leader in me is giving us the tools and strategies to help everybody make that make make better decisions and take better take be more um be more involved and engaged in making those decisions that impact on their work including the children and so that's i mean that's what really i think drew us as an administrative team to the leader in new york and i wanted to comment on the curriculum that we have in place so um for language arts we adopted wheatley wheatley is not really a curriculum in and of itself because curriculum would have a clear uh um would have outlined assessments and it would have the materials and and the way that you teach the

118materials it would have all those things in embedded in it and what wheatley does i think the reason why many of our staff likely is because it offers it offers a theme throughout the year and then and identifies the standards that are supposed to be addressed in the learning but it gives teachers a lot of um choice in how they um actually work with the work with the standards and how they teach the standards so it's not really saying it's not exactly showing them how to teach it versus eureka math which has some very very particular instructional strategies embedded in the program and so eureka math is more a more complete curriculum we are piloting a writing program patti gray our literacy um our instructional coach of literacy has been working with a team of

119teachers across the supervisory union mostly in our k4 at this point on identifying some programs that have promised for providing a more coh cohesive approach to the teaching of writing across the supervisory union um i suspect she told me she was working on a proposal to bring to me today so that i could bring it to our administrative team um upon returning um in december after the holiday yeah after the holiday and and uh during one of our administrative teams in december so we do not we have uh mystery science which is our k-5 uh science solution for teachers uh we do not have a science program for six through twelve our teachers design a lot of their curriculum our teachers design their curriculum in um social studies and in all the sp unified arts

120they design their own curriculum we have standards and i think the idea behind that is that we're all how kids get to the standards is not um it's not necessarily the glue that keeps i guess i'm not explaining as well but how they get we don't want to tell the teachers how to get the kids to the standards we want we want to have ways for um students to demonstrate that they understand standards that's the piece the assessment system that we're also working on because we have a couple different ways that stu that we assess students but we don't have common assessments which would be local common assessments or like science and social studies with the exception of smarter balance which gives the science assessment in 5th grade 8th grade and i think it's 11th

121grade um i hope that helps um elizabeth with some of your questions it does i i'd like to just quickly go back to the leader and me curriculum part for a second because i've i one of the things that i've heard is that uh it doesn't seem to be particularly drama informed in that it's um as far as uh younger students go it seems to be a little bit old-fashioned in the way that it treats good versus bad or um you know kind of kind of black and white thinking um that some of the other programs that we've implemented um tried to really purposefully stray away from black and white thinking i would say with the um because our lighthouse teams are not up and running fully that it would be premature to comment on

122on that because it would be up to the lighthouse teams to examine what they're using what what the messages are in the materials that they're using as they're working on leader in me concepts what's the lighthouse team oh the lighthouse team is our team of teachers and um that are our in each of our districts in each of our buildings there's a light house team of teachers that are helping guide the work and then that uh offshoot of the lighthouse team is an action team that has action team leaders this is all teacher directed and they lead the work of the staff to get staff to the place that they identified as their goals and i know for example their goal this year is to live and learn to learn and live the seven habits

123that is what they that would be a successful year at the end of the year as as as as staff the adults in the system are learning to learning and living the seven habits and that their students are starting to learn and live the seven habits i have a question then it's nicole um because leader and me there have been so many questions and there's always some sort of comment at all of our meetings regarding leader in me and it could be that this already happened and i missed it because i had another meeting or something um could could we have like a not oh it's almost like a board development you know where we have an initial lesson in leader in me just an overview we could certainly uh schedule a time for our

124leader in me either our coach or our consultant leader dana jean to come in and talk with you guys about leader and me and about how it's developed in each building and how it's individualized for each building um that would be great and to have a meeting that it's only that yeah so maybe an hour and a half let me know how you want to proceed with that and i can um try to get something scheduled okay thank you angie because i think that would be helpful it would eliminate a lot of the confusion hopefully hopefully and i know i know nikki's waiting but i just want to say elizabeth is absolutely right i mean curriculum runs in cycles and we just haven't been able to get that that next cycle of curriculum work going

125i mean we did that math in ela work but we to be completely transparent we're not you know we've just gotten way late last year we're getting way late again this year it's just it's not happening we do have standards like amy said but like angie said but yeah but that that and that would work its way up through the internal curriculum committee and that would work its way up to the board for final adoption and approval so that's why you haven't seen anything you know since we did that work back then but we do you know we will get there okay paul yeah sorry i think you need your volume maybe i should take myself off of me um um i i just want to address uh leader and me really quickly because i

126know that christine's on the phone and brittany's not here anymore um brittany started looking at leader and me way back before we even did this for people and i sat down and it was an informal discussion of what leader and me had to offer what really attracted me at the time to the program um is that it brings together all of these initiatives like and i don't you guys remember but i felt like we had like a um shotgun blast hitting the wall of all the different initiatives we had before the strategic plan was pulled together and leader and me um is a framework that pulled all of those a lot of those initiatives into one package that was much easier to present as a single package then we're doing pbis and we're doing restorative

127practices and collaborative problem solving and all of these different things happening all over the place and the reason that leader in me looked really attractive to me and i was excited that they were going in that direction was that it pulled it together into something that was a little bit more cohesive and simplistic um and so i guess i'm saying that as a person that's been looking at the program for years i just wanted to try to speak for christine and brittany which i know i probably just did a horrible job so that's it that's why i think the presentation would be in order yeah i think so too and just looking at the leader in me website um you know everyone can be a leader everyone has genius change starts with me educators empower

128students to lead their own learning and then develop the whole person and not just focusing solely on academic achievement so i i think there's and then if you go to topics of impact it's got five topics of impact and one is building student and staff resilience bullying restorative practices teacher efficacy and pbis so it really does pull together all of those different things that we were trying to right and focus is you're right instead of one program doing this over here it pulls everything together so it would be great to have to get an overview and so when someone in the community asks us well what is this leader in me that we have a better understanding and perhaps our communities would too rebecca that that's my concern i i know that at many of

129these board meetings i i hear a lot i hear often different programs that are being um utilized by our schools and on and and i just wonder sometimes if if teachers get um program fatigue um and it's like um so it would really be interesting i think bill asked before about surveying teachers on in on their response as to some of what's going on because um to me it it sounds a little bit like lots of different initiatives and and [Music] it was you know and then you just throw in another one that's bringing it together but it's still another initiative that a teacher needs to understand or integrate into the system um that that all sounds like a lot for a teacher to do in addition to teaching her students in addition to creating

130a curriculum in addition to and film i i'm looking forward to seeing and hearing getting an overview of the program okay thank you um it is 903 and we have a short conversation on public participation policy and then we have our item for action which is talking about our budget so i don't want to be here until 10 so if we could move on to public participation policy yep uh here i am trying to get my camera on again um but anyway i oh there we go there we are um sorry it says it's not going terribly well so if i get garbled i apologize in advance um i sent you all a document i think yesterday um seems like a year ago but uh which had to do with uh public participation in um

131in school board meetings i i would like to postpone this discussion until our next meeting um uh but i'd really appreciate it if you could read through the document that i sent you because i'm going to ask to have our policy updated and i'm going to ask to change uh to for us to consider um um creating consistency across our various meetings and uh uh because i think it'll and i'm going to ask that we consider uh changing the way we approach decision making because i i just to talk about it um because as you'll see in that document um and i'd be glad to provide sources for any of i did provide i think one of the main sources but uh yeah so i'd like to have about 10 or 15 minutes at the

132next meeting if that's all right on this subject sure so you could read the document that i sent that would be great that would really help okay we will do that thanks so we are going to move along now thank you elizabeth items for action we have our fiscal year 23 su budget review and approval yeah so i'm gonna just in the end of the time i'm gonna turn it over to larry who will kind of lead us through this with the budget committee input all right so i'm going to uh i'm not going to go through the entire uh budget presentation from last meeting um that's up on the website it's been shared out to all of you uh the budget committee which is rebecca roysman colleen spence and jamie turner has met several

133times we met again after the last meeting um and i've updated the numbers um and i have the recommendations which i'm gonna follow but for the interest of transparency i am going to talk about a couple of the changes that have happened uh basically from the state uh the one side is the adventure side which is the benefits um health and dental etc there's some of those changes are reflected here we got numbers back from the state and then also the act 173 revenue number um which i talked about earlier uh if you remember the state went from a 54 reimbursement rate for regular special ed to now it's a block grant so we didn't know what to budget for um but we got the revenue number from the state and that number came in

134close to what we had but it was not um perfect so and it came on the bad end so it the a special ed assessment actually went up um and the central office assessment actually went down based on when we got the final state revenue numbers but you're gonna all see that and again it's all been updated in the um spreadsheets i shared out um using google sheets when i make a change it updates it everywhere um so this is a total number now uh so before if you remember it was a five percent increase now it's a five point eight nine percent increase three point three eight percent of that is special ed and about admin and operations which is technology the curriculum department uh david the business office etc that is up two

135and a half percent year over year and to show you the differences um the the dollar amount increase from fiscal year 1920 through uh fiscal year 23 which is what we're working on right now tonight um was up 1.4 million and up 900 000 up a million and now 600 000 and those are the percentage increases you saw this last time but that's where before it was 5 now it's 5.9 and that is based on the um updated benefits numbers from the state uh what does this mean for your assessments and i i'm going pretty fast because i'm going to get to the recommendations but um equalize people in adm again those are the assessments we use this is the heartland assessment and you can see the change now again the big caveat here is

136we're using adm for food services which i'm going to talk about in a second um then mount scott me these are reflecting the new numbers weathers field and then the total assessments so this is all the assessments together that's what it does again special ed assessment went up uh a fair amount because of that revenue offset and the central office actually went down a hair um so that's well that's what will happen here so if you remember when we saw it last time weathersfield was actually going to pay like 4500 less now it's up 37 000. basically do that entire assessment different is basically due to um the act 173 revenue so the budget committee met and we they made recommendations um for tonight's meeting so the first one is a food service program coordinator

137uh no that's a recommendation so it's not in this budget it's not any of those numbers you just saw the dei coordinator the recommendation was yes with esser funds for fiscal year 23 which is next year and then the local s u budget fiscal year 24. and then the the food services assessment there was no consensus from the budget committee they wanted to open that discussion up to the entire su board to make a recommendation or a change right now based on the total assessments you saw it was if it was um adm again to uh define terms equalized pupil is every student in the su whether they choose a high school choice that's not windsor high school and adm is only students in the building so for example the foods the the logic would

138be that food service is not serving springfield high school students or hartford high school students only students in our building whereas special ed and david's office etc serve all students um and that's where again most of the the money is in the su budget so just just a quick summary in the interest of time those were the recommendations of the committee uh as larry said so there's no funding in this budget for a food service program coordinator and there's no funding in this budget for a dei coordinator for for this year the avm and equalized pupil discussion again just in the interest of time tonight because i think that should be a healthy discussion does not have to happen tonight that decision it could be in december it has to happen though before january because

139um you know you do need the accurate assessment number in your budget when you go to print not that it won't change some and it's not fluid a little bit as you go into the year but it would be nice to have that so um so i think the essential goal tonight if you want to discuss that tonight we can um but we uh we would recommend adoption of that ten million eight hundred and eighty one thousand fifty nine dollar budget and maybe a motion to just get it on the floor would be enough right now uh and then we could have other other discussions yeah bill you're right yeah student count is correct yeah probably we used to use the term adm colloquially in this issue from change 10 15 years ago but you're

140you're right we should i should you i should update to say enrollment count yeah or student account building count i also saw another account building count probably sounds better yeah i also saw another comment in the chat i just thought it was elizabeth had a question what is this ddi coordinator just one person well in essa right now it's um my understanding is it's around eighty thousand dollars but there's also carryover from besser2 for message two of another so am i right i wanna make sure i get that right not there's nothing in this local budget for the dei coordinator because we did budget for it in esser as we move forward with a job description and or a job prospectus but what do you put in there um 14 500 for that's our work

141with dr crum which i think is our our dei work and then we had suggested that we i mean we have not worked out the numbers for s or three we don't have a tentative budget just what we were thinking um last year when we were looking at sr2 and we knew that part of the ao the aoe was asking systems to be thinking about sustainability and that knowing that any positions that we created during with recovery funds was going to either be discontinued or part become part of the local funding um after the recovery period ended and that's one of the reasons i think i don't want to speak for the budget committee members rebecca colleen and jamie but i think the thinking was we would put a stake in the ground and budget

142for it locally fiscal year 24 regardless of essa right so right that's our next year or if we hire somebody this spring it would be esser and then it would be fiscal year 24 funded locally in the esu budget thank you rebecca your hand is raised oh i just wanted to respond also to um elizabeth's question in the chat and that is that yes we only spoke about one one person right yeah that's what i wanted to be clear with also with uh elizabeth that when we discussed this at the budget committee level for the su we were talking about one position one job description colleen spence hi we talked about that some when we were talking about the budget too elizabeth about um never one person and we understand that that's true but we

143weren't in a position to you know make those decisions now we don't expect we we're kind of um i guess our guess was that we may not be at the point of being ready to hire anybody by spring and if we were we wanted to have some money set aside but that we you know wouldn't there wouldn't likely be two by then but i'm with you that i think that it it is more than one person's job yeah i mean the other thing we haven't explored and we would need to explore i think as we go forward is the scope of the work in the job description right that we haven't developed and determined that yet and also you know the the fact that it needs to be more than more than one person as

144the work unfolds doesn't mean that it can't be you know looking at different uses of of people that are already in the system it might not have to be you know two or three or four new hires right i mean i i i think it can be there could be some creativity in the way you try to surround this person with a good team a good collaborative team to do the work we've talked about models where you've got a point person in each building for example or a point person in each district that might be at a reasonable stipend salary to to work with the dei i just think it's early in the process to really make that determination that's what we talked about at the budget committee level and i know that with so3

145floating out there uh i think there would be a way if we could get a job description written and agreed to by the end let's say by the end of you know this year i think we'd be in a good place to really to really do a good job in hiring and then in our next budget cycle figure out if we needed to do you know more than that and it i'll just add in that i know this isn't the time to talk about it but i know that it's gonna i know that it probably is preferred to have two people i also know we have we're a small rural community i don't know if i don't know if we can afford two people you know it's a qui it's a conversation to have but

146[Music] we'll talk more about it down the road right that will be a meeting all on its own and i also think the adm versus uh i'm sorry student count student count versus um equalized people could be a healthy discussion too and i just don't want to rush it at 9 20 at night i i do think i do think we do have to uh get a number for the budgets that are going to be developed locally because december we plan on presenting some facility of of of a draft budget for all districts yeah just do that assessment number just to reiterate what david saying the general fund is the administration operations and um and special ed the food service is an entirely separate fund so again like he's like he's saying the number you're

147proving is that number tonight and then the assessments you could change up until you don't want to do it but you could you could change that later for food and also food services if you went between adm and equalized people you know in a budget such as mount scotty you know it would not be a huge difference as far as their total budget number whereas changing this for example if we change the assessment out for special ed it would make a huge difference in amount of study so well all three districts right oh exactly are we at a point board i'm asking that someone would like to make a motion scott oh i can't hear you scott i need that volume scott i'm sorry i thought there was a motion on the table i don't

148think anybody made a motion yet nope there isn't a motion yet and again the motion would be it would have to include the number 10 million eight hundred and eighty one thousand and fifty nine dollars uh expense budget for the su for fy23 i'll make that motion to approve the number david just said wendy you got that number and he's got that number i assume [Music] is there a second i'll second discussion scott thanks so i'm glad that's on the table and i and i appreciate david and larry both explaining that we need this number and we can figure out how to divvy it up later and that makes an awful lot of sense it doesn't make i'm on board with that i've got some things written down and so whether it's late or not

149i need to say these things first of all going back to the beginning of the meeting and in the spirit of um in the spirit of uh what's the word oh the trust and verify school government in district governance um you know a couple things have been said tonight i'll go quickly here the go slow approach and or go slow to go past go fast excuse me go slow to go fast and and uh and us time out on new initiatives and that i just want to remind the whole group here um not that i have this all figured out but you know larry did bring students and students in school all day and i was really glad to hear that but you know the go slow approach and time out on new initiatives basically

150in my opinion does forgets the students and so it's the students and it's the fact that the clock doesn't change in the months go by and the years go by the students don't get another chance at middle level education or or a consistent curriculum across the su they don't get another chance at that so it's our job too make the decisions we have to make in a timely manner and you know both these go slow approaches and pauses on new initiatives largely serve school district employees and us as board members we're not school district employees and they have to well they need to get the job done and and then in the the setting that we're we've figured out in the last year and a half that um there's no such thing as pausing or

151you know getting it done later um the the pain is now um as the assessments go um i want to bring your attention to the minutes that we approved pages three and four and the uh the rough draft from last month on the assessments and i want you to note that the largest changes in those assessments were the food district the food service changes in some cases double digit they're the largest changes for and that goes directly against the spirit of um i couldn't find this in the minutes i could not go back in the minutes on the su site far enough to find any record uh um it's there for the public to see of the the discussion around why we went to equalize pupil years ago as i remember the reason for that

152was uh you know leveling year to year expenses for districts and so there's predictability that's really important and so changing that to a student account you know initially throws you know it throws that that idea under the bus and it um it brings a great amount of change the other thing i want to point out is that uh the districts that are you know gonna benefit from that are districts that have made a community decision a governance decision where students leave the district that's a community decision decision on the budget and the assessments it's the decision of this board so they're really two different things and to tie them together as if the students leaving the district entitles us to not spending in that area because those students are gone is wrong-headed in my in

153my mind i don't think they go together scott i i let me clarify just not not from what you're just saying but the intent my understanding of the um of of the funding based upon students in the building is only regarding the food that's right okay yep that's right those are the double-digit increases that i pointed to in the minutes from last month and decreases decreases for heartland significa and the largest the largest in every single district the largest increase or decrease is attributable to the change in assessment for the food program yeah scott's correct so and then i want to bring up one last thing is the um attention for the board at our new equity policy i just can't stress this enough it's a brand new policy and it you know it really

154articulates that we don't count a student and put a resource over there and this is the same for every student across all districts yeah that we meet students where they are we should be meeting students where they are as important as according to that policy i support that policy completely um the one caveat is that through the virtue of that policy's development his superintendents association the principals association and the school boards association managed to get the word may in there in front of unequal distribution of resources so in in that equity statement there's the word may require unequal distribution of resources i disagree with that i i've made that clear over months but um it's clear to me that it does require unequal distribution of resources and those students are the same so i have

155no problem you know cooking with equalized pupil even though for food program assessment even though it you know may not be intuitive to our communities but you know it's it's con it meets the the larger goals of the equity policy and of consistent uh year over year that's my speech thank you can i ask a follow-up question amy may i ask a follower question of scott um [Music] yeah nicole has her hand up but okay maybe she had same question you're muted um so i i will scott and i have had this argument between us as well um and i i don't think that we want to get deep into the adm discussion today but what i do want to say is that i'm the one that originally proposed this change um and there's a

156few reasons behind this change um one of the big ones is that heartland and weathersfield invented the food program that we don't have and when windsor joined the food program heartland's food budget skyrocketed the amount that we were supposed to contribute because it was no longer based on what students we were actually feeding it was based on our equalized people which includes 30 of our kids that aren't so i proposed this because i was looking at our budget trying to figure out how i was going to explain to our taxpayers that our food budget went up by forty thousand dollars just because another school joined the program that we had started so that's what initiated this discussion um another thing that is really frustrating to some of the heartland board members is that the food

157program by design is to encourage as many students as possible to eat on campus and the way the high school is currently structured the students are it's an open campus and certain percentage of students are allowed to go wherever they want to eat and are therefore taking away from the food program so that goes against one of the foundational ideas of when we created the food program and so and it sounds like emory agrees with me that adding another school caused both of our districts to have to pay more money into the food program and so that and i to combat the change from year to year i don't think that you know i'd be happy going with equalized people and taking off 30 knowing that 30 of our kids don't have any access to

158the food program and we pay tuition which in theory costs that has that food program cost in it so i it just feels like we're double dipping everywhere um and it didn't it wasn't appealing to a lot of the heartland thank you nikki bill so okay so so so let me clarify i think unfortunately i was sick during the last su board meeting but this is my this is what i support okay one that the food program contribution is based upon the students in the building that's what i would like it to be two in no way do i support an open campus for students who can drive the last thing i want to have is more teenagers on the road in the middle of the afternoon this is what i've supported since i joined

159the board okay so regardless of that they now have an opportunity to eat better food at school i yeah i'm not for the whole open campus thing um so that's what i support bill that whole open campus thing is for a completely other meeting at a mountainous gutney school district oh i know i'm just telling you what i support okay yeah so let's not i mean it is it's 9 32. yeah yeah and i don't want to i think it's a good discussion i think there's a lot of valid points between scott and nikki but i i think the important thing is um what we put in for the assessments is what is currently in the comparative budget report that's what when when we're doing the local budgets that's what we're going to use um

160and then if you come back in the december meeting to change it to the student account like bill just outlined or to equalize people which is what scott is advocating uh it would it would affect those local budgets so it's like you can put the decision off that you know that's fine it's gonna change your local budget so to what extent and how much you're can stomach uh that's that's a different question but uh just a heads up on if you don't make a decision on the assessment for food services tonight which calculation to go with um that's what's going to happen bill did you have a question if it makes sense yeah my my rebuttal would be um that both the communities of weathersfield and heartland have decided on their own to keep up

161with um you know just to stick with high school choice and it's pretty darn clear every single budget season the cost increases in tuition that go hand in hand with that and and to point out um so i think it's unfair to point out increases in food service that are um let's just call them insignificant compared to high school tuition increases and so i really think it that we because we're a policy body i'm just going to stick with equity policy unequal distribution of resources and my what i think is my role as a school director which is consistent spending predictable spending decisions for the community thank you scott are we ready to vote okay i will go down the roll again anne-marie we're voting on the overall budget so we're voting correct yes without

162any designation as to whether or not it's how the food service is being paid for correct okay uh hi bill hi colleen spence [Music] hi davis hi elizabeth i jamie hi mark hi nikki hi rebecca hi scott i support the overall budget plan for the su thank you and my vote is i so the overall budget for the supervisory union is 10 million and fifty 1059 dollars assessments to be determined in december correct thank you board wonderful thank you thank you thank you and thanks especially colleen jamie and uh rebecca rebecca who put a lot of time into this yes so our next agenda which that meeting let's look because december starts getting crazy um the fourth monday in december is december 27th are people willing to take a break from their happy holidays and

163have a meeting [Music] year-round full-time employees so we'll do whatever the pleasure of the board is board i'd rather not the 27th okay um our other the 13th would be the other date if you wanted to go in december that works for me right we have skipped a december meeting because you're working hard on local budgets but we we certainly don't have to we've got a lot to do for sure if we did the 13th and the only thing on the agenda was the assessment that would be good assessment and what was the other one we had and then those policies yeah the policy readings yeah we could do the 13th and just keep it to a to a really set agenda does that work for everybody on the 13th yeah if we had assessment

164and discussion on the public participation and the first reading of the library policy and second reading the benefit of the 13th is that the 13th of december correct correct i think we have another meeting on the 13th the anti-racism yeah that's five to six is what i have but if we went at 6 30. i just think the benefit of the 13th is for a couple your boards it would also if we could get that assessment locked down i could give that information to the to ed for the local budget right that would be the benefit of the 13th because it's earlier in the month um but david if the anti-racism meeting is from five to six could we meet his aboard at 6 30 like normal this board is usually scheduled for 6 30.

165so so that would work yeah the meeting with melissa is that the one five to six in my calendar it's five to six yeah okay that works okay everyone good with the 13th okay are you good so it will be food service public participation um second reading on the and first reading on library policy yeah i did it so just leave it all right so repeat that again amy sorry that will be food service assessment public participation policy first reading of library policy and second reading of the special ed policy yeah that sounds good did you say public participation yes yes that's perfect that's a healthy night it is and then we'll all toast happy holidays to each other at the end it's a good idea so i think we're good uh we do not

166need an executive session tonight okay i move we adjourn and bill thanksgiving bill we appreciate your opinion no thank you i do thank you guys thanks have a good night happy thanksgiving