001okay i'm going to call this meeting to order oops hold on [Music] uh i don't have any believe it or not i don't have any additions or corrections to the agenda today can you believe that you can i did have one change i've thought about making but i'm not going to um so uh uh i yeah i was thinking about moving the next meetings agenda to up before just before the um executive session but uh anyway um okay public participation i believe we'll have somebody who has something is there anybody besides mr wartz who is from the public who would like to say something okay nancy i think that might be you is that you i just let lisa and i think as long as everybody mutes their mic okay and is daniel the only
002one who wants to make a public comment okay daniela you might have five minutes it's currently 6 33 uh can you hear me yes great i saw that uh restorative just um was on the agenda item and i wanted to throw some thoughts out following firing a principal riley on that matter to start um some suggestions perhaps in a more heterodox uh perspective than you may be used to hearing and i may start that by suggesting uh to not as chris lord did in the october 14th board meeting castigate approximately half of the entire country on the basis of their political affiliation uh under a provable falsehood that such affiliation was somehow directly connected to the devaluation of a specific race i would also suggest that the school board not as they unanimously did in
003their decision to fire eyelid take a critically deconstructed subjective interpretation of a statement made as the true meaning of the statement independent of what the actual author of this statement truly impediments in uh supported by that author's own background and life of actions i'd ask that the board consider that safe spaces cancel culture microaggressions and trigger warnings may just do more harm than good to all individuals i'd like you to consider if creating a myriad of things as racist sexist or or some uh or as a direct consequence of any of those isms no matter the actual intention or severity again as you did in your decision against riley may create a cry wolf effect for occasions where there is actually a true racial sexual or other discriminatory based problem and make it more difficult
004to filter real and significant problems from pretended or exaggerated ones i would add the consideration more broadly speaking that laser focusing on race in this instance or any particular individual differentiating characteristic as the single most important element of any part of life or interaction between people and codifying that into the curriculum is quite the opposite of what leaders like dr martin luther king would have wished for that what the board truly ought to be doing is teaching uh and codifying this in curriculum with the appropriate board's true critical thinking skills anti-fragility that words are not inherently violence that would what does not kill you may in fact make you stronger that your feelings should not necessarily always be trusted that life is not by definition a battle between pure good and pure evil people or
005as ibram can be and similar anti-racism advocates assert between racist people and anti-racist people as if you can't just simply be not racist or that a person with a different ideological belief than you is not by definition a person that you can't associate with uh and much more broadly to consider turning around what by a heterodox outsider perspective is a growing systemic ideological indoctrination to postmodernist doctrines like critical race theory selectively spotlighted intersectional intersectionality or the categorically false and willfully dishonest idea taken as truism that america is an irredeemably systemically racist sexist or other ist place that is in summary to consider the ideas of jonathan heights or thomas soule rather than those of abram candy or robin deangelo and treat everyone as individuals judged on the content of their character with skin color being
006no more important than their height or the color of their eyes and hair it's a shameful reality i think that a tremendous amount of people believe what i just said but are quite scared to say it and the school board should take blame for that being the case i appreciate the audience thank you i i have a little bit of an expanded version of that that i'll email out yeah i think your mic is off elizabeth yeah that would be helpful to mail out a print would copy daniel uh next we have announcements and celebratory comments from board members um i i would like to i i don't know if this is correct but i wanted to congratulate the high school um which has formulated a community service um activity sheet is that correct where
007students are able to reach out to community members who are in need of some assistance with some sort of activity it may be raking their lawn or um or cleaning up their yard uh but i just think that this is i i just saw it recently on the town manager's newsletter and i just think that it's just a great way for um students to connect with the community and the community to connect with students so i just i i was really pleased to see this and i want to congratulate i guess the high school for pulling this together yeah i would have to give credit to the students their counselors and their their grade level pod teachers a lot of our teams choose different projects all of our students are required the community service this
008year once we went into covid and remotely in march it was a harder ask because going out into the community was difficult but we are trying to get back out there and making a lot of flexible options for our students to get their community service hours so we're thankful for those wonderful opportunities too thank you thank you rebecca and thank you colleen um and now um i'd like to introduce lisa ryan as you may recall since shortly after we placed tiffany riley on administrative leave in june we have been talking about when and how to go about restoring the communities of windsor and west windsor both the educational communities and the communities at large despite being incredibly busy but also with gushing praise from uh several people who recommended her i reached out to lisa
009um who lives in rutland lisa and i spoke in july and a couple of times since as we drew nearer when we were ready as a board to help these two communities move away from certain conflict and towards a piece among us lisa would you mind starting with a quick background of what you do yeah good evening can everyone hear me perfect i apologize i'm a little under the weather so my my voice is in and out um but thank you for having me this evening um i've been in contact like uh elizabeth said uh with with her since about july and um i'm really grateful for the opportunity to be here tonight and and to formulate some work going forward um so i'm lisa ryan i live in rutland city i i grew up
010in rutland attended rutland city public schools um i moved away for college where i went to temple university and studied psychology in spanish and then when i moved home um once it was time to you know start repaying back all of those loans um i was thinking about what i wanted to do and what that looked like for me um my family's in rutland i'm again i i was raised in rutland so my roots are really strong in this community in the community of vermont um so eventually i decided to get my graduate degree so i have a master's in mediation and applied conflict studies which has really allowed me to take various leadership roles within my community and within um my day-to-day work that i do which is um restorative and community justice work
011so i'm the director of the rutland county community justice center at brock community action we help folks who are coming out of incarceration we help them reintegrate back in the community utilizing restorative justice approaches we also work with victims and harmed and impacted parties i direct a supervised visitation program as well underneath the community justice center where we work with custodial and non-custodial families and dcf and who have children in dcf custody and really i say that all because all of the work that i do and including being involved in as an alder woman on rutland city board of aldermen um is really grounded in in conflict and and conflict management and skill building and mediation and resolution um and restorative justice really fits really nicely um it compares nicely with with those things so
012you know my interest in kind of um inclination to work with you all and and um you know a lot of what has been happening in your own community is to see what your needs are and hear from all of you um you know as far as how can we you know make the community whole again how can we engage in practices where we're valuing all opinions and all views and restorative justice really comes uh into that and that we are making sure everyone at the table has um you know an equal and equitable chance to to um speak and engage and be involved so um when elizabeth asked me to join tonight i hopped off a committee meeting it's budget season for a lot of us and board of aldermen were deep in our
013budget so i hopped off one call to get on this and and i'm happy to do so but i'd love to know um more about what you're looking for i also do trainings on microaggressions and social and racial justice i've worked uh collaboratively and uh with tabitha moore who i'm sure many of you have if you don't know her personally you've heard about a lot of what's happened to her and her family um so a lot of the work that i do is is based in rj is based in in conflict and also moving forward and and making sure that we're living and and you know we're really grounded in equitable anti-racist society thank you so much for being with us lisa thank you uh so um i'm having a heart there's so many people
014on here i'm having a hard time seeing everybody but uh does anybody have any thoughts about uh where we'd like to go with this um rebecca i know you had some thoughts about it amy i know you had i can't see you i know you had some thoughts about it chris i know you've had some thoughts about it uh and i'm sure that um that nancy and bill do too i just haven't talked directly with you i just think we are uh oh thank you by the way lisa for for being here and and um um speaking in a direction of healing and and and i think that's um that's um some of my concerns about what is going on i feel that we are this is a defining moment um and um and and
015i strongly believe that everyone has something to say and um how do how do we um how do we come together is is is not necessarily what i want to say but how do we move forward um how do we get to a place where we can speak to each other um in a respectful manner um and although we may disagree but um but just value that that peace that that freedom that we do have to speak um and um and move forward on the issues that that really need to be addressed it's it's a really challenging time right now um the schools i i i i you know i'm sure that schools will look back two years a year or two from now and say what was that how did that go our students
016are clearly being challenged in a way like never before our parents are being challenged in a way as like never before our teachers um um yeah um and so we've we've got work to do in spite of the challenges that we're living we have work to do and how do we do that um and get back to that place that's that's some of my thoughts thank you thank you thank you rebecca bill you raised your hand i can't see you on here but please go ahead he's there and his hand is raised and i'm sure he's trying to get to his mic i i basically just want to say thank you for taking the time to come to speak on this extremely important subject thank you so much i'm happy to be here um one
017of the questions i'd have for lisa is from your experience with doing this kind of work i mean would do you think uh you know a series of forums might be helpful uh do you think uh you know how how do you start to engage a community in some you know dialogue around you know some of these issues that can become pretty divisive if if we don't uh if if we don't have conversations about them right that's um that's a really important question and kind of at the center of all this and and you know and how how do we move forward and in what ways do we do that um i certainly think um community forums can be helpful i mean of course we are in unprecedented times and and you know whether that
018looks virtual or in person um you know probably virtual for the unforeseen future but um either way gathering and again making sure in restorative justice we talk about all parties so those harmed those who might have caused the harm and then um the community or victims and so how do we center that um and make sure it's it's part of all the work that we're doing so i think community forums are oops did i freeze up no you're good you're fine i think community forums are a great start um and i would also recommend um workshops as well for for the board um you know as as a as a collective um moving forward with different workshops around microaggressions um anti-bias training anti-racist training um and that way it allows you to develop and kind
019of expand your skills so that you can be more comfortable having these conversations and making these decisions but i certainly would be in support of you know facilitating conversations um you know between the board and either the public or any other parties that have been really centered around what's been going on lately thank you anybody else i think uh yeah there was another hand that went up chris ganjos oh there's your hand sorry you need your mic on too chris he's trying to get there and amy also has her hand up too elizabeth versus getting there i can tell he's these machines have been tough all day yes they really have lisa i'm trying to be careful about your time so just we can come back to chris you're okay would you mind nope i'm
020excuse me i'm good i'm also feeling like uh been in meetings all day today um so my concern um and i would think the most challenging thing for mediation or a restorative conversation in this area is the fact that there are different perceptions of who is harmed and who is being harmed by all of this work and a just uh an immediate jump to feeling defensive and i applaud you and i thank you for wanting to come and help us have this conversation because there has been a significant amount of defensiveness yeah thank you amy and and i think that's like part of the conversation that i'd like to you know speak more independently with the board about is you know what does that look like there might be multiple responsible parties there might be
021multiple um folks who are impacted or harmed harmed um and and then there's a community too so how do we you know change lenses to make sure you know everyone's being heard and supported and moving forward with this work thank you yo now chris is back with us chris do you want to quickly go i'm going to let lisa go and get on her her meeting yeah no that's fine and i at least i want to again i wanted to thank you uh for being here and i think amy may have in her the process of her question though i had to cut out and come back so i missed some of it uh i wanted to ask you to to give us a real short thumbnail definition of restorative justice for those people either
022on the call or the community that listens to this later on um so that some of us already understand it and we use words that uh not everybody does understand so just yeah absolutely so um and and i when i say restorative justice that that's a philosophy right it's um when in my work i say restorative justice because we're working within the criminal legal system um so when i talk about restorative justice uh kind of big picture i'm talking about using restorative approaches and transformative approaches to work through things so for example in the work that i do with many folks coming out of incarceration who who are under department of uh correction supervision we're looking at how we can heal how we can be restorative how we can be holistic in um making sure
023that folks are doing what they need to do in order to um reduce recidivism you know protect and enhance community safety and make sure there are no victims we're sort of approaches and practices and i apologize i sort of started with this over broad lens of restorative practices um are taking some of those philosophies not necessarily um you know in the context of the criminal legal system um but more so in life in the way that we do things and making sure we're transparent um we we're really it's not at us versus them it's a holistic approach that allows us to all come together in decision making um in working through things um you know when i think about restorative approaches and and i've done some work with with um schools and and particularly rutland
024intermediate school on you know things like community circles and how do we build community um how do we hold one another responsible respectively and how do we have those hard conversations and what is it like and how do we frame those conversations and those questions so that again we're making sure equity is is is uh intact we're making sure we're listening to people's emotions we're uh and feelings and we're really coming at it from really a bottom up you know to processing and going forward in that way i i that's that's a basic oversight of it and i'd be happy to get you more you know materials and a little bit more context around that but um a little elevator pitch that's what i've got for today that's good and elizabeth will you keep in
025touch with lisa in terms of plans going forward yup thank you so much lisa thank you appreciate you all some of your time um and please um you know get your thoughts to elizabeth about if you have you know particular and specific things that you want and that you need so that um you know essentially when i when i drop some you know scopes of services and things like that i'm attending to the needs that you all want because this is your process and i want to be here to support and facilitate that okay all right thank you good luck with your budget all right um uh so that was that was the wonderful lisa ryan um uh i i i tacked on a report of the of the racial equity task force which is
026the governor's um task force uh hold on i'm gonna put it in the where are the comments where are they if you got kicked out there they are sorry here's the here's the task force that i'm referring to uh so this is the governor's task force on racial equity um and uh you can it's quite long it's like 25 pages long um there are a few pieces to it that i thought would be good for us to for our board to know about um there are a few recommendations uh concerning um punishment and discipline um i'll just quickly read through some of it it says this is on page 11 punishment and disciplinary tactics including including expulsions suspensions and referral to law enforcement for student behavioral issue issues are counterproductive to countering systemic oppression in
027our school systems these tactics force students to miss academic lessons often making it impossible for the student to catch up they also don't aggress address the root cause for the students behavior and squander the opportunity for students growth in their emotional intelligence the task force believes the state should prohibit expulsions reduce suspensions and stop referrals to law enforcement for student behavior and instead adopt in-school and out-of-school services that address the root causes of student misbehavior and directly support their needs i think you should be pleased with this because we're already on this path i'm reading this to you because i feel like because this was a report commissioned by the governor that will probably have some legislation that's um will be coming up in this regard in the in the pretty near future uh uh
028furthermore the impact of school's current standard to identify and address bullying and harassment falls short of its intentions the task force recognizes that the legal distinction between bullying and harassment is vague ambiguous and does not reflect the experiences of students of color students with disabilities and students who identify as lgbtqia these are students who report being subjected to actions by their peers that are intended to ridicule humiliate or intimidate them on a repeated basis and that have substantially interfered with their right to access education the task force also recognizes that both students and adults engage in behavior that could constitute could constitute harassment but because it's masked or implicit the evidence of racial slurs or epithets are not present uh so anyway it has it has a couple of recommendations on here um which i
029think are things that we've really already been talking about one of them is the problem of uh of our our bullying um our bullying definitions um we're not definitions but uh don't include um uh they require evidence and they they uh they don't include um uh that they require um there to be uh so this sorry i'm getting muddled this would ask that a complainant be able to request an independent review of any bullying or harassment um accusations and so anyway just the reason i that i have brought this up is so that you could know where the governor's thoughts are headed um does anybody have any questions about that um uh uh elizabeth i i do have a uh a question um because i know that i've been told that uh we're we we
030review policies um school policies on an ongoing basis um would this be an opportunity to look at the policies um that are related to harassment that are related to bullying yes um and sort of help bring it in in line with what the governor's report is is requesting um that's right that's right and uh also uh we have policies and we have procedures and i i don't know that we have any policies that govern punishment or um expulsion from school i know that we have procedures that govern punishment and expulsion um uh and this sort of implies that that's going to um be looked at at a statewide level um and you know again our board isn't necessarily we or our board isn't where policy is made it's at the su board but um i
031i brought it to your attention at this level because i thought you would also be pleased to to see that what you're already doing is uh is what they're recommending so i think that's uh you should be you should be proud of yourselves um does anybody else have any questions or comments about this i can't see any hands besides rebecca do you have another question okay you learn how to put down now that's kind of that's a good job um okay moving on uh uh is next i believe is our budget um i hope everybody had a chance to look at the budget before just now uh i before we start talking about the budget i just feel it really necessary to say out loud that uh we are at the same budget process that
032we've had for the last at least six years and uh i i have to acknowledge that i'm frustrated here because we've been talking about as a board our desire to have the budget reflect our values so that when we present it to our our taxpayers we have something that we can explain and not just go through what the numbers are um we often have explanations for things like social emotional interventions and things like that but we don't have an overall picture of how the budget expresses our values um uh so i i just want to say that out loud yeah i i think it's you know i i agree elizabeth and i think that um yeah i mean i think it's just you know stated stated well and the process you know maybe needs to
033start a little earlier or maybe it has to spring from some sort of a summer retreat but we get caught in that cycle of of of this of the budget cycle and uh you don't always get that time what i will what i will say though is i know that kate and jennifer and colleen have spent a fair amount of time in the context of the strategic plan to some degree and also where as an administrative team they want to move uh the district forward um and i know they have a presentation they want to give tonight and then and then ed um you know ed has the numbers we can pull up later on but i think it might be wise to just listen to their powerpoint first and then we can get questions
034from that react to that uh you know they are providing the leadership for the monastery district and and i know they've worked hard on that and i i also want to say that it's clear it's abundantly clear that you guys worked really hard on this budget so thank you i see amy hand up elizabeth oh sorry amy yeah just a quick comment um it it is frustrating but at the same time at a certain point we as the board when we're looking at these numbers and preparing our presentation have to take the numbers and relate them to our strategic plan and i think it'll be really nice to hear what our administrators have to say so i'll listen to their presentation but we we also as a board need to use those numbers in our
035presentation showing that they do relate to the strategic plan which i am really hopeful that they do so thank you i i i think that's part of my frustration amy is that we are given the budget and then we are also the people who have to um explain the budget even though so well yeah except that's part of our job yeah but i i guess i'm saying that i i wish i had more of a hand in the budget yeah if i'm if i'm going to have to present it yeah i gotcha okay can you see that okay thumbs up we good can you see that okay good all right um so who's going to start kick this off is it colleen yeah i'll squared it off um thank you all for listening and giving
036us this opportunity uh we'd like to do exactly what you've just asked elizabeth and that is start with what we're doing and what we're excited about that we do believe is reflective of what the board is asking and wanting and supporting so that's how we decided to start we worked as a team and we're thankful to ed for meeting with us and helping kate and i along the way as we're learning a little bit a little bit more so and um yeah we're our number one uh piece is working as a team and being collaborative and we are doing that as a team of three and we're also doing that with our admin team and we want to be doing that with our school board and our community and our parents and our students and
037our teachers all the time so that's that's our number one goal so the first um three things i'm going to talk about is our big picture learning flexible pathways and portrait of a graduate and how some of those exciting things reflect in the in the budget and where we want to put our supports so with big picture learning what we're excited about is that this is a program started as a consultant who supported us about four four and a half years ago and we've been able to attend conferences have pd have a consultant here at our school in more than one school in our in our su and access to that consultant to help us with making a connection to flexible pathways and act 77 and personalized learning plans for our students and we saw
038a connection here that looked at out of the box thinking for leave to learn projects leave to learn experiences uh field trips internships they were matching nicely with our flexible ways program with our flexible pathways program we were always offering some online components prior to covid but there was a much bigger need for our online programming with virtual high school with ad options with other online programs to offer those passion courses that we don't we don't have the capability to offer in our school so a class in a japanese class a american sign language class a unique science specialty so those are the things we want to continue to offer for our students but this year um both of these areas big picture learning and leave to learn and internships as well kind of took
039a step back due to safety and not traveling and our flexible pathways and online learning increased so they both kind of changed a little bit but they're both pieces that we want to make sure we hold on to and um are considering when we're looking at our our budget planning and how it matches our wants for our students to have the needs and the passions to find the coursework that matches their capacity and we we wanna we want to make sure our students have that capacity um and our school has the capacity to offer it with portrait as a graduate we had the great work of our community and over 60 participants of employees board community members and we came with our five competencies of perseverance empathy um communication critical thinking and integrity and i
040we just wanted to touch base on a couple of those living examples that have already begun and one of those i think i mentioned it at another board meeting was perseverance and we saw it in a first grade classroom the children were talking about what does perseverance mean and the amazing stories about what it takes to learn how to ride a bike without training wheels were heartbreaking and so joyful at the same time and empathy was built in automatically when the children were like you'll get it you'll be okay when their friend didn't have their training wheels off yet and the bottom line lesson was in our first grade classes that when you don't persevere when you give up you don't get to learn something new and have fun was the message that first graders
041got and so i bring that to our attention because our community was a big part of this strong communication of building portrait of the graduate competencies and it's already trickling in in an informal way people are grasping to these great ideas so we also have a junior class who did a an entrepreneur program and they persevered through the building the prototyping the creating the adjusting the prototypes selling the governor making a call that the governor's order we had to cancel the sale in a safe uh covered safe event on the windsor common so the students had to persevere be flexible and then move on to online sales so that was another example and and i want to speak about the communication because i know jen's going to talk about the critical thinking in project based
042learning and place based learning but the communication among the staff and us as a team an administrative team of three working together with our our the rest of our admin team is us modeling this good communication this great communication that we heard our guest speaker talk about and working through things and making sure everyone's being heard so those are the pieces that we're excited about because working through these difficult conversations to come is something we we're going to keep doing and and persevering on ourselves so that was my share so thank you for letting me share kate over to me um so as colleen mentioned a lot of what that has come out of this is how can we model what we've been experiencing and jennifer colleen and myself are in this unique situation where
043we were kind of thrown into at some points over the summer what felt like a nightmare inside a nightmare and we had to spend a tremendous amount of time with each other and i always say to them guys this doesn't feel bad to me this feels magical because we have such different skill sets and such different strengths that really build off each other and we learn so much from watching each other display those strengths and this is working for us so we thought well how can we have this naturally as it happened to us as natural as a pandemic can be how can we naturally transfer this to our staff and our students and our communities so we kind of looked at what we already had in place in both locations and looked for natural
044fits that would feel good to our staff and one of the first things that came to mind was our march intensives so like everything else in the world they came to a screeching halt in march of 2020 and that gave us time to reflect on what is the purpose of march intensives what do we want to get out of them and how can we build upon them so the value of march intenses is that it allows teachers to engage students in unique learning environments around topics that they wouldn't have in a traditional program the topics are usually centered around the teachers passions and skill sets so it helps us to build relationships because students get to interact with teachers in a new light and the other thing that it does is that's really important to
045us is the march intensives provide our students with opportunities to get out of the upper valley and see what else is happening they've taken trips to new york washington dc boston um and to bring those experiences back into our building so how can we make this district wide it in talking with jennifer and colleen would really like to start working together to start building up our five through eight team as one so in the next time we have an opportunity to do march intensives which we're assuming is going to be 2022 what we would like to do is start a mini march intensives in grades five and e and that would be district-wide so albert bridge school and windsor school would have the opportunity to do age-appropriate mini march intenses that have um some constraints
046is that that state stick to day trips in the local area and they could be classes such as cpr or babysitting stuff that would get both our staffs and our children's together and our children together um the next fit that we saw that was kind of natural is already happening is our mtss team and that's our um multi-tiered systems of support so when we began this process and examining our structure about seven years ago there was a big push to pull to um build up our tier two and our tier three interventions which looks like pull out support and special education services so the pandemic combined with the release of vermont's new field guide led us back to what we kind of had been missing the past couple years how can we build our universal
047practices so that we're relying less on these tier two and three supports and getting back to how do we wrap around these kids so um in this case it seemed like once again the pandemic aligned the stars for us and we were forced into these pod systems and that allowed us to to kind of achieve what we've been trying to achieve for a long time having teams made up of academic support social emotional support specialists and meeting the children's needs and um it's working and there's parts of these that would like to continue to keep postcovid and what we've begun doing is our mtss team would like them to function at one team so meaning the leader or mts leaders in our school bridget and gina aaron maureen in jennifer's school amanda that they're working
048together and gina provides a nice bridge for that because she's been back and forth between the two schools for two or three years now i believe um so that our systems and our resources are shared where our greatest need is and what our great and at the appropriate grade levels um so both schools that would have access to the same expertise the same skill sets and the same resources the last thing that seemed like a natural fit we were both already doing and that's that early release friday and the enrichment for the student but again we'd like that to stop operating as silos in each buildings and provide the necessary pd opportunities that all our staff needs to benefit all our kids and staff will be working together and our hope would be that our
049children could spend time together too accessing the same enrichment activities no matter what campus they're provided on the ones that are the best fit for our kids um i think i'm going to turn it over to jennifer now hi everybody i'm navigating the slides so just bear with me so teaching a link we're going to talk a little bit about project-based place-based teaching and leading towards stewardship sustainability and real-world problem solving lends itself well to place-based and project-based approaches and their pedagogy although sustainability is a global goal its problems and solutions are anchored and situated in our local ecologies in our communities place-based learning can be difficult to integrate as can project-based learning because it requires teachers to particularly for playspace to create their own curriculum you can't take somebody else's place and put it
050in your place that's the magic of place-based curriculum an integrate experiences in which the students explore issues within their community develop to develop practical solutions and we see this as um although we were already starting this before we had the portrait of the graduate discussions we view this as an excellent way of encouraging and practicing our portrait undergraduate competencies we think about critical thinking perseverance communication and empathy particularly all of these approaches that we've been talking up about from the beginning big picture flexible pathways march intensives the mtss system enrichment and professional development all of these approaches um that we are asking of our students and us is not to simply know them the big departure here from what traditional dis um teaching has been is that we don't learn about ecology we become ecologists
051we don't learn about government we become civic active civic engaged participants and in experiences within our community we don't learn about science and math we become mathematicians and we work as scientists we don't simply learn how to write we're authors with a purpose for authentic need to communicate our thinking our concerns our passions and our compassion so this is the shift that we are in the process of making already and i feel like portrait of a graduate is ideally situated already where we have been trying to go we now know that in order to change the brain and develop these kinds of more complex skills we actually have to engage in the very process of doing it not learning about it and we have to get those neural networks um doing it and practicing it
052in order for us to grow so we don't learn about them we lose we use them um our seo org i'll talk a little bit more about this if at the end of this we still want to hear about it but i'll give you a brief overview um of where we are which is one of the things i'm pretty excited about since 2014 we've really been working across the whole supervisory union to pull together our social emotional learning as the evidence at this point is pretty clear that it is central and fundamental to all good learning and the leading the guideline for our social emotional approach it has a philosophy behind it which is we believe in in our district we believe that kids do well if they can and what that means is that
053if a kid could do well he would do well and if they're not doing well something must be getting in their way from doing well and on the surface it probably seems like common sense um but as a friend often says um you know what they say about common sense it ain't that common but i want us to be clear that this is a strong strong departure from what traditional thinking has been in our schools and in many homes across the nation and we we were no exception traditional discipline has looked an awful lot more like kids do well if they want to which puts us in a position of trying to make a kid want to do well elizabeth already alluded to this with the um statement from the oh i forget what it's
054called now it's not a task force racial equity thank you the racial equity um [Music] passport oh no okay it's a task force um and if you think about you know a school because we're school right if you think about detention suspensions expulsions all of these interventions are aimed at telling a kid you better shape up this is important and they're going to be some pretty bad consequences if you don't start behaving properly and when a kid is trying their utmost to behave properly to stay in class not to explode not to be that kid but they can't do it and we continue to say yes you can if you just try harder eventually the kid is probably going to start to own that and start to think a little bit about who they are
055as a person based on how it is we are are treating them and i think we need to give some serious thought to the cost that occurs when we are sending the not-so-cell message to the child that we think they could pull it off if they just tried harder in other words along with every reward or threat of consequence comes a message which is i don't think you're trying hard enough because otherwise why would we be trying to motivate them we must think part of the problem is that they're not trying hard enough and i think it doesn't take long before we send that message enough time that the kid actually decides that maybe it might be true in other words as stuart avalon often reminds us if you give a dog a name eventually
056they will answer to it you send them the message enough times that they're just not trying hard enough eventually they may come to the conclusion i'm not trying hard enough in which case they might start to drop out that's literally and figuratively drop out of school drop out of actually engaging in the process that could help and finding other kids by the way who have also dropped out of life as well and i think this is a consequence about sending the wrong message that comes with those interventions thank goodness already in our times in our schools we have made a shift from this and we are doing some serious work and i think it's it's been a really long process and if we're still interested i can talk more about that later um one of
057the things that we're really trying to do even though this is a time of in essence a crisis time when we're in this pandemic as well as other things going on um around us socially and in our personal lives um you know resiliency is essentially being able to take those tough moments and what i've been thinking more more about which is finding the rainbow in the rain and this team this team has found that the rainbow in our reign is relationships we are building those through teaming and not just teaming amongst us as the three administrators of our district but we're looking at teaming across and they have been we have been teaming all year long and this is helping us break down some of the silos the working together has made a critical difference
058for our students in building relationships with the adults the adults building relationships with each other and i don't know if kate or colleen at some point have shared some of the data but in both schools the office referrals the discipline issues are so far down from what they have been in the past so we want to hold on to those things and you know we're not just talking about the formal leadership roles we're talking about all of us right all of us taking ownership and leading with our strengths um and learning from the others who who have strengths that we need to shore up and that need more nurturing so this brings us to what we think is our biggest change in this um budget that we're proposing which is we are shifting to what
059i'm viewing it anyway as a collaborative leadership model and within this we're hoping to bring strengths to both the schools by supporting our staff by supporting our students through the big idea multi-tiered systems of supports um really to help us create efficiency in our systems not just efficiency for money's sake but efficiency for actual capacity one of the things that is unique to rural areas is we don't have the same access that other larger more urban settings would have to resources of skilled talented people so what we really want to do is make sure that we are supporting the growth of our staff by using our staff as well as our students in leadership positions um and sharing this stewardship of our of our community of our environment i'm gonna pass back to colleen to
060put some meat on the bones so shifting the this collaborative model the actions we need to take are sharing based on the needs of our students and our staff as jennifer said we want to build the experts on our staff we want to build the leaders in our social emotional supports in our areas of academics our teachers who take the lead on march intensive our teachers who take the lead in extracurricular activities in our student governments art and so we want to build the leaders and we want to support and grow the the leadership that best works for our students and what's working is when we're teaming together and we're seeing a lot of transition of albert bridge students to windsor and sometimes in the opposite direction making connections from the adults in being on
061both campuses makes school easier for students when they're seeing the familiar faces and that's what we want to do we want to build this team to work together our school counselors have always traditionally made those really nice transitions for our kids our elementary counselors know our students well and the more they know about our fifth and sixth grade programs in both buildings together they're going to transit transition our students to seventh and eighth grade more easily and the more they're visible the better it is for our students to see that they still have a person in their corner that they know while they're getting to know more new staff members are social emotional and interventionists sharing resources expertise and time between buildings our social emotional interventionists and our behavior interventionists can be shared amongst our
062buildings as a mounis gutney staff mount ascutney team and that's nice especially when we know of staff members who are working with particular students and then that student has to make a transition to another building and lastly we are already starting connecting our mtss team and our 504 approaches because we want best practices and we want it to be consistent across the board students with specialized plans that's that's more stressful sometimes for parents we want to make those transitions as easy as possible and they should look similar in both those buildings so i'm going to pass it on to kate uh jen can you put up the next slide thanks so how does all this excitement and all this planning translate into numbers uh album bridge next year is looking um at a population of
063uh 40 plus their kindergarten class they're going to do grade bands 3 and 4 is going to be combined and 5 and 6 is going to be combined in winsor school we're looking at a total of 492 plus our k students the only thing we want everyone to keep on their radar is we're wondering if due to the pandemic many parents held their kids back from starting kindergarten this year and will those numbers be larger than usual next year but we don't we won't know that for a little bit um if we go to our next slide so our total wages is down and that kind of asks how's it happening are we cutting personnel during this time so this does reflect our wage increase and there's been a couple changes overall our teachers that
064retired were veteran teachers as we know when they're retiring at their on the other end of the salary scale so that makes an impact albert bridge school had a 0.3 teacher whose purpose was to support the combined classrooms during math time they weren't able to find someone to replace that but again the systems that we were forced to put into place this year showed us that we didn't need to replace that teacher because the model that we're using this year with accessing all of our staffs and on their skills it worked and it showed us that we did not need another position there and finally as we've alluded to we've kind of reorganized administration we went from three administrators in windsor building and one administrator in albert bridge to right now operating as three administrators
065for the district um as jennifer's talked about and colleen has talked about we are we're showing this to our staff and jennifer has been coming over here on tuesdays the invitation and the possibility of us starting to go over to albert bridges there but we're taking this small because we had a tremendous amount of time for us to work together over the summer and get to know each other and we're just hoping that this translates to our staff um on the next slide this is the benefits this reflects the 10 increase but it is a direct result of the decrease in the wages that the benefits um are not as high and then our next slide is contracted services so um you can see we made a impact here and that's for a couple reasons
066hcrs used to provide us with bis and support staff keaty um has really taken the lead on that and we now hire those people directly so they work for the su not for hdrs we have hrs in our building um we have a clinician in the school our speech and language uh pathologist that used to be a contracted service so any time it was contracted through special ed but anytime regular ed needed to access that person we also had to pay for that service separately it caused us to pay for transportation lots of things now we have those people directly on our um district staff the assessments out of district the food services and the buses have moved to the supervisory union level and that has saved us some money we are hope and the
067counseling i'm going to talk about together because it's a little bit tricky and it's kind of mis it's kind of all the stars aligning and coming together so we are hope is um kind of like life coaching for kids across the su and that's paid for out of medicaid the difference at windsor is that we paid for a clinician for about eighty thousand dollars and this happened at one point windsor school had two school counselors in the elementary school and two in the high school we did not replace one in those positions we replaced it with this we are hope clinician now that we're operating um the way that we are with the team approach and social emotional supports and building up that team across the district and we're looking at district wide um we
068do have two element elementary counselors because we have maury mulligan who's based out of our building and david gal who's based out of albert bridge and we still have our two two high school counselors do we really need to pay um this money to contract a clinician out of we are hope we're not accessing them as much as we would want to um and we think that between the hdrs clinician that we access here in our building and between our school counselors who do have a background maury mulligan started out as an hdrs clinician who do have this background um and the training and unification of our social emotional teams do we need to continue to access this agency strictly for a clinician and jennifer colleen and myself are in agreement that we do not
069that we can move forward without it uh next total maintenance and repair this is kind of jim taft so i'm presenting this on behalf of him i can jump in kate if you want no i can do this one then you got the next one i think okay go ahead um we are pausing this year on any construction we're not putting up walls taking down walls we're not doing any rearranging in any of the buildings and our equipment is all up to speed with we don't need to add any more we don't need to spend a lot of money fixing any of them so that's why um we were able to make this difference in this part of the budget and i think colleen you're up now yeah so um we did hear that our
070transportation system has been centralized to the su budget there there are always costs with um extraordinary situations for some students who may need that or out of district transportation but one of the great things that's come out of this as being centralized in the su budget is that we get to work with the bus company to be more efficient about bus routes that work for us as an su rather than a building to building bus route and that allows where there's overlap in high school and elementary siblings in two different buildings making sure the bus routes work for the geography of our students and families rather than what's traditional so that's that's a nice connection with it being and our next slide not not much change here at all there is a bit of a
071phone system cost increase but our insurance and postage has not changed much at all jen okay so i'll talk briefly one of the advantages of us becoming a merch district is that the students who at um west windsor starting in seventh grade used to have choice now we are all heading over to windsor but we still have the grandfathered group of people who have chosen and here's essentially where they are in the corner or the column on your right are the costs that we currently are paying and then up at the top is the grade that the students are in and then based on each school where they are each year as we go through this we expect to continue to see significant differences in this sorry my dog is just really excited i don't
072know what um and and so long as we don't get a lot of changes that we don't quite expect um that should continue so the total issue assessments those of you have been in the su um meetings you know that those are an increase of nine percent but they've also added some things including the transportation costs or early childhood education has gone up and special education increases have gone up our supplies were you know cutting a little bit here and there so we're we're looking at just trying to knock a few things out of out of the budget for next year knowing that it's another tough year for our state for our taxpayers and we think we can navigate this fairly successfully so overall our budget for this coming up year we are looking at
073being down 2.71 percent total with which is the difference of 321 509 before i open this up to questions and comments um i want us all just to take a moment and step back and reflect together why are we here what's our purpose i know this is a budget discussion and i know a lot of people have spent exceptional time energy brain power particularly lately trying to help us make sense of this throughout our community why do we show up why do you as a board member invest your time and energy in this we've seen the numbers because you're getting paid well um so why do we as educators do the work that we're doing and i've been grappling with this for for a little while now at the same time i've recently started struggling
074with one of our five competencies from the portrait of the graduate which is integrity and i grapple with this because i think it's a really challenging concept to get clear about especially when we think about how are we supposed to teach it what does it mean for our students what does it mean for us right and one final thought that i'd like to leave us with is you know integrity has two meanings if you look it up on google um which originally i thought that's pretty ironic but then as i started thinking about the definitions um i think they're necessary for each other they're in essence you know a marriage and integrity on one hand has to do with a moral compass and honesty and on the other hand um the definition is about being
075whole and undivided this this i think we believe is the work that we have to do we have to teach our students how to be critical thinkers how to remain curious to ask the questions even the tough questions to teach our students to care for each other to care for themselves to be stewards of the world they live in to the world that they inherit from us the world that they're going to pass on and this reminds me something uh that mark and i my late husband and i used to grapple with often which is as teachers what is our goal what is our mission in a child's life whether it's as a parent teacher or as a formal educator and mark used to say the primary goal is to have the students who we
076are there to support we're there to teach to surpass us that's the goal it's not for them to know what we know it's not for them to do it how we do it for their life's challenges will be different than ours there will be some similarities their worldly experiences are going to be inherently different than ours and so when i think of integrity to have a system that supports that unified mission to develop thinkers who work together with compassion with passion to meet the challenges that they face i can think of no better mission for us and as a leadership team our job kate colleen myself dr baker angela do katie ahern right our job is to support our colleagues our fellow teachers those who are in those classrooms daily with our kids working tirelessly
077to support those kids our parents who have undying commitment to the well-being and success however they define success of their children i believe that we're important in education that we know better we're a place in society where it is essential and we're at a point in in our district in our supervisory union where i believe we can stand united to do this work what we're asking for in this budget is not so much about the numbers but about the chance to take the risk the risk of not knowing where we're going necessarily having ideas but not knowing and knowing that the importance is the process the process of allowing us to team to do what we're asking our students ultimately to do to team up as educators with our parents with our students alongside our
078community members and evolve into something that we don't yet know what it is and if we're authentically doing this work if we're asking our students to do this work shouldn't we as the adults also then grow in the same way i think this is the integrity that we want to hold ourselves to not that we're teaching it but that we're living it through the process of building the skills in communication perseverance critical thinking and empathy and i believe i believe in our team this this communities the the entire community that we live in the windsor west windsor community in our ability to do this remarkable work so thank you for taking the time to listen to us and thank you for caring questions comments i'll turn it back over to you elizabeth uh well first
079that that was absolutely fantastic thank you so so much thank you thank you so much that was great that was the best budget presentation i have ever seen in my entire life thank you for the context thank you for the hard work thank you so so so much welcome i just want to say like we can't let ed get caught in the shuffle here he'll probably tell you we asked a hundred questions it was probably closer to 75 but it was like if you've given a mouse a cookie every time we asked one and answered another one and he took make sure that we understood what these numbers were where these cuts were coming so shout out to ed we stole his thunder tonight by asking to present but we appreciate it that was that
080was really great thank you ed thank you thank you all so much jennifer cagan calling that was fantastic um the first hand that i saw go up was chris's i'm not sure if it went up before amy's or not but uh chris please go um to reiterate mostly what elizabeth already said i am i am so moved um and and honored to to be to be in the in the presence of this of this process and to hear the the the concepts that we have been talking about as a board and as an administrative uh group for several years really start to come together and really come out into a um into a something something that you can really see and uh and the possibilities of the the the change and the positive change that
081that's that's in front of us is uh like i said it's moving um i've never been moved by a budget uh presentation before i not even not even think about ever think about being moved by a budget presentation before i was looking for my phone to play solitaire and when when budget price presentations start i'm i'm i'm getting old and and uh and uh honest about some of this stuff but uh yes that was terrific and i'm i don't have any questions um yeah that's all thanks thank you so much definitely a moment thank you thank you um amy please go ahead well my comment again not really a question but comments kind of like chris was wow that was um that was a moving presentation and can you present for us that's not a
082meeting yeah but what was so exciting to hear and almost brought well tears of joy was when you talked about not being building administrators but district administrators that this is something when we were talking i like chris said however many what feels like a hundred years ago um just wanting to work together as a team administrators with teachers with parents with students and all of us coming together and what you said jennifer about students not learning about doing something but actually doing that they are writers that they are mathematicians that they are sociologists that scientists that that is exactly uh just perfectly what we want our kids to be doing and i think that that would also be extremely exciting for teachers students and the families to hear when their kids come home and say
083i'm a mathematician or you know just talking about the what they're doing in their place based learning so thank you thank you and i'll stop now thank you amy i i'm reminded of actually a comment that i made when when you and i presented our plan to the the uh agency of education and it was that you know when we were talking about or when we were presenting our district merger plan that we've never been here before we've never you you know you you've done this exciting thing by by considering yourselves district wide and nobody's ever done this before at least not here and that's really it's very inspiring and really cool rebecca well i i also want to thank you um being on the board um for a very short amount of time um
084your presentation brought me up to date on on all of the questions that i've had i mean you really have talked about things that i've had questions about and and i've dug into some of it but you really put it in perspective for me to this evening and and um and showed me okay uh this is um what it looks like um and um so i really want to thank you and i appreciate um so much the presentation i did have a question and that question i think was kate um one of the qu the comments that you have made is and it sounds like you all three of you were really thoughtful about making this sort of a decision when um you looked at your counselors and and being an ex-guidance counselor i kind
085of had oh um where you have decided um to make a shift there um and um and the shift sounded awesome um and and i you know but it sounds like you sort of were eliminating a counselor's position i i wasn't totally clear on that no a couple years ago i'm gonna say three or four years ago windsor operated with um a school two school counselors in the ad in the elementary side so i think they function k8 and then two for 912. so they were looking at kind of the same um counselor to student ratio one of those counselors left abruptly and for whatever reason we never replaced that and then we contracted we are hope as an su and they they're not clinicians they're kind of like life coaches for kids is the
086best way i could describe it but we never filled that counselor position and then a decision was made to get a clinician in the building for some of our hiring students and we would do that through we are hope through the process of us learning about this budget and asking geez what you know ed what is this money um we were paying 80 000 for that clinician and the kind of experiences we had this year and when we step back and look at where we can make natural connections between the two campuses our counseling system came into play um you know why should david give up any kind of connections with those kids right when they come over here in seventh grade and maureen has a really strong clinician background why can't she go over
087to albert bridge if necessary it just seemed like you know we have this opportunity right now to make this change let let's do it and if we're wrong then we'll own that and we'll go back and we'll we'll figure it out but we don't think we are all right thank you so much i see nancy has her hand up too cut colleen did you want to follow up with that did you have your hand i just wanted yeah i just wanted to say um one of the pieces as working as a team and our philosophy of collaborating something we've been saying a lot lately and i i heard it earlier this evening that we're working through it jen's saying can we have the opportunity to work through the process even if we don't know what
088things are to come for the future can we work through the process and that's what we're trying to model but everybody on this call has equally important perspectives and expertise so we're always trying to build that and as educators we're always trying to find the teachable moment to model for our students and best practice says meet our students where they're at meet our families where they're at meet everybody on this call where we're at our teachers and we say students do well if they can we've been saying principals do well if they can school board members do well if they can our superintendent does well when he can like we all are in this together so that's what we believe and we hope we hope you appreciate the work we put into it because it
089meant a lot to us to do a good job yes i think we all appreciate all of them it's clear that we all really love the work that you put into it [Music] um nancy i just wanted to just add my thanks it put a huge smile on my face to hear that wonderful presentation and though i just kept thinking inspirational it was just wonderful thank you that's all amy do you still hear from you know what's up that was an ed recommendation he said talk about what inspires you so we did it excellent okay i had one more comment and that was kind of a follow-up on what kate just said that you hardly ever hear people saying this that if we're wrong we'll own up you know that um going in in a
090direction trying something new that we always think well we're right we can't be wrong and so thank you um for um understanding that um i think what what were we talking about i i think with the um strategic plan or portrait of a graduate you know having giving ourselves the room for failure and to learn from that failing that so thank you that was an example i'm so excited is chris's hand still up or is that an old hand uh it's a new hand if i if i can um just just the simple fact that we're we're in all of what's what's the potential and the possibility of this of this plan and and all of that and just on the on the sideline of the of the actual budget the budget came in under
091last year that that's like this is a bonus that's just i would have been happy with that you know as a as a oh gosh because covet is here and we've gotta we've gotta tighten our belts but now we're coming in with oh we can we can tighten our belts from the kovid standpoint and from the financial standpoint and do more things and be more excited about what's going on rather than just okay we we were able to hold things down you know like i said it this was a this is an exciting budget rather than a uh rather than just a budget so thank you again for all of that including the reduction in costs can we pass the bill tonight i'm in the budget tonight david you're muted yeah there might be a
092reason why i'm muted because and i and i certainly after that uh exquisite presentation and i also applaud the three administrators they worked really hard at this and and they worked with ed and they they definitely knocked it out of the park tonight and i think it's most of what what's really it's the sincerity and and the integrity behind the words i mean they really believe what they're telling you it's not just you know fuzz and fancy fluff um but the other real the real point to this first of all to answer your question elizabeth yes you could approve this bottom line tonight i mean you know what you've got to remember is that they're going to be a couple of adjustments we just settled the teacher contract uh today in mediation and that was
093exciting and there's going to be a a little bit more of an increase which will do a little bit more of a wage increase i i don't know how much it'll impact and then we're going to get all that tax stuff from the agency here in the next month or so and ed will do his magic with that worksheet and then we'll know how how much this bottom line drop uh results in a tax rate so you know you could wait till january and do that i mean i what i love about what you just said elizabeth is i i think budgets should be passed on their expenditures and how well they tie to what you believe in and what you're trying to present and and and if the sincerity and enthusiasm of this budget
094is what it is i mean i think you know adopting that bottom line now and and again we wouldn't ed would have to work the numbers on uh on the actual salaries so i don't know whether we could put a a final number there i noticed his hand went up but i i think we probably are still about a month away okay ed ed go ahead well i just want to say congratulations to kate colleen and jennifer they did an excellent job and it's all all all credit goes to them they really um we work together i just i grilled them on whether they knew what was the numbers were when i showed them the account summary i wanted to make sure that they understood unlike in the past what was buried in that reduction
095or increase and it got contentious but we got through it um the other thing is i want to make sure that you know it's great to see the board so enthusiastic but i will say that david said they just settled the teachers contract today i think i'm okay at saying that i'm not sure but yeah i'd like the opportunity to get real numbers in there or wages i don't expect that they'll be drastically different but certainly they will be different and then i think it's important that you get a tax rate i could potentially once i get those numbers out i could send out the budget again via email so you'd have time to review it and uh if we met again i mean it doesn't have to be january it has to be whenever
096you're it's convenient to you but if we met again in the next few weeks or however long it takes me to get the numbers together i think it would be a pretty short meeting i agree i agree thank you so much all of you for doing for doing that well well done so i think we could set you know at the end of the meeting we can talk about when we might want to set a meeting to adopt the budget it could be that last week in december it could be that first week in january uh it really it's up to the board uh moving along jennifer are you prepared to go at long last in your trauma transformed or do you want to wait or do you want to wait it's up to you
097i'm happy to wait that's a lot of information we've already given to you guys but if you'd like to have that information i can do that now what's your pleasure you know um knowing how the brain works as adult learners it would probably be if i were the teacher i'd probably say now is not the best time to give that additional information okay okay i'm sorry spoken like a true person okay well wait we'll put that next time she's ready to go uh okay so that leaves us now we're at uh covert 19 updates yeah so uh and there's not a whole lot there are you certain uh well there's a whole lot there believe me there's never just uh a little bit but um uh i i i think the real critical pieces to
098this is the uh you know the surveillance testing that went on right before we left uh on the thanksgiving break and about 50 of our staff across the su it was voluntary you didn't have to be tested uh and i think um you know the folks who decided to do that uh were were pleased that they did i think we may even get more takers the next time they're going to try to do it once a month which i think will be helpful i do think though that it was a wise decision uh to take that week after thanksgiving and go remote because we did have a couple of positive cases and i talked to some of my colleagues superintendents who tried to come back on november 30th and they came back but they were
099sending lots of teachers home lots of kids home they had to shorten the day in a couple of districts because they didn't have enough teachers to get through the day we avoided all of that by having that remote week and in consultation with the union and the administrators we decided it might be best to do the same thing during the christmas break so we're going to take that week of january 4th and and go remote and i'll tell you our teachers have stepped up and they're doing a much better job with remote uh instruction uh they prefer in person parents prefer in person we want to keep the kids in school but we think that the payoff of not having to send 30 or 40 or 50 kids home because they have to quarantine is
100a trade-off for that remote week so we can keep them in school after that january break the governor is going to have a uh another news conference on friday his last executive order that talked about the multi-household gatherings went through december uh uh 10th i think or or 11th so he's going to have to either uh change that order or uh reinstitute that order on his press i don't know how many of you watch his press conferences on friday but they're on i think around 11 o'clock and channel 3 has them live you can get them online as well so so pay close attention because i think he's going to address the multi-household issue again the the holiday break and whether or not there's going to be some suggestions that all schools take at least
101a week after uh after the holidays and we'll see how that how that goes we did slow down athletics uh i think you've probably noticed that athletics um we you know the original plan at the state level was to have high school athletics begin on november 30th it did not and and right now it's indefinitely postponed i don't think we'll have athletics at the high school level until after the holidays are over but that's okay we can start basketball in january and go into march or april there's nothing that says you have to play basketball in december or january it's just that you want to try to get a season in because we have a lot of kids whose passion are sports and you you want to be able to play to that and so
102we'll uh we'll we'll keep we'll keep working on that but the one thing i want to say in closing is that uh our our staff and our communities and our parents have been absolutely wonderful i send out those weekly sort of updates and i always kind of when i hit the send button i always kind of shiver a little bit because i never know you know even on that last one about taking that week after after uh christmas but i'll tell you i i get you know if i get 20 emails back which i do sometimes 17 of them are positive and they are just so appreciative of us keeping them informed of us keeping their kids safe uh and it's the same thing with the staff i think uh you know they're getting covert
103fatigue they're getting tired uh they but they've done yeoman's work of keeping this going and that's everybody from support staff to special educators to regular educators to the administrators um so i i i think again even in this cobit pandemic we can be proud of the work that uh that we're doing and the support that the board gives us in in trying to do that work i don't know if anybody had anything to add uh to that on the administrative team or any questions from the board but that's kind of where we are now i know elizabeth is going to be busy legislatively because uh i i at the at the uh in montpelier because uh we're gonna have to address some of these issues uh that are covered related like what to do about
104town meeting what to do about next year's uh you know harmless causes around some of the budgeting issues uh and uh so so it's gonna be it's gonna be a busy season uh not only a budget season locally here but elizabeth is gonna be busy i think we have a legislative breakfast this friday without the breakfast i'm gonna still come even though there's no food but it'll be virtual and and we're gonna talk to our legislators about some of the what the superintendents in the southeast think are some of those priorities they're the same priorities that the legislators have but but that's it for me unless you have questions nancy do you have your hand up yes um um just for a personal thank you to all the um school principals because that week after
105thanksgiving was beautifully thought out and um it was uh it was a very good week and it wasn't um i maybe all of us who have children at home were primed a little bit but i thought it went wonderfully and i was very very grateful for all the work that went into that week and i look forward to the week uh after christmas after in january thanks nancy i think for for our family there was a little bit of uh apprehension about the week after thanksgiving because there was almost like a ptsd effect from distance learning in march actually was really interesting um but anyway okay uh the next item thank you very much david and thank you to our principals and to uh all of our staff and teachers you're all holding up remarkably
106well and doing a fantastic job and i really appreciate all of you um thank you uh okay now we have the tuition question right so um uh uh lucy donna's a is a resident of west windsor i don't know if lucy is at the meeting tonight or not she was invited to be here uh is lucy on the line anyhow there there was a request for tuition to be paid under uh the grandfathering provisions in our merger agreement for her one of her high school students to attend the kent school in connecticut and what we've done traditionally as as a superintendent i review the website of anything that could be potentially religiously affiliated sometimes i'll go visit the school i decided not to go to connecticut to do this today but i have done that
107in the past but the website i think clearly pointed out of the episcopal affiliation and to make a long story short i had originally over the summer time denied the request and there was no appeal to the board but just recently there's been a court case filed in vermont for three supervisor reunions who have in the past denied tuition to religiously affiliated schools and and those three supervisor reunions are being represented in court uh by um uh by uh the mcneil law firm and uh out of burlington and orders that montpelier i'm not sure where bill is from and their recommendation to me was that you should always encourage uh the parents um even if they don't really want to appeal to the board because the board makes those final decisions by statute and and
108also they have another appeal to the agency of education so my recommendation would be to deny the request and then uh bill bill uh ellis from um from the law office i know we're going to have an executive session he'd like to come in and just spend five minutes with us and explain uh you know all the ins and outs before you make a decision publicly uh tonight you know you you could when we come out of executive session you can make that uh decision but certainly if the any public questions you have uh it's it it is a complicated issue by the way the lawsuit uh that we are involved in has nothing to do with the monastery school district it's the heartland school district one of the students in heartland was denied tuition
109to the new england classical academy over in claremont i think or it's over in new hampshire and that has a strong catholic affiliation um so uh that that's that's that's the case that's pending in in court right now but bill can explain a little more about that i know the agency of education is supposed to give us some direction on how to handle these we haven't had any in the past and uh and we really need some direction so did you do you have any examples of um of parents in in our district in windsor or west windsor who have tried i guess not windsor no tuition anyway isn't being paid out of pocket anyway but are there any examples in west windsor this is the first one you so there's no precedent in windsor
110when they were a tuition district we we had one in wethersfield and that was too i think there was a catholic school in claremont and then there was the new england classical academy the heartland request but no requests uh from mount scotty or west windsor so there's never been anybody who wanted to go over to the central vermont christian school in fuji but not in my tenure no that's surprising too but no um nancy you have your hand up yes um i wondered why we are voting if it were heartland or is each as is each district voting for the uh no this is a mountain scotty request yeah this is a this is a west windsor family this is a west wing family and i looked at school and asked them whether they considered
111themselves to be a religious school and the person i talked to in the office of admissions said yes oh thank you i got last time i was trying to turn off my microphone and i turned off everything i was off the so i missed i missed the explanation thank you i would hold off on a formal decision tonight i think you do want a promotion but i would i would let bill i'm going to text him now because i think we're getting close to executive session uh how close do you think we are elizabeth uh i think we're probably about 10 minutes away i'll tell them uh 8 25 8 30. is that good yeah all right uh okay so then are there any other questions or comments about this matter at the moment hearing
112none the um the next item on our agenda is two items which have been combined which are innovation team slash portion of a graduate i was thinking about trying to think over the past year since we're in december and thinking about um what we've dropped and what we can pick back up in the in the next year what's worth picking back up and what's not i think we we were forced to drop the innovation team um because of really myriad reasons at the time uh and it's kind of a good thing because it seemed to sort of coincide with um with where we were in portrait of a graduate but taking a step back from the portrait itself i think that the innovation team really the idea of the innovation team and uh what to
113do with your two buildings and also your beautiful uh presentation um the three of you i think it's might be a good time to um think about revisiting the innovation team uh uh and sort of adding in the the extra layers of the portrait of a graduate and and uh um really thinking about you know five years down the road um david is there somebody who we who you can think of to get to moderate that or should we go back to the drawing boards and ask around yeah well that's where we got that's where we got a little bit stuck last time as we were looking for you know somebody to facilitate that and we had a couple of people that we reached out to and and they couldn't do it and then covet
114hit so we you know we just want to stop look um i think we should i think we should uh i think would be good to have somebody to facilitate that i think the foundation that you saw late tonight with that budget presentation does kind of set the stage for that kind of conversation and uh and so it's really a delicate balance of whether we just kind of try to find somebody to facilitate that that now it's a little i really do think we need a facilitator and we can get now that we're all virtual we can get somebody good who doesn't have to travel here they can we can actually um do it from here and now that we know the ins and outs of how these virtual meetings work uh we can have
115breakout sessions or breakout groups or whatever whatever so we can manage to get some somebody good to facilitate i think so i would say i know that you know this they don't even have to be in the northeast they could be you know right actually they could be in california right as far as that goes and i've got some thoughts about that uh and i know that the administrative team i think maybe we maybe we do a little brainstorming we get back to you elizabeth you think about it and then you know maybe we'll bring a couple of names to the next board meeting okay amy i see your hand yes i raised my hand again and this gets back to what jennifer was saying that in many ways um our district administrators have been
116the innovation team yeah this time yeah instead of a group of people sitting in a room or on a screen talking about it they're doing it and that is so exciting they are showing us that it can be done and that it will be done so yay thank you excellent does anybody else have anything phil i see your hand yes um i think moving forward with the innovation team especially looking hearing everything i've heard tonight really looking at um a much longer term plan you know what can we help the administration what can we help with the school to get to some point in five ten years i think the administration team have has really come up with a good direction um for the next couple years so are you are you and amy both
117saying that we don't need the innovation team after all amy's saying no bill are you saying no we don't need it no i'm not saying that at all i'm i'm i'm basically saying that uh when we meet with the end when we meet as an innovation team we can really begin to take a long-term um view as the portrait of a graduate and the plans of the administration become as they play out um instead of looking um you know what are we gonna do in the next two years to get to point b we can start looking at well in the next couple years these changes within the district that the administration has planned will let them play out where do we want to be in five or ten years right that's what really really
118great right and that's that's kind of what i was saying too is that instead of sitting at the table like we were a year ago and people saying well how's that gonna work are you sure that's gonna work well i don't know um there there was a lot of tension at that table in that room and our district administrators have shown us that there's a lot that we can do when we work together and we take some chances and we say you know if it doesn't work we'll own up to it and we'll go at it in another direction so um i they're showing us that we can do it so thank you and i think what would be helpful is just to the only reason why i'm saying we just need a little bit
119more time you know this is a new administrative team and they've obviously tackled this you know incredibly well tonight i think we just need a little time to process you know it's not the same team we had when we were talking about that innovation a team the last time but i think it's so much of of this is happening organically with with uh staff members and with this team but i think it would be still be good to just kind of brainstorm what what that next step would be to start looking long-term i think bill's right that's really what we want uh look at that strategic plan and say okay what can we do collaboratively over the next say three years so i'd say let's keep it on the agenda and we'll bring we'll bring
120some names uh back to you i see colleen's hand is up too yeah i was just gonna say you said i think we should keep the brainstorming i think in in a classroom brainstorming sessions are the best part they're the fun part they're the part where we get to really hear each other's perspective so i would never want to lose any brainstorming sessions ever excellent um chris did you take your hand down yeah it's down okay uh all right so according to my agenda we are oh i just heard the the bloop of a comment hold on let's see what it is that might have been bill raising japan oh okay billy you have another um speaking of brainstorming that the information team might be a good um platform to also discuss if we are
121going to innovate how can we support it with the budget yeah yep yeah even a long range plan on the budget you're right bill yep okay um a thing that is going to be on our next agenda david you have talked about this already but we will have a member of the windsor select board come and talk with us about the dinah story and [Music] their vision for um having it become part of a curriculum district-wide i i assume i i sent her a number of questions um for her to consider before um before bringing it to our board and explained um we don't necessarily pick um sources or topics for teachers um and so uh yeah so we'll have we'll have her come and and give us the background and uh we'll have the
122innovation team love the budget yeah and uh yeah always a covet update i think um i think that's good that's going to be fun and also should i try to bring lisa back well i think that would yeah i think we need to get more specific around yeah i think that would not be a bad idea just kind of get specific around uh the direction we want to take with with my question with with lisa was just more around you know do we want to get you know sort of the policy work in place first that we're doing with jameson and and uh and ariel we've talked about that and and uh one possibility is for her to have a forum with us directed about what we talked about this evening and then another possibility
123is to have her kind of um grease the wheels on the implementation part of uh of the um policy yeah uh but um but i see those as two totally different things and i don't want to confuse them um you know they're kind of they're related um they're definitely related and that's why if we have somebody doing it lisa would be good for both i think but um i think it needs to be what she does with us needs to be fleshed out a little bit more um so i agree okay i think bill's going to be signing on to bill ellis i told him we're really close okay so with that um uh i'll take a motion to enter executive session so moved second okay all those in favor of entering executive session please
124indicate by saying aye aye are you going to approve the previous minutes at another time oh shoot i'll do it after the executive session okay so i'll send you that wendy thank you yeah thank you all y'all you you really did great thank you good night everybody thanks everybody thank you