001let's see i don't see everyone quite yet [Music] okay okay folks i have it at six o'clock and tonight is october 28th at 6 00 p.m i'm calling to order the board meeting of the atusd school board my name is caitlin hollister and i'm the chair of the board um normally we would be going right into our regular meeting schedule but this evening i will be asking for an executive session shortly and the board will be exiting this zoom i did want to indicate to those participants or attendees who are here with us we will be back um and this was this meeting will stay open so you'll know when we are on return and we are live streaming this on our youtube channel which is hu web app and it also is available there
002as a recording and mad river tv also will be broadcasting this evening so that is my intro for this evening um right now i would be asking for a motion from a board member to enter executive session and as stated on the agenda the recommendation is to move to executive session with attorney ph berlin superintendent bridget niece and director of finance michelle baker for the purpose of negotiations slash labor relations agreements with employees because doing so in public session will clearly place the public body at a substantial disadvantage second thank you second um is there anyone opposed to the motion okay with that i'm going to ask folks on the board to exit this zoom and to check your email and um i will be sending hitting send now so that you will have a
003different link to follow for the executive session again attendees you can stay on or join again around 6 30 6 40 and we will be back thank you foreign okay folks i think we are back and we are resuming in open session now at 6 43 p.m so for those of you who just joined us thank you again um for joining us this evening for our huuusd board meeting before we move into public comment had a request this evening for a moment of silence um as we all know this has been a year of tremendous loss in many ways in our communities both at personal level and in a much more greater community and global scale and as many of you know there was also an individual loss this week mariah mcgill a resident of
004wheatsfield and a parent at the basement school died this week in wakesfield and we mourn her loss and we want to send our condolences and sympathies to her family this evening so i would request a brief moment of silence in her memory thank you this evening to resume the rest of our business this evening i would invite public comment for those of you who would like to offer a public comment for up to three minutes you can raise your hand or hit star 9 if you're calling in on the phone okay i see matt lillard go ahead matt you'll need to unmute first go ahead all right thank you very much um first i just wanted to thank the board for uh for uh confirming that the resolution last week or last meeting to move
005forward with seven eighth grade merger at crossfit brooke i think uh i think it's a great move as as uh some know especially old board members i've been a proponent of that for some time um i would obviously like to see it sooner and that's why i'm commenting tonight um i'm a parent of a sixth grader who has made the choice that is hopefully will be granted to go to crosstalk next year and and uh really the main reason is i don't believe that there's an equitable education between harwood middle school and crossbrook middle school you know doing the research there are certain programming issues that you simply can't get at harwood that you can get across crosstalk uh you know there's there's lack of a general music program at harwood uh if you look
006at the amount of time that students actually spend in their core classes while it might seem like a small couple of minutes every week or every day that adds up to almost three weeks of instruction in core classes that students who go to harwood union middle school are not getting compared to their counterparts in the same school district in the state of vermont right down the road at crossfit middle school you know there are other issues like the ski program which i feel strongly about we we live in vermont we live in this great place we have these great resources that's not available at harwood unit middle school where it is across it and there are other instances and i i really just implore the board to seriously consider that you know why we've got
007two middle schools having such just different educations and why that is and how we can fix it and how we can fix it soon because i believe that we saw a lot of people choose it last year that were not rewarded i see i think i think that that that trend is going to continue um i only know anecdotally from a couple people i've spoken to that are making that choice and you know the other thing is there's no bust across the brook if that was offered what would choice actually look like then right now the only people that can really choose are the people that have the wherewithal to get there and it's not fair to everybody to not even have that choice it's not fair to those that gets to get left behind
008at harwood middle school because of that and it's it's not equitable for those that want to make their choice and it isn't granted so i encourage you to if you're not going to merge sooner than later um you know 22 23 while a lotable goal is great but it doesn't fix the inequities that exist now and i think those need to be fixed and they need to be fixed before the next school year thank you thank you matt anyone else this evening [Music] okay um before we move on i do want to address and after any public comment if there is a technical detail that i just want to make sure that we have on the record um the issue of general music came up last week and bridget i'm wondering if you can speak
009to that because i know we did hear from a teacher who was concerned that the information shared was not quite accurate about the offerings you know caitlin i can't because i don't know that specifically in my head so i'm not prepared to speak to that i know that they are different i believe that some people think they're equivalent if the board really wants to take up the specificity of differences between cross at brook and harwood union middle beyond what was put into the document i strongly recommend that you bring dwayne and um tom here so that you can ask them your your own very specific questions about those calculations now fair enough i just wanted to make sure that if that was um uh a glaring omission that we addressed it okay i'm not wrongly
010sure i agree with the position that that teacher had written i don't have it before me so i'd rather not comment thanks fair enough got it all right folks so thank you again um right now we will be moving on to um approving tonight's agenda are there any objections to proving tonight's agenda okay hearing none we will consider the agenda approved and we will go on to our first discussion topic this evening which is related to our pre-k to 12 planning specifically following up on last week's action item um as you saw in our leadership report tari and i have um offered an outline of next steps in the spirit of the motion which was to move forward with implementation and what we have suggested involves three components one is continuing to provide background information
011and get us all up to speed we do have an extensive document that's really a collation of many other documents and meeting minutes um the atari's been working on and that we're going to get out to you as soon as we can the second component would be defining the decisions ahead specifically around the facility and we included a chart around some of those decisions for what if any addition might be made how it might be paid for um and what will really at the very basics what kind of change to the building if any might happen um so along with that our suggestion was that we think about two subcommittees of the board one to take up these facilities questions specific to crossfit brook and another to take up communications um so that is our
012overview in terms of again moving forward with implementation again with getting the board and the public the necessary information and continuing to get very specific about the board level decisions that would need to happen my request tonight would be to hear from board members specifically on um thoughts on this process as we've laid it out so as you comment i'd be curious to hear that and then if you would be interested in joining one of these two teams either the facilities team or the communications team which we would not expect to be a heavy lift of many meetings but perhaps one or two to get started i am going to indicate that if we start diving into the um question of whether to merge i am going to likely interrupt and move us on because
013the focus this evening is taking an action that was made last week and again moving forward with it um what tari and i want to make sure is that the process that we're offering around that policy decision is one that the board feels will allow us to move forward effectively so i hope that makes sense and i would look for folks to indicate if you would like to weigh in tim thank you yeah i just have a clarifying question and how do we communicate what our plans are for the high school i mean i think you know we had the pre-k 212 plan you know we put that in advance because of covid uh you know we crossed this bridge um last meeting to move forward with a merger um with the sort of implication
014being now the high school was free and clear to to move forward and this you know this level of planning seems uh to be a little bit ahead of addressing the high school i mean if we're we're really gonna you know use this timeline um you know what what can we say immediately about getting to work on on the high school which i think we're all in agreement um has been maybe neglected the most in all of this thank you that's very well said tim thanks for raising that um christine yeah i was actually going to second what tim said because it did occur to me that um you know whether whatever structural the facilities that we need over at crossfit brook those kind of go hand in hand with what we're supposed to be
015doing at harwood and if the idea was is that now we're kind of freeing things up to move the hardwood board bond along um and i'm not saying set this aside but why wouldn't we maybe have that other part of the facilities committee going or why wouldn't they be picking up that work in addition to doing the cross of brook stuff right and i'm happy to do whatever and i think hearing this too i think there's been interest um at many points of let's build on where there is strong consensus and if we can come out with some work where the board is really unified around that high school i think that would serve us and our students well lisa yeah i would um i'd really encourage us to involve as bridget said involved wayne
016and tom from the start i think inviting them to a meeting and and being able to ask pointed questions and also um here i know that they did start the process of gathering the information that we asked for um and they weren't able to complete it but they started it and there might be some valuable information that they've gathered that we to update us um past what we've gotten in the past and so i think it'd be a it would be a smart starting place for us great thank you and if there are folks who are interested in being part of these teams you know whether it's a facilities team that works both on some high school specific and some seven eight specific questions that's one task and then um whether it's some communications work
017that's another teresa you're on you i hear the clicking i'm not sure if it's from her trying to unmute or not okay hi can you hear me yes sorry thanks um i uh i think we should consider getting a new nasdaq or something uh enrollment study just to determine what the size would be we have changed pretty dramatically since i believe 2017 was the last the study that the numbers were based on particularly in our high school and i know we're talking about merging the middle schools here but a lot of our numbers were done on a different denominator so you know it could be good for us could mean like maybe we don't need a bond or or we need less of a bond or something like that so i would encourage us to
018update our numbers based on the most recent information okay thank you jonathan yeah i was just saying that i would be willing to be on the facility is it hard to hear for others yeah he's really quiet you're not on mute but it's faint [Music] just saying that i would be on the facilities committee [Music] thank you michael yeah volunteer for the facilities committee if you want um probably not the best communications person but facilities i could do sweet thank you christine i'm i'm happy to i don't know where rosemary and alex stand but knowing that i've been on facilities so i could provide some continuity i'm willing to do that as well and i just wanted to put in i think um and michelle can correct me if i'm wrong i think we got
019updated uh enrollment projections last fall so they you know they might have changed from last fall to this fall but they're they're more recent than 2017. and we have engaged in nasdaq to update our role enrollment projections this spring okay thank you that's great michelle alex um i i'm happy to you know help out on a facilities committee whichever is helpful i i think it it's probably good to have people who've um read through all this information multiple times so i'm happy to help however i can let's do clear five what we originally were talking about here was just uh facilities can be related to the middle school at crossfit brook it wasn't the whole thing so maybe i'm not sure if you guys like alex and christine are you thinking high school stuff too
020or just middle school is that okay with you either way is fine with me i mean we did a lot of middle school stuff on the bond already so i'm happy to do whatever everybody decides we need one thing that we could do is use some input from folks this evening and then come back with a charge a draft charge next week for that committee so that it is you know specific enough um to lead to the kind of work that we need to get both around the high school and around the 7 8 and if the board is interested in taking up that high school facilities work first then that committee would address that piece first or if it really needs to be hand in hand i would suggest that we um at the
021next meeting yeah or two groups right or high school specific group and um a seven eight specific group um it would seem to me that they are just two distinctly different projects and we may actually reap some benefit in jumping on some of the high school improvement challenges which seem to have consensus and certainly demonstrate that we're getting someplace yeah i'd participate in high school only okay is there anyone who feels strongly that that the heist i guess what i'm hearing is high school first is there anyone who feels differently about that they say so i don't want to go down that too quickly sorry i would i would prefer to see us add like a fourth category here which is some like a high school facilities committee that's working you know at the same
022time in tandem but in an effort to not be rushed and to sort of have plenty of time to get clarity i'd rather not like delay either one just but we have a number of people who are willing to do some thinking about and have some expertise so i think we could maybe support two small groups doing some at least next steps planning and then once we have specific tasks maybe broaden it out should i try adding a fourth thing right now for further discussion or do we want to wait till the end of this discussion to do something like that i think you can put that up there just to keep it the visuals helpful for me i'm going to see alex then jonathan and christine um i i mean it's fine to separate
023them out i think that everybody will as soon as we start it figure out that it's hard to talk about one without the other so i don't think we should try to do them um one at a time because i think we'll end up with questions that are unanswered that way so i think either it has to be one group where you have to be doing them in tandem so that two groups can communicate otherwise we're going to end up all tangled up i think so jonathan you could um have two separate groups because we're both working with the same concept of um how which students are going to be at which school um and so i don't necessarily think it's as tangled as it was when you're looking at like a k through 12
024plan and and the configuration depends we kind of have this uh merger happening uh so i agree with tari i think two separate small groups is the way to go and that would delight delay neither of them because i think they're both important thanks christine yeah i i don't want to delay either of them either um and because they're both important but also because i think we'd want to just be going to bond for one number so it would make sense to have the number for each of them and we can combine them for one single bond uh question but but maybe it would make sense to have like two groups and they can both sit down together at the outset to kind of review together what's been done and then go off and separately
025do their work just so um it's we don't want either group working in a vacuum but they don't necessarily need to be working together it's just my thought thanks so i had i heard tim interested in high school i heard alex christine michael jonathan interested overall is that correct okay um and um again i think my instinct would be um to come back next week with um some draft charges to address the um you know both the middle school and the high school priorities and using the background information that we have but if there's any further guidance that you'd want to give at this time in terms of just that of committees this would be the time to do so i'd probably be more interested in the middle school group thanks jonathan high school party
026one we're gonna we're gonna tim your your committee's going down rivals go ahead alex yeah i'll uh i'll i'll volunteer for the high school great yeah get up joining tim scene you guys can have your finance committee meeting and then after spring we're looking for rose right now what did he say rose i'll help i'll help with the high school too um michael are you okay with middle school i'll take whichever team will willing to have me i feel like last kid picked or something but yeah whatever whoever wants me great um [Music] and uh let's see christine or alex do you have preferences i don't care wherever you need people you can it doesn't matter to me i'm the same okay other thoughts this feels like progress and i would be really excited to
027come out of this meeting hearing that our board has many enthusiastic people wanting to work on these projects and wanting to prioritize our high school in our middle school and our high schoolers and our middle schoolers of the future so even if we're communicating just that in our recap i think that's progress and that's exciting all right i'm going to move us on unless they hear otherwise okay um so the next piece in our agenda this evening is um enrollment and we had an extensive report from bridget and her team this week and so i wanted to encourage folks first to share any questions you have um for bridget and we can hear yeah let me please let's start with questions i think i would start then bridget with a question um was there anything
028or what were the elements that were most surprising to you and your team in looking at this data oh there i am we are both clicking at the same time yeah thanks caitlyn i mean what i would say honestly is there's there's nothing here that's a surprise and what i mean by that is this is data that i live in michelle lives in it um enrollment is very fluid it changes every single day people up people down moving in moving out people changing choices so um it's something that we're very familiar with and um i wouldn't say that anything jumped off the page because we probably know the story behind you know most of the numbers um so you know i think we can kind of walk through it if people don't have very particular
029questions i try to incorporate um the prior questions into these graphs and grids so i think when you start you're looking at we just popped out you know three years of enrollment the gray boxes at the top the first graphs really show you the kids that we have enrolled in school so as the note says these are kids in the remote academy and these are kids that are attending every day these are our kids and this shows you the the differences um we're about 96 i think uh students less in 2020 overall than we were in we're 82 oh i guess i didn't do that right 16 82. we're about from last year 1668 to 86 in total we have 82 less so let's start there we have 82 less kids all things said and
030done all the move-ins all the move outs all of the early college all of the kids in idc were 82 students less moving on down this is a new data point that i've started to uh to collect and i think it might in the future um behoove us to also look at a grade 1 comparison to a 12th grade graduating class and that's because preschool is all over the map you almost cannot find trends and patterns in that it starts to stabilize in kindergarten but there's still quite a bit of movement in kindergarten and then it stabilizes even further in grade one so you can see here that we had 108 graduating seniors last year and we backfilled it if you will with kindergartners that are 113. we're also looking at pre-k numbers to see
031like who's coming up the pipeline that'll likely be in our schools and you can see that we have approximately i think we have 11 less pk students all overall enrolled then moving on down we start to answer those questions that i think you have asked which would be how many kids moved in how many for were from out of state and how many were from in state and you can see that 61 students moved in and you see the the division there between in and out and reasons why students were we did start to ask this year based on feedback we got from the board reasons why you moved in and reasons why you moved out and reasons why you signed up for idc so that data is in its early stages because we just
032started after the conversations you had at your board last year to start asking but you can see some of that the transfer out data the next graphs where we're talking about the transfer out again we have a high rate of students in early college you see we have 22. i thought that was very helpful that caitlin included the link for lamoille south because we're a lot like memorial south both in the number of campuses we have they are different in that they have two high schools in their district but um for you know comparisons size-wise it's always a good look-see and we really don't look very different much than the numbers that they had so we have 22 kids in early college we have students that are homeschooling and you can see i added in
033the um the the written piece down below to give you a point of reference last year we had 11. so covid has definitely moved a lot of students into a home study program that we would anticipate will return and principals know those families and have those conversations so we're expecting the majority of the 52 kids albeit maybe 15 not to uh that you know that they will return there's they're still with us locally so 22 early college 52 home school and then 31 moved out of the district so that's the vast uh majority of the 136 that you see is the grand total of the of the out migration data and then you can see the number of kids in each grade that went to private school as a choice or um we have high
034school choice of nine to twelve you can see in and out um and that looks pretty much like what i would tell you is a typical year down below you can see hura is our remote academy um we started the original number i believe was 157 when we first set it up and heads had kids uh families select and that we were about 157 and then once we got rocking people change their minds and i think we're at about 134 when we opened the academy and then since then some people have changed their minds and folks can choose to go back into school but not back and forth into and then back to the remote academy so that's the way that is set up right now we're counting at 117 students that are um in
035the remote academy including four of them that are from granville and hancock uh in the remote academy down below i thought my team did i was really proud of the work that they did here in the color-coded graph where you're really looking at each school building and um you can see facings at the top and then we go down they're color coded for you and you can see here the uh what would be all of the possible resident students and then from there how many are continuing idc year to year to year how many new id students went went out and then how many new and continuing came in you can see what those numbers look like you can see the number of tuition students in each school and then the breakout of of how
036many are actually in the academy and how many are actually physically in our buildings this year and of course that's the last column that you're you're looking at there all the way down through the high school and the and the middle level um then you see the some other summary data about the students that are actually in the building attending and how many are in her across the district and what that looks like so inside and then we get into idc so we move on down into the inter-district choice data um and this is you know continuing new um numbers here um each of these graphs tries to sell one piece of the story to the graphs at the top you have to be really careful because they only tell one piece of the story
037so they have to get integrated in order to sort of see the totals but one of the things we did was look at just this year's idc because we had just started answer asking the question of why did you choose idc so these two graphs are representing that of of the respondents so up above it tells you of the of the people that responded in idc at cross at brook um you know what they said and so on and so forth and you can see the reasons listed down below and that's the sum total of the story if you will about enrollment who are our kids where are they and where are they going and some why jonathan go ahead yeah thank you i um i'm just noticing you know this is a um yeah
038that's a pretty significant drop um with 82 i'm just trying to make sense of these numbers but so you have 82 less students but you also had um when you have the homeschool number i guess that is um that's 52 students that may return but so i guess that would be a drop of about about 30 this year as compared if you include the homeschool students and you assume that they're going to return a drop of about 30 total um as compared to um a drop of 14 last year do you do you feel like that there is a that this is a um putting all these together is this um an anomalous year i i was expecting that to be a little bit more of a balance or we had so many uh i
039mean that's a pretty large number of students moving in um at least that's what you know in terms of the real estate that's what's been happening i was expecting there to be a little bit more balancing out i just didn't know if you had any comment on that i i think it is an anomaly you know i i don't know that we can put sort of that much um into it we we when we give you the nasdaq report and michelle does the piece for budget we usually look 10 years back jonathan and then 10 years forward so there's the prediction and then there's um the reality of what it's looked like over the 10-year period and you know i have questions myself and how much this data might skew that data going forward because
040it is truly such an unusual year of uh movement i mean it's just all kinds of movement right so in terms of the the net to what you're you're asking yes 61 students moved in right we also had just alone 31 move out of district so how much of that was directly related to folks losing their job you know moving in with family elsewhere and that sort of a thing that they they moved out of the district so of the 60 we had 61 move into 31 moved out of the district plus you have the number of students that um are in homeschooling so those two numbers the number of folks that moved out of the district and the homeschooling number stand out to me the amount a number of students going to private school
041looks typical uh as to what most years would sort of look like um in the early college number it's been peaking up a little bit each year because more kids take advantage of that benefit but that's that's also a pretty becoming a pretty stable number at this point um [Music] so yeah i i i think that was uh not a surprise but maybe a little bit of a disappointment because we had hoped with the number of kids that moved in that there um we would have seen a less less of a decline but nonetheless 82 kids less is about four classrooms if you look at it that way at least four or four and a half classrooms of students um and that's at you know 18 20 kids in a class that's between four and
042five classrooms of kids that we've lost um this year thank you alex yeah i mean if you look at those lamoille data that you know they had a decrease of 81 students also which is similar to us um which you know and similar 39 enrolling in private schools there um and 18 in early college so i mean it sounds like our our numbers are actually pretty consistent with the um our sort of sister district that you would assume would have similar kind of influx of students too so i mean i think i think that's that's helpful just in thinking about our numbers anomaly or not it it may be a statewide anomaly unless you live in southern vermont where i think they've had a huge influx but thanks i think one of the other data
043points that is worth noting is that we have 78 families that take the option of idc so i know you're going to want to talk in the future a little bit more about idc so i think that's important and that's with um a freeze this year if you will at the 7 8 because we could not take those other 18 students to cross it if if we would have added the 18 students to cross it right then you'd be looking at 106 families that take take that option for their child and i and i think that's that's important to know teresa um bridgette first of all thank you and uh thanks everybody worked on this i thought this was really comprehensive and very well done so i do appreciate it thank you um and i
044know anything related to [Music] the covet sort of impact on enrollment has been answered in this so really comprehensive thank you my my comment it's less of a question more of a comment is is more for the board i mean we're at a position now where we we've got fewer than 500 students in the high school we've had fewer than 500 for a while we're dropping down to you know 450 and if you look at the high school we you know on average if you include the the early college um you know the last five years we've gone down something like 20 between a graduating class graduating and their eighth grade year you know um and so i think we should be um as a board you know it's one of the things that i
045put on the agenda request caitlyn and and this is kind of what i think we need to get into is for you know what is the long-term determination of our high school are we actively going to try to retain the students in the high school are we going to say okay that's that's going to working you know as bridget pointed out early college kids more and more kids are taking advantage of that so how do we as a board create the policies and think about our planning and our investment in the high school to accommodate for those kind of things um that's a that's a big question that i kind of have and even if you look without early college a lot of kids in in the last five to seven years have moved out
046between ninth and tenth grade you know our current eleventh graders something like 18 of them left between 9th and 10th grade and so you can you can see that in the trends and so i just i want to just kind of call it out i feel like as we're looking and especially before we really begin to bond i think we really want to think about the student outcomes that we're trying to do and a focus on retention and i don't think it should just be about maintenance i think it should be about a very holistic approach the way we should be thinking about our high school thank you okay thanks tim oh yeah thanks um bridget you i know that choice has been open for about a month now and it's got maybe a month
047more to go do you foresee us um meaning to take a similar stance uh you know obviously we're months away from evaluating the applications but um what are you thinking is going to going to take place with idc uh you know on the cross of brook side of things i think you're going to find yourself in the same situation it's only been open a short time and i think when i last looked at it there's families that have sixth graders in the valley that i have immediately signed up for idc to cross at brooke thank you you're welcome so certainly this doesn't have to be limited to only questions and bridget again i appreciate the report and the overview um and continue to have questions whether of each other whether bridget um but this would
048be the time to discuss anything related to enrollment and idc that folks would like to put on the table this evening christine sure um i just want to point out i mean i think one thing that i find interesting is how many more students from harwood middle school end up matriculating out or leaving and going out to private schools than we have for crossfit brook middle school i think it's about four times the amount if i got that and you know thinking about teresa's point um you know i know a lot of teachers and a lot of pedagogy talks about how important environment is to the classroom and to the climate and culture of a school and you know it just strikes me having deferred this harwood bond for so long if we haven't caused
049ourselves some pain in that regard because i don't know that the building has caught up with current teaching methods and i think um you know just just the general condition um in certain regards in terms of lighting and windows and um you know things things that aren't you know that really are in need of maintenance uh if if we you know brought that building up to being uh what we want it to be in terms of uh current teaching methods a more positive environment that really speaks to the quality of education that we want at the school if that would help us retain some of our students um you know because it really a high school should be a centerpiece of a community and um i'm not sure that as a board we've really given
050the message that that's how we feel about it thanks christine um michael i mean i just went sure quickly i was looking back at the nasdaq report um and looking at it seemed like for the la we were trending the wrong way so i agree that we have to figure out the best we can for high school but um last year we had 34 fewer kids than what was projected and this year 109 fewer um if you if i count for like 40 of the homeschool coming back the 69 fewer so we're trending in the in the reduced population thanks alex yeah i guess um looking at the idc numbers um and thinking about what teresa said um if if our goal is to keep students and retain them and um help families feel like
051they're getting what they want out of their education if we have to say no to another 20 idc students this year i don't think that's going to further us in our goal of retaining students so i think we should figure out what we need to do to say yes to the families that want to move schools in our district if our goal is to retain students i i think that needs to be part of our uh our thinking when we're trying to make decisions about what makes our families happy it sounds like you know we weren't able to do that this year and i think if we continue to not be able to do that we we might start to lose students through that process thanks um teresa and then alec yeah um can i
052just get a point of clarity uh christine where are you seeing the number that the people are matriculating out of the high school or coming from the harwood 7th and 8th i just don't see it i mean so where did you get that number tari's right on that page two kids left crossfit to go to private school and eight eight kids left hartwood middle school to go to private school yeah but then you also have moving out of the district 11 from cmbs just moved out of the district so and then only three from hums well i mean if you add them all together you know it's like 26 something going to practice i just don't see the same it's not the same correlation i don't think they go really here's another thing i just
053want to point out and bridget correct me if i'm wrong this is also based on self-reported information and i don't know if people were able to to select multiple categories so presumably and again correct me if i'm wrong i could have both moved out of the district and not been happy with the district but i would have just chosen one of those i'm almost certain they wrote their response all right thank you so they could type in anything that they wanted right so within that we sometimes got maybe multiple layers of information and maybe just one point of information so i just wanted to also add that to the complexity of this data but i want to be clear move out of the district means the family moved out of the district the family no
054longer lives here it wasn't the student that you know what i mean like those families moved out of the district they no longer reside here okay alex go ahead yeah um the the early college number 22 do we have a sense of what the primary motivation for these students to uh elect the early college route um i mean i can speak to you know conversations where i've had with three families and they're all very different and be interested in find out really what uh what's the reasons for that i think you said it they're all very different my understanding from my administrators at the high school is just that that they are all very different that said i think there are some commonalities the courses that you take through early college are paid for by
055the state they're free so some kids see that as a real financial incentive for them and their families and they have a leg up um i think there is some pattern on you know they get to kind of toe dip into a college experience and a college course pretty easily and i think that some of those kids too have already taken ap classes and have exhausted those possibilities and so they see that as the logical next step especially in 12th grade so so as a follow-up could this be a symptom of where students may not find either the choice the rigidity the rigor uh or the quality up to a place where they might prefer i don't believe that if you look at lamoille south they have 18 students in early college if you look
056at other districts our size with high schools you're going to see a similar same amount i think that it uh i think it's great that we have students that that frankly have achieved in their high school years um the requisites to be able to be successful in early college classes and for many families that there's a serious financial incentive there um so i i don't i just see that as their logical next step in their journey and it's something that's available like dual enrollment dual enrollment is also another area where part of flexible pathways and helping kids go further at the state initiated both of those programs thanks uh lisa yeah i think this is all great information and again thank you for collecting it um as i look as i think about kind of
057the next 5 10 15 years i think i truly agree that the the best thing we can be doing is to trying to figure out how to reverse this trend and to um if not mitigate our declining enrollment at least at least that and if not even trying to reverse it um and so whatever we can do to try to really get to the root causes of why people are coming and going um i think is huge and and the the new um the new data we're collecting about why people are coming in and out is great um i it would be it would have been nice if we had that for longer i'm so glad we have it now um so it'll be interesting to see what that says over time and um other
058things that i can think we can do are like talking to teachers the people that are on the ground and um closest to the problem are also closest to the solution so they might be able to offer us a really great insight as to what they think um you know is going on with their students um yeah i'm just i guess in my brain i'm trying to think of things that we can do to really kind of identify how we can work towards reversing this decline thanks other thoughts or questions this evening alex could we request that the um principals do um just ask the early college kids why they made their choices could we get that information from them the way we did from the other um students would that be possible just might
059be helpful information also for us to know not not because there's anything particularly different about our district than any other but um but if there's things that we can do i mean in terms of retention again if there's things that we maybe for some kids that's a great choice and it allows them this really this jump on college and there's all sorts of benefits but if for other kids they might have stayed and um been able to gain something with another year in high school it'd be nice to know that just so we we could offer them what they need it might be something that we could consider in the spring as we're thinking about um you know the data we would need going into next fall i'm presuming that these students are not on
060campus right now um i think it's it's an interesting question to me in terms of is early college actually something that we want to encourage more students to be doing or is it something that we would um [Music] i don't want to say discourage but um find ways again to keep those students um on our campus and that i'm not sure tim yeah yeah i just had a question about that early college where do those uh where are those kids uh you know in a typical year you know non-coveted year where where are those kids uh taking their courses is it mixed they're just taking some early classes kind of ap like and then the rest of their curriculum is the same or state schools so they're physically going away from campus yes they don't
061count in our adm is that i mean is that a potential revenue source for us i mean or do they physically have to go and take the class somewhere else i mean if we're going to have the high school available only to the high school is there a way to facilitate the program without without losing the students outright i don't believe so but if the board as a whole is interested in learning much more about the specifics of how it works with the early college i think that you would invite the director of guidance from the high school to really be able to do a q a with you on that topic thank you great thanks caitlin i've been raising my hand but i don't think you could see so good so let's go to
062tari um christine rose marie and then we're going to move on i just about the early college thing and even the dual enrollment it's tricky because i think we do lose those students but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's a negative student outcome like that might be a great opportunity for our students and i think something that harwood has been pretty remarkable about is our the flexible pathways program and encouraging kids to follow what's best for them and not just what's prescribed for everybody and so i just want to be careful when we think about early college and having a lot of kids take advantage of that it doesn't necessarily represent a failure it may represent providing great opportunities for our kids it's not to say that we don't have you know opportunities for further
063growth and learning that we can do and understanding why kids make those choices but we should just be cautious about oversimplifying uh what the implications of those decisions are yeah i could weigh in on that i really think that if the board really wants to understand that it's a story it's not so simple as surveying kids um and i i would say i think that it's something to applaud now it doesn't work for you in the constructs of how you fund your school but you've been able to educate students in a way that they're able to access early college and be successful in that endeavor and i know that there's many individual reasons why they do that including some of the course selections that there are they're offered to them at that point that high
064school could never offer all of those and at the same time i don't think we should interpret that as a lack of success in rigor in the school i wrote a letter a college reference letter for one of our students today and this particular student in conjunction with many other things took seven ap classes at harwood union that's really quite an accomplishment there's always room for growth and improvement but being able to offer more classes when you have declining enrollment again something to work on i think there's a story and it's probably different for individuals as to why someone may or may not choose harwood union and it can be as simple as a student i'll give you an example of student who is choicing out who parent works at another high school and so
065he has this opportunity to go to the same high school where the parent works and there yes there are some different offerings there but it doesn't necessarily make harwood less good it's just that that is another opportunity there's a lot of flexibility a lot of flexible pathways in the new uh the new ways that it hap you know kids learn at the same time um i do think that the board should probably entertain some robust conversations on the facility and that's not a popular conversation on any level because people say that people don't judge books by their cover yes they do and when you have a high school that is clean it's very clean but it hasn't been up updated and upgraded and another big component of that is athletics when you have a track
066that you can't compete on and you and you don't have enough field space and other you know things that you've learned or we've all learned about in the facilities those kinds of things do enter into why students may go someplace else so there's it's all of that i think to talk about thanks christine yeah just really quickly i just want to remember that you know a few weeks ago we were louding um the alternative pathways and saying well we should keep them going because they seem to be really popular um and i think it's important that we we provide experiences for our students that work for them and i and i think there's also an economic piece with with early college i mean this is an opportunity to get college credits for free um and
067college is a very expensive proposition in this day and age and also quite frankly i mean i think some kids are they're just ready to be out of high school i went to one of the top high schools in my state and if i had had early college i probably would have done it just because i was ready for a different scene so you know it's it's small town sometimes sometimes you're ready to move on it doesn't doesn't say much you know doesn't necessarily speak to the academic experience it just might be somebody's looking for a changes scene got it thanks um rosemarie you're the last one last word oh you're on mute though you oh you want me to unmute um so this is something i'd i guess i'd follow up on what tim
068was talking about because as teresa mentioned the um the enrollment at harwood we see you know going down the moving of the the middle schoolers to cross it brook so it's going to free up some space we're going to have excess space and i think thinking of the early college and opportunity and equity that as we're looking at the high school and considering the space how could we use that space to maybe um either partner with the vermont state college system which we all know is struggling financially or find a way of bringing in some of those early college opportunities to the extra space to allow kids that maybe want to take advantage of early college but don't necessarily have the means they don't their parents can't afford to buy them a car to drive
069to school or whatever the reason might be i think we really need to think outside the box because we have an opportunity once we bring the middle schools together to upgrade the high school and incorporate how it can best help our students with preparing them for life after high school i look at this as an opportunity and i hope we consider that as we're examining our options thank you terrific thank you um all right folks thank you and um we will continue to get to get um updates as this landscape changes um our final main discussion item this evening is around anti-racism and uh we had our workshop on october 7th i did follow up with hal and his suggestion sent out a survey earlier this week um heard from about eight of you um
070indicating you know at least i think five or six who are interested in further workshops um also some interest on setting goals for the board um for the board's work around anti-racism so those were some of the themes that are coming out um and also a house suggestion wanted to have some time now in our open session to reflect on that workshop share any lingering thoughts um and consider some direction for the board here so i wanted to open up that conversation um see where it leads this evening and as this is one of the major strands of our board work this year this will continue to be an agenda item for us um depending on where the conversation goes tonight that can inform how we take this forward whether with a facilitator like hal
071um whether with our full board um discussions we do also have an approved agenda request coming up to discuss the black lives matter flag again um so a lot of interrelated topics and i want to open that discussion up for further reflection so [Music] okay christine go ahead um just in terms of working with him in terms of setting some goals for the board did any was there any thoughts as to direction or i mean you know generally my my concern is that this is a group that kind of tends to be invested in the status quo and when you're going to start doing anti-racism work you're talking about changing examining structures and um and and change so i just don't i you know if we're going to spend time on it i i want
072it to be fruitful so i don't know what um people are thinking in terms of goals and i didn't see from survey responses very concrete um goal areas necessarily come out yet um i think the overall theme that i gleaned was um interested in continuing the conversations lisa yeah i'm i'm definitely interested in continuing the conversations i think that was a great introduction workshop but i don't think we you know it's kind of like the first step to anything is starting to do some deep dive into your personal reflection but but you don't do the work unless you do the work so it has to continue somehow and i think having it led by somebody um who can lead us through doing that work is um the only way it's going to get done to
073be honest um i think he'd be a great resource i mean i feel a little bit lost on the whole black lives matter's flag being raised i really want to see it be raised on our campus and i also want to see it be raised in a way that um the school community and you know kind of just done the right way i think a lot of us are kind of questioning like who it's supposed to come from and like how to make it legitimate um he'd be a great resource to kind of help us figure that out and so why not use him if he's kind of part of our team that's helping us navigate this um so i'd be interested in that conversation thank you um michael yeah i agree with lisa there
074um i've been trying struggle thinking where we um go from now from here i know i proposed the flag i got some feedback that um different people it's not everyone's on the same page but that you know stuff from the student so what we can do to say and learn for us so we can say that we are there supporting our students with the supporting staff supporting future staff to move to the district i'm not sure how to get there um but how we say we're behind you right and we'll we'll make it you know some of the stuff that comes along with it is outside of our purview of the saying administration please do it for things like curriculum right and specific details inside the school but it's very clear somehow we say yeah
075we support what you're doing and we'll stand behind you and come to come to us if you want to thanks alex um so my comments come not having attended his training so i'm i i apologize if this was talked about and i didn't know it but um i would say for me i would want our goals to be consistent with our 30 000 foot level um to make sure that uh we have some guidance about how to how to make sure that we um are incorporating his ideas and others into things like our budgeting and our curriculum and the and the places the places where we have well where we have oversight to make sure that we are um making you know allocating the right amount of money to the right places um because i
076think if we're thinking of anti-racism in a systemic way we have to think about where what our role is in that system and where we can get some help in um not necessarily making the changes on the ground but making the changes to the system that will make it easier for the changes on the ground to happen so and i i don't know who the best person to do that help us with that is and if that's him then great and if we need a different kind of training from somebody who works more specifically with school boards on anti-racism training then great also i mean whoever we think is the person who can help us with that it thanks tori i really enjoyed the work with mr colston and um i thought he had great
077frameworks and thinking for us in that systemic way as well as nudging us personally and i don't feel like i know what the next steps are i like this the idea of trying to have our conversations at the board table focus around the the [Music] the policies the systems that we have control over um and i but i'm not sure how to do that work and i but i think we could sort of invite mr colston back because i mean he works in the legislature like he or he is a legislator he's worked with these larger systems and large corporations and i i think he could probably provide us with some guidance um about how to do that so in some ways i guess i'm sure um i don't i'm not saying let's write a
078blank check but um you know an open program or something or an open invitation to me seems like actually a valuable thing to extend and also remembering that this is a long-term project for us too so whether it's working with us on the visioning stuff which we have slated for the late winter or um or something sooner you know all of that stuff could be or maybe maybe it's part of our budget conversation early on when we're trying to set some budget goals i think the finance committee is coming up with a schedule for that right so maybe that could be part of it you know those might be some place where we could ask for some guidance great thanks tori um rosemary i mean now you're good there we go um so i agree
079with with alex as far as um continuing the work but remembering what our role is i i envisioned that the the real work would happen at the ground level with the students and teachers that had started the work and i i think it would be great if we could have mr colston work with them and then he could help the board guide us in how we can support the boots on the ground group get the work done because they're the the students and teachers i see as being the most active piece of um helping our district and becoming making it more um making this more visible and um and our role as alex had mentioned we should be the ones who helped set the policies and make sure that the resources the financial resources are
080available for that group to be successful and i will just remind you that there is some extensive staff training happening all year this year it's with a different trainer but with breath of haslam that started in october and i think they have at least four sessions in the course of the school year um jonathan yeah um thanks i found the workshop to be uh excellent and and i would welcome uh more of that and i also feel like it's directly relevant to the work that we're doing and it because we heard i think lisa and tary had some really good points about ways that additional work with mr colston could shine light on on topics that were directly involved with one being a vote about raising the black lives matter banner and the other one
081being whether he has any recommendations for um sort of structures and structural racism and whether there's whether there's anything from his perspective that we can do from our um you know bird's eye view of the district so um so i i think those are really good proposals great thank you uh tim go ahead yeah thanks i i think something that would be valuable for me is just a basic baseline of you know we own the system um and so if there's systemic racism uh to address mitigate uh what have you you know how is our school district uh you know our policies and procedures is there something inherently flawed uh in the system that we operate um and and so from a practical perspective at first you know you know that that would be helpful
082to me um to point out obviously you know i thought the training was was okay um you know it's it's interesting perspective to try and overlay the history that he shared with us and so in so doing i'm trying to understand you know how to even relay that you know message right so that's a message given to us that you know here's you know here's you know the genesis of our privilege shall we say and um so here we are as a school board we took in the information their self-reflection but we have a vision statement for the you know you know for our district you know we've we're sat here tonight we're talking about other trainings that are happening you know at the school level i'd like to know what those are i'd like
083to know what the training is because it would be helpful to know what the goal is at the outset so rather than can you know have some continuum of you know why you know systemic racism is pervasive it's well we have a school district this is what we created can you help us you know navigate why why that might fall short i guess you know in some thanks teresa all right i'm on mute um i uh i agree with all the comments around policy uh i did like the workshop but as you guys know before we went into it um you know it's not about us you know we're transient you know we're not going to be on the board 20 years from now um racism will still unfortunately hopefully much less but still exist
084personally um and so it is about the policies and it's also um i think i know myself from from what i'm hearing from my peers here it's kind of hard to figure out what that leap is like what's the next thing between the policy because we could have the policy so i've been thinking about it almost like um forgive the analogy if it doesn't come out right there was a time when there were no fire extinguishers in schools there was a time when there were no it was not a policy to have regular fire drills and you know keep people safe and then somebody created a system and then that system got replicated and so and now we just have an expectation that our administration is going to have a book and that's what they
085do and here's the list of things they do and in case there's a fire this is what they do and so i'm trying to think of it in terms of what is that template what is that framework and what should we as a board expect from our administrators to to get from our administrators of what that book looks like you know so we'll have the policies but i also think that you know there's there's how those policies are enacted we are also responsible for making sure to review and approve that those kind of uh overarching sort of procedures and make sure the system is actually in place uh and meeting the policies and so i think that's where if it's not this gentleman somebody could come in and really help us because that's i think
086to me that's where the gap is like i have no idea how to do that i don't i i don't imagine anybody really does and i imagine our administrators have a pretty good idea but let's get somebody who has expertise in it like real expertise and has implemented the fire drill in other places so that they can bring it in here kind of where i'm thinking all right thanks alex uh yeah no that was i think that was a good a good point on teresa's part and i would i would actually dial it back just a little even a little bit more i think there's probably a deconstruction phase because you know the truth is i don't believe any of us would be able to go into into the environment certainly the structural environment and
087truly assess where we fall short and maybe it is bringing somebody into the district and and looking at the language of our manuals and looking at you know what are those those places where you know it might look overt to those who are very sensitive to the subject whereas for folks like ourselves not much uh is is apparent so you know i think there really is uh a need to truly assess you know what those gaps are and what what a plan of action might look like and you know and just to extend it one step further you know uh caitlyn you had mentioned that the the district uh are already doing some trainings whether it's the teachers maybe it's the administration and staff but we have no idea what it is that they're training
088on it would probably be a good idea to kind of get a sense of what that is and what the desired outcome is going to be all right bridget you want to speak to that um sure right i can see that the board might be interested in yet further dialogue but if you look back to my prior board report at the bottom i included some anti-racism resources and in those resources i gave you all of the information on the trainings including a folder of all of the materials that rebecca haslam was working with our staff that would be all of our staff um provided so that might be some also also very interesting reading for you all toward thanks bridget i think it's exciting to think about how the board might be able to support
089changes at the grassroots level but i don't think that it should be the board's job necessarily to figure out what those changes should be it seems to me that there are like for example if we take we know that the staff throughout the district are working on an ongoing basis to do some training around anti-racism and i think that um [Music] by the end of that time many people in the district who are really working with kids and really are on the front lines will have some ideas of changes that they think the district could make so actually i do like teresa's analogy of the fire extinguishers at some point somebody realized we need some fire extinguishers we need them in every building in fact we need them in every classroom well we need somebody
090to we need the school board to pay for those fire extinguishers so i don't think it was the job of the school board to say we can see there's a problem you need fire extinguishers in every room but it was the job of the school board to figure out how to pay for something that the people who were working in the classrooms knew that they needed or were or were running the schools that they needed so i don't i feel like i don't want to have us hire somebody to sort of do this investigative work at least not right now i think we should let this play out a little bit and then we should encourage and look for either money or or time and we know that time is money for the people who
091are already doing this work to ask for what they need to do it to do it better to make the or make recommendations for changes and then we can respond to that and that's the way that we kind of do our 30 000 foot thing but we also support meaningful change at the grassroots level or the ground the ground floor level teresa um i just uh want to react to tari's comments tori i totally agree um that it it's great to have that organic and be built up my question is i don't know what my expectations of the administration should be like when they say okay here is the plan i have no idea is that a good plan or a bad plan you know it's just a plan um we have no way of
092like the tools i don't feel like this board has the tools to evaluate um conciseness the comprehensive comprehensiveness of it and i feel like we feel like those exist and so like why would we reinvent the wheel and so um i would like to have somebody help us figure out you know what that would include like what does a good plan include like what what should what are the table stakes here what are kind of the bells and whistles so that would be the only thing that i you know i do agree with how it should be created from your point of view it's just like as the people who are overseeing it and responsible for kind of approving the overall implementation of it you know i would like to know be more better educated
093in what we should expect from that plan so what i'm hearing overall this evening is certainly ongoing interest in outside support for our learning and our decision making and some interest in defining um goals and outcomes for board level work in this area um i am happy to follow up and share some of our conversation with hal and hear about a few ideas he might have and bring those back in november um it does sound like people are interested in some additional time and that could be someone like hal coming to a board meeting and going through some decisions or some goal making goal setting process with us but i think this is a conversation that needs to continue and i think it would be wise to have that consulting person at the table with
094us so that's what i would suggest going forward and if you have other thoughts why don't you share those with me between now um and the sixth when we'll be defining our last our next board packet i'm good okay thanks um next up we have communications which i think this week will be our board recap any volunteers lisa thank you um and anyone to do a quick edit and review thanks tari um we also now as i indicated have a front porch forum account so shannon wisdom will be able to post this when ready on all of the front porch forum from the huusd so um that is a new edition thank you very much and finally our consent agenda um i'd be looking for a motion to approve tonight's consent agenda second second great
095i think i heard a few voices are there any objections to tonight's consent agenda any abstentions oh thank you got it theresa um otherwise that will carry and is there a motion to adjourn like the motion all those in favor all right all right be well everyone thank you again we'll see you in a few weeks all right thanks everyone good night you