001SBSD Owl Cam: I'd like to call to order the March 18th, 2026 regular meeting of the South Burlington School Board. SBSD Owl Cam: The first item on our agenda is a proposed executive session to discuss, employment of a public officer employee. SBSD Owl Cam: I don't think we'll need the other, SBSD Owl Cam: Options for why we go in an executive session, just employment of a public officer employee. SBSD Owl Cam: I would entertain a motion to find that SBSD Owl Cam: Premature disclosure of the information would put the district at, a disadvantage. SBSD Owl Cam: Bye. SBSD Owl Cam: I move. Emily moved. Dan seconds. Any discussion? SBSD Owl Cam: All those in favor? Aye. Aye. The motion passes. I would entertain a motion to enter into executive session. SBSD Owl Cam: Homework promotion.
002SBSD Owl Cam: Dan, motion? Second. Emily, second. Any discussion? SBSD Owl Cam: All those in favor? Aye. Okay, we're now entering into executive session. We expect to be joined by our Superintendent, Joe Clark, and we will be back at 6 p.m. And, Superintendent Joe Clark joined us for that. We adjourned about 5.30. SBSD Owl Cam: The first item on our agenda is the Pledge of Allegiance. SBSD Owl Cam: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. SBSD Owl Cam: The next item on the agenda is announcements. SBSD Owl Cam: I have an announcement. SBSD Owl Cam: Our April 1st school board meeting is being rescheduled to March 31st, one day before, so,
003our next meeting will be Tuesday, March 31st. SBSD Owl Cam: Is there any other announcements? SBSD Owl Cam: I will also be testifying in front of the Senate Education Committee tomorrow. SBSD Owl Cam: I'm just gonna be giving them my personal thoughts about, SBSD Owl Cam: The value of public schools to healing all political divides. SBSD Owl Cam: Slow. SBSD Owl Cam: The next item on the agenda is review and accept agenda. So, we have comments from the public. SBSD Owl Cam: Then we have four discussion items, a March 11th, 2026 federal law enforcement incident on Dorset Street, update on ENDS Policy Committee, Legislative Advocacy, school board website update. SBSD Owl Cam: Then we have the student representative report. Then we have two action items, Monitoring 2.5, and… which is Financial Planning and Budgeting, and
004Monitoring 2.9, Communication Support to the Board. Then we have SBSD Owl Cam: Superintendent's report, which today will be around student behavior. And then we have the consent agenda. SBSD Owl Cam: Are there any suggested changes to the agenda? SBSD Owl Cam: Yes, I would suggest that we remove the monitoring report 2.9 communication and support to the Board until such time we're able to prepare a report. SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, so the… yeah. Does, anybody object to… SBSD Owl Cam: moving the 2.9, giving me and Michelle a little bit more time to finalize a report. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so that's… SBSD Owl Cam: That is struck from the agenda. The other suggestion that I was going to make is, since we had a discussion item about the March 11th, law enforcement incident, we removed the
005school board website update section, discussion item. SBSD Owl Cam: Do we have any objections to that? SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so we'll also strike that one. SBSD Owl Cam: Any other amendments to the agenda? SBSD Owl Cam: Alright. SBSD Owl Cam: Then… the next item on the agenda is comments from the public. SBSD Owl Cam: So, at our school board, there are 3 opportunities for the public to comment. SBSD Owl Cam: During comments from the public. SBSD Owl Cam: About any topic, whether it is on the agenda or not. SBSD Owl Cam: Also, before the board takes action on an action item, but only on the topic being action. SBSD Owl Cam: Also, this is a specially worn community forum, but only on the topics worn for that community forum. This is not a community
006forum. SBSD Owl Cam: This Board will not respond to public comments unless this meeting is a specially designated community forum, and the comment is on a topic or not on the agenda. SBSD Owl Cam: You'll be given up to 3 minutes. SBSD Owl Cam: Please do not violate anyone's privacy. SBSD Owl Cam: And an official complaint or grievance cannot be filed during public comment. SBSD Owl Cam: Do we have any public comment? SBSD Owl Cam: Without the face. SBSD Owl Cam: I'll take it. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay. SBSD Owl Cam: We give people a couple minutes, just given the fact that we're about 10 minutes early from our approximate time on the schedule. SBSD Owl Cam: If we can move on. SBSD Owl Cam: We will move on. There's nobody online still? No. Okay. And
007we do have another time if someone wants to talk about specific things during the discussion. SBSD Owl Cam: That's not… But only us. And it would only be about that. Yeah, so that's why I just wanted to make sure there was… SBSD Owl Cam: plenty, you know, I don't want somebody to show up at SBSD Owl Cam: 6.15 and say, hey, you didn't let me talk about this, but I also understand it says approximate time on our schedule, so I think we can probably move on. I'm gonna give people one more minute while I join the Zoom, and then we'll move on. SBSD Owl Cam: Great. SBSD Owl Cam: So, we will move to the next item on our agenda. SBSD Owl Cam: Discussion items… SBSD Owl Cam: on the March 11, 2026 federal law
008enforcement incident on Dorset Street, and I'll turn it over to, Joe if he has any comments on… on the incident. SBSD Owl Cam: No, my only comments were, that this was a, municipal activity, not even municipal. It did not happen within the schools, it was down the street from the schools. Nonetheless, our staff did a wonderful job in, making sure that students were SBSD Owl Cam: I say safe, maybe not, emotionally or, SBSD Owl Cam: More mentally, because it was, you know, there was some angst about what was going on, but the staff did a great job of keeping students SBSD Owl Cam: Keep the students safe, and… SBSD Owl Cam: Big shout out to Monica for all the work that she did, helping, the family who, was in need. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay. SBSD
009Owl Cam: Thank you, Joe. Are there any board members who would like to make a comment on the event? I have a question. And the question is really for Joe, and that's just, I'm wondering, is there any… SBSD Owl Cam: Policy recommendation for, anything that you think would help SBSD Owl Cam: for similar situations in the future. And I kind of want to isolate my participation to things that we can do practically, as opposed to impractically. SBSD Owl Cam: I thought that, you know, the district has a very robust crisis plan, and I think that our staff implemented that, incredibly well. SBSD Owl Cam: I would not… and that's not policy anyway. I don't have any recommendations for any changes in policy. I think that the work that we do, it was clear that we
010do a good job in reviewing our manual and practicing and those sorts of things, and it went up pretty well on that day. SBSD Owl Cam: Thank you. SBSD Owl Cam: So, the board has not taken any, collective statement on this, so at this time, it's another time for… if any board member wants to make a personal statement, reflecting on the event, they are free to do so. SBSD Owl Cam: I will make a personal statement if no one else wants to. To reflect Joe's comment, I want to, like, first and foremost thank the Brave staff, SBSD Owl Cam: Melissa McDonald's, Monica DeRochers, Hrisky Moulds, and others, for being very student-centered, last Wednesday. SBSD Owl Cam: And acting. That's humanity? SBSD Owl Cam: I think that… I understand that it did not happen within the
011schools, and… SBSD Owl Cam: there's not much that we can do within that, but I do think that it's really important SBSD Owl Cam: I think that members of our community within the global majority are feeling very unsafe right now, and feeling very scared, and I think it's important that we, as a pillar of that community, support them, and make sure that SBSD Owl Cam: We support them as members of our community. SBSD Owl Cam: I have a short statement. I think… SBSD Owl Cam: So I was walking my dogs, When the whole thing happened. SBSD Owl Cam: And, I pretty quickly figured out that there were some… there were some pretty dangerous vehicular vehicular activity right outside the high school, and… SBSD Owl Cam: at a time when, you know, elementary school students were
012passing in school buses. Like, I… you know, I always walked my dog right about that time, and it was all happening right about that time. SBSD Owl Cam: And as I watch the events unfold over the course of the day. SBSD Owl Cam: where I kept coming back to was the issue of just kid safety, you know? Kid safety. SBSD Owl Cam: It's the thing in our society that we take the most seriously. It's more important than food, it's more important than shelter, it's more important than mine. SBSD Owl Cam: And… When the driver Decided to use the motor vehicle in that way. SBSD Owl Cam: cross the sidewalk, cross the median, go into the northbound lane, right in front of our high school. He put kids at risk. SBSD Owl Cam: When federal law
013enforcement decided to do an action SBSD Owl Cam: You know, right in front of our high school, right in rush hour, when all the school buses were going by. That put kids at rest. SBSD Owl Cam: And… When the protesters SBSD Owl Cam: went to the scene and interfered with the law enforcement activity, I think that when there was a kid inside the house, I think that that also put at least one kid at risk. And so, my understanding of the events SBSD Owl Cam: Is that really the two organizations that put kids' safety first were the school district. SBSD Owl Cam: and the South Burlington Police. And so I have a lot of thanks for both of those organizations, and I hope that, situations like this can be avoided. SBSD Owl Cam: In the
014future. SBSD Owl Cam: Is there any interest from the board in making some kind of a collective statement on these events? SBSD Owl Cam: I wanted to make my own personal… Oh, yes, please, go ahead. SBSD Owl Cam: I didn't write anything down, but I wanted to echo what I've heard from everyone else about SBSD Owl Cam: Being so grateful to our school staff and administrators who SBSD Owl Cam: Recognized quickly that there were, children who needed that… our support, and… SBSD Owl Cam: did what needed to be done to take care of them. I… SBSD Owl Cam: know that the kids are out in South Burlington have seen what's been happening throughout the country, and I can imagine it's, SBSD Owl Cam: scary time to wonder if that's going to start happening here. So,
015I appreciate all of the teachers who are now still in the building and still supporting our kids, the kids of the global majority, and all the children who SBSD Owl Cam: are wondering what's happening, and South Burlington's gonna be the next place where all the horrible things they saw on TV are gonna happen. So, I… I just appreciate that. SBSD Owl Cam: as a school board director, my… my concern is for the children, and as we've all said, that's where we… that's… that's what we own here, is making sure that the kids of South Burlington are safe, and that… I think that our district did a great job SBSD Owl Cam: jumping to… to protect them, but I also do encourage us to look at how it happened, because it's impossible to make SBSD Owl
016Cam: the perfect choice in these kinds of situations, I think. So, it is a good place to look at what we did, reflect on it, and see how we might improve upon SBSD Owl Cam: our, instincts next time. SBSD Owl Cam: Because there's always room for improvement, even, you know, in the heat of the moment. SBSD Owl Cam: it's incredibly challenging, and I just commend everyone for… SBSD Owl Cam: We're stepping up and taking care of our kids, so… Jump. SBSD Owl Cam: I guess I did have a question. Is the South Burlington School District, and this is important to you, probably, does South Burlington School District have a policy for SBSD Owl Cam: federal agents coming on property? Like, ICE agents can do that? We do. We have a, SBSD Owl Cam: a procedure
017that's been shared with principals. I believe principals have talked about it, not necessarily in detail with staff, but they've given them enough to know that we have plans in place if anybody were to show up. Yes, yep, yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: Yep. SBSD Owl Cam: And also, the day after the event, we had a regularly scheduled principals meeting, and we probably talked for about maybe an hour and 15 minutes, debriefing everything that happened, and talking about what might we do different next time, and that, and that'll also be the topic at our next crisis intervention team. SBSD Owl Cam: Are you… are you concerned at all about Dorset Street, just in terms of it being a dangerous… SBSD Owl Cam: roadway, that there's not much media in between, you know, like, and the reason it's
018relevant to this is because, again, my concern is so much what was happening with the cars and the kids, like… Well, I mean, our Safe Routes to School group talks often about speeders on Dorset. People, SBSD Owl Cam: Drive quickly, and, that's a, SBSD Owl Cam: That's an issue. Again, I'm new to the area, so I haven't seen anything other than that sort of thing happening. Also, I mean, at rush hour, and when kids are leaving, and when pick up and drop off, sometimes it's tough to make those left-hand turns. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay. I know that Laura is a big advocate for SBSD Owl Cam: lowering the speed limit in front of the school all the time, not just when there's flashing lights. So she was here, and she is here. SBSD Owl Cam:
019Maybe, yeah, she might mention that that's been a concern that we have talked about in the past, is a way to make that a safer area, but I think it's a little tricky with the city and it being such a busy street for South Burlington. Right. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, is there any other personal statements that he wanted to make? I mean, I would just say, and yeah, I just added a little thing, and I think as a school board member, I think our responsibility is clear. My responsibility is clear. Our schools must remain safe, stable, and welcoming places for students. SBSD Owl Cam: Under long-standing federal law affirmed by the Supreme Court, in Flyler v. Doe, public schools educate children who live in our communities regardless of immigration status. Every child who walks through
020our doors deserves the opportunity to learn in a safe and supportive environment. SBSD Owl Cam: And I hope, as a community, we can continue working towards solutions that respect both the rule of the law. SBSD Owl Cam: And the dignity of every person, while strengthening trust. SBSD Owl Cam: That's all I would like to say. And I will echo also, you know, very grateful for the teachers that were supportive of the students and students that needed it. SBSD Owl Cam: And I am hopeful, hopeful that SBSD Owl Cam: tensions can be lowered, because I think that there has been a lot of stress that's been placed on law enforcement and the community, and I think that's… that is really challenging, because I do think there's some responsible middle ground, where we're respecting the rule of
021the law, and ensuring that things are being conducted safely. SBSD Owl Cam: So… It's a tough balance, for sure. SBSD Owl Cam: So, is there any interest, on the board to make some kind of a collective statement? SBSD Owl Cam: Okay? SBSD Owl Cam: I'm not sure I have anyone… SBSD Owl Cam: I'm not sure if the community is… is, hoping to hear something from us. That would be my only reason, you know, concern to maybe share with them if there ceased to be concerned. I haven't seen SBSD Owl Cam: too many comments coming in. I don't know if anyone else has had interactions with me about wanting to learn more from us. SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, I've not heard anything. I did have a meeting with the union, today, and I will be putting
022out a statement to staff, just reminding them of what, you know, their role is in not only keeping kids safe, but also in, being, SBSD Owl Cam: able to pull in how they interact with folks, but also knowing that we need to react with empathy when things like this happen. So that'll be going out the next day or so. And I do feel like the… SBSD Owl Cam: Communication that… did you send that just to parents? SBSD Owl Cam: Like, just the update? No, I sent it to everybody. So, yeah, I think that Joe's statement is probably… SBSD Owl Cam: versus us. SBSD Owl Cam: Al. SBSD Owl Cam: As part of my role, I over… Would you just talk to people who you are? Yeah, my name is Monica DeRocher, and I'm the Director
023of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Antiverse, and Social-Emotional Learning here. SBSD Owl Cam: As part of my role, I oversee the multilingual program, which has about anywhere from 100 to 200 students in a month. SBSD Owl Cam: And I have heard from several of our multilingual families about SBSD Owl Cam: the district's position and stance on welcoming immigrant students, kind of citing the case, that we had just cited. SBSD Owl Cam: So there is… I have had… I've received a lot of phone calls about multilingual parents. SBSD Owl Cam: Concerned about sending their students to school, and… So yeah, I'm pretty excited. SBSD Owl Cam: Really appreciate that, thank you. SBSD Owl Cam: And it… And it could be an interesting, SBSD Owl Cam: You know, we don't have to necessarily make a… big, long. SBSD Owl
024Cam: comment as a group of 7 people, which is hard to do, but we could, you know, say what Jen said to just make sure that everyone understands that we welcome SBSD Owl Cam: Of all children into our schools who live in our communities, and we will support them and SBSD Owl Cam: help them learn and grow in our district, regardless of immigration status, yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: I'd be interested in… if that isn't understood and isn't clear, it would be important to me that we make that clear. SBSD Owl Cam: So one option would be, and I'm just going to toss this out there before we kind of decide this board, if we're gonna move on it at all. You know, one option would be just stating SBSD Owl Cam: the facts of what
025Jen said about, you know, the Supreme Court and federal law has long recognized that we will educate anybody in our district. And we can just keep it super, you know. SBSD Owl Cam: flat, like that, you know? I think, personally, a statement that implies SBSD Owl Cam: I think that the… the school district runs the risk of, being accused of… SBSD Owl Cam: Supporting lawlessness if we go too far in the direction of SBSD Owl Cam: In any direction other than just stating the facts. Yeah, just the public justice. I would… SBSD Owl Cam: I would agree with… Saying some statement of, SBSD Owl Cam: We welcome children regardless of immigration size, regardless of race, creed, religion. SBSD Owl Cam: I don't love, like, the following the letter of the law, because I feel like…
026SBSD Owl Cam: I've flattered a lot about civic disobedience the past week, right? And so I think that… SBSD Owl Cam: Sometimes civic disobedience is required in order to… stand up for… SBSD Owl Cam: All children, regardless of immigration status. SBSD Owl Cam: I also don't love… trying to be apolitical, because I don't think that this is a political issue. SBSD Owl Cam: I think that this is a humanity issue, and that we need to… Treated as that. SBSD Owl Cam: What I would say is, I do like the idea of stating the facts, but I also want to make sure that I… it's understandable who we're speaking to, and who I think we're speaking to are just our families in the district, and saying that, you know, they're welcome, everyone's welcome. Oh, that's right,
027yeah, and they're welcome, regardless, and that's where I think, though, I would agree to keep it. We're… we're speaking to more than just families. You know, like, if the school board SBSD Owl Cam: puts out a statement, it's gonna be viewed by every… you know, like, by… everybody's gonna judge it, right? And so, I think it is inherently political. Like, it is… it is political, and we have to consider very carefully SBSD Owl Cam: You know, are we saying that schools support SBSD Owl Cam: you know, civil disobedience, and I think in this case. SBSD Owl Cam: We don't have to. And then we just stick to what Jan said, which is basically quoting the law. Yeah, but I do think it's important to just add a little bit of a welcome, like, more, not
028just, like, we're letting you in here because we're… we have to, and more of just, we welcome and support the community members that we serve. I mean… SBSD Owl Cam: I mean, if I can, here's what I had said. As a school board member, my responsibility is clear. Our schools must remain safe, stable, and welcoming places for students. SBSD Owl Cam: Under long-standing federal law affirmed by the Supreme Court in Flyler v. Doak, public schools educate children who live in our communities regardless of immigration status. Every child who walks through our doors deserves the opportunity to learn in a safe and supportive environment. SBSD Owl Cam: And, I mean, we could just leave it at that. I had added, I hope we can continue working towards solutions that respect both the rule of the law
029and the dignity of every person while strengthening trust within our community. That doesn't need to be said. I think the first part of that is what's… is what's relevant, in my opinion. Yes, I agree. So I can put this in a, would you, would you, let me put it in the chat? SBSD Owl Cam: No, hold on one second. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open a document. SBSD Owl Cam: And so at this point, I'm going to ask, is the board… is at least two-thirds of the board amenable to amending this… amending the agenda to add an action item to make a statement on this? SBSD Owl Cam: We don't act… by agreeing to change the agenda, we may end up voting against the action item, and it may… nothing may happen, right?
030But are we okay with even considering doing an action on this? SBSD Owl Cam: I am. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, hearing no… hearing no objections, we'll amend the agenda to add an action item on SBSD Owl Cam: making a statement on the enforcement action. So, if you could… I'm going to share my screen. Do you want me to drop it in the chat? No, email it to me, and then I'll paste it into my screen, and then we can all edit together. Is this a statement, what Jen just said? SBSD Owl Cam: No, we're not sure yet. We have to see it together on the screen. We're just… we're talking about it right now. Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: Would we open up public comment? Yes, for that? Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, we didn't just
031vote to make that statement, we just voted to talk about it. SBSD Owl Cam: Something else or two. SBSD Owl Cam: I'm gonna paste this in, and it's not… we're still going to discuss it once we paste it in. SBSD Owl Cam: So I think that we would probably remove… SBSD Owl Cam: So my suggestion is to start off with… let's move this… I think… SBSD Owl Cam: I think that this part is probably something that the whole board, if they're going to support a statement at all, would agree with. SBSD Owl Cam: Is that true? SBSD Owl Cam: And Monica's gonna give us some parts. I'm gonna fight for a commuter fee. SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, okay. SBSD Owl Cam: Is this something that the whole board agrees is a potential… if we were
032going to do a statement at all, which of course we'll still vote on, would this be an appropriate thing to put in that statement? SBSD Owl Cam: So, the standard that I would apply to any statement that we make is that it doesn't run any risk of creating further division within our community. I think SBSD Owl Cam: The way this is written, and only this satisfies that standard. SBSD Owl Cam: I would agree with that. I would agree with that. I think that this is… SBSD Owl Cam: Politically not going to increase division. SBSD Owl Cam: It's just stating facts. SBSD Owl Cam: Go any further, might alienate one side, or you might alienate someone. SBSD Owl Cam: But that's not what we're here for. I'm not here to create a bunch of false dichotomies
033and put people in boxes. Can I change deserves to has the right? SBSD Owl Cam: Just because it's a… It's the right way, actually. SBSD Owl Cam: I guess what I feel is I hear what you're saying about where this would be out to the whole community, and I understand that. SBSD Owl Cam: My focus is… reaching the… SBSD Owl Cam: as a school board member, the school and who we serve is what I'm thinking of, and I want to make sure that it reaches… my most concern is how this SBSD Owl Cam: Will be understood by the people who are SBSD Owl Cam: needing to hear it in our community, who have children in our schools, who aren't sure where we stand. So I get that other people will have opinions, and that's totally
034their right to do, but SBSD Owl Cam: As long as my first concern is reaching people who want to hear from us to know that we support them. SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, I almost feel like it would… Doing more damage, for now. SBSD Owl Cam: a statement. SBSD Owl Cam: That just kind of… restates the fact, like, I, like, we're not… Saying our support for… SBSD Owl Cam: art community, we're just kind of stating the fact. I don't know if that… One breach. SBSD Owl Cam: Kind of what Emily was saying, the… SBSD Owl Cam: Well, I mean, I hear is that it needs to. Yeah, I think that's where the second part of it, our schools must remain safe, stable, and welcoming places for students. I agree. I think that line really helps make
035it SBSD Owl Cam: Understand, you know, puts it in perspective. SBSD Owl Cam: And it doesn't say anything that should be political, in my opinion. SBSD Owl Cam: Monica, did you have a comment? SBSD Owl Cam: I'm not sure about how to articulate this best, and I agree that, SBSD Owl Cam: I don't believe this would put us into any political waters. I was… SBSD Owl Cam: as I've been on the phone with parents. SBSD Owl Cam: they often reiterate there was a 4-year-old and an 18-year-old, and that would have been my kid. SBSD Owl Cam: So I would offer maybe something along the lines SBSD Owl Cam: around, as care… this is totally in the… but as caregivers, we recognize, like, our responsibility in protecting your kids, something along those lines. So, something to
036consider, but many parents have said, like, that could have been my little girl. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? Or my son, my 18-year-old son. SBSD Owl Cam: I think my… Hesitance. SBSD Owl Cam: you know, like, as individual school board members, I'll be the first one to say, you should say what you think. You should say it on Facebook, you should say it in other paper, you should get on TV and say it. SBSD Owl Cam: But as a… as a school board. SBSD Owl Cam: I think that we need to put consent before policy. SBSD Owl Cam: And I… instead of policy before consent. And what I mean by that, consent before policy, is that I don't think that we necessarily have strong consent from the community, the whole community, even the people that you
037may not agree with, that, it's the right thing to SBSD Owl Cam: highlight, anything other than… The fact that there is a right to education. SBSD Owl Cam: And in terms of it being worse to say this. SBSD Owl Cam: rather than just not even saying anything at all, you know, I bet that a lot of people didn't know that it was… SBSD Owl Cam: you know, plowler versus dough, that gave people this right, and that, indeed. SBSD Owl Cam: And, you know, children do have this right. It doesn't matter who you are. If you live in our community, you have a right to a school. So, that would be why I would say that we… SBSD Owl Cam: on… on balance. SBSD Owl Cam: It would be better to say this than nothing at
038all, because it gets those words into the public. SBSD Owl Cam: Weiler v. Dole, Supreme Court, a right, you know. I think we've already agreed that that's acceptable. SBSD Owl Cam: But going beyond that, and adding what Jen said at the end, our schools must remain safe, stable, involved in it. SBSD Owl Cam: that's fine. That's… I think going beyond that. SBSD Owl Cam: It might appear that we're taking sides, and that's not what we can afford. Okay. I agree. And I do like how that last line just makes it… Right, yeah, that weighs the facts, and then also just a little… SBSD Owl Cam: We can all agree on that. Do we need this part? SBSD Owl Cam: We could just start with our schools most familiar. SBSD Owl Cam: Yuma, and I'm sorry,
039I'm wordsmithing here. Do we mean stable, or could we just say self-safe for Waterman? SBSD Owl Cam: our schools… it was fine the way it was written. Yeah, I think stables, I think stable's okay, because it should be stable. SBSD Owl Cam: But… All students. All the students. SBSD Owl Cam: They're welcoming places for all students, for all students. SBSD Owl Cam: Sorry. It's Mark. SBSD Owl Cam: You're out of work. I know. SBSD Owl Cam: Any other comments? SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so at this point, I would entertain a motion to SBSD Owl Cam: Release a statement from the board. SBSD Owl Cam: I would entertain a motion to release a statement from the board stating, under long-standing federal law, affirmed by the Supreme Court in Plyler v. Doe, public schools educate children who
040live in our communities regardless of immigration status. Every child who walks through our doors has the right to learn in a safe and supportive environment. SBSD Owl Cam: Our schools must remain safe, stable, and welcoming places for all students. SBSD Owl Cam: works for me. SBSD Owl Cam: Would anybody like to move? SBSD Owl Cam: I move. Emily moves. SBSD Owl Cam: Second. Dan seconds. Is there any discussion? SBSD Owl Cam: And at this point, this is now an action item, so we would be accepting public comment on this. SBSD Owl Cam: See nothing old, SBSD Owl Cam: All right, all those in favor? SBSD Owl Cam: Aye. Aye, aye. SBSD Owl Cam: Alright, the motion passes. SBSD Owl Cam: So, we will get that, on our website. SBSD Owl Cam: Alright, is there any
041other… any other discussion on this item? SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, we'll move on. The next item on the agenda is the update on the ENDS policy. SBSD Owl Cam: So, we have to kind of reset our minds here a little bit. SBSD Owl Cam: This is a policy governance district. Policy governance is a way for school boards to work. It's voluntary. We decided to use policy governance, and basically what it means is that we set ends SBSD Owl Cam: And executive limitations, which is kind of like saying we set goals, and then we set rules for the superintendent, and the superintendent can do anything in the world, as long as it's allowed by law, and it's not SBSD Owl Cam: ruled out by our limitations in order to achieve those ends or those goals. And
042so, at our last SBSD Owl Cam: few meetings, we've talked about the need to update our ends policy. SBSD Owl Cam: and also update and create a strategic plan. And so… SBSD Owl Cam: At our last meeting, a committee was charged, Michelle, Alyssa, and I, and we were tasked with just organizing this process of doing the ENS policy update. So, I've got a couple documents to show you today. SBSD Owl Cam: The first one… I will share my screen. SBSD Owl Cam: The first one… Is a quick primer on… What are ends? SBSD Owl Cam: So… SBSD Owl Cam: First of all, ends come from policy governance, which is, again, it's this voluntary framework that we have imposed upon ourselves in order to make us better at governance. And it was started by these people,
043the carvers. SBSD Owl Cam: a while back, and I personally think it makes a lot of sense, because it basically tries to separate what we do from what the superintendent does, and make sure that the organization doesn't get confused about who is in charge. SBSD Owl Cam: So, I'm gonna go through just a few slides that are straight from the Carvers. These are… this is from their Frequently Asked Questions on their website, and I'm not going to read the full text of every frequently asked question, but I did highlight a couple words that I think are relevant. And what we're talking about here is, what are ends, right? SBSD Owl Cam: Because that's what we're updating as our ENS policy. SBSD Owl Cam: So, this is my favorite FAQ for this particular topic. It's, isn't
044ends just a jargon word for goals. SBSD Owl Cam: And according to our governance model, the answer is no, it's not the same thing, because an end has… SBSD Owl Cam: Results, like, what results we want. SBSD Owl Cam: Who is gonna get those results? SBSD Owl Cam: and the worth of the results, right? So we're not allowed to set an end that doesn't have all three factors, right? You can't just say, we want these results, but not say why. You can't just say, we want these results, but not say for who. SBSD Owl Cam: So, ENDS is a specific, is a specific thing that is bigger than a goal. And so, SBSD Owl Cam: like they say at the end, because they're very opinionated people selling a policy governance theory, the use of traditional
045management terms would be dysfunctional. So what they're saying here is that as we go through the process of updating our ends, we should not fall back to words like goals. SBSD Owl Cam: vision, like, whatever. Like, what we're talking about are ends, and the special thing about ends is results, recipients, and worth. SBSD Owl Cam: This question has come up here. We have a strategic plan. Isn't that what ends are? SBSD Owl Cam: And I highlighted… this is… strategic planning is a useful management tool enabling managers to plan the allocation and use of resources. So, like, the purpose of the ENS Policy Update is to enable managers SBSD Owl Cam: To do management things. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? SBSD Owl Cam: So, strategic plan is something that we are not gonna write. SBSD Owl Cam:
046We are going to tell the superintendent what we want. SBSD Owl Cam: what he can and can't do, and then he's gonna figure out how to build a strategic plan. And so later in the year, that will happen. SBSD Owl Cam: Similar… to… The previous question about whether ENDS is just another way of saying goals. SBSD Owl Cam: Ends, are not just saying, like, what programs we have. So we're not allowed to have an end that is like, you know, we are gonna have a wood shop. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? As much as I would dearly love for that to be the N, we can't have that as an N. SBSD Owl Cam: So, SBSD Owl Cam: the end… So at this point, this is obvious. Like, an end is not just, like, we want
047to have a certain program in place. SBSD Owl Cam: And then, you know, they have some advice, I don't know how useful this is, but they say maybe, like, you should revisit your ends once every year. Revisit. We're not doing… we're not revisiting. We are updating our ends, right? Our ends have not been updated for 12 years. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? So, the purpose of this process is a more comprehensive update of our ends. SBSD Owl Cam: But I could certainly see that a future school board might want to revisit our work in a year, but hopefully don't have to redo everything. SBSD Owl Cam: And then this is my favorite one, they say, okay, well, we already have a mission statement. So in South Burlington, I think it's arguable whether we have a mission
048statement that's separate from our end, so we might not fall into this trap, but their advice is that if you have a mission statement that you like, put it on the plaque, give it to the CEO, and then throw it away. SBSD Owl Cam: Hey, I thought that's pretty much. SBSD Owl Cam: So yeah, I think that's really all I wanted to say about ENDS. SBSD Owl Cam: Joe, do you want to say anything about ends, or anybody else? SBSD Owl Cam: No? Possibly possible. Okay. SBSD Owl Cam: So, next, the committee met a few times. SBSD Owl Cam: And, we… I think the most concrete thing that we want to show In our plan right now. SBSD Owl Cam: Is, is the… is the calendar that we're proposing. SBSD Owl Cam: I think this
049will help us understand what we need to do as a board, today and going forward. So, the purpose of all of this SBSD Owl Cam: is for us to have a third reading and an action on September 16th. So, unfortunately, that's a little bit after, Labor Day, but it should give the superintendent time to build the strategic plan in the fall and have it ready for the following year. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? So that's the goal of this whole schedule, and we just backed into, what we were going to do based on that. So… SBSD Owl Cam: a couple different concerns. One big concern is that we want to get wide demographic representation from the community SBSD Owl Cam: In terms of what they want our ends to be. And so what that means to
050me is we need SBSD Owl Cam: Blue collar. We need white collar. We need… SBSD Owl Cam: older people, we need younger people, we need people, kids, people without kids, because, the school district is owned by the voters and taxpayers, right? We're not owned by SBSD Owl Cam: the parents, right? The school district is a service that is provided by the taxpayers to the parents. SBSD Owl Cam: So we have to involve the widest set of people. That's one concern. And then the other concern is that, obviously. SBSD Owl Cam: teachers and staff are an incredibly important stakeholder group, and so we want to set up this calendar so that they can be involved, right? And so we didn't want to do a lot of activity over the summer where traditionally staff would not be
051available to comment. SBSD Owl Cam: So, if we again, look over the next few months until September 16th, SBSD Owl Cam: This means having a number of community forums, the first on April 15th, the second on May 6th. SBSD Owl Cam: then a third, and then a fourth, all the way through June. The last day of school is June 16th, so what this means is that we will have given four chances for the community to show up at our meetings and talk to us about ends before teachers leave for, you know, before the school year ends. SBSD Owl Cam: Can I ask you a question? Yeah, of course. So, those community forums, will you be holding those in different locations? Like, could we have them around South Arlington, like we've done before? SBSD Owl Cam:
052Okay, because I think it's a good idea to get out, and maybe even consider, too, does it have to be set at those times, or can we have other groups that meet at different times? Well, I'm glad you asked, because the other thing that we want to do, in addition to community forums. SBSD Owl Cam: is have focus groups. And so, part of what the committee wants you all to do tonight SBSD Owl Cam: is decide if it would be okay to, hire a consultant to help us run those focus groups. And so the request to the committee tonight would be, would you set us a budget for hiring a consultant to run focus groups? And part of the idea with the focus groups is SBSD Owl Cam: with the community forums, you're asking people
053to come to you, but with the focus groups, we could much more go to people and say, well, when can you meet? I want to meet with you. SBSD Owl Cam: we'll go to where you are, we'll do it outside of a normal scheduled meeting. It's not a forum of the board or anything like that. It might just be a board member or two and a consultant running these focus groups. And so those focus groups would run basically during the same time as the community forums. They would be wrapping up SBSD Owl Cam: Just at the end of school. SBSD Owl Cam: So that's how we were planning on getting information from the community. The community who are the owners of this school SBSD Owl Cam: Of the school district, and getting their input on,
054on this. SBSD Owl Cam: A couple other notes here. So, our proposal is that we should first hold a community forum on April 15th, and then wait and ask board members to wait until May 6th to give their own opinions about what should go into the ENS Policy Update. SBSD Owl Cam: So, in other words, right before our second community forum, we'll have a discussion item where board members are encouraged to SBSD Owl Cam: give their ideas. They will have already heard the community say them once, but, you know, for example, I'm gonna say, I really think XYZ. SBSD Owl Cam: And then, over the summer. SBSD Owl Cam: And I guess the, the other… SBSD Owl Cam: idea that the committee would like the board to endorse is the idea that we're gonna, like,
055the board is gonna write a policy. We're not going to hire a consultant to write the ENS policy. SBSD Owl Cam: the committee is going to come up with a draft that we will then work on over the summer and have ready on July 8th, with a first draft, and then we will work on… on all the month through August 12th. So the committee is going to write the policy. SBSD Owl Cam: and then bring it to the board for a first draft in mid-July, and then we'll work on it together in open meeting. SBSD Owl Cam: So we're not hiring anybody to write this policy for us, we're gonna do it ourselves. SBSD Owl Cam: So that's the big picture. Committee members, what other… what other things should we… I think we do want
056the consultant to review, however. In addition to other reviews, we need to look at, you know, feasibility of implementation. I think there are pieces of that as we move along and develop that. SBSD Owl Cam: The actual language, against the goals, is to make sure that those are… SBSD Owl Cam: actionable, measurable, you know, achievable. And that, that requires conversations with experts as well, so… SBSD Owl Cam: So when you say consultant, are you thinking, like, the SBA? No. No? SBSD Owl Cam: So, I have a… SBSD Owl Cam: Because they have, I think, helped. I will say that, I mean, certainly that is an option in the universe of options. SBSD Owl Cam: it's not my recommendation, not because they don't do good work, but because I don't think they're completely independent as being
057kind of entrenched in the implementations of policy governance that we have in the state of Vermont. So to the extent that we would want to break out of that and have somebody leading process and doing data collection that doesn't have skin in the game, that doesn't have a political stake in the SBSD Owl Cam: around, I think is advantageous. SBSD Owl Cam: Not us. SBSD Owl Cam: But my two cents, and… Yeah, so the… Your perspective. SBSD Owl Cam: Also, be able to ask. SBSD Owl Cam: Had you looked into, pricing for consultants? SBSD Owl Cam: No, but… SBSD Owl Cam: I was imagining… I don't know, do you want to say anything about the… It's a chicken and egg conversation, right? Like, what's the budget? What's the… so, I, I developed a list. SBSD
058Owl Cam: Of possible consultants. SBSD Owl Cam: And they include people that are former colleagues, people doing this kind of work, but it's in my own professional area, so I do know people. There are also people that I know word of mouth, there are large organizations that you can go to, their pricing is varied. SBSD Owl Cam: Particularly when you get up to, you know, like, big consulting groups like McKinsey and that kind of… at first, probably is a little pricey. SBSD Owl Cam: I don't want to say rates out loud, because I probably will misrepresent, because it's been, you know, 3, 4, 5 years since I was doing a consulting day, so those rates probably would have changed. What I do know is I… so I've reached out to two, and I've had an
059in-depth conversation with one. SBSD Owl Cam: And what I will say is she is more than willing to submit a, you know, kind of a proposed modular structure, like. SBSD Owl Cam: if you just want me to do the focus groups, this is what it will cost, and these are what my rates are, and this is what I think the estimate of effort is. We could do it the other way, you know, set the… set the max. SBSD Owl Cam: Which I think is useful, because we kind of want to know where we're working, and back into it from there. Yeah, that would be my suggestion, is that, similar to the budget, you know, we draw the box, and if somebody can fit in that box, great. SBSD Owl Cam: And if they don't, then…
060SBSD Owl Cam: we'll try with somebody else. So, that would be my suggestion, is that we, Is that we say. SBSD Owl Cam: Get proposals that are up to, let's say, $15,000. SBSD Owl Cam: Or something like that. SBSD Owl Cam: So, I think that that's probably all that we need to talk about in terms of the update from the ENS Policy Committee. If… SBSD Owl Cam: the board agrees that with the idea of having four community forums, with the idea of having focus groups, with the idea of us actually writing the policy, and then having it reviewed by this consultant, and then also presented to you all on July 8th. SBSD Owl Cam: for review, and then with the intention of doing, an action item on the 16th, then I think SBSD Owl Cam:
061really, what we need from you right now is just telling us, okay. SBSD Owl Cam: try to get a contract for X dollars, and then we'll bring that to you at the next meeting, if we can get it. Okay, I have another question. I mean, and I know that I asked this, I think, during our last meeting, and I forget what the response was, but… SBSD Owl Cam: When I did go through the SBA training last year, they had talked about the portrait of a graduate. SBSD Owl Cam: How could any of that component… I don't know if that's, like, a trademark program, like Portrait of a Graduate, but I just remember there were some… SBSD Owl Cam: cool takeaways from that. One of them was, it was, like, graduation, and there's a large number…
062we're going to be having the end of the school year coming up, so I'm thinking about soliciting input, and maybe I'm jumping ahead here, I just want to put this out there, but soliciting some input from families who actually do have kids that are in the schools. SBSD Owl Cam: at the graduations, Kindergarten, middle school, high school. SBSD Owl Cam: I remember VSBA saying they had set up a table, and they had had, you know, when my SBSD Owl Cam: student walks across the stage, I want to, or… I forget exactly the way that they phrased the question, but people would have post-it notes, and they could SBSD Owl Cam: turn things in, and they were using that as one of the, kind of, metrics that they were collecting, and… SBSD Owl Cam: you know,
063to evaluate, not even metrics, but just data that they were collecting as they were… as they were looking at all of this. And I'm just thinking of, you know, so again, it's just an idea, kind of, out there, like, I don't know if… SBSD Owl Cam: when you're doing the M's, like, how would that align with the portrait of a graduate, or is there any relation between the two? SBSD Owl Cam: So the ends we have right now, if you put our ends up to Portrait of a Graduate, it looks very, very specific. And Portrait of a Graduate is… there are multiple authors on that. There are multiple organizations that work with it, in terms of going to SBSD Owl Cam: often at the state level, this rolls out, but clearly it happens at the
064district level as well, to, you know, figure out how that… SBSD Owl Cam: What version of that you want to implement as your, SBSD Owl Cam: you're kind of guiding light for your organization, because it's not always policy governance, right? At the state level, when one portrait of a Graduate is implemented, it drives the assessment and accountability system. SBSD Owl Cam: We have a, you know, different version of what that looks like at the local level. But that is all to say, what we have right now reflects a great deal of what is in Portrait of a Graduate. And that… thanks for queuing up another, important SBSD Owl Cam: thing. SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, SBSD Owl Cam: my goal, personally, is for ENDS policies to be written in a way that is understandable by the
065whole community, right? So this goes along the same goal of considering that the ends should be set by people who don't have kids in school. SBSD Owl Cam: And also, you know, like, it shouldn't read, like, legalese. It shouldn't read, like, official ease. It should read, like, you know, kitchen table talk. It's like, this is what we want for our kids. SBSD Owl Cam: this is what you, my neighbor, want for my kids, which is kind of weird, because you want something for my kids, but yeah, that's how society works. So, SBSD Owl Cam: I just want whatever… any concepts that we import, You know? SBSD Owl Cam: which may be tried and true, I want to make sure that we put them in a way that is, plain language. SBSD Owl Cam: And that
066could… that helps tie in the understanding of the community members who don't have children in the district, but how… SBSD Owl Cam: We're all… everyone's affected by how the children are educated, and there's… SBSD Owl Cam: There's positives for everyone when we focus on SBSD Owl Cam: and, you know, better in the education markets in the district. I did want to just point out that we changed the date of that SBSD Owl Cam: April 1st, you can change it to May 3rd, 1st. SBSD Owl Cam: That was my only little thing I noticed. SBSD Owl Cam: And I don't want to jump the gun there, but it is thinking about ways that you can solicit feedback from the community. SBSD Owl Cam: And I just happened to like the idea that they had it at,
067like, graduation events, because these ended the school year, and there were tables that were set up, and they had post-it notes, ways that you're just collecting the information. Or, Joe, I would imagine you go into your 3Q groups. SBSD Owl Cam: And, you know… Getting them engaged again. SBSD Owl Cam: continuing to tap in and pull some of those voices. Yeah, some of the ideas for who we talked to from a focus group point of view. Well, I think it was somewhere… SBSD Owl Cam: of groups? Yeah, here we go. Okay. It's… actually, it's gotten quite wrong. Yeah, the thing about this, it's heavily weighted, inevitably, towards school community. Yep. But, yeah, so I added what you were suggesting, Jen. SBSD Owl Cam: Collect inspiration on graduation day, and I also, this was important, I
068don't remember if it was Alyssa or Michelle, who pointed out that, after we do our first reading on August 19th, we'll send out a community survey, and we'll hype it, you know, when we were doing superintendent search, we got 400 responses. SBSD Owl Cam: So, you know, that'll hopefully just be the… SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, great. The icing on the cake. Yeah. And minor tweaks at that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would just say, I don't… I mean, just for timing, collect inspiration on graduation day, that's awesome. Graduation days for the high school is June 12th. SBSD Owl Cam: I don't know if it matters, but some of those things… some of those things, I think you would want to move forward. SBSD Owl Cam: Because… SBSD Owl Cam: you know, and it may not
069just be the high school, it may be kindergarten graduation, it might be middle school graduation. I mean, these people are going to have more skin in the game, because their kids are going to be… I love that idea. I think that going around, and using our student representatives to… SBSD Owl Cam: You know, yes, I was gonna ask… Help students go in and write post-its and stuff. Yeah, I was gonna ask, because… SBSD Owl Cam: I've heard ends all the time, but, like, still trying to fully understand what they are, like… SBSD Owl Cam: I think it would probably be great to hear what students want out of SBSD Owl Cam: their ends, since that's what's affecting them, right? Like, I still have a great understanding of them, but I know, like, we just started,
070the superintendent advisory group with Dr. Clark, like, me and Loman could reach out to that group to get input on this kind of thing, like. SBSD Owl Cam: I think it will be important that students also have an input as one of those community… Right. Yeah, a good way to… well, one… one way maybe you can begin to ask the questions is. SBSD Owl Cam: to… so ends, you can… SBSD Owl Cam: you can think of as outcomes, but they're outcomes for you. They're… what outcomes do you think will best prepare you for your life beyond high school, right? What, who, why? Yeah, absolutely. The result? SBSD Owl Cam: the recipient they're worth. Yeah, right. And I think what's missing, and I really like your point, is, you know, maybe the superintendent could coordinate some
071kind of a student assembly SBSD Owl Cam: Where any student would be free to come up and present an idea, or just submit it and have somebody else read it. SBSD Owl Cam: So maybe you would consider having some kind of a student event. I also considered when I saw your announcement, too, about the committee, you know, kind of riding on your coattails there, and can we tap into your committee? Although, I mean, I think… Like, there are lots of… It might be cool to do, like, a… SBSD Owl Cam: a big, you know, get everybody in the gym, right? I mean, this is a big deal, right? You know, go beyond… because the thing about committees. SBSD Owl Cam: is… SBSD Owl Cam: that, obviously, the students who are most tuned in to academics
072are going to be the ones on that committee, and the people who are, you know what I mean? Which is inevitable, it's hard to get around that problem, but, like, at least in a big SBSD Owl Cam: audience, you might get a little bit more participation from people who wouldn't necessarily volunteer for maybe a slingshot with Smarties. Yeah, I think… I think students will, even if they're not as in tune academically, I think they will SBSD Owl Cam: find this to be important if it's put in front of them, and it's easy to access, because it is… SBSD Owl Cam: that is the thing you hear from students is, what am I going to actually take out of school right now and bring you? So I do think kids will engage as long as we're
073purposeful about where and when. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay. I'll tell you what I really liked about our first, Superintendent Advisory Council meeting, when we went around, asked the kids, you know, what grade are you in, what do you do in school, what do you do out of school? A lot of kids said, I don't do anything in school. And that was purposeful, that we did not go just for the SBSD Owl Cam: student council, or the valedictorians, or that kind of thing. We wanted a wide spec… a wide range of kids, and… SBSD Owl Cam: just that very perspective, that I don't do anything in school. I think they really appreciate having voice now that, you know, I want to be involved in school, so maybe these are some ways. Okay, so I'm going to
074put a placeholder here for you, Joe, to basically recommend what you want SBSD Owl Cam: to have happen here. Student engagement. SBSD Owl Cam: I mean, I would be looking for tips on parent engagement, too, right? Like, we talked a lot about this, that, you know, there have been a lot of committees, and SBSD Owl Cam: When we put the word out, sign up for our committee. SBSD Owl Cam: there's not a lot of diversity in terms of this… it's the same people every time, but there's also not a lot of representation of the diversity in the community in that process, and so we have been thinking, how do we break out of that? And we think that targeted focus groups is one way, but that requires a little more energy and, like, going to
075and saying. SBSD Owl Cam: who would you recommend? And going to the PTO, who would you recommend? The PTO principals might be able to help. Principals, yes, principals who are working on all families. And if you guys could, you know, help us bring in that parent voice, then the consultant could be proportionally more SBSD Owl Cam: spend proportionally more time getting the non-parent voice, because they wouldn't… why bother having that set up, because that would just be prohibitively expensive to have that person doing all the contacting. Okay, so I'm just gonna… SBSD Owl Cam: Superintendent. Is this okay if we say, you know, superintendent will advise SBSD Owl Cam: board on parent-student engagement, freeing up consultants to focus on non-parent? Is that acceptable? I mean, they could still… SBSD Owl Cam: Do focus groups with
076school, community, if… SBSD Owl Cam: Useful. Why can't we just have a consultant to review? SBSD Owl Cam: I mean, you're gonna pay a consultant basically to organize this stuff. SBSD Owl Cam: Some of it. SBSD Owl Cam: Not all of it. SBSD Owl Cam: Right, some of it, not all of it. SBSD Owl Cam: But this list keeps growing and growing and growing, which means SBSD Owl Cam: the cost for organizing it will grow and grow to grow. So, I mean, is there a problem with just having a consultant? SBSD Owl Cam: to review what… Because you're writing by the county, and obviously run through the board. SBSD Owl Cam: Sure. SBSD Owl Cam: Reviewing what? Written by the… you mean the ends that are drafted? Right. Yeah, I think that's part of the
077process, to review the beginning… actually, to review what we have, document the rationale for why we need change. SBSD Owl Cam: And then, the other big piece is to be the person who SBSD Owl Cam: collects the data, so to speak, right, that is in on the focus groups, develops the questions and asks the questions, and then summarizes the results. So it's not me, it's not Seamus, it's not Alyssa, who may have some local interest or bias that SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, I, I can hold that. Maybe called out on the table. SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, this is a long one. SBSD Owl Cam: If you don't want to go down that route? Are they going to be doing everything that, you know, stays there? Well, I think the point of my last thing was
078just that the superintendent may be able to help us SBSD Owl Cam: to do parent and student engagement to some degree, which would save money on the consult side. So I think at this point, I think we've talked about this probably for long enough, SBSD Owl Cam: would it be okay if you guys gave us a ballpark number that we should be shooting for, trying to get a consultant in? Does that work? SBSD Owl Cam: I don't feel like I have an accurate idea of how much, so I would… I'd like to kind of… SBSD Owl Cam: Hear what you say. SBSD Owl Cam: I was thinking… I don't want to predetermine it either, right? I kind of… part of me wants it to come up, you know, like, tell me what this costs, and
079I'll tell you if we can afford it. I was gonna say, could we get, like, SBSD Owl Cam: A number and bring that to the board. SBSD Owl Cam: for approval? So, we could. I think that… and I'm totally happy to walk away from this conversation without a number in mind, but I think if the board said. SBSD Owl Cam: you know, this is what it's worth to us. I think that we would have a fighting chance of getting a consultant to meet that price. And so we should… and so, like, you know, if… and it's like, okay, if we do this, and they were gonna charge us SBSD Owl Cam: you know, X minus… SBSD Owl Cam: $1,000, and so we've just wasted $1,000 by setting a price. Okay, fine, we wasted $1,000. But,
080on the other hand, if they were going to charge us SBSD Owl Cam: 2X. SBSD Owl Cam: But they want the business, because it's going to look good on their resume to have South Burlington School Board and Policy Consultant SBSD Owl Cam: then we've just saved ourselves X. SBSD Owl Cam: So, I would… I would say let's just… SBSD Owl Cam: eyeball a number, see if we can get a consultant for it. If we can't, if everybody refuses the business, then we'll have to come back for more, but… Well, a consultant's going to give you their price based on the amount of work that they're going to do. But as a consultant, you could go… you could lowball, you could highball, this could cost… SBSD Owl Cam: 10X, 1X, 5X… Well, you said… Yeah, but
081you get what you pay for it, too. SBSD Owl Cam: So… Which is walking bright. SBSD Owl Cam: And you had mentioned $15,000, is that what you said? That's my sense, is that we should just say, let's see if we can get a consult for $15,000 if we can. Do we have a budget for that? SBSD Owl Cam: Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: I'm… I guess I'm… Tom? I could say that's the X. SBSD Owl Cam: Personally. SBSD Owl Cam: That's… that's what I'm… I'm not saying, like… SBSD Owl Cam: spend it all. I'm just saying, like, if it comes in there under, like. SBSD Owl Cam: Sounds… I think it's worth it. Okay, okay, well… If you have a good consultant who's willing to do that, they might tell you, okay, for that price, this
082is what I can do for you. Yeah, yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, well, it seems like the sense of the board seems to be that $15,000 is not crazy, and so, like, if we… SBSD Owl Cam: you know, we could use that. I don't know if they'll be watching these recordings, but SBSD Owl Cam: Maybe. I don't know, but what I will say is I'll… from that part of the conversation, I will simply recuse myself, because I do know some of the people that we will talk to. And I don't want to have any appearance of trying to benefit this person, or that person, or whatever. That makes sense. We're tapping into my contacts, we're not giving business to my friends, right? And so if I could just stay SBSD Owl Cam: out of that
083part, that would be right. Okay, so I feel comfortable with the number we've been given. It's obviously not a commitment from the board, but it's a good ballpark. SBSD Owl Cam: And it sounds like nobody objects to… it's clearly worth that amount to get a good consultant, so… Okay, great. All right. SBSD Owl Cam: We'll move on to, the next item on the discussion agenda, which is legislative advocacy. So the concept here is if we wanted to talk about, forming a board committee. SBSD Owl Cam: To advocate on the current issues that are facing our district, such as SBSD Owl Cam: redistricting, such as foundation formula, such as, you know, the healthcare negotiation law, age 42, which makes SBSD Owl Cam: the way that the state negotiates healthcare much more rational. So is that something
084the board wants to discuss right now? SBSD Owl Cam: I like the idea of legislative advocacy. The one thing that… SBSD Owl Cam: I mean, I would be amenable to that. SBSD Owl Cam: We had talked about this during our meeting before, and one of the things that I was asking was, I mean, it seems like it would be helpful to have some guidance, because there's so much information out there, it's like, where do you even begin? SBSD Owl Cam: Right? And I think that was one of the questions that I was bringing up when we had spoken before. I don't know if that came through or not, but… SBSD Owl Cam: you know, when you think about, like, when we're talking about school funding and all of these things that are outside of our
085control, but we need to advocate, well, what are those things? And where do we even begin? What does a roadmap look like? Do you all get the VSBA emails? SBSD Owl Cam: Like, the one that came this week at all of the legislation that was formed. So, just want to make sure that you get that. SBSD Owl Cam: I'm not happy in that or not. I signed up for… SBSD Owl Cam: And you know, and even then, Joe, I mean, we on the board may get some of that information. SBSD Owl Cam: what I would like to see is a legislative advocacy that is… encompasses more than just the people that are on board, but it is a community-wide SBSD Owl Cam: Kind of thing. I think, you know, it's going to be squeaky wheel,
086gets the grease, more voices, all of that, and I think that that would be a powerful thing that we can, SBSD Owl Cam: you know, that we can gather around. But it… so I'm very supportive of this, but I think we need more voices than who is here. So, one way we could do that is we could charge a committee, and we would basically say, here are the SBSD Owl Cam: issues that the committee is supposed to look at, and the committee is done when these issues are done being talked about in the legislature. So that's one action, you know, that we could take. SBSD Owl Cam: In Ohio, every school board has a legislative liaison. That's a school board member that is, like, the… SBSD Owl Cam: conduit to the Ohio School Boards Association
087when they get all their legislation, and so it's one person. SBSD Owl Cam: And what they don't do is what I'm going to say next, is I think if that were the way the board went, which is, like, a liaison, I think that person could work to get a community group together to kind of SBSD Owl Cam: South of them. SBSD Owl Cam: I think that would be a lot of burden for one person. Didn't we have a group where we were meeting the board? There were a couple of representatives from the board that were meeting with our legislature, remember? Yes, there have been multiple… there have been multiple attempts to set up a recurring call with SBSD Owl Cam: legislators. And at least in the first couple calls, it wasn't all the legislators. SBSD
088Owl Cam: It was kind of more of those who have previously identified with support. Yeah, we don't have that happening right now. I don't see one on my calendar. It kind of went defunct. Okay, all right, because I know I did participate in one of them. We had a great conversation. SBSD Owl Cam: I mean, I'd be interested in doing something like that, but I just, again, I feel like it requires more than me. There needs to be a lot more voices that are present. SBSD Owl Cam: I think voices from the community that are divided, particularly voices that are frustrated with the school spending, I think would be, you know, to be able to look at that and to say, what are the things that we can potentially help to influence? Maybe we can
089get Jerry Silverstein to the State House. SBSD Owl Cam: That would be great! SBSD Owl Cam: I know he's on the call. So, I guess my suggestion here is that SBSD Owl Cam: I don't think we need to talk too much about this tonight. I think that we should consider, charging a committee SBSD Owl Cam: Because I think it's too much burden to put on one person, and the purpose of that committee is to do more than just talk to our legislators on the phone, but to actually organize groups of people in the community to go to the State House. SBSD Owl Cam: it's remarkably open, as I have learned recently, and just kind of make South Burlington's presence known. So, is the board amenable to the idea of charging a committee? SBSD Owl Cam:
090Yes. Sounds like there's no objection to that. Okay. So, the key thing about committees and policy governance is that you're not allowed to have a standing committee. You have to specify what the end of the committee is going to be, right? And so, I would suggest that such a committee would cover, redistricting. SBSD Owl Cam: Foundation formula. SBSD Owl Cam: healthcare negotiation, SBSD Owl Cam: But as I say that, I'm realizing, well, so is it… how do people feel about that kind of a structure? SBSD Owl Cam: Could you just make it Act 73 so it's not a million things, it's just that one thing? But wouldn't we want to advocate on the other stuff? What's that? Wouldn't we want to advocate on the other stuff? Well, those things are a part of Act 73.
091SBSD Owl Cam: HA42 is it? SBSD Owl Cam: redistricting and foundation funding? Well, but I was saying, also, HA42… That would be different, yeah, for sure. But I agree that it needs to be… not just because of policy governance, but from a functional perspective, it needs to be pretty focused, like having a big long list of things that you're advocating for. SBSD Owl Cam: Well. SBSD Owl Cam: You're kind of talking about everything, then, and you're not… you don't have a focus where you're actually bringing… Well, I don't necessarily agree that healthcare costs SBSD Owl Cam: redistricting and foundation formulas too much for this committee? Is that what you're saying? No, I'm just saying that it doesn't… There's six and one half dozen of the other, is what I'm… it could be… you could call
092it Act 73, that's one big zip has both listings in it, or you could make it separate. SBSD Owl Cam: Do you have any other suggestions for things that we might want to look at from a legislative advocacy point of view? I think a possible suggestion is instead of listing the topics you want to talk about, is make the ad hoc just time-based, so that we are going to advocate for anything that has an impact on South Burlington schools through the end of the legislative session in June. SBSD Owl Cam: So we basically form a committee to… SBSD Owl Cam: To work on legislative issues this… SBSD Owl Cam: And then, you know, like, spiritually, it's like, well, that kind of is a little bit like a standing committee that just stands up during when
093the session is in session, and then stands down when it's not. But let's evaluate when we get there, and that's a problem, you know? Because there is a purpose to having a focused SBSD Owl Cam: Committee, you know, because it's the board telling the committee what they should work on. SBSD Owl Cam: Right, I also feel like there's a lot of uncertainty about where this could go anywhere, in terms of, like. SBSD Owl Cam: what we decide, what the state decides about redistricting. So, it's kind of hard to make an end goal when we're not really sure SBSD Owl Cam: Right, and it's our first time, so maybe this time we just have a time-based committee, and next time, we'll actually come more prepared and say, okay, here are the issues that we want them
094to advocate for. Okay, so I would… any other… I'm going to propose a motion. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so first of all, is the board amenable to, again, amending the agenda to convert this into an action item? SBSD Owl Cam: To turn… to charge a committee. SBSD Owl Cam: No objections? Okay. So the next question is, who would be willing to serve on this committee? We can have up to 3 people. SBSD Owl Cam: You gotta raise your hand down. Sorry. All right. Here's your idea. Oh, that was my idea. I would… I would be willing to discern in some capacity. I would also be willing to serve, that's good. SBSD Owl Cam: I'd be interested, I do know that Laura has some connections, so, we can't have more than, you know, three, so… No,
095no, no, no. I want to have a conversation, I want her to be part of the conversation before… that's all, SBSD Owl Cam: So… So, well, I think, I mean, we can… I think that what we should do tonight, just to move the ball forward, is to, SBSD Owl Cam: Either we should wait. SBSD Owl Cam: until the next meeting, when Laura's here, and have this again as an action item. Do we want to do that? SBSD Owl Cam: Can we wait till next meeting, have it a warrant action item, and talk to Laura Walsh here? Sure. I mean, is anybody else interested in being on the committee? SBSD Owl Cam: I'm interested in, like, learning more about SBSD Owl Cam: Kind of what you're saying of, like, how… how can we advocate more, and
096things like that. SBSD Owl Cam: I think that, I think that warning it for action. Great. Okay, so what we'll do is we're not going to change the agenda, we're just going to warrant it for action on the next meeting to, charge a legislative advocacy committee. Okay, great. And it would be great to have student reps on that committee, obviously. And they don't break our quorum, so… SBSD Owl Cam: Barrier? SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, and we have struck the next item from the agenda, so we are now moving to our student representative report. Okay, we have a lot of announcements for you tonight, so just bear with me. There will be no school for all students this Friday, March 20th, which will mark the start of Eid. Enjoy the long weekend. SBSD Owl Cam: The
097art show at the University Mall is still happening until tomorrow, March 19th, so if you have time, go visit the mall and see artwork from students across the district. SBSD Owl Cam: Activity Block, also called A Block, is returning to the high school. This is an opportunity for clubs to meet during an extended advisory period built into the school day. This time gives students the ability to explore new interests, engage with peers who share similar interests, and then also build community. We want to thank the student council for advocating to bring it back. SBSD Owl Cam: And our first activity block at the high school will be next Wednesday. SBSD Owl Cam: March… 15th, 25th, and I think we will have 2 or 3 other ones this year as well. SBSD Owl Cam: On Friday,
098March 6th, South Burlington High School hosted its second annual National History Day competition. All students in grades 9, Social Studies, and then grade 10 American Studies participated. And this year's theme was Revolution, Reaction, and Reform in History. SBSD Owl Cam: And over 140 students projected, and… SBSD Owl Cam: presented. The winners from each category can be found on the newest newsletter, and the state competition will be on Saturday, April 11th, and award winners will qualify for the national competition, which is in Washington, D.C. So, we wanted to thank all the participants, and then all the volunteers as well, for a really successful competition. SBSD Owl Cam: Can I ask a question? Yeah. Where is the state competition going to be held? Great question. I don't know that off of the top of my head. Okay.
099Do you know off the top of your head, Bern? SBSD Owl Cam: Where's the state competition gonna be held? Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: I feel like they just… SBSD Owl Cam: I don't know. It's definitely, like, on the national history there. I can also tell you, actually. I'll find out. SBSD Owl Cam: Yesterday, Mom and I helped host the first Superintendent Advisory Committee with Dr. Clark. We discussed the purpose of the committee, we brainstormed future meeting topics, and we discussed the high school kitchen table discussions that me and Momin have been having as well. It was super successful. We felt like there's a really diverse group of kids there, and we can't wait for the next one. Thank you, Dr. SBSD Owl Cam: Dr. Clark SBSD Owl Cam: The high school held another successful talent
100night last Friday and Saturday as well. This is the class competition where each grade competes with their original 15-minute script, and judges grade based on participation, set design, and more. The seniors took home first place, so that was great, and the juniors trailed in second. And we wanted to thank everyone who participated, and the key club who put SBSD Owl Cam: A lot of hard work into planning it. SBSD Owl Cam: Lastly, and most important, last Saturday, students from the high school and middle school traveled down to Norwich University for the State Science Fair. So many students from both schools won awards for their project, and the middle school won the award for the best performance from a school as a whole. So, congratulations to everyone who presented. SBSD Owl Cam: So, lots of great
101stuff happening in our district right now, and… SBSD Owl Cam: I think we… me and Momon needed to talk about starting representative recruitment, but I think I can talk about that during, setting the agenda for next meeting. Does that sound okay? SBSD Owl Cam: Can you forward me the newsletter when the NHD moves out? Yes, for sure. SBSD Owl Cam: Do the board have any questions? SBSD Owl Cam: The Superintendent Advisory Council is made up of students in grades 6 through… well, Ollie's the only senior. We started so late in the year, we thought, well, one senior, and then… SBSD Owl Cam: kids, when you're on the committee, they are on the committee for life, or until they quit. So… so they will move up, so they'll have some history of where we've been and
102what we're working on. So every year, we'll add new 6th graders. SBSD Owl Cam: And how were they, how were they chosen? They were chosen by… the high school, they were chosen by, counselors, and the specific, SBSD Owl Cam: the request was, we want kids who represent a wide spectrum of students in the, in the building, and kids that aren't afraid to speak their mind. So, it was not, and specifically, we don't want kids that are involved with everything. We want it to be, you know, general student population visible. SBSD Owl Cam: So, and how many are there from each grade? SBSD Owl Cam: The middle school, there's two from each grade, and the high school, there were maybe eight or so in each grade? There were close to 40 kids here yesterday, and it
103was great. We had some good sandwiches, and got a nice picture, and we got some nice… I liked the picture, but you weren't in it, were you? SBSD Owl Cam: No, he took the photo. Did he take the picture? Yeah. Yeah, you weren't in the picture. You need to do a saw face to do that. SBSD Owl Cam: So, if other students wanted to be involved in it, is there some way that they could do that? Or, like, when you get into the high school, will you be recruiting more kids? Yeah, we'll add more kids into the high school. But, yeah, I mean, it is not, like, an open, application. It is a kind of a select, group, kids could maybe talk to their principals or counselors about, hey, this sounds like a cool event.
104SBSD Owl Cam: And I'm sure we'll rely on, current students. SBSD Owl Cam: To help us make some selections, too. SBSD Owl Cam: Sounds like a very impressive design. Well, I'm good. SBSD Owl Cam: Any other comments on student representative report? SBSD Owl Cam: I'm sorry, one last question. How often do you all meet for that? SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, it's quarterly? We're gonna shoot for, like, four times a year. Our next meeting is May 19th, and that'll get us through this year, and then we'll start up again in September. Okay. I think I saw a quarter, like, about the… SBSD Owl Cam: All right, thank you very much. The next item on the agenda is Monitor Report 2.5, Financial Planning and Budgeting. SBSD Owl Cam: Is this one that we review more than once?
105This is one that we do four times a year. Okay, so it should be fairly… SBSD Owl Cam: Well, I think it's the first time it's been done in a while, and I think what we would like to… what we've talked about in the last meeting that we've talked about in the group is SBSD Owl Cam: the… SBSD Owl Cam: they are working to do, like, a monthly financial report for you that we are hopeful will reduce the need to do these longer reports. We'll still do them, they'll just be shorter kind of things? Yeah, well, I'm thinking maybe we could do those once a year. If… we could do these once a year, if we were to give you a monthly, shorter, you know, report about where are we year-to-date, where are we month-to-date
106with expenditures, revenues? SBSD Owl Cam: And where's our money moving? But, but for right now… With that decision, I think we'd have to do… we would have to update the policy, which would be a… SBSD Owl Cam: minor thing. Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: Right, right. So, on over to Gene Marie. SBSD Owl Cam: And would you introduce yourself again to us? Sure. The first time I spoke tonight. I'm Jean Marie Park, I'm the Senior Director of Operations and Finance for the school district. SBSD Owl Cam: And I am sharing with you the financial planning and, Budget Monitoring Report 2.5 for this evening. If you're bringing up, I'm, like, a hot mess here over my computer, so… SBSD Owl Cam: But I did want to share with you that I am starting my own committee. SBSD
107Owl Cam: Which is the Finance and Facilities Committee. Why don't we combine that, and we are soliciting… I've asked the principals to put that in their newsletters for me, to put that word out to the community, looking for folks to join that committee. I'm also going to put it on our website. I haven't done that yet. I'll put it there, for folks to join, you know, similar to the superintendent a few times a year and talk about SBSD Owl Cam: Our facilities and, obviously the facilities and how we maintain them impact our, finances, so, it makes sense that that is really joint committee. So, SBSD Owl Cam: If you're interested, you can reach out to me directly. I think Front Page Forum is probably the place you should advertise that. Yeah, yeah. SBSD Owl Cam:
108And before I start this, I just want to say that on Friday, we'll be doing bid openings for the two RFPs that we currently have out. We have an RFP for, SBSD Owl Cam: a piece of equipment that we use for snow plow removal… snow plowing and snow removal. We also have an RFP for another boiler replacement project at the Orchard School. SBSD Owl Cam: So, just so the board knows, to make my friend Seamus happy, we have, it's… it is loaded on our website as it normally is, it's been advertised in the other paper, and, we've advertised it on the Twitch forum, and then in addition to that, of course, we've sent it out to the vendors that we SBSD Owl Cam: you know, we generally send it to inflicity of contacts with. So,
109so far, and we gave it a month-long deadline, so far, we have received SBSD Owl Cam: Two bids for the, snow removal equipment, and, no bids on the, boiler. SBSD Owl Cam: no good deed goes unpushed. So, we'll continue to try, but, so far… So, just to clarify what you just said. SBSD Owl Cam: the district is making a strong… Concerted effort. Concerted effort to get as many bids as possible to control folks. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I personally use Front Porch Forum, you know, a decent amount. I think it's a really great way to communicate with the general public and folks that are not attached to the school building in some way, shape, or form. So, I think it's a great thing to do. SBSD Owl Cam: You know, just in general,
110I know, Joe shared things around Uptown Meeting Day, like, it's just a really great avenue to use, and I think that I've seen other districts using it, so I think it's a good thing for us to do it with a variety of topics, so… SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, this is pretty short and sweet, and the good news is that, SBSD Owl Cam: It's all good news. Why can I not figure out how to just make this thing a place? Somebody… Thank you. Your slideshow. Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, thank you. Thank you, Nick. So here we go. SBSD Owl Cam: There are three components to this policy. The first one is financial plans do not create unacceptable financial conditions, for the financial condition and activities policy. So really what this speaks to is SBSD Owl
111Cam: Are we staying within the approved budget? Are we incurring any additional debt? You know, are we staying within the borders and the boundaries that have been provided to us? SBSD Owl Cam: And, you will see in the evidence of compliance similar things that are attached in here. I'm not going to open those documents because they're a little bit of an eye chart, but we have those for you to look through. And what you'll see as we go through these three is SBSD Owl Cam: That, primarily we… the team has listed us as proficient or approaching, com… approaching compliance, primarily because of SBSD Owl Cam: And you've heard me say this several times, but in the last few years, we've had a gigantic staff turnover, and we also changed from one software system to another,
112and so… SBSD Owl Cam: a lot of the parts of these policies include over many years. We have repetitively done this thing, you know, year after year, and frankly, we haven't, because of those changes in staffing and changes in the software, so… SBSD Owl Cam: So we do really believe that we're doing very good work now, and we feel like we're in good shape, but we… we are at that place now. We were not necessarily at that place. SBSD Owl Cam: A year ago, so that's why, primarily, you'll see us listed as, SBSD Owl Cam: Approach in compliance, or proficient, not, like, exceeding. SBSD Owl Cam: So, and I will say that I think that we're… our team, our superintendent, all of our budget managers really work very hard to be, very fiscally minded and
113stay within those boundaries that we give folks, like. SBSD Owl Cam: it is unusual for us to have a budget manager who's allocated X dollars, and then as we near the end of the fiscal year, realize that, oh man, you, like, really blew it out of the water for no reason. Like, there are times when we do go outside of what perhaps is budgeted to a certain line. SBSD Owl Cam: generally forgotten reasons, psychism, they go just for the family that we're not… did not. SBSD Owl Cam: a whole ton of purple paper, Justin. SBSD Owl Cam: So, in this one, specifically, we are, proficient compliance here. SBSD Owl Cam: The next one is financial plans include credible projections, separation of capital and operational spending, cash flow planning, planning assumptions, and predicted financial impact. Again,
114this is really one that speaks to, SBSD Owl Cam: The not doing this year over year, SBSD Owl Cam: like the folks say here, review of our fiscal 26 budget and year-to-date financial reports indicate the district incorporates revenue and expenditure projections and monitors our financial activity to support responsible financial planning. SBSD Owl Cam: And to me, one of the most important lines here is the fiscal year 2025 audit did not identify any material weaknesses related to financial planning or reporting. So… SBSD Owl Cam: we think we're doing a good job, and the better news is that the auditors also, for sure, believe that we are doing a good job there. But again, this is not something that we have been excelling at year over year, so which is why they've indicated that we're approaching compliance
115here. SBSD Owl Cam: And then the last one is, kind of to some of the topics that you were discussing earlier this evening. Financial plans provide sufficient resources for board governance responsibilities. So, are we allocating enough funds for you to be trained in doing a good job of the job that you are assigned to do? SBSD Owl Cam: you'll see, it indicated in here the professional development budget over the last couple years, and then here's your December 13th minutes from the training that you did last, last winter and this winter. SBSD Owl Cam: However, because we've had so much change in board members, the planning of… it's not been, there's not been a steady, comprehensive, annual plan that we do for training, or that you do for training. So the money's there, but we just
116haven't done a great job in SBSD Owl Cam: And pulling the trigger on some of those things. So, so again, listing as a bridge of the sphere. SBSD Owl Cam: That's it. Six quick slides. SBSD Owl Cam: Does anyone have any questions for me? SBSD Owl Cam: you know, I forgot to do my introductory speech that I typically do, if you wanted to go over that, about what my… SBSD Owl Cam: interpretation of the policy was, and I'm happy to do that for you, sure. SBSD Owl Cam: Sure. It was my fault, I'm sorry, I asked a question. SBSD Owl Cam: So… SBSD Owl Cam: All right, so the monitoring report, you can see it is a short policy that's being monitored, and Jean Marie did a great job doing that. Let me talk about
117what my interpretation was. We will be in compliance on the policy when we can demonstrate that financial planning and budgeting SBSD Owl Cam: The current fiscal year and future years is explicitly aligned to the Board's end's priorities as prudent, and does not risk financial jeopardy. SBSD Owl Cam: It's derived from a coherent multi-year plan. SBSD Owl Cam: Compliance further requires that financial plans include the specific elements identified in Executive Limitations 2.05, and the plan preserves the Board's stated governance and investment prerogative. SBSD Owl Cam: And so you can, Jean Marie did talk about what these components are and what that looks like in, again, SBSD Owl Cam: thought that was done well, gave you the report, and then you can see the rubric that the team went through when deciding what level of compliance, and
118realizing that proficient compliance is pretty darn good. It's almost impossible to get to advanced compliance. SBSD Owl Cam: That's not that, it'll continue to be our goal, but, we're, we're, SBSD Owl Cam: We feel good about proficient compliance, and we still do some… have some things to work on. SBSD Owl Cam: So you can see that the overall compliance rating is approaching compliance. SBSD Owl Cam: And then the executive summary tells you the things that we're going to do to get above approaching compliance. And, it's a long, several paragraphs, but, specifically, SBSD Owl Cam: the things that Jean Marie talked about, that we have stuff in place, we just need to put them more consistently, and make sure that we're doing them annually, and SBSD Owl Cam: The final paragraph, I think, summarizes it well.
119Moving to proficient compliance will require both administrative planning and board ownership of governance… governance development. SBSD Owl Cam: We will work with the board to establish a more systematic approach to identifying governance training priorities, including annual discussion and planning of professional development needs. SBSD Owl Cam: This will allow the administration to more accurately incorporate those priorities into the annual budget and ensure appropriate resources are allocated. So I think that comes down to, really, the retreat we've talked about a few times, is that when we have… if we have an annual retreat, SBSD Owl Cam: especially now that we have a board that's been together for a little bit of time, now we can start, instead of going to training about how boards interact, it could be training about what our goals going to be as
120a board. What do we need to continue to grow on, and that can help us inform our budget for the following year, so we can plan for you to have SBSD Owl Cam: Your, trainings that you're gonna need. SBSD Owl Cam: So that is that? Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: questions you have for me or Dean Marie? SBSD Owl Cam: Well, I actually did have some comments, and maybe… can I share my screen real quick? Yep, oh, yes, I'm sure. Go ahead. So, I had shared this, SBSD Owl Cam: earlier, when, let's see if I can actually do this, hopefully this pulls up there, right? SBSD Owl Cam: Can you guys see my screen? All right, so what I did is, SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so what I… I actually did is… this is very, very
121high level. SBSD Owl Cam: And I was thinking that something like this, this is just a suggestion, I wanted to put it out for the board to consider, because when I first came into this, like, policy governance was, what in the heck is this? I didn't know what it was, and it's taken me a while to figure it out. SBSD Owl Cam: And so, if you've got people from the community that are dialing in or participating in meetings, or maybe they're not, because this stuff is SBSD Owl Cam: pretty high level, and it can just fly right over their head. I thought it would be really helpful to provide an overview of what policy governance is. So I shared this earlier… I just… as I was going through looking at everything, I thought. SBSD Owl
122Cam: Cold eyes, this is what I think would be helpful. What is policy governance? SBSD Owl Cam: Why does it exist? Who is responsible? How is it implemented? When is it evaluated, and where is it located? So just high information for people to know. And this is just an overview of that. Here's a screenshot from where it is on the board. The board defines what success looks like. SBSD Owl Cam: and sets the boundaries. The superintendent decides how to achieve it, and is held accountable for the results. So, super high level. SBSD Owl Cam: for the community. SBSD Owl Cam: And then I have this next slide, our policy governance. This is our policy governance manual table of contents reflecting the governance model. The board defines the desired outcomes ends. SBSD Owl Cam: Sets clear
123operational guardrails, and delegates authority to the superintendent, and then monitors performance through a structured process, blah blah blah. SBSD Owl Cam: Which is our monitoring reports. SBSD Owl Cam: And I liked having something like this, especially because now when we're talking to the community about, like, the ends, this is where it fits in. This is what we're talking about. SBSD Owl Cam: And then to support the continuous improvement, the board follows a formal annual review schedule, or whatever it is, periodic schedule, aligned with performance and responsive to results. The schedule can be found here, and I thought we could provide a link or something so that people understand what the frequency is. Or we could even SBSD Owl Cam: Put a little schedule over here next to these and indicate when they were reviewed, etc,
124right? SBSD Owl Cam: And then the updates to policies may occur as needed. Proposed changes are shared with the community for input and review publicly by the board prior to adoption. And people may remember that we had… which one was it? Was it Treatment of Community? I think was the one that we recently… was it change? Which one was the one that we just recently did? I can't even remember. But we just did one. I should say. No, well, we did one. SBSD Owl Cam: Video cameras. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, yes, that was one, but then we also had one before that, and it had to do with public comment, and I think it came back to front treatment of community. Right. Oh, I see what you're saying. So we have updated these, we've amended
125these, so I think that's important. And then what I had here is… SBSD Owl Cam: just a screenshot of, hey, here's the one we're reviewing, and this is where it fits in. This is the one we're specifically looking at tonight. SBSD Owl Cam: And then I put together a little summary SBSD Owl Cam: Key takeaways in plain English. Overall status, district is approaching compliance. Here's the big gap overall. Lacks, you know, we're operationally stable. We lack formal, consistent, forward-looking systems. SBSD Owl Cam: And here's the path to improvement. So it's just key takeaways for people to understand, because again, I think we can get so lost SBSD Owl Cam: and, you know, board members can get lost, the public can get lost, so I just put it out there, I sent it to Seamus, I
126sent it to you, Michelle, and to Joe, I didn't send it to the whole board. SBSD Owl Cam: But I just figured I'd share it with you anyway. So this is just more of, like, hey, food for thought, like, how can we make this more digestible, or… SBSD Owl Cam: the board, and also for the community. So anyway, I just wanted to share that. I can share it with you, or Joe has it. SBSD Owl Cam: I particularly like the in-state English portion, like, that's where we need to be, right? Yeah. Just financial stability, strongest area. Financial planning rigor needs work, board governance funding needs consistency. So, that's it. Jen's suggestion was, is this something that you would like to see in the first few slides of every SBSD Owl Cam: Well, and what I
127was thinking, yeah, like, when you have, like, what if policy governance? Like, you may need to restate that, and it probably isn't something, because your documentation is going to be on the website. SBSD Owl Cam: And so the idea was, you just have something there, so if somebody comes along, because I know there are people in the community that go back and watch these recordings and actually look at our monitoring reports to see. People… there are people who know, and then there are some who don't, but anyway, I just thought it would be helpful to calibrate, this is what it is, as a reminder. SBSD Owl Cam: And it would be… and I think some of those early slides SBSD Owl Cam: they just be… once you land on the language, what it is, where
128it is, why it's important, you don't have to change them, it's just… or you put it in the backup, regardless. You don't really have to speak to them, but you… maybe you do. Maybe you calibrate, hey, just for an overview, remember what policy governance is. Tell people… Here's where it fits. Tell people what you're gonna tell them. SBSD Owl Cam: tell them, and then tell people what you told them. Yeah. So anyway, I'm putting it out there, food for thought, just opportunity to potentially improve the process. SBSD Owl Cam: I think… and I did like that, like, the one slide, like, this is your key. Yeah. I wouldn't want it to be, like, more work for you guys already do so much work with the monitoring report. But if it's something that could be just,
129like, part of, like, if this template is part of the monitoring report, so just, you know… Just standard insert. Yeah, insert, copy and paste, yeah, then I love the idea, I just don't want it to be, like. SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: It would be more work, but not substantial, right? I mean, it's one extra… I mean, the three are already made, you know, and the other one is just a summary of what we're telling you, so that's not… I don't think that's… Just move the little red box down into the one that you're doing? Yeah, so it's not… it's not something that would be, SBSD Owl Cam: undoable for us, so if the board wants that, we can absolutely do that. Could even say something on the top, like community summary, right?
130And then there's the board report, so that… I like… one thing I really like about it is that putting the… SBSD Owl Cam: language up front that talks about what I'm doing. It makes it… SBSD Owl Cam: So that nobody looking at a monitoring report has to figure out how to situate what the heck that is, and… SBSD Owl Cam: it's done by cross-referencing policy governance, right? Like, just have it right there. Only we do that, and we don't probably even do that, although… I know I don't always do that, when I shouldn't be looking back and referencing the exact language, right? Like, to have it SBSD Owl Cam: like theirs. SBSD Owl Cam: Well, and for people to understand where the policies are, and there's board policies, and then there's other policies, and honestly,
131I'm still a little bit confused over that. I remember there was this big revelation SBSD Owl Cam: Last year, the former chair brought it up, like, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't communicate that before. It's like, oh, wait, where are those policies? So I think understanding which ones we're talking about and how they fit into this scheme. SBSD Owl Cam: of all of this responsibility is really helpful. And it also helps bring all that hard work you do to the community in a way that is digestible, and it makes me think of, you know, a year ago when we were talking about SBSD Owl Cam: policy governance, and I said something like, I can't understand this, and some other people who'd been on board for a while, like, yeah, well, no, you'll never understand it, or
132no one will ever understand it, and I was like, well, maybe it's not good then, or maybe we need to… and so here we're a year later, and, like, working on ways to help people actually understand. Exactly, and that's what I think we have a responsibility to do, for the transparency of what is the school doing, how can SBSD Owl Cam: We very clearly see what the results are. This Shows you what we're doing. SBSD Owl Cam: So that's my… I mean, I do training. I train people on stuff, like, so this is, like, how do you take it, complicated stuff, and make it that somebody can look at it and go, oh, I get that. That makes sense. SBSD Owl Cam: Should we monitor? So, anyway. Thank you. Thank you, Jen. Should we monitor?
133Are people ready to move on to that phase, or do they have any other questions? SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, actually, I did have questions. Sorry, I had questions… oh, sorry, Emily, were you gonna say something? No, no, no, I was just saying thank you, and… SBSD Owl Cam: So I did have a couple of questions. One, what does… SBSD Owl Cam: efficient and ultimately advanced compliance actually look like in practice, and how will we know when we've achieved it? Like, are there specific metrics, outputs, or evidence that the board should expect to see, is number one, and then two, how does that differ from our current, like, approaching state? SBSD Owl Cam: I don't know if you can speak to that. Yeah, I mean, I think that all of the work that we did this
134year in budget development was… that was our first time through that, right? Like, involving the community so much, and working so much with our principals, and SBSD Owl Cam: So, I think as we continue to do that year after year, that to me is, like, getting better at building our budget, so that when we bring it to you, you know what's coming, and you are happy with the product that we put the effort into, right? So, to me, SBSD Owl Cam: I… so that… that to me is one of the biggest indicators, that we are… we have good practices, that we change them if needed, and we're using them year over year. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, and then my next question was, I think this fits into that, is do you have an idea right
135now of the tools or the systems or the processes that you would need SBSD Owl Cam: Is… do we need, like, a formal multi-year financial model, improved documentation, or a new financial… no, no new financial system? No. Okay, thank you. We've got that, thank you. Okay. All right. No, there's, there's nothing… SBSD Owl Cam: There was a lot of cleanup that has been done in the last year or more, and so SBSD Owl Cam: we are feeling now, and I mean, I've said it to the team many times, like, we are just getting so much better at budgeting. I mean, we saw that even in this year, where instead of, like, we always had $100,000 allocated to this one, but you only ever used $75, so this year, we're just going to give you $75,
136right? So, we are becoming better budgeters and more accurate at that, and so… SBSD Owl Cam: that… that is going to continue to improve over time. But knowing that the other piece of that is SBSD Owl Cam: maybe one year you did need $100,000, and so that's… it is a living organism, our budget, right? We do move things from line to line, and adjust as needed. Like, one of the pieces of work we're doing right now with some of our, budget managers, in particular. SBSD Owl Cam: really big budget, just looking at where are you at right now, where does the rest of the fiscal year look like, and adjusting what, they put in… they put in purchase orders at the beginning of the fiscal year, and then maybe you thought you were going to
137spend $100,000, and well, hey, you've already spent $100, but out of this other budget line, you haven't spent any, so readjusting what those purchase orders are, what we have encumbered and not. SBSD Owl Cam: And… and trying to be accurate at that. So. SBSD Owl Cam: So we're constantly adjusting because it is a living organism, but also be… trying to be better at forecasting and budgeting as the years go along. So, we'll get there. I'm feeling really, really confident in the budget managers and the teams that sit under me. And I think when we get to these monthly reports, we've already talked about, we're planning, like, the second meeting of each month, so the team has time to close out the prior month, to put the reports together. SBSD Owl Cam: Not nearly as exhaustive
138as this, but it would be 5 or 6 slides about where are we month-to-date, year-to-date, how are we comparing to what our projections were, and maybe how does it compare to last year. So you would have, every month, an updated SBSD Owl Cam: you know, how much of everything we're spending, how much is instruction, how much is operations, those sorts of things. And then I think as you… when you get to see those on a monthly basis, when you see some of those regular payment vouchers go through, I mean, I was just looking at one this morning, whoa, a million dollars, like… SBSD Owl Cam: That feels like a lot of money, right? Like, if that's coming out of my personal bank account, right? But, like, there's… there's reasons why, and we plan for it.
139It isn't a million dollars on… that we weren't accounting for, so… SBSD Owl Cam: you know, just you all having more regular information dumped from the finance team, I think, will make you feel better about, those… when you see those introductions come through. Yeah, that's coming to a board meeting near you soon. Yeah, and I think we had talked about before, even from a stewardship, having some visibility to SBSD Owl Cam: this is what we planned, and this is where we are. Yeah. And it's like a tracking, so you can actually see, like, how are we doing? Yeah. Because if you say, we put in $100,000, and then we only spent $75,000, so now we put it at $75,000, it could even be, like, a little green dial, or a yellow dial, or a red
140dial, you know what I mean? Like, make it visually, like, oh, I get it, you know, we're in the range. SBSD Owl Cam: or this is where we're seeing that we're not tracking what we expected, right? I think as much as we can take that and put it into a way that people can get what we're doing, that's the support that we need to provide to the community. SBSD Owl Cam: I believe, in order to get some alignment on the work that we're doing. And I do think it highlights the great work that you're doing. SBSD Owl Cam: We just need to do a better job showcasing that. Outward. Yeah. Beyond this. Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: The other thing that I'll share, I had mentioned to you folks earlier, some meetings ago, that, my team,
141my finance office team, was meeting with the Burlington School District, finance team, and so we actually did that just before this meeting. SBSD Owl Cam: And we kind of really went through, the big subject, you know, the big budget areas, the big management areas of, like, and just talked through, like. SBSD Owl Cam: hey, are there ways that we can work together on nutritional services? Are there ways that we can work together on transportation services? And we were really at high level and very beginning, sort of brainstorming, but it was really great to have those conversations and realize that there are SBSD Owl Cam: there are a lot of… you know, sometimes you feel like, oh man, we're, like, stuck in this by ourselves. We are not. Like, they're in the same boat we're in,
142they just happen to be on the other side of town, so… SBSD Owl Cam: You know, we're months and probably a year or more away from seeing any realities out of that, but it was just really good to start… to finally start those conversations and… and see that there… it feels like there's some… SBSD Owl Cam: And, you know, for lack of a better phrase, low-hanging fruit there, then we can probably move on, so… Will you continue to have those meetings with them? Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: This was just the initial meeting, but… and actually, to the point, you know, it took us, like, 3 times before we could all finally find a time to get together, but, it's… we were trying to do it in the middle of budget
143season, which everybody understands, so… Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: But… I… I do… I'm… I came away really very hopeful that they… SBSD Owl Cam: you know, it's not like these other neighboring school districts are our adversaries. They all want to work together, and I think that there's so much going on at the State House, and it's so much unknown, that it was like, hey, maybe we should just try to see if we can figure some of this out, I believe, so… I thought the elaboration is so good. Yeah, you know, there are likely some stumbling… we will come upon… we can see some stumbling blocks right now, and we'll probably come upon some other SBSD Owl Cam: but, for some… at least for some of the things that we were considering, I think that SBSD
144Owl Cam: It felt like, okay. SBSD Owl Cam: This isn't impossible, so… Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Is there any other board question? Comment? The comment, part two in the report, your first question, it lays it out. And that question, I think, was… SBSD Owl Cam: With dual systems processes. SBSD Owl Cam: know the, how, how, what… SBSD Owl Cam: what's our goal? How do we know when we've done it? How do we measure it? How do we know when we've achieved it? Part two, that's… SBSD Owl Cam: what that's all about. And it lays it out in a really explicit message. SBSD Owl Cam: I'm not sure that answers your question. Well, what you're saying is, yeah, what were there… yeah, I'll go back and look at it again, because, yeah, I was thinking more specifically,
145what specific metrics, output, or evidence should the board expect to see? Yeah, that's the… Okay, yeah, let me go back and look at it. SBSD Owl Cam: Right. SBSD Owl Cam: Thank you. Alright. SBSD Owl Cam: So, I would entertain a motion to monitor the… SBSD Owl Cam: Monitoring Report 2.5, Financial Planning and Budgeting. SBSD Owl Cam: Hi, everyone. SBSD Owl Cam: Have my moves. SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, second, second. Michelle, seconds. Any discussion? SBSD Owl Cam: All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Okay, so now we'll do it. So… I'm going to… SBSD Owl Cam: go over the three areas that we monitor, and for each one, I'll go around the room, and I'll take their vote. SBSD Owl Cam: And, SBSD Owl Cam: So, first of all… Should we just explain, or do
146you want to explain quickly what the peer sections are, since this is illicit first? SBSD Owl Cam: Sure. So, there's Teresa. Thank you very much. SBSD Owl Cam: So, the evaluation areas are monitoring report, district outcomes. SBSD Owl Cam: And I'm fine for unacceptable. SBSD Owl Cam: based on our discussion from earlier, we should really be calling this, district plans, not outcomes. It's dysfunctional to talk to you, in other words, according to Carverse. Well, this is in the executive limitations, so I don't think we… Okay. So anyway, the monitoring report section is about the SBSD Owl Cam: Quality of the interpretation that the superintendent gave, and the relevance and adequacy of compliance criteria. SBSD Owl Cam: And it's scored from 0 to 4. SBSD Owl Cam: And the district outcomes has more to do with,
147like, the real-world effects and whether it worked, right? SBSD Owl Cam: And then the compliance plan is, SBSD Owl Cam: You know, insofar as they've said, okay, here's how we're gonna approve. SBSD Owl Cam: Is everybody ready? SBSD Owl Cam: So… We're gonna start with, SBSD Owl Cam: And I guess it'll be… the… The staff considers… Right. SBSD Owl Cam: So, the staff have also done an evaluation of compliance. SBSD Owl Cam: And, they judge themselves proficient compliance, as we heard, on… SBSD Owl Cam: On one, and then approaching compliance on 2. SBSD Owl Cam: If you remember this section of the report. SBSD Owl Cam: So, we'll start with Allie. Monitoring important, policy interpretation, relevance, and adequacy of compliance criteria. SBSD Owl Cam: What is your rating? SBSD Owl Cam: That's true. SBSD Owl
148Cam: Good. SBSD Owl Cam: Emily. SBSD Owl Cam: Jen? Great. SBSD Owl Cam: I'm a 3. SBSD Owl Cam: Alyssa? SBSD Owl Cam: Michelle? SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, sweet. SBSD Owl Cam: Dan? SBSD Owl Cam: Great, okay. So then the next one is going to be the district outcomes. So this is, like, how well is their financial planning budgeting having good effects on the… on the district? SBSD Owl Cam: Allie, are you ready? SBSD Owl Cam: Go ahead. Jamie. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay. SBSD Owl Cam: Emily? 2. SBSD Owl Cam: Jen? SBSD Owl Cam: I would say two, also. SBSD Owl Cam: I'm… too. SBSD Owl Cam: What was that accent to this bum? SBSD Owl Cam: Michelle? So… Down 2. SBSD Owl Cam: Great, okay. And, compliance plan acceptable? Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: Yes.
149Yes. Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: So that's an unanimous, yes. SBSD Owl Cam: Great. Okay, well, thank you very much. That includes our monitoring of 2.5 financial planning and budgeting. The next item on the agenda is an… is the superintendent's report. This time it's about student behavior, and for context, SBSD Owl Cam: I would say that there are those in the community who might believe that we are being SBSD Owl Cam: two lacks in our discipline. That's what I've heard from both parent and non-parent, constituents, and so I think it's… it would be good for us to clear the air, explain what's going on, talk about state law. I'll turn it over to Joe. Yes, thanks for giving me this opportunity to talk about the good work that we're doing in our… in our buildings. SBSD
150Owl Cam: I'm going to start by talking a little bit of philosophy about what is student behavior, what is discipline, and then I'll talk to you about how our students are doing, and some of the laws that regulate how we can respond when students do not behave as hoped. SBSD Owl Cam: So, there's a… Pretty well-known, educational, SBSD Owl Cam: guru named Phil Schlechti, and he talks about the images of school. SBSD Owl Cam: And he says, when you look at a school, you can look at it in one of five ways. Is it a factory? Is it a warehouse? Is it a prison? Is it a professional service? SBSD Owl Cam: Or is it a learning organization? These are his guiding metaphors. And he put a little chart together talking about these images of
151school, what they are. So, when you look at SBSD Owl Cam: The top, the guiding metaphor on the right, is the learning organization. SBSD Owl Cam: The core business, when you're a learning organization, your core business is designing engaging academic work for students and leading them to success. SBSD Owl Cam: In that work. And that's really what our philosophy is here. We are a learning organization, so we see students as volunteers and knowledge workers. The principals are leaders of leaders. SBSD Owl Cam: And it goes all the way down to the bottom, which is the prison. If your guiding metaphor of a school is the prison, then you… you think that our core business is containing, monitoring, corrective action, and punishment. The students are seen as inmates, the principal as wardens. So that's… those are
152the opposite ends of the spectrum, right? Yeah, I get this. So, SBSD Owl Cam: So, we… SBSD Owl Cam: we believe in the learning organization as our guiding metaphor. So, really, what that means is, when you're in a factory or a warehouse or a prison, what we do is emphasize compliance. SBSD Owl Cam: sorting kids, supervising them, containing them. Discipline becomes something we do to students. We… it's an action that we take upon students. SBSD Owl Cam: When you're a learning organization, what we do is we design engaging work, we teach expectations, we build students' capacity for self-regulation and responsibility. SBSD Owl Cam: It's not… the goal is not to be permissive, nor punishment-first. It's about creating a safe, orderly, learning-centered school that uses accountability and due process. Again, so we… we see ourselves as
153a learning organization. SBSD Owl Cam: My personal overarching philosophy of discipline is this. Discipline is a noun. First, it is a noun. It's not a verb. It's something we want students to have. SBSD Owl Cam: It's not something we do to them, so it's not about compliance in the moment, it's… it's getting students to develop self-control, responsibility, judgment, and respect. The root meaning of discipline… it shares a word with… it shares a root with the word disciple, right? A disciple's a learner, a follower, one who's taught. SBSD Owl Cam: That reminds us that discipline is tied to teaching. SBSD Owl Cam: formation and growth. It should be understood as part of the educational mission, not separate from it. What this means for schools is we don't just simply punish misconduct. SBSD Owl Cam: We teach
154students how to behave in a community. We help students learn from mistakes. We create opportunities for reflection, repair, and better choices. SBSD Owl Cam: And so the adult responsibility… well, the best way to change student behavior is by changing adult behavior. So adults must model the behavior we want students to show, and if we want calm, honest, respect, self-control, students need to see those qualities in us. SBSD Owl Cam: So, what I want to talk to you… that's our philosophy, our overarching philosophy. Now, this… we are required by the state to report various, incidents SBSD Owl Cam: and, punishments to the state. And there are 3 common buckets of misbehavior that we are required to report. The first bucket is student conflict, bullying, harassment, threats or intimidation, significant school conduct concerns. SBSD Owl Cam: The
155second is refusal to follow directions, insubordination, skipping class or leaving campus, disorderly conduct, or other behaviors that interfere with safety or learning. And then the final one is vaping or drug use, theft, technology misuse, vandalism, or property damage. So those are the three SBSD Owl Cam: real buckets that we're looking at when you're talking about discipline and how to report them. And so that kind of breaks it out, like, the first one is kind of SBSD Owl Cam: student to student, the second one is student to school, and the third one is kind of more like student against themselves, or against, like, an inanimate object. Yeah, great question. And so, when you look at the first one, student conflict, bullying, harassment, those are almost always, like a first offense results in some sort of discipline.
156When you look at the second, bucket, refusal to follow directions. SBSD Owl Cam: Well, that's what it comes… that's what the teaching part of this comes, right? We're not going to discipline a stupid… a student the first time they refuse to follow directions. We're going to use it as a learning opportunity. This is what our expectations are. Same… it's insubordination, sort of… all those sorts of things. SBSD Owl Cam: And then the other things, vaping, theft, those clearly also are things that we, typically come with a first, time, consequence, though there might be some, mediation that we do. For example, if a student's using drugs or alcohol, often we would, SBSD Owl Cam: have a, SBSD Owl Cam: Oh, I can't think of the word, where we would take some of the punishment away, where
157they would do, some learning, you know, they might sit with a counselor or whatnot. Yeah, restorative, yeah, that, but that's not the word. But I know what you're saying. Yeah, I know what you're saying. SBSD Owl Cam: I'll think of it, like, in the middle of the night, and I'll wake up and say, and I'll tell you, alright. Anyway… SBSD Owl Cam: So, these are the, these are the state… so, when I tell about the… all the incidents that we need to report to the state. SBSD Owl Cam: These are the number of incidents in the South Burlington schools that we had to report to the state over the past 3 years. So in 23-24, we had 139 reportable incidents. Now, think about it, we had 2,400 students SBSD Owl Cam: We had 139… Incidents
158that we needed to report to the state. SBSD Owl Cam: Do you mind if I ask a quick question? So, one of the reasons that I hear about child behavior, again, from parents and from non-parents, is this concept that they have of clearing the classroom. Every time you clear the classroom, do you have to report it? SBSD Owl Cam: not… it is… no, it is not a reportable incident, and we'll talk about clearing the classroom a little bit, right? If the… if the behavior… SBSD Owl Cam: we'll talk about it in a little bit, but when we're talking about clearing the classroom, we're almost always talking about students with disabilities, right? And how we deal with discipline for students with disabilities, by law, is different, and that does not always include a consequence that is
159reportable to the state. I see. Okay. SBSD Owl Cam: And so, in 24-25, there's 145 incidents. Look at this year. 25-26, this is the partial year, this is through January. There have only been 38 reportable incidents this school year, district-wide. SBSD Owl Cam: Can I clap? I think it's the phones. SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, I'm a data person, so when I look at a trend drop like that, I'm like… Yeah, it's amazing. Okay, so now let's look at the September to January, so we have true comparison. So in 23-24, between September and January, there were 76… SBSD Owl Cam: reportable incidents. In 24-25, there were 84, and this year, again, 38, to this point, from between September and January. A significant reduction. That's, that's really good work by our, our teachers, our staff, in working
160with kids instead of SBSD Owl Cam: doing unto kids. And the skeptical person would say, well, is it just being underreported? SBSD Owl Cam: A skeptical person might say that. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so when we look at state reportable incidents, you can see it, district-wide, you can see about each school, and where they are, and where they've been. And we see lower numbers in all of these places. Look at the middle school. SBSD Owl Cam: So, to the point of being underreported, I would say, is it happening across everything? I mean, that's where I would say this is pretty impressive. If it was in one area, maybe, but the fact that it's across the entire school district. SBSD Owl Cam: Do you have any insights? I have the raw data that shows every incident
161that has been reported, and what the student did, and what the consequence was. I don't believe I put it in this chart. SBSD Owl Cam: I've been consistent in 3 years of putting my data in, and this year definitely looks different from the past 2 years after the changes. SBSD Owl Cam: And, would you verbalize that, Principal Burke? You just made the sign. I think that means you agree. Yeah. Is that… SBSD Owl Cam: And I think Jan's question was, and maybe you're going to get to this, do you have any insight into why that happened? SBSD Owl Cam: I can tell you that, and Monica is our HHP person, I've had much fewer HHP SBSD Owl Cam: Pacing for us, I believe. Incidents this year compared to the previous two years. SBSD Owl Cam:
162So, qualitatively, is that kind of the bulk of the reportables, usually? SBSD Owl Cam: At the elementary school. At the elementary school. Most of our state reportables are… the top 5 are using harassment, bullying, fighting, bust and abuse. SBSD Owl Cam: No problems. SBSD Owl Cam: bought that, for instance. They're safer. SBSD Owl Cam: Wow, that's great. Yeah, so this is 2526, so by school, and South Burlington High School, of course, we have most students there, and so this is something that would be, unexpected. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so let's talk about Clear the Classroom. This is how this whole thing came up. I guess what I first wanted to let people know is if there's any kind of, fault among the community that our kids are running wild, they're absolutely not. We have great
163kids, who make great choices most of the time, and like any school, you have some students SBSD Owl Cam: Who, for whatever reason, don't follow the rules, and we do a really good job of working with those kids to find out what's the root of what that misbehavior is, so that we can, help them not make those decisions in the SBSD Owl Cam: In the future. SBSD Owl Cam: So let's talk about clearing the classroom. Now, when we talk about clearing the classroom. SBSD Owl Cam: what we're talking about is when you have a student who is so out of control that we have to remove the rest of the students in the class so that we can deal with that kid. So, let's talk about what the goal is. When we're talking about clearing
164a classroom, our first goal is to de-escalate SBSD Owl Cam: First, we want to de-escalate whatever the issue is, we want to protect students, all the students, and we also need to avoid more restrictive interventions whenever possible. SBSD Owl Cam: That is a… that is… by law, we have to provide the least restrictive environment for our students with disabilities. SBSD Owl Cam: So what that means in practice is we try the least restrictive, effective response first. So what is the smallest consequence we can give to get the most amount of behavior change? So what we first do when there's a student who is misbehaving in class is we try to de-escalate. SBSD Owl Cam: we use calm… and this is all… teachers get training in this, right? This is not what I think I might
165need to do. It is based on the study they've done, the professional development we've provided, the work that we've done in getting staff to know what the calming strategies are, redirecting kids, providing support, student choice. SBSD Owl Cam: space and time, right? So that's what we try to do first. If that's not effective, if we try all these de-escalation practices. SBSD Owl Cam: And it's still not working, then we remove the student who is causing the issue. SBSD Owl Cam: And most incidents are resolved by helping the student leave the setting with support. Almost all of them, if we de-escalate and that doesn't work, then we take the student out of the class. What's very rare is relocating the class, and that's only if safety requires it. SBSD Owl Cam: So it's used when behavior
166in the room is unsafe for peers or staff. SBSD Owl Cam: And immediate separation is the safest option. Class relocation is a safety response, it's not a disciplinary tactic. We only do it when people are, when there's risk to other students. SBSD Owl Cam: In the room. And I think that, you know, when we hear about… when people are talking in the community about, boy, they're clearing the classroom a lot. SBSD Owl Cam: It's not, but… but when… anytime that you do need to clear the classroom, right, that is something that is… attention's brought to it, right? Kids know when a classroom is cleared, and they go home and talk to folks about it, and I think it gets… SBSD Owl Cam: a lot more, interest in the community because it is so unusual that
167it's happening. So, if there's any kind of thought that, well, we're clearing classrooms all the time, that's just not the case. It's just not the case. SBSD Owl Cam: This is what the principals are telling us. Before… Yep. If you go back to the last slide, you… you had stuff on there, like, least restrictive, and if I understand, there's federal law, and that's the… but please tell me. The federal law, there's state law. SBSD Owl Cam: And then there's us, and could you talk a little bit about what laws are… Yeah, I'll talk about IDEA in a little bit, and also, Section 4500. Right, thank you. Yep. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so this is what the principals are telling us. I asked all the principals, and they said that it's really… SBSD Owl Cam: It's
168very common. What… or what goes on in between buildings is very consistent. SBSD Owl Cam: that clearing the classroom is an uncommon practice. It's usually safety-driven, and there's a lot of prevention that goes into preventing that from having to happen. SBSD Owl Cam: Clear the classroom is not a common high school or middle school response at all. I think they can count on SBSD Owl Cam: one or zero fingers the amount of times they've had to do that. That is typically not a secondary, activity. It is almost always in elementary. So this whole class relocation was described as very infrequent and used only when behavior becomes unsafe. SBSD Owl Cam: And several of our principals emphasize that the great majority of students show appropriate classroom behavior. SBSD Owl Cam: What happens more often is the
169student de-escalation and removal of the student from the setting when possible happens, SBSD Owl Cam: That happens most often, and when you say removal, that's voluntary, right? But, yeah, the student doesn't necessarily want to go to the office, but they comply. Hey, head… go down the office, we're going to take you down the office, that kind of thing. Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: hold or clear the halls responses during a crisis or medical event in the hallway. So there could be times, it's not a clear the classroom, it could be a clear the hallway. We have a student who is having a seizure event, and so we want everybody to stay in your classrooms so we can give privacy when the EMTs come. SBSD Owl Cam: those kinds of things. So, I would say, probably, SBSD
170Owl Cam: clear the halls is more common than clear the classroom because of the type of events that happen that cause us to say, hey, just don't let kids leave while we have, you know, EMTs here. SBSD Owl Cam: We have a great support from our counseling, our administrators, our behavior staff, and CPI-trained adults. CPI is the training that all of our… not all of our… a lot of our teachers get in, SBSD Owl Cam: In how to, respond when students are misbehaving, and how they can, SBSD Owl Cam: I'm not going to explain it as well as I would like to. How they can, SBSD Owl Cam: guide students into a safer position, but they're trained, so there are various levels of restraints. We'll talk about restraints. SBSD Owl Cam: that, are minimal, based
171on whatever the activity is that the student is doing, and they are trained, and they are to make sure that anything we do to a kid is safe. Again, very, very rare that this happens, though. And I just looked that up, Joe, just as an aside. If this is correct, is it Crisis Prevention Institute? That's what CPI is doing? Yeah, CPI, Crisis Prevention Institute, and SBSD Owl Cam: an escalation. You ever found? Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so this is what… and the principals, what do they continue to tell us? Why… why is our behavior, numbers getting better? Why are we not clearing the classrooms as much as people might say? PBIS, right? Positive Behavior Behavior Intervention and support. We have a PBIS program, and when it is, SBSD Owl Cam: Implemented with fidelity, kids
172behave better. SBSD Owl Cam: Second step, an SEL routine. Second step is one of our social-emotional learning programs that kids learn about how they are supposed to interact with other kids at school. Restorative practices, relationship-based intervention. I think… I think a general philosophy among all of us is that when you build strong relationships with kids, they are more likely to be compliant. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? If a kid trusts an adult, and they're having an issue. SBSD Owl Cam: The adult would be much more successful, in getting them to stop doing what they're doing. SBSD Owl Cam: And we do a lot of training on when not to put the hands on a student, right? We… we… the last… the last resort is always putting hands on a student, and that is, again, that is
173only when it is the safety of the student or the classmates, that are, that are at, SBSD Owl Cam: that are happening. SBSD Owl Cam: So, student safety, learning continuity, protections for students with disabilities, these are the other things we consider, right? And I'm going to talk about these students with disabilities in a little bit. It's a rare practice, it's a safety-driven response, and there are state law guardrails, so let's talk about those. First of all, students and IEPs, so this is federal law. SBSD Owl Cam: The law does not remove accountability, but it adds process, services, and problem-solving obligations when behavior is linked to a disability. So, if a student's behavior impedes their learning. SBSD Owl Cam: The IEP team meets, to consider positive behavioral interventions, supports, and other strategies. SBSD Owl Cam: Now,
174with students on IEPs, they can only be removed from school for 10 days in a year. SBSD Owl Cam: without providing them additional services. If they are removed for more than 10 days in a year, the district is required to provide services beyond those 10 days. SBSD Owl Cam: If discipline becomes a change in placement, we need to have what's called a manifestation determination. That is, is the student's behavior a manifestation of their disability, right? So if… SBSD Owl Cam: If the student is acting in a way because their disability causes them to act that way, it puts more restrictions on what we can do discipline-wise with a student. SBSD Owl Cam: And as you see in the last bullet there, that you conduct a functional behavioral assessment, and you implement a revised a behavior
175plan. Again, it's all about, SBSD Owl Cam: Trying to teach students and put in, practices that will prevent the student from behaving as they were. SBSD Owl Cam: So that's federal law. Let's talk about Vermont Rule 4500. This is the one that really talks about, what is allowed and not allowed. So, Rule 4500 says that restraint or seclusion is allowed only. So restraint, putting your hands on a kid, seclusion, putting a kid alone somewhere. It's only allowed when SBSD Owl Cam: A, there's an imminent and substantial risk of physical injury. SBSD Owl Cam: B, when less restrictive interventions have failed or would be ineffective. C, as a temporary monitored emergency response. SBSD Owl Cam: and D, not for convenience, punishment, or routine behavior management. So, in other words. SBSD Owl Cam: We cannot put hands
176on kids unless these things are all through. And every time we do restrain a child or seclude a child, there is a 4500 report that the person fills out. They go to Nicole Carter for her review, they come to me for my review, and I read everything that happened and what the… what precipitated the behavior. SBSD Owl Cam: How did the staff respond to the behavior? Was anybody hurt? Those sorts of things. So those come across my desk, and by my own witnessing, looking, and I didn't… I should have brought a count. SBSD Owl Cam: I can tell you that the clearing the classroom is… it's rare, but again, it's… people pay attention to it because it's… it's… it is unusual. And because it's unusual, it, gets a lot of, maybe, attention. SBSD Owl Cam:
177So, this is required. I just talked about this. Any… after any restraint or seclusion, you… you have to, do a same-day… they have to fill that report out immediately. The parent has to be noticed by the end, given notice by the end of the day. SBSD Owl Cam: or the phone, and written notice within 24 hours. There has to be written documentation and monitoring, and then the team be briefs to see what happened, and it has to be, SBSD Owl Cam: there is escalated reporting for repeated, lengthy, or rule-violating incidents. So, if we get a 4500 report, it will ask, is this the first time this student has been restrained? And you'll fill out those notes, the second or third time, and the more times it happens, then it puts in more actions that you
178have to take to prevent that from happening again. Because if we're having to restrain or seclude a student. SBSD Owl Cam: that many times, they're probably not likely in their least restrictive environment, and that's when the IEP team would get together and change maybe their place. SBSD Owl Cam: So these are the takeaways I'd like you to, like you to take. SBSD Owl Cam: Clear the classroom, it is rare. It is not a routine… it's not a discipline model at all. It is a model to keep students safe from students who are having a tough time controlling their behavior. SBSD Owl Cam: It is, our first line response is always prevention, right? You build great relationships with kids, you engage them in meaningful instruction, that takes care of 95% of your discipline problem. The other
1794.8% are, SBSD Owl Cam: are prevented by de-escalation, or they're stopped by de-escalation. Hey, knock that off, hey, let's, let's give you this choice, let's take you here, let's do whatever. SBSD Owl Cam: And student support. Students on IEPs have additional federal protections, and state law already places limits and reporting requirements on restraint and seclusion. So… SBSD Owl Cam: that's what I'd like you to take from this, and there are a couple people who are much smarter than me about this in the audience, if you have questions, I will try to answer questions, and I'm sure that they can answer them even better than I can. Actually, I think there are… there's four people at that table, smarter than me. Two of them are building principals, and Monica deals with this a lot, too, so
180any… actually, any of them could help with it. SBSD Owl Cam: If you have questions. SBSD Owl Cam: So I have… I have two questions. SBSD Owl Cam: Roughly speaking, How many clear the classrooms are we talking? Are we talking tens? Hundreds? Thousands? SBSD Owl Cam: tens district-wide amongst all of the buildings over a year. Tens. I think I've had two that I'll share. Yeah. Okay, thank you. I would say district-wide, actually, this year, probably less than SBSD Owl Cam: Less than 50, I know for sure. I would say even probably under 30. SBSD Owl Cam: And, you know, and I think I was one that brought this up, and it was last year, I happened to be talking to a parent, and they were the one that had said to me, they had a
181student, they were in elementary school, they missed their music class. SBSD Owl Cam: for several weeks in a row, because they had to keep clearing the classroom. And I don't know when, if it was last year, or if it was in the past couple of years, but it was… it had happened more than one time. SBSD Owl Cam: And that was what precipitated the conversation, like, what is happening that they have to clear a classroom and that kids are missing? SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, so if it was, like, more than one time in a… in the same classroom by the same student, it would not happen much more than a couple times, because that's when the IEP team is getting together, putting in the behavioral plan. Is there a different placement for them? Do they
182need to be in a smaller group? What not? SBSD Owl Cam: But again, when your kid comes home and says, I miss music, I miss music again, that's… that causes you to think… What's going on? Yeah, what's going on? It also invites an opportunity to talk about SBSD Owl Cam: what happens, and how everyone's different, and that, you know, compassion, and sometimes you miss a music blasts, because we all are at different levels, and we're all working together, and learning together, so… SBSD Owl Cam: in my opinion, if this is the safest thing that has to happen on occasion, I don't see this as an issue for the students who are in the class and have this experience, because it's just a shaping experience in their life, and they can feel lucky that they know
183how to control their body and don't have to, you know… Well, I think… SBSD Owl Cam: for parents who have, or community members who are not parents, who have existing trust issues with schools, which makes this for many different reasons. I think that, like, having a… SBSD Owl Cam: You know, like a scaled number that says, like, if you say, let's take 50, like, let's say it's 50, SBSD Owl Cam: you know, 50 classrooms were cleared over the whole course of the last 6 months, but how many classrooms were in session? Like, that's 50 out of, what, 2,500? 50,000? So, having a district… I think that, like, having some kind of number around this is the best way that we can SBSD Owl Cam: Well, the concern, right? Saying that this happens 0.1% of the
184time, when your kid walks into the room, it's likely that that room's about to be cleared. That would be really helpful from a political standpoint, for both parents and non-parents. And the fact that it happens more at the elementary school, where you have younger, less mature kids, it's not happening at the middle school and high school, because by that point. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? You know, they have better control over their body. The other thing, this was really helpful, Joe. Thank you for putting this together. Would it be possible… I know it's in the board SBSD Owl Cam: meeting minutes, like, it's in our board materials, but I think some of these presentations that we do, like, as we're looking at SBSD Owl Cam: you know, potential updates and whatever. Like, there might be links
185to some of these documents that I think will be really helpful for people to have. Yeah, they're… I mean, they're beyond the minutes. This actually is already on where our agenda is. It has all of these handouts that we've done. It has the monitoring report, it has this on the website. Yeah, yeah, no, what I'm saying is, like, just as we go onto our website, we might want to have, like, you'll have a link to SBSD Owl Cam: monitoring reports, you might have a link to some of the materials that we've presented outside of this session, the superintendent reports, like, how do we handle behavior? Like, I just think it might be helpful, again, for the community to navigate things if they happen to end up on the website, and they're not looking at all
186of our board meetings. SBSD Owl Cam: So that was my first question, was what… what's the rough number? And it would really be great to have a number that I can see the next time I hear about this, because I do hear about it quite often. I can just be like, listen, that's… SBSD Owl Cam: 1% of the time, that's 0.5% of the time. Like, you're more likely to get struck by lightning than, you know, have your classroom cleared. I mean, obviously, it's not that unlikely, but that would be really useful for me as I try to rebuild community trust in SBSD Owl Cam: you know, as we all try to rebuild the community trust in schools. And then my other question is, on the video surveillance policy, there was a case where our own
187policies were different from the state's. SBSD Owl Cam: Right? They were more restrictive than the states. Right. And so I was wondering, is our procedure SBSD Owl Cam: more or less, or I guess, is it more restrictive than the state's? Do we have additional requirements that we're placing on teachers or administrators that go beyond what the state's Rule 4500 says? No. No, we have to follow 4500. SBSD Owl Cam: We follow the model of policy pretty much to a T. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so to clarify, we don't have any additional, SBSD Owl Cam: you know, state law would allow you to do this, but we don't want you to do that. You have to… you have to follow these additional procedures. SBSD Owl Cam: So, for every restraint and seclusion, we follow exactly what
188the state does. SBSD Owl Cam: And state law says we have to restrain a student before our use of gloomy student. SBSD Owl Cam: That's so cute. SBSD Owl Cam: I think the answer to my question that I heard from the back was that we… SBSD Owl Cam: There's federal law, there's state law. SBSD Owl Cam: we have adopted, I guess, a model policy, probably from the VS… maybe? Although, I'm not sure. VSBA. So, we've adopted a model policy, and in no case has the school board or the staff decided to impose additional SBSD Owl Cam: Restrictions on how staff can apply SBSD Owl Cam: discipline or anything like that? Correct. And, clear the halls and clear the classroom are procedure, not policy. So, in terms of policy, we do have Rule 4500, which is
189restraint, seclusion, and suspension. SBSD Owl Cam: And we follow that in line with the model policy from the BSVA. SBSD Owl Cam: And then, in terms of Clear the Classroom, Clear the falls. SBSD Owl Cam: That's more of a procedure, and it's very parallel to what districts in Jim and County do. Okay, so, like, if somebody comes up to me and says. SBSD Owl Cam: Man, why can't they keep those kids under control in schools? You know. SBSD Owl Cam: The answer is, well, first of all, we're following the law. SBSD Owl Cam: And second of all, what? Well, my answer would probably be a little more sarcastic, which is. SBSD Owl Cam: we… our job is not to keep kids in control, because that's… we're not a prison, we're a learning institution, right? Our
190job is to teach kids and to get them to develop skills about how to… how to behave. And so, we are working with kids and doing the least amount of consequence for the most amount of change in behavior that we can, because we want SBSD Owl Cam: When you build a culture that is about learning and growth and, and mercy and those sorts of things. SBSD Owl Cam: That will do more for school safety than anything else, because as you build relationships with kids, and kids trust you, when they see something going on that shouldn't be going on. SBSD Owl Cam: they'll tell you, right? When kids come to school feeling like, we are just trying to keep them compliant and under control, first of all, as soon as they learn there's more of them
191than us, they can uprise at any time, right? SBSD Owl Cam: Second, when… when that happens, then that's when SBSD Owl Cam: it's… it's like any of us, right? Nobody wants restrictions placed on us, and we get a little irritated when it does, and it makes for a less… SBSD Owl Cam: a less welcoming environment, so that's not what we're looking for in our schools. I would also say, at the elementary level, that we have to figure out what's the function of the behavior. So, young students often don't have the communication abilities that, say, the middle schoolers and the high schoolers do. SBSD Owl Cam: We have students who have experienced trauma, and their go-to is fight or flight. SBSD Owl Cam: So it might look like a student running out of the classroom, or
192it might look like a student picking up a chair and getting ready to throw it. So we have to figure out what's the replacement behavior for that child. You know, if it's a kindergartner that's just coming into us, it takes a while to build that trust. SBSD Owl Cam: for children to really trust us. They haven't always had trusting adults in their lives. SBSD Owl Cam: Or they've transitioned from multiple schools, multiple home environments. SBSD Owl Cam: So sometimes it does… it does take time for us to figure out the behavior. We're really fortunate that we have… our school psychologist is the person who trains us in CPI, so all of our special educators, all of the administrators. SBSD Owl Cam: All of the support staff who work in special education are trained in the
193de-escalation strategies, and that doesn't just mean how to do a restraint, a physical restraint, it's when I'm seeing a child starting to get agitated. SBSD Owl Cam: Can I step over the behavior? Can I distract the student with something else? Is this child hungry? A lot of young children don't even know how to tell you that they're hungry. SBSD Owl Cam: So we have to figure out what are those cues and what's going on for that child. And sometimes it's partnering with pediatricians, with, Howard Center clinicians that are interfacing. SBSD Owl Cam: So I think you see it more frequently in the elementary school, because we're trying to figure out these SBSD Owl Cam: Young students. And they also have to learn what it looks like to be in school for seven and a half
194hours. SBSD Owl Cam: So it sounds like… The answer to a question like that is kind of a challenger. SBSD Owl Cam: response, it's to say, well, I'm not sure it's the right question. SBSD Owl Cam: it's, you know, it's like, challenge the premise of the question, which is, we're not here to run a prison, we're here to create the, you know… Yeah, I don't know if that would appease anybody answering those questions. I would say that it's probably not as often, or as, SBSD Owl Cam: as frequent as you think that it is, and these are some of the things that we're dealing with. And safety, of course, is always our top priority. We are not going to put kids in a place where we feel that they are not safe. So if students
195are in a state where we need to clear the classroom, again. SBSD Owl Cam: we will look at that child, we'll have a team get together, discuss what is that behavior, and make a decision as a team whether… are they in the right placement or not. And… SBSD Owl Cam: Often they are in the right placement, but there's all these things that Holly so eloquently talked about that could be causing these behaviors. And we see that it works, because when you get to the middle school and high school, we don't have these because of the work that's going on. SBSD Owl Cam: And because of the maturing of the students as they, you know, learn communication and how to SBSD Owl Cam: tell what their needs are. I also think, too, when we do need
196to relocate students from a classroom, they're much more resilient than the adults are about the situation. You know, all of a sudden, they're going to the library. It doesn't mean the learning stops, it means, yes, it got disrupted. SBSD Owl Cam: But we're getting the materials to them wherever they are while dealing with that situation, or they're picking up a book, or they're going into another classroom, and suddenly it's two classes, doing whatever's going on in that classroom. SBSD Owl Cam: So it doesn't mean, like, there's no learning going on if that happens, it just means that it got disruptive. SBSD Owl Cam: And it teaches children how to be resilient, too. Like, yes, the adults are here, we're keeping you safe, and we did need to make a zigzag in our day, which happens
197for many reasons, and hopefully we can get back and repair with our classmate who was having a hard time. SBSD Owl Cam: Thank you, thanks for that. But I think also, too, this, again, is really helpful, and I think the fact that whatever you're doing seems to really be working, because the numbers are coming down. I mean, that's pretty significant. SBSD Owl Cam: Strong efficacy. Huge. So… So, to answer the question, I was having the same thought. Right. We're being shown here. Yeah, we're purposely and teaching social-emotional learning skills. SBSD Owl Cam: We have, like, we have Joelle Van Lent, who comes to all five of our schools. She's a Vermont psychologist, and we do a consultancy model, so we'll bring SBSD Owl Cam: like Monica, who's having a hard time in school, and let's
198spend a half an hour brainstorming about the behaviors that Monica's showing, what are the things that the adults need to change, or that we need to change in the environment to help Monica be successful. SBSD Owl Cam: Well, I think it's at your school where you've got the pom-poms for the positive behavior? We do, our honey suits, yes. I love that. Yeah. SBSD Owl Cam: So, one… one plug, if I can make, I would highly encourage anyone from the board, because last year we had the chance to go, Seamus and I went, remember, and how great that was? And to go see some of those things in action was really pretty cool. SBSD Owl Cam: So… SBSD Owl Cam: That's… I mean, if you can remember being an elementary student, right? Yeah, does clearing the
199classroom, is that disrupted? Maybe a little bit, but so is the first snowfall. So is the first time a bee flies in the window. You know what, those things, that's… that's… Skunk on the plate. Skunk on the playground. Skunk on the playground. Really? So all of those things, yeah, it's… it's… SBSD Owl Cam: I don't want to make light of it, but… Sure, it's rare, it's, SBSD Owl Cam: And we respond appropriately. Well, yeah, it's adults in the broader community SBSD Owl Cam: Having to come to terms with something that you guys are seeing every day, that they don't see every day, they don't understand, they just view as, SBSD Owl Cam: symptom of some over… some problem that needs… and so… SBSD Owl Cam: Yeah, and I would say this, because, I'm older than
200a lot of you, most of you, but there… there were not students SBSD Owl Cam: with disabilities in our schools when we were in kids. There were, at least in Ohio, I don't know how, it was in Vermont, right? There was a workshop. And it's great that we educate all of our kids, and we have our kids with disabilities in our schools. It's great for them, it's great for their peers to interact with them. And so, older generations who hear, oh, but these kids SBSD Owl Cam: out of control. We are educating, more kids than have ever been educated with a wider range of abilities than ever before. And it's hard, hard work, but we do a pretty good job at it. SBSD Owl Cam: And I do think it benefits everyone, even though it
201is challenging, but it does make for better people all around that are grown-ups experiencing that. And you're never, as a parent, you're never prouder than hearing that your kid helped with a situation like that. Yep. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, well, I don't have any other questions. Thank you both. Appreciate you. Thank you. Is there any other board comment or questions? SBSD Owl Cam: Sincerely. Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: The next item on the agenda is the consent agenda. SBSD Owl Cam: When we did the monitoring report? SBSD Owl Cam: Yes, I was gonna say, yeah. Christy had her hand open, sat her hand up since then. Okay, let's return back to that, I apologize for that. Would you… if Christy is interested in speaking, would you please? Christie (she/her): Hi everybody, can you hear me? Christie
202(she/her): I can't tell. Can you hear me? SBSD Owl Cam: Yes, yes. Christie (she/her): Oh, great. Thank you so much. Sorry about that. Christie (she/her): So, first, I just want to say that conversation was so refreshing. Thank you, Dr. Clark, for centering learning at a time when behavioral conversations don't always do that, so I appreciate that. My comment is Christie (she/her): to something far, far earlier in the meeting. I was with my two and a half year old during this discussion, and wasn't able to be present. But I did go to Media Factory, which I've learned is my hack for listening to parts of the conversation I want to hear, and then trying to get my voice in there before you all end the meeting. And so I just… Christie (she/her): one point of correction
203that I… I just can't live with myself if I don't make is that I heard earlier in the discussion about what happened on Dorset Street that protesters Christie (she/her): were part of the problem that day, specific to student safety in the building. And what I want to say is, from the time that I was on scene until the time that we were able to get Joanna's daughter out and to safety. Christie (she/her): The protesters who were there were doing nothing but guaranteeing safety for children in that house. Christie (she/her): And I can't speak beyond the time that I was on scene. I left to help with dismissal back at the high school, but I can tell you that between the hours of 8.15 to 3.15, the folks that I was standing alongside, their entire commitment
204that day was to student well-being and safety. Christie (she/her): And to that of Joanna and her family and those in the house. And I think it does a disservice to those folks, and it is an erasure of that experience if we were to suggest that those folks were acting out of the best interest of children at that time. So that's what I wanted to offer. SBSD Owl Cam: And that was, to clarify, I think that we'll consider that part of comments from the public, because we actually started comments from the public at 6.05 instead of 6-15. SBSD Owl Cam: So somebody who wanted to comment on that made sense. I mean, that's… and also for going forward on agendas, Joe, we should remember that we so often get to comments from Republic 605, that we
205should just… SBSD Owl Cam: tell people that that's when it starts, because otherwise they're going to miss it. Okay. Maybe we can change it on here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the template. SBSD Owl Cam: Alright, so we're on consent agenda. SBSD Owl Cam: and the… Approved minutes of March 4. Thank you all for coming and staying. Thank you. SBSD Owl Cam: The ones that we can improve all at once are the minutes of the March 4 meeting, accounts payables, and the payroll warrant. SBSD Owl Cam: alms… And I believe, also, the higher the leave of absence, the resignation. SBSD Owl Cam: So, pretty much everything except approving the AP voucher checks. So, is there any objections to approving the consent agenda? SBSD Owl Cam: Any questions about the accounts payables? SBSD Owl Cam: Alright. SBSD Owl
206Cam: No? Hearing none, the consent agenda passes. SBSD Owl Cam: I would entertain a motion to approve the AP voucher check to the Howard Center in the amount of $149,675, and to Vermont Mechanical in the amount of $199,667.76. Jen moves. SBSD Owl Cam: Second. Melissa, Michelle, seconds. SBSD Owl Cam: Any discussion? SBSD Owl Cam: All those in favor? Aye. The motion passes. SBSD Owl Cam: So, the next item on the agenda is to review the agenda for the March 31st meeting. SBSD Owl Cam: So, let me pull that up real quick. SBSD Owl Cam: So, so, what we have right now… is, SBSD Owl Cam: In discussion items, we have a presentation of the audit, so I'm guessing this is the financial audit? Yes. SBSD Owl Cam: And then we have a discussion item on
207common roots. SBSD Owl Cam: Is that just learning about common road? Yeah, they, I'm sorry, I forget the name of the person that runs that, what the comments… Carol? Yes, Carol's coming in. She wants to share with the board about all the great work that we'll do. SBSD Owl Cam: Okay. And then, on action items, we've got Monitor Report 2.9. Again, it'll be our third time that we're going to try and monitor it. Michelle and I have just been very busy, and it's a direct monitoring, or it's a direct SBSD Owl Cam: It's different from other monitoring reports in that the board has to do more effort in terms of actually writing the report. SBSD Owl Cam: So, another item that we have added tonight was to charge the legislative fair… or the SBSD Owl
208Cam: Legislative advocacy, committee? SBSD Owl Cam: We don't have a topic for the superintendent report yet. SBSD Owl Cam: And I guess another discussion item that we should add is, around the, ENS policy update. Hopefully, by then, we'll have some sort of an answer on the consultant. SBSD Owl Cam: So, is there any other big picture items for March 31st that people want to keep in mind? SBSD Owl Cam: Always. Roman and I are gonna need to start talking about representative recruitment on the 31st. In the past. SBSD Owl Cam: we would recruit a new representative, a junior, really late in the year, and their first meeting wasn't until August. And we and the past school board member, Gracie Morse, found that was impractical, and SBSD Owl Cam: confusing over the summer, as well as,
209it's great for that new representative to be on the board with the two, so me and Momin, for just a little while. So, SBSD Owl Cam: I think we're gonna try to post it, like, on April 1st for high schoolers to see, and we need to, SBSD Owl Cam: I don't know if you need to formally vote on it, but we need to nominate two… SBSD Owl Cam: board members who want to be a part of the process and spearhead the interviews with us, which Emily and Jen did last year. So, I think it might be good to actually, like, add it under something we're going to talk about. SBSD Owl Cam: And it can be under the focus on student learning or, like, our report, but… SBSD Owl Cam: I'm not sure if you
210have to, like, vote to have two people. SBSD Owl Cam: No. SBSD Owl Cam: I mean, yeah, I don't know how that works. SBSD Owl Cam: So, for next time, should I add recruiting a new student representative to the focus on student learning, and separately, a discussion item on student representative structure? SBSD Owl Cam: Okay, so I will take it out of the focus on student learning, and I will just put it in, SBSD Owl Cam: That's it. SBSD Owl Cam: And I'll put it under… I'll put it as a possible action. And we'll talk to you more, then, about what our process looks like, and what resources we're using. Okay. SBSD Owl Cam: Right, any other… SBSD Owl Cam: things that we want to put on the March 31st? I would like to add
211a discussion item regarding board communication protocols and social media guidelines. SBSD Owl Cam: Given recent committee feedback and a March 2024 Supreme Court guidance in Lynnke v. Freed, I think it would be beneficial for us to ensure that our public communication aligns with our board code of conduct and our constitutional obligations. SBSD Owl Cam: So, communication… Social media. SBSD Owl Cam: Is your school board website update back on? You know, we talked about that before. It's up to someone. Oh, I don't know, it should be in the parking lot. It was gonna be this, this today, but we took it off, and we'll put it on for next week. Next. SBSD Owl Cam: meeting is what you meant, Michelle. I'm just asking if that's the will of the board to do that. SBSD Owl Cam:
212the parka, I think you were the main advocate for… Me? SBSD Owl Cam: Talking about the school board website update? I remember seeing that. It was on today's… Oh, there it is, school board's website update, yeah. I mean, I think it is more of just a discussion, and it's, you know, some of the things that we talked about tonight, like, I think there's a lot of really great things that we're doing, and it's the navigability of our website. Like, is there a better way that we can… SBSD Owl Cam: have information presented, like some quick links to superintendent reports, or just whatever. I mean, that I'd like to… that I think that I would like to see, and… SBSD Owl Cam: on our website. I think we can improve how it's presented. I wonder… what
213you were talking about. It's not exactly the same, but it is about more communication. SBSD Owl Cam: Are you okay adding that? Because I… SBSD Owl Cam: Another way to do it would be, you could meet with Joe, and… SBSD Owl Cam: figure out what you guys want to recommend, and then come back to the board, make a recommendation to us. Time to do that. SBSD Owl Cam: Does that work? SBSD Owl Cam: Because I think that… okay, so let's… let's have… No, it does, I'm… I'm… SBSD Owl Cam: I'm… Laura's not here, so I'm gonna ask her a question she would ask. Is that… is that policy governance, or is that operations, the website and the… The school board website? SBSD Owl Cam: It's our… it's our piece, not… not your… not the school
214district, but the school board page. Okay. Yeah, because that's what I meant. Presumably, anything that you wanted to implement would require staff resources to actually implement. SBSD Owl Cam: You know, because, like… Oh, have you been making changes? I thought you had access to… Well, I have that, but I'm just basic… I'm just… it's no structural stuff, I'm just putting, like, you know, a header, a text, header, and text. We'll see that's all good information. SBSD Owl Cam: Well, why don't you guys talk, and figure out what the scope of what Jen is imagining is, and then you guys can figure out… Yeah, I'm not… I'm not opposed to making changes, I just want to make sure that… Yeah, we're not in too far in the weeds about this is what the website should look
215like, this is what font we should use. Oh, no, no, no, no, none of that. It's more of, like… Well, you guys talk about it, and come back to us for that. Okay, yeah, let's set up some time, Jen. Sounds good. SBSD Owl Cam: Sorry, were you gonna say something? Okay. SBSD Owl Cam: Alright, I think that we're done, SBSD Owl Cam: So, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. SBSD Owl Cam: Alyssa moves. Second. Emily seconds. Any discussion? SBSD Owl Cam: All those in favor? An aye. All right, we're adjourned. Thank you. SBSD Owl Cam: It's too cold.