Tahanto Meeting 12/14/2021

001[Music] you breathe um tonight um we welcome guests tonight thank you for joining us and so um that's really the centerpiece of this meeting tonight in addition to other reports from leadership leaders and our subcommittees and uh elementary schools um the centerpiece is really talking about the preliminary budget tonight and two questions and those first numbers and as a reminder that budget process is an iterative process over several months this is just the starting point for that budget and then um but there will be changes in the budget refinements and things will get prioritized those numbers will shift as we go uh so let's start with the pledging leadership [Music] for all um [Music] consent agenda which has a number of items in it uh payroll payable warrants school committee meeting uh school committee events

002and executive sessions november 9th the election subcommittee meeting policy subcommittee meeting hands and do we have a motion to accept the consent agenda one second uh so communications does anyone have any communications to report physical tonight i just want to comment on a few things in our shared drive i put in open meeting law guidance recent guidance from the attorney general's office so this will can be to read and consider there's one parent email which jeff and i are working with like i should be raised um i attended the berlin select board meeting um and that was a useful visit and uh um interesting to get to talk with them selectmen but in particular they offered an invitation for us to join them for their coffee talk coming up in january 20th uh regarding the

003election the original elections so i've discussed that with the election subcommittee they'll be discussing the ascent to that um and we'll organize that follow-up i'll be in touch back with the selector i attended a cpap meeting on december 6 where karen did a great presentation on around the individual disabilities should always remember have to take the acronym apart individual disabilities you talk about ideas yeah individual disability education connect yeah um she did a great presentation that's worth watching online if you get a check is it online here um the powerpoint is i think uploaded okay i hope so because that was worthwhile you did a great job and um it would be great for other people to get to see that um also the cpap um council was looking for more involvement from berlin parents

004and boys and parents on that council and then some of their activities so please put the word up your ear to the ground if you can direct anybody over there to get involved with their projects they would welcome that and last i attended the parent math workshop in the morning um how do you say his name yes which was was wonderful i was really glad to see this and a lot of those are going to continue and i would encourage uh parents of the elementary students in particular to take those in as they can cover you know their small nights but they're useful um use eye-opening kinds of reviews of how math instruction has changed since you were in school and it would be helpful for you to work with your children knowing some of

005the things that he's sharing so that's worthwhile all right so we're going to move right into reports and get on to the presentation [Music] and we're doing some research um any other questions or okay so um i just want to join your attention first to the um um i want to stop by saying don't panic over there on the sidelines um you typically don't do it this way most of the time the public and school committee even they don't see all of these numbers that we have here for us we sort of pair things down before we bring it down and the reason why we've done it this way a couple reasons one um you're a new school committee and so yeah as you know we may have commended to educate you as we go

006along talk to you about the budget process from the ground up and how it gets developed [Music] so that's the first thing the other thing is that as we as we start working through these i don't know if i want to say close pandemic budgets um you know we think it would be negligent not to show you um in a community that the entire student needs and we realize that a child may not have and then we go from there you know these we get requests from the towns all the time they do their calculations and they figure out to calculate what what the town capacity is and we understand that we try to work within those and within the um the policy of the school committee and i just want to bend loaded up

007in the drive like policy dvd budget planning excuse me the very first slide says the first priority in the development of the annual budget will be the education of the culture of our children and our schools however the district will attempt to balance the valid interest of the and you know our job as a school district is to make sure that we we procedurally do what the school committee policy is to do if you look at if you look if you look through the packet you'll see that the theme the dean of this budget is an investment in people investing in our personnel so you'll see very little investment in this budget applications concrete things computers things of that sort which usually do appear and we came to this conclusion because we had some time

008this year to stop looking over the last 18 to 24 months when it's been done and two things really came from one of them is that the district improvement plan which is what we work off and generate a budget from but the school improvement plan come from that's what all of our goals are developed is very fragmented we know partly that because while we saw how valeria you were when we were presenting it because we know that you know as a committee you really didn't have a hand in it you developed it and you didn't vote and i'll talk about that in a second but the other thing was um we found that there's an enhanced need for personnel to work with our students to work on the parking anxiety the depression all of these

009things that have come to light and being covered enough now that's not to say we didn't have this stuff before but just like coping with a person if you have something in you you have asthma it will it will take advantage of that so all of those things that we saw before in the district have just now been enhanced and so the need for additional personnel to deal with the social emotional need and to continue to expand the program in the district is really critical so um what we plan to do for the future going forward here this year is on starting in march we will develop a new district between a three-year sort of transitional different improvement plan we usually start the process around march so it'll be you know around the time we're

010figuring out this budget and then you know we'll finish it up in the summer and and bring it to this school community for both so that you can have some ownership of them you know you don't you didn't believe you really had ownership of the plan we were working on and they get very fragmented see how many callers are on it i have been made and even we have some trouble following that so we'll have a new plan um many of the budget items or the budget items that don't make it through on this budget the ones here they're still important but you'll see them again in the new the three-year district they'll appear some place there and they'll be prioritized so you'll get to actually see them again and ask questions about it again

011[Music] um so tonight though we're going to present the budget as it's written here your consideration and your discussion [Music] um we'll take questions tonight and we've provided brief explanations of each of the items which we usually don't do so we'll expand on that a little bit more and obviously the principles together the directors together they can they can answer questions we decide to present it like we do the district improvement plan because we really are trying to tie all of this together the budget with the district approving plan and for it to reflect the needs of our students you know we realize at the end of the day that we'll have to make some cuts that the towns don't have the capacity for for these kind of percentages um but i will tell you

012we you know in 2019 when i presented the enrollment reports some of the trends of building building building in these towns and um some of the trends in enrollment and birth rate exams the first time in the last 10 years that the average has changed at the birth rate example in blessings has gone up from 35 to 42. um so but that comes those kids are going to go to school someplace at some point and and you know we're going to have to deal with that so these numbers of two percent increase 2.5 percent increase i don't know but those kind of increases will become more just as this town grows tiles around us have seen the same kind of pattern and if we don't do something before then we'll see those 26 27 28

01329 in the class you have an elo population it's almost quadrupled from a country that i don't even know how to pronounce um so to think that this is gonna it's really not realistic and yeah many of these many of these things we've seen the social emotional needs of the students they're just increasing um so we're going to go through the presentation and we'll take some we'll take some people take some questions um i do want to point out something else that you might say well why don't you just why don't you just take that stuff off now again we want you to see the cost we also the real quote do we also want you to realize you know we could have taken some things out and you won't have seen them but i

014was going to talk tonight later on about things like reducing the budget using school choice one that's stuff you may not see so it would reduce the budget you probably won't see it reflected in anything in personnel or program but it will come down you know this is the kind of thing that comes back to point you it's like it's like you're going to build a house and so in the in you know the framing cruises you know it's going to cost destiny like well that's too much it's okay we can get the cost down and they take 20 or 50 studs out of the wall you never see them but there's an impact and there's a payment somewhere down the road at some point payment comes due so we're going to start and the

015way we're going to do this um we put it all on one sheet for you to see the directors will present we'll talk about your item in addition to what's written and then bob will tell us how we're going to take off line by line so um karen we're going to start off with the level service items and special editions here on top guess bob okay uh just spraying the difference between the top section and the bottom first for people sure so um well so level service budget represents basically our existing resources and programs um and um contractual costs uh so you know teachers union contract other contractuals it also includes our our legal obligations under iba special ed requirements so we might be adding a paraprofessional or out of district tuition we're legally obligated

016to pay for those it's in addition to the budget but it's part of the level service budget the above level service requests are discretionary decisions we have the ability to make ads we really don't have a discretion on the above-level service requests these are things that are basically required or they're in our court programs and services so that's kind of the difference we're going to start off talking about the level service budget that's right it's old i swear everybody um so the special ed on different tuitions we've had a lot of movement this year we've had three new students move in who were already had some pretty significant out of district placements in place um and so this year we're not paying for those tuitions but next year we will be responsible so those three

017hit as well as one of our own students who has had to go into an out of district placement we also have some special ed paraprofessionals as we were doing um as we are out through cloven we had a lot of our pretty significant students who couldn't medically come into the building and a lot of those students had one of our professionals for health reasons so the paraprofessionals as new students moved in we were able to use those paraprofessionals for our new students but now these students are coming back into the school from homeschooling so we need to go back and replace those powers that we didn't hire in the first place so that's why we're getting hit with a few for next year um and then contract services was just there's a little bit

018more ot services especially in loyalty we've needed more um not a significant amount more but um still impacts the budget do you want to talk about the amounts bob yeah so um i'm just uh in total everybody that better so we deviated from our powerpoint format this year we thought there was a lot of information to share i wanted to try to give a picture of the district on one page and uh so this company is a high level so the the special education tuitions karen talked about i think there's actually a fourth that um moved in this year it could be wrong i think so there's four students um in the top line special education tuitions that's also transportation legally transportation from these students to their placements so the combination of those four placements

019and transportation is 690 000 that also includes inflationary increases that are approved by the state every year the pair professionals is five paraprofessionals there's two at tohonto and um three at boylston for one-to-one student needs they're required in the iep in special education contract services is relatively minor compared to those in total this makes up um four point five percent of the seven point three percent increase our level service budget uh would have been two point eight percent uh we didn't have uh these these costs so that's the impact of um of those additional expenses can i just ask a quick question to clarify that first line out of the almost 700 000 is for four students is that what you said tuition and transportation it's almost 700 000 for four students for tuition and

020transportation yes one placement can cost up to three hundred thousand dollars um in fact i believe we may have one that is 300 that we're paying half within that number plus transportation um karen how many of those have just moved in there's three i mean bob's question but there's three that have moved in and one that is a student here who has had to go out is that the number you have um four total four yeah okay i know off the top of my head that one program is one baby there might be a little bit more than that with the paraprofessional added to it so if i may ask the question i'm not withdrawing finance this is an ie question can we ever run special education here in the building and not have to

021transport out and pay externally but bring another special ed teacher in one-on-one is that does that make sense at some point it doesn't for these children so we did that actually and boyles did we created a program for some of our students where it did make sense we had about four i think four originally that we thought might need out of district placements which was plenty to create our own classroom and bring our own teacher in and create the program some of these students need such highly specialized things that it's just not cost effective to do it as expensive as it seems to recreate that kind of program for one child would be much much harder one-to-one nurses things like that so these really are where the students need to be okay thank you um

022question on special education circuit breaker so um what is the what is the frequency or at what point is the school district reimbursed through special education circuit breaker or other state state aid to reimburse some of these costs how how does that work we get reimbursed the year after we incurred the costs and it's we get reimbursed for uh 65 to 75 of the costs above approximately 65 000 so we absorb um it's actually four times the per prequel expenditure rate which is about 65 000 so that's absorbed by the district first so if you have not had a district placement at 65 000. we're not going to get a penny for circuit breaker for what's above circuit breaker is 65 to 75 percent and we would receive that the year after we incur the

023costs best practice is to budget on what you've received as circuit breaker in a given year plan to use it the next year which is what we've done in this budget we've planned to access some next year's circuit breaker money a little bit a portion of it which we uh typically do but we feel like we're in a position where we need to do that and i will talk more i think jeff and i felt like there's a lot of information to absorb tonight we want to talk about risks and opportunities at the january meeting there's some things that could be potentially additional expenses there's some things that we might we might identify ways to potentially pay for some of this we also might get new information that some of these costs are going to

024change so you know that'll be something to look at is you know can we access circuit breaker more in other words thank you the next item up here is the teachers union uh contractual increases um and that's uh 236 thousand that's for steps and lanes on the scales i think people have seen so steps and lanes plus we've assumed the two percent uh cost of living increase the next three lineups i'll talk about too because they're they're related the health care benefits we were given guidance that we should expect a little bit of a half year increase here this year based on our claim levels um they have formulas that look at our claims relative to our premiums and we're not doing we have significant claims so they estimated to suggested using eight percent it's

025possible that we'll get less i wouldn't imagine we'd get much more than that usually have a range um this also reflects changes in enrollment so we have factored in kind of the most up-to-date enrollment levels we have so these aren't necessarily all going up here for example berlin as memorials had less enrollment than we anticipated during the year so that's a lot less than a eight percent increase i should also note uh just format wise these percentages represent uh the the percent increase over last year's budget what they what they contribute to the overall increase of 6.4 so that's what these percentages mean they don't mean it's uh 3.9 more than last year um so the the reason for another another factor on the health care benefits is last year we had a free month

026of health care from our insurer they gave us a one-month premium holiday and we took that savings and we didn't just subtract it from the budget because then we'd have to add that this year plus we have to add these increases so what we did is we took that savings and used it to make a larger opeb contribution and we used it to fund the special ed reserve so these decreases of 121 000 kind of tie in with this increase this increase would be less if we had budgeted we had shipped in one month to to cover these two line items does that make sense okay uh so so the net of these is is overall a relatively small increase of uh fifty thousand dollars i think uh carol's gonna i'll talk about the last

027study and then carol's gonna talk about the the math tutors one that represents uh we just had some uh different changes in contractual uh pricing we've also used zoomed during the pandemic we're still using that we're using a filtering program for chromebooks for students at home previously they were in district and we've gone one to one and they're now students are taking them home and we're required for the child internet protection act to provide safe browsing environments so we have a program called bloxy that does that so um and we've also had a you may have experienced some problems calling into toronto we've had some challenges with the phone system it's old the wirings will have a vendor that will support all aspects of telecom that factors into the tonto increase so that's contributing 37

028000 to the overall total um and then carol's going to talk about the the math tube and what that represents yeah the elementary math tutor math coach coordinator position has been in place this is the first year it's been in place the position was voted on by the school committee last year and that position essentially supports the elementary teachers works on instructional practices works on with the principles amongst the data and basically supports anything to do with the math um and it's also in this it's a new position that began this year and that person also works on building community engagement as i mentioned earlier so we're excited about the position and um this change represents a change in funding source so what and we'll invite a teacher to work with him and go in

029on observe that teacher look at the instructional practices ensure that that teacher is hitting specific standards for that grade level approaching strategies and skills in a certain way making sure that all the content is addressed it's that person becomes a confidant to the teacher they're not reporting to the principal they're not in a supervisory position they're really trying to build a capacity for better teaching in the classrooms that person might work also to provide professional development to groups of teachers and generally between the two schools of course are pretty busy oh so the cost is a decrease at berlin because the position uh last year was approved you know mid-year some point during the year the um the nineteen thousand dollar decrease at burlington represents um a shift at half of that math coach from

030berlin to boylston in the budget since it's being budgeted for the first time in fy23 it also represents some tutor support to the math coach previously the math coach was a specialist that provided direct services to students while their coaching teachers the tutors will provide direct uh supports direct services to students who have those uh those needs so um 48 000 represents mostly the shift of the costs and um and adding the tutors uh into both schools so that we had uh that partially uh budgeted previously so all in all it's um you know across the three you know that there's a total for each school you know again jeff mentioned this is uh you know we're going to continue to look at this but this is where we are at at first look um

031we have a requirement to present our budget december um there's still things that are estimates and and relatively hard to determine at this point we don't know what our state aid is when we do our presentation in february we'll have that information and we'll refine these figures so total increase of 7.3 percent uh level service next i think uh we're going to go over the uh i just want to say on this uh that was a vote by the skill of the school committee vote to develop that reserve and um and it was done so that as we build that resource we don't we don't see the as big hits when we get these um special education costs that that are unanticipated so again i think that was born last year yeah the the fund

032was approved two or three years ago it's the first year of last year this year's the first we were able to fund funded and there's fifty thousand dollars in the fund we're going to go through the level service increases next level service excuse me um somebody gonna address the teacher and the aides yeah so the first request above level 3's request for the teacher from boylston we have in grade 5 we have 34 students leaving this year the census says that we should have around 43 coming in as that predicts 53 students coming in next year uh nez deck has been domestic cadet projections that we use for our enrollment have been either accurate or slightly below so this year we had 267 students and and bes and dynasty projections in 2019 with 266 for

033this year's about 10 underwood actually showed up that project the early projections the next year at bbs total was three league um so you can see that you have 260 276 now if the if the nasdaq projections for the incoming class is correct that will cost about 300 and so you know we'll be within eight to ten students and again so an additional teacher will be needed at some point in order to keep those numbers down i do want to remind you that when i took this job there was a survey in the community and both the first and second item on what they want to see from the new superintendent is to keep the classroom numbers down so we think we've been able to do that but as as the enrollment begins to increase

034and we don't see any drop in that then there will be more more teachers the aids uh it should be pointed out and it's at number two there's actually a little graph there between 2014 and 2017. every pair of professional general power professional and then school was cut that was the result i don't know totally but on the projection there was a slight doubt of the threat which really never happened um and enrollment and so those little private professional professions work side by side with the teachers offering direct support to our students social emotional academic um and what uh bes is requesting is two um 0.45 pairs to be added um that still doesn't bring us up to you know you you think about us 2021 we're still not even at pre-2015 levels at that

035school within the increasing population so i'll talk about the money yeah so the uh the teacher um is 88 000 that represents the two percent that's um for a master's five plus benefits assumption uh the kindergarten aids is intentionally 0.45 so that we can avoid doubling the cost by adding benefits in so that's 23 000 and i also wanted to say that the the write-ups there's detailed write-ups that were given by the administrators and principals that talk about you know why these are important so we're verbally sharing it now but you can look at that on your own too you know that there's you know potentially if we don't have that teacher potentially impacting uh classrooms at the elementary school we have to consider other grades going from three to two classes so i just

036encourage people to we'll post this to read it and it's easier to take that away than our typical powerpoint presentation where you hear things and you don't necessarily it's hard to remember so that's what those two are and um karen so um the speech language pathologist is at boylston last year we started having more need for speech language pathology than we had several years ago our full-time speech pathologist at boylston was cut to 0.8 as a budget cut for money saving and by the end of last year we just couldn't cover services and we were scrapping to find a way to do it so this year we put in uh the rest of that time to bring her back to full time into our my special ed grant and we've been paying for it that

037way it's not kind of a long term plan but it got us through this year so we could get her back to full time and get everybody's services covered um so that's why that's in there for this year the floating nurse i think we've all heard with the increase in need with our nurses with uh they're running a contract tracing out of their offices on top of what they've done all this time and on top of that they have the test and stay program that they're managing they're not doing the actual testing finally we have people in place to do that but they still have to do some of that testing and they have to manage it and they have to know who's testing and they have to pull those students down so they've really

038just tripled their jobs these years so what we're asking for is to make the floating nurse that we have that's a temporary position this year that we have attempt service doing full-time to support all three buildings so when there's a need in one particular building when something's heavy duty and they need extra contract tracers they can go to that building if we don't have a substitute for a day we can use our person to cover the building and just to provide a higher level of safety for our students in the buildings and the last one is the special ed teacher at boylston boylston has a lower amount of teachers in comparison to the other schools for instance at middle school i know there's one special ed teacher at each grade level the teacher is part

039of that grade level they have time to consult with teachers they have time to follow up with parents and families at boylston they have one teacher for three grade levels and so they really struggling to do anything other than what they have to do in the ieps and they really want to be able to do a better job of being proactive working with families doing some investigation and so that's why we're asking for another position there is that it let me stop there bob there's a bs pre-school one a couple down let me do that one too sure so this one is starting to sound like a broken record i'm afraid but um ace and i always would we would very much like to see the bbs preschool go back to beat yes it's been

040not one of our highest priorities in the last few years but we think it's really important for the students to have access to speech and language pathologists not just for the half hour that they run from bes over here to do the services for the student but to have the speech and language pathologist in the building able to consult with their teachers and work with them throughout the day and see what's happening and the same with ot and pt it's difficult there's wonderful things about the preschool here but it's difficult for some of those students to get the full service that they could get if they were going to be yes as well as there are some students we would like to be able to have go into the kindergarten and do a little bit

041of time in the kindergarten that might be good for them while they're still in preschool but we don't have that option here so we would love to see it go back to bes at some point so i'll just talk about the costs on those um and i think also that one camera first we're going back to bes i think that um you know what we're representing here is it being added at bes and the tonto program being maintained the topka program is a is also a vocational trained early childhood education training program um but our heavy needs special ed students we would move to eds with a teacher our assumption that uh this is we'd have some paying students um students with ieps do not pay we're required to provide those services so we're assuming

042that paraprofessional would probably be covered by by the rest of you getting the program so that's 88 000 for the preschool program um includes salary and benefits for that position the cost of the speed language pathologist the costs are listed here uh for each of those positions um we felt like we also look we make assumptions about what what level of experience we hire and factor in benefits for those um the speech language pathologist you know we'll look at this more i mean that might be something we could again keep in the grant one more year um one thing we think about though is that when we when you the state has a rule that when you have professional staff in a grant you pay a actually nine percent tax so we would sacrifice nine

043percent of whatever we put in there and i think that it gets contributed to mtrs for pension costs um so we want to long term move it out but that might be the type of thing that we could push out one more year and leave it in the grant so those are the expenses associated with those idols the uh curriculum assistant straight in the middle layer this is an assistant for our assistant superintendent currently it's a part-time position you know aside from everything we do it can be boiled down to doing the business of teaching and learning and everything everything related everything related to teaching and learning superintendent and it's not as much of a sit behind and just position as you would think matter of fact we wanted to we want to in the

044buildings working directly with uh teacher groups working directly with principals working on everything related to teaching and learning and currently um the top contact is not able to do that she's in the office way too much and so when and really what she needs to be able to do is hand off four or five head of the day to an assistant and say i'll be back at three o'clock this is what i've been done and think again the schools the work of principals and work with the teachers so that they can have a great impact on students um so that they can as we move work and develop professional development it's going to impact students the positions um the central office split um like our central positions 50 25 25 50 time for 25 to

045each elementary school uh that cost represents uh a salary of 48 000 plus benefits minus what we already have budgeted for the existing part-time role that that part-time loan would go away and be replaced by this so that's the the 50-196 this is the um the total across all three schools the next position is the elementary literacy coach similar to the math coach coordinator and the the timing on this is significant and that there's a tremendous shift in the teaching of literacy particularly in the early grades you're doing the science of literacy um you'll see we talked about this at one of the other meetings with foundations integrity new skills and new strategies for teaching children how to learn to read and to write and to communicate so with that we need somebody who has

046the expertise in that area and can work with the teachers support them as they're shifting instructional practices and they're really learning as they're teaching the students we also have them three through five teachers who are moving into a new curriculum resource but they have to have training on that and continuous training continuous work in those areas staying up with them looking at assessments looking at that data and being able to take that data and put into action some of the intervention steps that we need to have in place for our children learning to read this is like the of everything if their children don't know how to appreciate they can't do anything else it is the most critical academic area that we need to focus on so we're looking for that position to fulfill that

047role to do professional developments incentive training to work with the teachers to work with the principals across both elementary schools and also to provide also to provide as a liaison to again to parent community and helping parents learn how to teach their children at home to support the work that's been done in these schools do you want some of the instruments down to that yeah so this you know in our district improvement plan we focus on the music department in one of our sections of teaching and learning and this area was brought to my attention by the by the music department um what we're trying to do is build you know we talk about equity build equitable opportunities for all of our students to be able to play instruments students who love music but may

048not be able to be afforded the opportunity because of the cost we have students who obviously rent their instruments but there are children who cannot afford to purchase or to rent those instruments as well we have instruments in the school but what the music department brought to my attention is these instruments have been here a long time both in the elementary schools middle and high school they either need to be replaced or refurbished at this point so what we tried to do is make it reasonable they set up a chart with me and they need a reasonable amount of suggestions for instruments specific instruments to be replaced over several years of time so that's what those numbers represent for this year we'll try to do that similar to what we do with the curriculum the

049content area resources that we purchase to do this over use a cycle we have a cycle of replacement or refurbishment that's what this represents so the cost for the la position again this is with benefits included is 105 the instrument repairs is 12 000. we also might have ways to to look at potentially paying for some of this out of we have i think it's a donation fund and if we had some we do have a small amount budgeted for repairs in the budget right now so there's things we can look at for some of these but you know again to carol's point about equity we do want to have kind of a the ability to kind of maintain these instruments and kind of recycle or refurbish some annually each year again we are going

050to look at that further um the single sign-on software is uh we have a million um i'm not the expert on this but it was explained to me that we have a million different passwords and logons that we create and um john correct me if i'm wrong but this is a this is a program that would enable us to sign in i think using our google name and password and uh it would also kind of tie in with our desire to be secure and not have people keeping track of their names and passwords and places that they shouldn't yeah they actually allow kids to just take a qr code they don't have to remember anything they literally just get their little code um and that's six thousand two thousand for each school um school choice

051this is something we'll talk more about um at our next meeting um in january but this is this is we have healthy reserves of school choice the district receives five thousand dollars for every student the district takes in from another town in addition we receive an increment for special education costs depending on i don't know exactly how it's determined it's based on covering some of those incremental costs for special ed students that come into the district um the um the amount we so let's using rough numbers uh they don't have the exact numbers up ahead but for illustrative purposes we take in about 500 000 a year in school choice money right now we budget to spend a little bit over seven hundred thousand uh between seven and eight hundred thousand so we are budgeting

052to basically erode our reserves and we can afford to do this right now because we have healthy reserves but at some point we need to reduce that gap and basically we should be spending the revenue that we take in so this represents what i think would be a kind of a healthy step towards reducing the gap however when we come to kind of reviewing these that's one i would sacrifice early on given the large increases that we're seeing overall so but i didn't want to put it there it's in our district improvement plan it's something we think we need to address um and um and it would be 115 000. we also didn't take in school choice students in boston last year so part of this also is kind of a reminder to us uh

053in the schools um we are going to create uh some budget challenges um if we don't accept school choice students but continue to rely on this funding there's kind of a balance there um so that's something that that we try to look at the last item is the tanto counseling department and tonto stem teacher first i should also say because diane's not here she has five why why am i last why am i two items last um these are not in any priority order these are um listed they're all here they have not been prioritized yet um so i wanted to clarify that and jeffy are you going to talk about last two yeah um so when i took the job here one of the things i i think it can't come up with friends

054and expensive one of the first things he said to me was we lose kids so i'm going to find out why and then i wanted to do something about it and find a way that we can separate ourselves from our schools a lot of the high-performing schools of the area so one of the things we've been working on is the development of an internship shadowing um experience for uh juniors and scenes to allow them in the junior senior year to leave the building for some part of the time and [Music] visit have shadowing internship experience of various technology companies in the area we have someone this year was working on a database of those companies who would accept students from us at the same time covert comes along and we see just an explosion of

055anxiety and depression in students and things that we really need to deal with so this gave us an opportunity to expand the counseling department we currently have we currently have true guidance counselors for seven grades so what we're what we're proposing here is the addition of one more guidance counselor so that we could have one dedicated to grade six to eight and deal with because that's what we've seen a lot of the social emotional issues in those grades um especially that transition from elementary to middle school um one council for grades nine and ten and then one for eleven and twelve that would also pick up the internship shadowing job so the career the career council constant increase so that's that's the addition of one guiding one ft guidance consequences and then the other thing

056is we have we have i think it's roughly 10 teachers who teach outside the content contract to teach six courses instead of five it severely limits the um the expansion of our programming in the district uh and it's a structural deficit we really do need to do something about uh that we need to chip away with um adding a one ftp stem teacher this is really a two for one adding um one stem teacher and then it allows us to take our athletic directive who who actually teaches three math courses removed all his teaching all his teaching roles and it would be a full-time ad and then an additional full-time stem teacher but the other the other the other great thing about this is that we want to expand the role of the athletic director

057we want the fbi director as you know coaches like america we have a lot of kids play sports have a big impact on children so we watch ead to start offering workshops on leadership workshops on fair play collegiality all of these things that are important to their emotional growth so that one's really the two for one um well the cost of this uh two positions are 88 000 change and 105 this we made an assumption that we want to find somebody ideally with multiple licenses so they can teach for example engineering and have classes so we assumed a little bit more of an advanced placement on our salary schedule than some of the other positions and so in total that would bring the above level service request to 4.9 percent or 880 000 relative to

058last year's budget uh if you know if everything was funded you know dream world obviously but you know everything was funded we'd be looking at a 12.2 percent increase in those of the increases by schools but again we thought it was important to outline what these things are and why we want to do them and get feedback and certainly get feedback from the towns as well and then we have some time between now we will actually be meeting with um it's both the towns before the the open budget hearing um and we'll continue to to look at this make uh revisions and prioritize bob can you just cover the uh there are people expensive so the districts on this slide uh if you uh go on the department of elementary and secondary ed's website i

059believe this is the dart tool these are the districts it calls as uh it identifies as peer districts or comparable districts they're not exactly the same they're between a thousand and two thousand i think between a thousand and twenty one hundred students similar demographics for the most part and i'm familiar with some of these towns mount greylock is probably the closest in size so this shows you uh what our per pupil spending is relative to other districts it is a little bit different by school as well we don't have um through the information provided by the state it doesn't have a school of breakout but we know from when we were prior to regionalizing the elementary schools that berlin would have been higher than the highest there building memorial in part because your fixed costs

060of the building including the administration all the maintenance costs are spread over a smaller number of students if you look at just the instructional piece it would actually be pretty comparable to to boylston wilson previously was in the bottom seven percent of the state boston elementary and i think we saw that right at the end of when we were utilizing they were up to somewhere in the 20s high 20s so we made some progress there and tahanto was slightly below the median in the state so this shows where we are uh we are below the uh the state median and we'll uh we'll share this again next meeting i'll probably add a state media in which i should have included there i thought that was helpful to put give you some context about our budget

061and with a thousand students um you know we looked at kind of the middle i don't know c conc which is uh about half a million dollars half a hundred thousand five hundred thousand dollars more than here five hundred thousand times a thousand students five hundred student excuse me five hundred dollars times a thousand students is about five hundred thousand dollars so to get to the median of this group we have a have to increase our budget by 500 000 so that's just some context for where we are it's also wanted to point out mom graylock it's probably the most like us was based on so about that does um include regional transportation or transportation costs in the per pupil cost because i'm i'm thinking that you know some of these districts have much wider

062geographic areas and so transportation costs would be higher and things like that i just didn't know if if it includes that or not i could check that i know that med school spending which is a different number does not include it i am not 100 certain if per pupil expenditures conclusion or not i don't think it does um but i'll confirm and get back to you via email i'm just curious i do know that nellis c cronk i live in millis littleton are similar to our towns where it's within town so the transportation will be similar midway mount greylock might be different manchester aztecs might be different the next slide is just the showing what upcoming dates we have related to the budget and significant events i want to point out in january one of

063the things i did was check with other districts on the timing of their budget presentation we don't get uh we receive chapter 70 revenue information uh in january from the state that's when they release it that has a significant significant impact on the assessments that the towns get berlin pays for the berlin memorial school boylston pace for the wells elementary school tejanto is split and there are minimum contributions that are defined for municipalities by desi based on your wealth based on the number of students in your district all of these have significant impacts on the budget not necessarily the spending this is the only one that's spending related we don't have a lot of optics to which of ours to to people in our towns uh that are going to uh choice and charter so

064we get updates on that in january um we know the students that are coming in but not as much about the students that have gone out if somebody move into town can you continue to go to another uh continue to go to where they were and pay a school choice sending district so that's significant expense we find out about in the revenue we get from chapter 71 and chapter 7071 is transportation those are significant inputs as well we have heard that um the revenue picture is a little bit better at the state level but whether that translates to anything we'll see um it's there's uh not going to go into the details but chapter 74 feels pretty complicated and it's set up in a way that doesn't penalize you if you um i'm gonna not

065go into it but basically we're getting minim minimal increases each of the last five uh to six years um with the student opportunity act for changing the funding for chapter 70 in the foundation budget and there's a chance that it could result in us getting more chapter 70 revenue so we'll we'll see that certainly would help the towns have been taking much most of our increases are coming in the form of assessments not chapter 78 so this is a potential opportunity that we could see in the budget process the open public budget hearing is in mid-february um and this will allow the time between this and the march 8th meeting will allow time for comments feedback into the district to kind of absorb that information and we'll either present the same budget in february 15th

066or take uh feedback into consideration and potentially make an adjustment for the march 8th meeting um so i know one of the questions was is this the the final budget that we're going to get um not necessarily um i think we um are going to look for feedback we get from the towns between now and february and try to work towards a place that we think balances what the town's feedback is and balances what the school's needs are but again we do have the opportunity to make adjustments here and the town meetings are these two dates are at the bottom please [Music] okay can we talk about that timeline again um i was just wondering and this is probably horribly more of a learning question for me we're going to work on the contract negotiations

067in what march april may how are we going to have this pretty much is this number already set since the budget is going to be finalized in march it can't be we would be not negotiating your faith if we didn't go into negotiations we have to negotiate the contract so we can just make an estimate unless we actually have to sign the contract the number that's in our budget's an estimate and subject to change this happens every three years it's typically a three-year contract once we have this one done it will be easy to budget the next two years it's a challenge this year we budgeted what we what is typical which is two percent it could be higher could be lower and when we talk about risks and opportunities in january we'll talk about

068that i can share like what is the impact of an additional 1 um but no that's a good question and uh you know the timing is such that it has to be an estimate um for the february march presentation it's a three-year contract so we can get close to the estimate for this budget so we'll have an idea of the number by february march yeah well you know we go into the negotiations you know the negotiations so powerful american foils and finances so mike check my comment to you here is the above level service request can you clarify in all future documentation whether that's a one-time charge or an ongoing charge so in other words let's say you pick one of these things up let's use single sign on it i assume that's an annual

069cost for the license so if you're going to do this you're going to be continuing to do this year over here it'd be nice to know here which of these are going to be a single hit to the budget add it on or this has now become a fixed expense going forward i assume when you're hiring features and other things you're not going to fire from the next year you're going to continue i i can't address that i in my i talk to the principals about this anything that's one time i try not to budget um so um yeah let's use the musical instruments i heard it may be a three to five year program to do an upgrade and then it would drop off that type of information would be very useful that's a

070good question on that one we have to look at more howard um i you know we will have to look at that more if it turns out that there's an element of that that's one time i mean there's a number of instruments and they want to repair some um there might be a certain number they repair every year as specific a single instrument is actually more expensive than every allies um so we would when we budget this one budget just the recurring costs okay thank you well any other questions [Music] i'm just full of questions um so my question is on a couple of the positions covet has clearly had an impact and i and i feel for the schools and you know we in front-line service have have um really borne the grunt um

071of copen and um trying to work with that so you mentioned covid um with respect to the floating nurse and covet was also mentioned as part of the uh addition to the hondo counseling department are you up and i know the state just passed legislation yesterday for covet funding broad covert funding are you aware of any funding in that package that could potentially provide seed funding or um or some future funding for these positions not yet i mean we're looking into that i mean one of the things like so we don't know in terms of tests let's just take the nurse for example we don't know in terms of testing what it's going to be like next year we don't know if the test is still going to be required and if we have so

072currently we have underestimated that we have um do the top of the bed we have a company that provides a health care professional that helps our nurses with the testing takes an enormous amount of time to do their testing so we have some someone who does that and that's that's not of course that's provided to the state um if we didn't have that the nurses would have to do all of that we don't know if we're if the state's going to have that contract so what we're waiting to see on some of this to see so if we if we did have that contract with cic next year maybe we could get away without that in there so but we don't know that again we have superintendents have meetings with the commission of living week

073or two and you know these are the kind of updates for guest services we know we have a contract we'll know if we have additional money or if we have additional grant money for um the in the counseling department to deal with the social emotional stuff but our plan was to expand the guidance department all of these problems that we're seeing we're just seeing more of them it's not like we didn't see them before um so and another one that it would span that position of the internship shadow shadow in person again we're working on a database this year hoping to have that position put in so um these were things that we were a lot of them they wanted pipelines we were working on this should just push some stuff to the forefront so

074anything that has to do with social emotional learning anxiety or any of that kind of stuff it sort of got pushed up a notch just because we need to deal with it you know but we'll keep you posted on you know additional funding as it comes in and margaret did you have more questions on your list i'm all set thank you we're gonna see you tomorrow that's right so that now from just part of the regular budget process we didn't have school years like does that matter or well originally what we were budgeting this world wasn't just for um when that you could put this at full time as a fourth nurse or effort or to do another floating nurse for a year the problem is the problem becomes and either of those would sort

075of work at this at this moment probably become in order to get a floater this would really have to go to a contracting agency people are going to take a nurse who can get a job anyway this isn't going to want to take one for a year so if you go through a contract you end up paying more so it's a 70 000 position now um and they're not even your nurse really they just you know they're high at hand cost would be a lot less of course you're doing it every year so that's that's something we're going to need to consider yeah a few squads is it gonna be maybe in the next presentation uh more of a presentation you know you see a voters that are taxpayers he's paul upset so what the

076hell are you getting twelve 12 you see you know 30 40 in some cases 70 and a lot of categories on those tests and i know you know a lot of stock in last year's mcas but still in some cases 70 percent of kids won't even meet expectations and now we have a 12 percent increase and we're going to specifically tell them how that's going to improve that numbers on tests just an improvement overall we don't put a lot of stock in that guest but they are something you have to do yeah i mean we made projections but certainly the principles and we're not going to have to speak to it tonight you know the coaching rules how much does that increase the numbers you know a lot of it's tough to quantify i mean

077you know you get 10 and you get just you know a lot of [Music] well i think i think you have to wait till we actually have an m test that's done in that question you know so is that it's a valid that's a valid question i think that's a such a shocking number yeah no i you know that it's not just that it's all of these things that you think yeah like a lot of things that [Music] um but i like that like but things like that are you going to do another future presentation to highlight all these things this is what we're doing we're not going to say we're going to go from 70 to 40 but we're expecting significant improvement in this that just these numbers say okay we're going to hire

078this teacher that this role cost this much you know that's fine you can imagine what another future what to actually see are you going to actually tell us that did you control the question so some of these things and the answering questions directly as we start to prioritize these things we'll start to determine which ones we need to know right now um [Music] think about as a district what are the things we're going to need to move uh to give our students what they need over the next one to three years so again we're going to have to stop for advertising okay so so on that one i think we should thank you for joining us um [Music] requesting the school committee approved earlier during the business intersection meeting our insurance company has a risk

079management grant and outlined basically the intent of them giving this grant is for us to engage in activities that reduce our exposure to a claim and they win by not having to pay out for a claim what we have we received the grant uh it's four thousand nine hundred nineteen dollars and eighty-five cents we're gonna use it for a cyber security risk assessment uh just under four thousand dollars and offers some material handling equipment so we can um avoid like something like a back injury or you know for occupational safety so that's what that is um this is an annual grant that we can apply for cyber security risk assessment we can third party standards is something that our honor is recommended and we're able to get it paid for from this grant the second

080item that i want to go over is a summer programming reinforcement grant margaret earlier asked a question about france um this is something that just cropped up they weren't expecting it and um i think carol and karen and jeff and i occasionally had some surprises this year we can grant some of them small but this one's for 15 000. and um we ran i might remember we ran a summer acceleration academy uh this summer uh we had a good response we actually uh program had one more classroom so we are um getting reimbursed for the access to that program we're also getting uh this this will cover some of the costs of our summer special ed program uh we saw a large increase uh in the number of students participating in that program on 34

081in 2019 to 54 in 2021 some of those compensatory services um so a portion of those additional costs can be recovered this money will go back into the general fund or a couple of these were charged your grant this will kind of free up some money uh to pay for some other things and again i would recommend we recommend that you accept this grant for us um the financial statements powers and sullivan are a cpa firm they have completed their audit and kind of shared audit financials and imagine letter two items on the management letter comment one is uh for a fraud is for an internal control review i would be doing that they've given me kind of a model to follow basically to assess risk of theft or fraud or things like that um

082so that's something that we could complete on our own the other recommendation to have is cyber security assessment which uh we're gonna engage a third party for who's uh specializes in that um i talked to susan we had a lot on the agenda for tonight and we decided that um we want to have uh the audit burned in uh goes to most of their clients two percent once a year just so you know that it's a real person it's a real audit so it is something that i would recommend if you do and we would schedule it sometime in march you see again probably include somebody to talk about volta at the same time which is the security of financial statements these are not really how we run the district these are required reports in

083gaap format and or in modified accrual format um government financials can be a little bit um confusing so if anybody has questions have a request that we wait for a presentation from the auditors in the spring the last item is deferred berlin memorial peace agreement we have more discussions with the towns we have a draft but it's not yet finalized this is for the lease of the berlin memorial elementary building for a dollar it's something that we're supposed to have and we just want to once we have this in place we'll just roll it over year after year probably sure if it was since it was elementary desire to change it so once we have those finals we'll bring it back to the committee any questions all right i'm done sure i'm bringing forward this

084evening the su-3 grant for the approval of the school committee similar to what we've done in the fall and our other grants from federal and state levels this is your three grant just uh we received approval on after that meeting so i wanted to make sure that you had a chance to see that this particular grant was 268 and unlike the other grants and typical brands even the even the federal brands this one was a very transparent very public brand we were required to get input from the community both the school community and the parent and parent and community at large which we're able to do through the survey that we provided to parents and the community um so we took feedback from there i know that um we met with cpac we spoke with

085the pto's principals and karen and i met with the ptos and their staff as well to get an idea of what the priorities were for the schools we then moved into prioritizing that funding some of what you'll see here will be funding over a two-year period of time the grant ends september the end of september 2024 so we're spending down our two grants right now and we'll move into this grant at the beginning of the next year with these costs again we make sure to make sure that we maintain that elementary adjustment counselor for two more years that was critical some tutoring work we also want to try to run that summer learning academy again as the second year um and also the family success partnership with wraparound services that we have about available for

086families as well so those are just some of the costs of this particular brand um so last at our last school committee meeting the committee asked that we compiled our vaccination numbers as best we could so in the beginning of my report i gave you a little background about how this is done it's not an easy process and they really have to pull them student by student and staff by staff and some people have not shared that information so they might be able to pull it um and i just wanted you to know that process so you know it's not a real time kind of thing at this point we're investing in some software that we're hoping that we'll be able to change our medical records in a way that'll make it a little bit

087easier for this data but not as instantaneous as we would like um so i just wanted to read for you the results boylston elementary we had 92 students and staff had completed both doses maybe 131 more 131 more to reach that 80 berlin memorial we had 13 of students and 90 percent of staff were fully vaccinated and tahanta we had 445 out of 662 staff and students so they were at 70 they're our highest at this point pre-k does fit included in that number but it wasn't making a significant difference we as you know i think we have the vaccination clinic here over the weekend much better turnout this time we had i think i reported 91 signed up when i was here saturday morning and we were up to 131 i didn't get a

088final out from them yet but we had a pretty good turnout and then they'll be back in three weeks to do the follow-up doses they were taking all ages all ages we get parents vaccinated it helps the kids as much as getting the kids vaccinated so happy to take anybody and karen do you have an idea of that timeline on when that vaccination data might be ready when the vaccine might be ready to include i guess that's what i'm saying we can't pull that in real time it's very staff intensive to do that we can't go in and pull it once we get the new software it'll be easier but it still will be quite as simple and that's going to be sometime in january before we get new software okay so that's going to

089be delayed um but it's being presented here you're saying that right now as of when you call it december 9. yep for fully vaccinated yeah i was just wondering in terms of officially being able to include it in the dashboard and updating is going to be the hard part you could do um a one-time information but um and maybe once we get the new software we'll be able to give it to you a little more often yeah and maybe it's something like maybe the facts something that's a discussion from the public dashboard but maybe the vast data is updated on the dashboard at a different breakdown that would make a lot of sense and i can't appreciate the time that you guys took to give us this snapshot in time and i i certainly don't

090think it's necessary to see a daily the weekly update of this information uh one question i do have looking at the tohono number maybe we don't know it but if we do or do we have a sense as to how many of the unvaccinated in these numbers were partially vaccinated and we're just waiting for them to get their second job because i'm sure the sixth graders in particular you know quite had the time to have had both those and then happened two weeks after assuming that part of it is another reason why it is i'm right and i don't know what that number is you're loading everything in and it'll be so great when it's done so and there's no way you know there's no um expectation when i ask this question but just to

091kind of give everybody an idea how long is it going to take to input all of that data into the new system it's a lot of it's done electronically the challenge is getting all the people to talk together paul's been helping me with that and getting all the in the technology pieces a little beyond me but once we get it going we're hoping that the changeover from our whole system to our new system will be about a week and then some clean up time you know my discussion was that there are two of them was familiar with this you know they seemed to get an impression [Music] want to say that i appreciate that people wanting to do this system because it's not going to be extremely helpful [Music] my only comment would be that

092you know i can my own personal reasons for wanting to see these numbers without their equipment out there tomorrow just a quick question i'm just wondering um if this information the vaccination rates that you just shared with us might be something that jeff could put in his um update because i feel like i'm glad we have the data for our own fyi um and because i think some of the school committee members when we vote we need to you know we need as much data as we can i think there's parents out there that kind of want to know like where are we one way or another whether or not they want the mask or they don't want the mask or they're just wondering like what's going on or kid are other kids getting vaccinated

093um so i don't know if you're able to i know there's all kinds of rules with hipaa and everything but if you're able to information yeah i mean i think that's that's great i'm shocked that that many kids from boylston elementary already are vaccinated that's that's a great you know um so i mean i'm just wondering if you could share that i think that type of communication will give the community like this that's like yes we are tracking this yes we do have sense yes people are very vaccinated yeah we can put a vaccination all of this data is not identifying any person so we're able to do that um it's all it's all available so we can do it as a group and report it that way yeah i think it's worth it i

094mean it's just my opinion but it's great okay thanks mike so uh that's great karen thank you for all the work behind that and for sure it's complicated and we appreciate all that you're doing thank you so i'm going to move over to paul sure um good evening um again my report is pretty brief um i just gave you a few highlights um about state federal data one update since i put this together last week on monday the state announced that they were going to be pre-populating some of the federal c rdc data um and so they asked us to refrain from inputting data until mid-january january 18th so just one additional update that didn't have a chance to get into that report does it happen um i really want to highlight the second piece

095um again partially because it's on on your votes for tonight but the district received forty seven thousand three hundred and ninety nine dollars and thirty six cents um from the uh emergency connectivity fund um that will allow us to replace 178 chromebooks that's the good news like bad news is we have about 300 to replace so we still have some work to go but it does certainly put a big dent in that and as well as allow us to continue to offer internet connectivity to some families that are struggling and don't have internet connections at home so it allows us to pay for that monthly hotspot that they're using awesome you know we're seeing a lot of grants in this uh tonight's report and uh we just want to acknowledge the amount of work those

096things they don't just you know come out of thin air there's a lot of uh it's just a lot of work putting those together and finding them and putting them together and getting them ready to send out is it's a huge homework so we appreciate um your efforts and it's great to see the results from those efforts [Music] all right yeah 47 399.36 [Music] good evening everyone um um [Music] bring your attention to goal one um around curriculum alignment and that second subset are because it was something we talked about when we were doing that we talked a lot about what does that look like is it's more opportunities in the classroom for kids to translate forward fingers to the keypad and produce and receive feedback on them and that's the best way that you

097can really build up that skill um i also wanted to highlight it because you notice that the literacy coaches we currently have in place support that endeavor um anything that's important to talk about on the cost of talking about the budget where we're talking about creating a literacy coach position that's going to be able to provide even more focus and attention to this while also doing all of the other work that we're having focusing for you know you talked about the new literacy program you're bringing in okay year two and you're piloting in three to five and that's a ton of work and those used to need a ton of support and right now the the limited coaches we have they're also full-time jobs the thought of supporting those because you know kathy murphy does

098the full caseload of the intervention but she's providing foreign and so to continue this workings and really to be able to emphasize that that's something that's that's individual in the budget so we can we can grow that the other area i was gonna point out was in goal two and the increased practices goal it's on the second page there all by itself it's adding that 0.6 um counselor the adjustment counselor dps and because we have noticed the uptick in social emotional needs and this is an attempt to try to support kids through that um what this position is allow us to do is support teachers in the tier one implementation of the jury school community um tier one meaning that whole class she's able to support the teachers in providing that um and she's also

099able to take some of that tier two some of those kids that need a little bit more um so she can take them out she can push in and had more in trouble this year which is struggling to get involved in the morning so she's been able to work individually with kids and families and develop plans what that means for learning is that we're supporting these kids and being available for them if they can't get them in the building if they can't focus on if they're too busy focusing on positive firearms they can't be present and that's what this role really does um there's a whole bunch of other stuff in there but wherever the time the fact that you guys have already seen the district talk about those and then any questions he's as

100someone who had a student in fifth grade or a child um who needed help getting into the building the council was invaluable and once the child was in it was smooth sailing so even some kids are worried about their parents what are their parents doing without them they've been you know they've been there taking care of their parents for a year what are these parents gonna do and they're sure that you know they can still make their own food okay um but it's a you know i joke about it i justify it but it's these are real concerns that kids are going through and it's nice to be able to offer that support i'm just not familiar with the term getting the kids into the building and what specifically they do to accomplish that what

101do you mean it looks different for every kid like literally you can't get driven to the building no like they'll be out in front of the building and then get out of town okay or you know this morning a little girl mom was able to get into the rest of you would not let go of mom i'll get something to help [Music] the time you know um kind of what kind of supports what is it that your students worry about what is it you know do they need transition materials when they earn something from coming in is the kid that benefits from having a special job um it's different for every kid it's a lot of work to figure out what it is for each one it was really helpful for parents too because we

102don't know what to do like it's like you've never faced this before why do you not want to go where you've always gone willingly and happily so i can't tell you like as someone who is really struggling and wondering what did i do wrong to someone tell me do this don't do that do this um but it really does you made an excellent point about wanting them to feel comfortable once they're in the school as well because they won't learn if they're there against their will all right thank you thank you ace i appreciate your time tying some of these items down to teaching and learning how to emotional well-being help your comments health better clients plan thank you directly from the um district improvement plan talked a little bit about things that we wanted

103to emphasize that i wanted to pick up in terms of my school improvement plan something that ace has referenced and carol referenced earlier and that is the need to better support our literacy efforts uh we're trying new literacy programs as basis a different philosophical approach to early university and we've been very passionate about trying to empower teachers but to do that effectively one of the things they need is an expert because i know this would be a surprise to everybody they do not always use an expert not early literacy i don't understand why um but they want to be and they need someone that they can go to who's not their boss and i think that's the most essential part of that literacy coach is someone they can go to and be vulnerable and say

104i'm not sure how to do x y um so that's something i want to emphasize as well why not cancer and you heard me talk about writing what we did on cancer reports um an essential part of improvement in our literacy efforts um and so i want to do that the other thing that i wanted to just briefly bring to everybody's attention is that reinstatement i'll be special and coordinator which we've already accomplished this year but how important that's about the elementary level the individual we had for the past several years was incredible it brilliant but it only worked one day and it became it was a heavy burden for the principal's prayer because we had to pick up all the extra stuff but the individual we've hired this year shared bank has been amazing

105addition to our staff and i thought that's a great thing that we've got in in our planning uh further embrace your strengths and improve our service to those our media students coordinator but they spent full days in your school and then they travel back each day [Music] and [Music] we take offense if you would like to leave and sally thank you for coming and you didn't even have a report to give if you want to leave you're welcome [Music] the frequently asked questions that we're going we will be continuing to meet going forward that we have the primary one being necessary uh any questions on the document in particular that's coming up for paul i just thought it was really well done there i think that i didn't [Music] yeah it really just lit it

106up cleanly do you know in 2019 if it was just i mean susan you might know if it was just the people running that or i'm sorry if it was just the people on the committee that were running or did somebody actually lose were there more people than scenes in [Music] running a pose that's what i'm just wondering that are there more no there hasn't been more seats than people hasn't really been a race i don't think or more um [Music] adam i guess the question for you is when we vote on this do you also want to be making a motion about um asking the school community to give you authority to put your your names and emails on there in case people have questions thank you all right uh my policy yeah we

107have a pulsing meeting several of the votes tonight um k policies uh mostly revolving around community engagement facilities fundraising advertising news media finance policies and then you see also that there are four paid policies that we're just noting that we're not recommending any changes for so just letting you know that we didn't take a look at those those will stay as is um i said the next meeting for the policy committee i believe is the 13th all right so we're up to evaluation lori so at our next meeting which is january 11th jeff is going to present his quarterly update and in your binder i would recommend you bring your binder and then pull this part out and it would be a great place to take notes as he's speaking because when it comes time

108to fill it out you're going to want to remember all the stuff that you think you're going to remember that you spoke about so um we talked about possibly playing sticky notes on it but because it's so it's actually geared towards his goals this year they could just write right on yeah um so i would recommend bringing the binder pulling this out and using it to write on and then putting it back because originally i was thinking maybe you could just bring this part god knows so many things get lost um so it's the red tab section um so uh we did a first read on goal number one which is about community outreach and serving as the gasoline established groups already um so that is reposted for and then i also upload it at

109the sign up sheet because we said to sign up if that goal is approved that sheet is ready for people to sign up tonight and i saw what i tried to do is go get the details because i thought it might not review what nights do they meet how often do they meet who's uh usually in that room maybe i know that person um and that might inform where they might like to uh they have questions about either of those materials how do you intend to have people sign up for points individually right um what i would figure i printed out the sheet and i figured just have it right here at the table end of the meeting just put your name in a spot if you have time to think about it um if

110that works for everybody i figured probably not wouldn't take too long have you spoken with those other groups um not yet well i talked with cpac um they're very happy to have somebody coming to join them and think with them sometimes about things that they need like like they wanted involved registration from darwin's house we wanted to think about how to get that was they were glad to have someone else to think about that so i anticipate that that will be the same for the other groups these groups used to come to school meetings regularly quarterly or something and report to school community and we haven't done that in the last year so we've lost touch but i think people have appreciated being in touch with the school committee and having that flow so i'm

111anticipating that they're looking forward to having this outreach okay so um the koga dashboard um [Music] let me give an update here um the when megan and i first talked with jeff about the dashboard the lab though we raised the question of whether the staff data should be posted separately from the student data and at the time it seemed like that was fine no problems they have that data it could be included that's why it's included in the in the chart that i can get up um when when karen and jeff looked at the dashboard mock up down with the real numbers in there they said no not sure we should be including that staff data particularly at the elementary level where the schools are so small that staff can be identified and so i

112checked in with our legal counsel see if he had any words of advice there and he said he agreed and he suggested he would take the data down now to just to err on the side of caution and um what i'm going to propose is that we put this the content of the copic dashboard again uh on the january agenda for vote so that if parents won't weigh in on what should be on there they have an opportunity to do that i didn't want to introduce a vote to tonight's um because you voted on at the last meeting so i didn't so we're going to look for parent input how would we go about that would we well the agenda is posted and that's the obvious advice is it's about the agenda um i don't

113have other plans for that because i'm not looking for parents to redesign the dashboard but i think what we're what right now we're talking about is to just roll the staff numbers into the student numbers so that we can have a sense of evidence is the idea and nobody can differentiate students but you have a sense of it in the building [Music] so if you know somebody felt strongly that no no no the staff data should be there um then they might want to speak to that i didn't want to step over that opportunity for them by introducing a world that wasn't on the such a small number to start figuring out who's at home right that's what they do i know especially if you know they're out for a week yeah it becomes very

114obvious who that is so so what i asked um missy to do what she's already done is to take it off the website um and megan is going to give her a revised version that has the staff and student data role together up there but not without disaggregated um and then so we can't revisit that um decision formally in january that seems okay with everybody here so that's whether there is not are seeing are assumed to be public school transition i did tell you that early on i'm not sure i can still tell you that now i'm not sure that the nurses because of the number of cases and numbers and testing that they're doing i'm not because i asked about that same question we seen it in school sometimes we have two siblings who

115are also in a class together so is that a school transmission or is that a home transmission you know i don't know i have some um friends other areas who've seen something in room transmission in the preschool setting for example and it's good to see that we haven't seen any kind of significance right within a particular classroom related to a case you know today right anyone else i mean i'd love to see kind of going on adam said and i don't know if this is possible maybe not like public publicize or post it as a dashboard but just how many actual positives are we getting out of tustin's day because that would kind of give you your possible school transmission you know it would just at least be kind of a starting point or you

116know giving us some visibility if there even is an inkling of any school transmission because i would guess if there's zero positives in a class somebody is covered in the test and say there's zero positives then there was no in-school transmission for that specific case um so it would be good you know maybe to have that data i mean i'm not saying now but i'm saying that down the road if we're going to have to vote about the masks or removing masks if we do hit that 80 you know come march would be good to have that that data you know um if there's a case you know is there any possible i know that we we don't know for sure no we don't and i think the challenge is what we're finding why it

117gets a little murkier this year where they're staying in school so we test and stay a group and they're fine they're fine and then later on one of them comes up as positive and it may or may not be from the original person you know there's been so much time in between it's a little murkier to do that but we could um we can record the number of positives through the tested stay i mean that's a that's a definite number that's a concrete number right and i mean you know we talked about i know about false positives so you know that would be another there's a i think i have a personal situation there are a lot of false positives but i don't know if there's other situations where that happens or not um and

118i don't know if the nurse actually goes through the process of um you know making sure their actual positives by forcing the child to go get a pcr test do they have to get a pcr test if they test positive on the on right so that would indicate a false positive yeah and we have as you know we have had some false positives yeah and that's expected that's why we have to send with pcr the pcr is really going to tell us definitively yeah but i wonder what the false positive rate is you know versus the rate of the test and i mean like that's the kind of data i'm a data person so that is but yeah i don't even know if it's possible to get that kind of stuff that kind of data

119[Music] which i appreciate when you're thinking ahead to a decision the school committee may need to make down the line and what kind of data might we want to have to inform our decision making and this is a good time to be thinking about that right so i'm not sure that we've nailed down the answer to that question yet we're exploring some different data points here but i think we should continue to think about that what what data might be informative to us six months from now or three months from now you know at the end of the day it has been interesting to see before the reporting people can get uh threatened to talk in high school where i know they've been able to remove past deteriorating 95 percent of activities and then you

120get to see that force them to take a step back having you know on these of the data from our own district but also the information we can glean from other schools that might be ahead of us on this timeline because of their higher vaccination rating what are they now seeing different buildings the other thing about in-school transmission you're gonna have two kids in the same room you have kids positive and test the contacts and if you have three kids that are positive that doesn't indicate necessarily that they will thought that they [Music] so if you could just have to be just in close contact we already had you got it someplace else she got something so i mean it's i think it sends false information now i agree because maybe two kids went to

121a birthday party on the weekend and then they both have it but they might affect someone there yeah and still spread it to one another um i think we should probably keep this topic on the agenda uh so that we can continue to get updates and continue to explore other data points that we think we should be collecting that we think are secure reliable kinds of information [Music] and i think we're ready to move on okay so we're ready moving to the business portion why don't you do that now we're going to do that so i'm going to do a 10 000 foot level summary um so capital typically is uh more straightforward or discrete items so we're getting a scrubber for the floors of royalton elementary it's a bigger school than berlin and it's

122something that will help in terms of saving costs and also improve the performance of the stripping of the floors and finishing them um consistent issues with roof that require fair repairs in placing of the metal roofing flashing i'm going to continue to do that that's 18 000 and there's asphalt improvements you might have seen the huge potholes some of those were fixed last year there's 15 000. and the last item is 25 000 for a facility assessment which we did at berlin two years ago this is a roadmap uh two years ago or a year ago uh there was recently done at berlin and it's a roadmap for the all the capitals underneath the building over the next 10 15 years a very helpful document and with the schools getting a little bit older we

123thought that would be a good thing as well for berlin really the main item is we're going to use the priorities for identifying the building assessment by the consultants that assess the building and address the level two priorities that are remaining which is mainly related to the entry egress areas and the socket at the main entrance in the west and east side doors and [Music] that's 56 000. the second one is in entrance access control security jeff perkins i believe this is done from discussions we have the emergency planning committee the police admire um and that's twelve thousand dollars uh it would it would create um so again asked me about this there's you have been to boylston elementary when you go in the first door it's locked you have to get access to it

124and then there's uh the principal's office secretary or some form of staffing that will see you invite you into the second floor that's considered kind of the ideal security you have for a school so you have you get admitted to the school and then you have to be seen before you're admitted again we don't have that at birmingham or tohonta uh this is the cost we've got a quote to install that at irwin memorial um we'll we'll also look at this a little bit because where this step where the person in the front desk that's a berlin it's not right next to where the entrance is um so this is one that's um it's on here that's what it cost uh we have to continue to think about that one and see how um whether

125that's going to make sense with where jd sits we're not going to install a phone with the seating location in a really good point actually you can see when you have the ring doorbell you can see on your computer or on your phone seen and then there's two doors but i get what you're saying huge cost savings you know i understand i mean if you're if you're in the you're in the vestibule um somebody will physically see you um yeah i know okay excuse me for berlin right yeah i think some of this this class isn't just seeing the person securing the second door yeah no it's not very interesting to say that right right you know that that's not documented at all like i guess my question um this is this is for the

126security building and i think it's a security [Music] a little bit more expensive seventeen thousand um we also have these rooftop units that were styled in the building spot and it seems like recycling through and replacing them regularly so this is to replace i believe three motors on those rooftop games the fan motors seem to have a license plate for close to 10 years um so this would replace three of those and the last item is the debt service on the building bonds that's kind of ongoing item that we have every year so we total the increase is one point nine percent from toronto zero percent for berlin and boston a 7.7 percent and 5 000 i don't anticipate a lot of pushback from the towns on capital dollars no matter specific questions about some

127of these but their feedback has been uh their focus is on the operating budget this year and the um this like this to cherry taxes this did come from our conversations with a crisis management team upon first responders and it was one of two uh of the lower cost items that we could use to increase the security until the other one wasn't failed the security funds on all of the first floor windows so you elementary is that glass it's not bulletproof but it will uh you can't get to the bus okay any other questions on the capital expenditures here i haven't been lewiston somebody goes to asphalt repairs the continual repairs um it's cracked it's got holes um significant divot you know i don't know so these waffles some of it's potholes there's there's like

128just cracks that are continuing to erode more like significant cracking throughout the lot um we prepared one section of it last year with another section that needs to be done next we're trying not to do like a whole big payment um i can uh does the town timing department ever help with that kind of thing um we've asked um and if they're if they have the capacity to do it they will they have the capacity and equipment to do it um and they try to do small stuff though with the actors around the school they helped it they did help with one of the projects when we had a temporary driving the first time i had a temperature so this is just prepared though like you're gonna need these same repairs next year probably this

129wouldn't be the last one there um i don't know they don't specifically continue definitely um so their reason watches what's that what's the cost of just repave it versus 50 000 every year based on my like previous experience in other jobs i could do a parking lot a couple hundred thousand um i don't think we need to do that at this point it's not a huge lot but there's also the drive down to the street um you're talking about the back right what the playground is there's a road that was just paid to move around yeah okay i'm talking about the side parking and the front entryway the drive up the front you're ready to loop around and on the side we have included pictures of some of the previous budget presentations i think we're

130um ready to move on okay thank you bob for circling back to that sorry um so let's go on to business items then uh start with the d policies that are provoked tonight um i'm just going to leave it to you to look at this list on our agenda and just draw a motion are we unable to do one motion to approve all of them um chrissy you know if we can vote for all my experiences but i have not um i've never done that [Music] an um through age on the agenda sorry uh discussion any items there all in favor [Music] opposed okay thank you um we have a motion to accept the sr 3 grant funds of 268 thousand 868 [Music] um [Music] risk management grant is 4919.85 discussion on paper hi post

131okay we've got a motion to accept the copen 19 summer programming grant by 15 so second discussion number one the document type outreach goal um [Music] goal one as presented in shared drive so and discussion i could just kind of think this is great this is a big step forward follow me post the faq the election subcommittee in motion to accept the document sorry a discussion [Music] a motion to accept the emergency connectivity fund grant of 44 6999 and i don't know whether like both letters didn't come but that is one piece of it that's for the chromebook and there was an additional seven hundred dollars for the um hot spots funding which brings the total to that forty seven three ninety nine thirty six okay okay motion to accept the emergency connectivity one grant

132about forty seven thousand dollars three hundred ninety nine forty seven thousand three hundred ninety nine dollars and thirty six cents okay discussion thank you for catching that i'm all in favor all right okay okay now the annual report of the towns uh well this is a draft [Music] just this background of jeff reddick and a couple of other people in brown i ran by um because what i was really looking for was somebody to hack it back because i feel it's wrong but um the nobody had suggested to cut out that felt actually that it was all useful um so i want to just open up for feedback but if it's if it's editorial feedback it's best to just download the document put in track changes and send it to me that's easy to do

133we don't need to take the discussion back to them but in terms of the content um if there are things that are missing that you think are essential or things that you think don't want me or whatever but let's just open it up for feedback because i need to bring the final version of this back to in january i think this is great and i think that i wish i factual information here that people come to learn but i didn't necessarily know in one place okay it's a lot of our city yeah thank you [Music] i'm not looking like this or something else any other suggestions or direction okay um i thought in my front eyes the person in vermont who puts the teleport together to just get her feedback is where the length is

134acceptable um and then so this will come out for a january vote and then it has to go to the setting rating all right well thank you for taking the time to make that you think about that um and i just want to note that in the upcoming meetings um in january remember that the 2015 was given to a governance workshop um with dorothy presser facilitating around women this week just articulated what to us that we're community at collectively and um they also have a social media policy i think we want to take a look at discuss whether that needs to be vision in alignment with that vision and i'm thinking that it would be good for that to be three hours rather than two so that we can actually complete work there and not

135have to bring it out into the school committee unless it gets assigned to specifically a subcommittee but i think we could actually feel like we had enough time to really wrap up our thinking if we went for three hours um and then february also it's two meetings because of the budget hearing on february 15th and that's just one week after the school committee meeting with the following with this vacation and then i think we're back to one meeting um any other issues or agenda items you want to put on the table tonight all right well i think we're in good form um i will have another training call before the january meeting because those have been useful so far people are various questions that we've then got to forward over to uh chad for someone

136on the leadership team so they can guess those from the company he can share resources so we'll just continue those with that longer um is that where that letter came from did it come from uh that's where i sent it out to the city yeah that was one of the cases there were a couple of cases at the same time yeah so my director you didn't mean [Music] if you were going to develop um discuss school maintenance about recommendation back to the school committee so you were advising the school committee and that's why it needed to be [Music] it's very subtle i think it's useful to continue thinking and learning about because it's i i every year i've ever been on the school community we end up talking about welcoming more and how i'm wearing

137the christy all the time how is that how does this work so um i thought it was pretty nuanced the attorney general's advice so i think we should just keep keep thinking about keep raising the questions okay um the other thing that attorney general's guidance pointed to was that you have to be aware of your subcommittee relationships not just your committee relationships so if um mike and adam want to be talking together they they're not a form of large committee but they are a form of the election subcommittee and so their conversation should be privy to so lots of subtleties i think for us to pay attention all right so on that note i think we'll move on and um um [Music]