BBRSD School Committee - 9/14/21

001[Music] all right i'll call the order um first i just want to thank uh rebecca holmes for live streaming us tonight instead we haven't volunteered for that job and to our thanks to paul o'nara and uh sean paul point and joel lay who all contributed to his technical arrangement and set up for tonight's meeting so thank you uh we have a reminder to those in attendance that your human voice may be broadcast as part of these proceedings and uh all attendees at tonight's meeting must adhere to the mass department of ed's mass mandate for school buildings that means that we're all talking from behind masks so i asked if we could have some microphones because i've heard especially if you're sitting far away it can be hard to hear so we're going to try that

002out that means we're going to be all of us be experimenting with how close to earth is can you tell me because i know we can't is that good to make any difference um [Music] we will be runners and bring these around to you when we do your reports uh so that you can cut this one too okay so i guess we should start with the pledge of [Music] allegiance to the republic of which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] oh [Music] uh so we have started circulating the payroll and payable warrants already the right folders to make their way around everybody should and we have let's move on to the consent agenda we have two items in there two sets of minutes of school committee minutes

003on august 31st and the september 7th policy subcommittee minutes so i need a motion to accept the consensus of them so adam um made motion second okay glory second uh so we have a motion to accept the consent agenda two sets of minutes any discussion about those okay um no sorry did you say that i don't know i praise that well okay unanimous acceptance of the consent agenda and then communications does anybody does anybody receive any communications since the last meeting you should be aware of can i ask you for when we do the pledges is that possible yes one is on order okay yeah yes put the mask up please thank you um [Music] i'm gonna cut this as some announcements also um jeff there's a vaccination planning tomorrow is that right um out

004in the front of the building and the uh parking spaces will be the coach bus that will be coming and so that's where the vaccination clinic will be right now they are accepting walk-ins and there's more information on the webpage on the district's webpage members of the school committee are invited to tour [Music] the three schools that at the end of september you'll be getting information from september 27th 28th and 29th first thing in the morning i bought uh one for a day and we hope you can make it to those so watch for the email from christy and thank you for everybody who's welcoming us into your schools the school committee myself and lori uh will be going to two selectmen's meetings we want to let you know this we have communications from the

005boylston selectmen inviting us to come and talk with them and just check in and give a report on how things are going established some communications with them and um then i reached out to the berlin selectmen and asked them if they would like the same and basically both groups were very excited about having uh re-establishing some connection with the school between the regionalization and covet the lines of communication are kind of just separated and so i think we're all interested in getting some communication flow going again between the two towns and the school committee so i wanted to let you know that those meetings were scheduled toward the end of october and closer to mid-november and uh we'll let you know about those i know that we'll be talking about the school committee election and

006introducing uh the what i think of as the new school committee um so that we'll also entertain any requests from them for information that they'd like to be hearing about we hope to do that several times during the year at least and we will invite them to come here if they ever want to or they have administrators if they ever want to attend the school community so next on the agenda is the election election update which we will have on the agenda every meeting i and since we last met i've met with both town clerks i visited the state election division website and documents there consulting the legal counsel trying to build and understanding of what a regional school election process looks like and what the timeline uh and i adapted a preliminary timeline from

007here to november 2022 beginning to map out my understanding of this i'm still clarifying parts of this but um and i'll share that with you at the october meeting but i wanted you to know that based on the conversations i've had and the review i've done so far i will recommend to you tonight that we withdraw our homeworld petition that we submitted last spring sometime for a special election we have plenty to do to get ready for november which i can detail for you more in october but one of the one of the main uh tasks that we have to do is to prepare our communities for this election because it's different it's the first time we've done the regional election it's different we will have all six seats open at the same time berlin

008residents will be voting for berlin seats and boylston seats and vice versa if you run for office for a school committee you need to take out nomination papers in berlin and in boils both you need to collect signatures in berlin and boylston and hopefully you'll participate in candidate forums and so on in both communities also this is an opportunity for us to make clear to people in the towns what the school committee does and why these seats are important in particular these these this next election will have some two-year terms and some four-year terms in both towns after that all terms are four years but they broke this up so that seats will stagger and undo different schedules so that only half of the school committee has to run for office in any given year

009but that means two and four years out this district those people sitting on those seats may be able to participate in selecting the next superintendent and they definitely will be able to participate in contributing to the next five-year district improvement plan and helping to set the direction and the priorities of the district so those seats are important and we have some education to do in the community to help people understand what's important and how they can get involved and we all know it takes multiple passes multiple times for people to see and hear this information before it starts to make sense that they know the questions they want to ask and so on so that's why i'm recommending that we stick with the regular regional election on the state ballot in november 2022 we have

010plenty to do there and we can go into it more next month i'm recommending that you go that path tonight we're going to give you time to think about that and we'll ask you to vote on that direction in october anybody have any questions at this time i use nobody built this um [Music] that has already done the work you're doing myself but i'm sure somebody when they were planning that agreement probably did talk about that but i was not there yeah so it wasn't written into the big role no no because this is a this is a state process so it gets dictated by the state in the town floor we're seeing the nomination papers all that stuff uh in the election domain um so we need to agree that the two towns decided

011to go regionalization this never came up well i don't know that it never came up that's what i'm saying i wasn't at our table was anybody here at that table whose responsibility [Music] i'm happy to learn about it because then [Music] and as should the rest of us because then we can teach others about it more easily we know it ourselves um i i don't pretend to know all the details but i think the motivation for selecting that that they did was to have representation from three from each town representation from what three boylston members and three berlin town members and i don't know the method you're proposing results in that yes but i think that was the motivation for picking them up that they did and it's a more complicated scenario but i think

012that's why they ended up developing legally yeah so they maintain equal representation from the two towns on the schools sure so so they took the time to figure that out and that's i think that's fair but like nobody knows the process those are the sources i'm consulting town courts documents and the sc and i have to pull from a lot of sources here yeah and because of that because we're building our own understanding of this process and we know we have to keep our eye on the ball with this i am proposing a there will be an election subcommittee this year who really helps us stay on track with this and works uh thinks about how to get the word out to our two communities okay so mark to sub committees approving some committees at

013this point and um i have since we last our last meeting i met individually with team members to offer startup support and to get to know about their interests and their skills and thinking about these committees opportunities might um help with my first priority is really to help strengthen the knowledge and capacity of this committee to work well together and with the administration because we have so many good methods we need to all wrap up together and what i've seen so far is a terrific willingness on the part of all the new members to really dive in and learn more about their roles and all the ways they could be helping which is very encouraging exciting it's good energy [Music] and um committee members really need to devote a lot of energy in the fall

014to thinking about their governance role in the school committee and learning about their roles and responsibilities so i'm proposing um four subcommittees and two liaison positions and i'm i'm not including a community engagement or outreach subcommittee which i might do in another year but for this year i feel like i want to tackle those topics together in our usual committee structure of times and in our governance workshops so i'd like to have debuted a handout in the shared drive that describes the charge of the policy committee the superintendent evaluation subcommittee those are both continuing committees that we've had before a negotiation subcommittee because this is year before contract negotiations teachers union an election subcommittee a new member orientation liaison and a scholarships and awards so those are described in i'm not going to take them

015apart they were describing what you read for the meeting tonight so so first i wanted to see if there are any questions or presentations about those descriptions okay so i i will ask for a motion to accept that some committees proposed for as described in the sheriff exactly julie i'm in motion to accept the subcommittee descriptions uh join the second laurie ii any discussion on favor and again we have unanimous approval of the subcommittee thank you i appreciate that so now i'd like to appoint people to those committees so a service policy committee that's a continuing committee and i will continue to chair that committee and mike will continue to be my top and will continue the service work on that committee particularly for the first half of the year i'd like to reserve the

016option to make adjustments to that committee mid-year if it's needed or if warranted to either expand the committee or change our rules to start with we'll just continue with me as chair of life and support for the fall semester the superintendent evaluation committee i'd like to appoint glory heart as the lead and julie lee to be her brave patriot see lori uh worked with me on the superintendent evaluation symphony last year she's very tuned into what needs to be done she's familiar with the format and everything and i'm here to support them as needed and this is a good opportunity for julie kit to learn that process and i believe the two of them will lead a transparent and fair evaluation process the negotiations committee we'll need to work collaboratively with the superintendent with the

017legal counsel with the teachers union to negotiate the next teacher's contract i'll serve as the lead for this committee i'll appoint magnet grill to serve on this pig and i would like to request that atoms serve as an alternate in case either one of us is not able to stay with the committee or pay certain meetings the election subcommittee i'd like to appoint mike cotman and adam wilder to that committee and again i will lead that committee until this election timeline is finalized and approved by legal counsel and the two boards of selectmen and once that timeline is everybody's on the same page with that and that's all approved by everybody then mike and adam will co-lead that committee new member orientation liaison i'd like to appoint lori to that lori has done that before

018and she's recently not so long ago and remember herself so she draws on that experience of other people that's terrific and that means people now finally who are appointed to to assist with new member orientation for the short term and the last meeting no longer need to fill that role but like in particular people complimented your welcome email that you sent to them and i appreciate that thank you and then finally the scholarships and awards liaison i'd like to appoint julie lee to take on that as well because she's a berlin member and those scholarships and awards are situated at berlin the moses retire scholarship and the very impossible hotman award for both uh affordable recipients uh again that material is all organized and ready for julie and i will support huli with that as

019keep the school committee informed in what's going on is it their input have them uh a proven proposals you want to put forward that kind of thing so you should plan to have a slot to report out if you want to use it um so let me take pause there and just check with anybody to see if there's any questions or clarifications around committee appointments i'm reading the subcommittee to the school committee section that says the chair of the person will appoint the committee members by the you've never done that before so i don't know number two the community care person subject to the approval by the committee will appoint the subcommittee chairperson candidate members i read that to me that would be emotion [Music] we can certainly you can certainly so would all in

020um and part during part of jeff's reports he will reference the district improvement plan that christie prepared for you this is the finder here and um i just want to thank christie for preparing me at my request and i encourage you all to bring these to everybody because every all the work you do in committee kings should be uh tied in you should be seeing this district improvement plan move [Music] thank you so the first thing i'm going to do is just take a quick look the only thing i really want to say about it is that the trends the moments look fairly stable berlin looks like an increase in that was really due to uh from last year to this year an increase in preschool i will tell you that i've asked the principals

021to come tonight to answer any questions that you might have about those these numbers and to also tell you that i do an enrollment report big one in i'll probably do it in december this year and it encompasses five-year trends ten-year trends building permits birth rates real estate sales all things that would that would influence the enrollment in the district and um i didn't do it last year because it was sort of off here but we usually get some projections from from state agencies yeah so i put together a report like that so that's really that's really more more global we can get a feel for where these trends are going and we'll also be able to see how covert has impacted these trends so far but other than that these numbers look fairly stable

022are there any questions for the principal in terms of things that catch your eye off the numbers it seems like last year's kindergarten class in town no but you know there's a little bit of a movement back here with the apartments there but not really significant if there's more just uh one of those years um [Music] check while i do this enrollment report in december but one of the things from 2019 i remember is they projected zero students coming out of that and we know that that's not true we already we're already starting to see students out of this right that's something we're going to have to look at [Music] thank you the next grade of question number of garland children correct because they don't assist 43 books and only nine for braille [Music] that

023appears to be last year i see another file called 2122 but i don't see that i can access that the 2020 wasn't correct but just mislabeled so i have a couple questions too um and i know you'll probably be able to answer this better from december because that will show five years but looking from grade eight to grade nine um [Applause] so that's 16 kids have left is that right yeah so um that is due significantly to the agreement that berlin has with with assad versus boylston as with assad so they are accepting more berlin students from assad so that's why you see that discrepancy i'll talk a little bit about that when we talk about the district improvement plan let's come up that question okay a lot of districts yeah you know that's that

024sort of that transition year whether it be um you know vocational schools don't start until ninth grade um and then you also see the the transition um to private high schools all right thank you and i can't confirm that it is only nine eleventh graders any other questions again this isn't the end of it i'll come back with some more in-depth um [Music] are we going back again yes [Music] all right next up is gloria pierce who's the last second edition we're really really fortunate together she's a new school adjustment counselor um she's working with students three days a week she gets years of experiences adjustment counseling flashstone and china uh there's also been a clinician consultant with community health uh she has a bachelor's from smith college and masters in counseling from boston college

025nurse jenny i don't know here i had a chance to talk to her yet but she's been everywhere danny lois is a native of canada he graduated from the university of alberta she's many years of nursing experience including being in school nursing connecticut before moving up here during her time and she also has experiences of pediatric and neonatal ironman she's been fantastic all right laura rainsford uh is a new teacher this year in second grade she had a bachelor's degree in master's degree from wesleyan university and comes to us from acton-boxborough where she was a special education assistant teacher and a grade one consistent teacher all right i wasn't sure which one was to do sherry train uh will be working in both elementary schools but i get to introduce circles i'm the better one

026as a new special education coordinator at the building level she's taken over for the recently retired leading balance before she's many years of experience a special ed team chair worked in leadership in seven hills charter school she has both her bachelor's and master's degrees from fitchburg state university she's already shown herself to be an asset all right old school this is i don't know i'm high memorial school after spending many years in the acton-boxborough system as a special education and general education classroom assistant she's also done private remote tutoring she owns a bachelor's degree from umass amherst thank you jeremy horn is actually returning to the school district she spent 10 years as a paraprofessional at boyle's elementary school before escaping to take a position in hudson where she was in paris since 19 or

0272017. she has a bachelor's degree consumption college and a master's in education from maria college that's leslie diggins leslie was hired actually last year during the pandemic uh to help us with some remote work she is this year a 0.5 math tutor at berlin she uh has a bachelor's degree from holy cross and many years of experience working with school-aged children so then swept out i don't know how to get to the bottom she's at the top of my list senator kapoor is a paraprofessional who comes to us from the acting-boxborough system where she has several years of teaching experience she holds a bachelor's degree from osmania university in her native india where she also worked for seven years as a teaching assistant all right so first up we have amanda jonery who is our

028um school counseling secretary no she has them she's hold manager in our banking program okay now that this is amanda um amanda mcdonald in counseling she's a native of ohio uh she's our new counseling office administrative assistant and she um comes to us from clark university she worked as the academic records coordinator we have emily mccarthy emily comes to us from assabet um she is got holding for bachelors and masters from simmons college and has experience in team teaching in native littleton and chelsea okay emily sequeira um emily is not new to tahanto she has been a paraprofessional for years at tahonta and she is now a our middle school math teacher she has a bachelor's from snhu and i'm very excited to welcome eric sheehan eric is um comes to us as a modern

029special needs teacher for the middle school comes across from worcester public schools and eric has worked at the central mass collaborative u inc as well as millbury public schools hannah dakota um hannah is a paraprofessional at tahanto she's a recent graduate with her bachelor's from bridgewater state in teaching and she is currently pursuing her master's degree she was working in my school i think so we took jennifer from um berlin memorial [Music] and she is uh new to our honda cafeteria staff jocelyn charpentier uh jocelyn um is our new library media specialist um she has a bachelor's from uri and a master's in library of science from simmons college she was most recently the library media specialist on in acton-boxborough this is kelly ergins um kelly is our new school nurse she's a graduate of

030both quincy college and university of south florida um most recently been a school on nurse in framingham she has experience as an rn at beverly hospital north shore hospital and mass general this is kelsey green uh kelsey is a is our modern special needs teacher she has a bachelor's from arizona state and a master's at grand canyon university and has experience teaching uh in both arizona and more recently in sharing mass megan logan megan comes to us from connecticut with a bachelor's and master's from penn state and most recently she was a special education teacher and from connecticut [Music] yeah um thank you for those introductions it's great to hear the backgrounds of these people and we have a lot of new stuff um thank you okay [Music] we have so many members that do

031this in two pieces that i'll do a high-level piece and talk about the origins of this district improvement plan and touch on a few highlights and then next month these directors will go into more depth and charity and give you uh you know sort of a better overcomes of the digital improvement plan let me just check um so i started in january 2018 and one of the first conversations that we had at the leadership team we want to look at some high impact areas over the next five years that you could focus on and so the report when you look at it isn't all encompassing by any stretch but if there is you know there's also the big areas that we thought we can tackle there are some things that obviously we were not able

032to do and things that we certainly wouldn't be able to do and not over here and so this gets updated you might listen to living documents and we really developed it so that we could have something internally we could use but also make it public so that anybody in the community could take a look at it and say we you know we have an idea um where you go so so basically so if you look in the front so the color coded you can see we've been adding colors as we go along things partially accomplished not accomplished new things that we had i will say that out of that list of leadership on the newest one so and that's a good sign that you know the principles stay and the directors are here because that

033stability is important it's important in any district on page four is a little introduction and it really touches on the thought of four high impact areas it's kind of written in the text we look at curriculum we look at equitable access technology and innovation and fiscal planning and responsibility those four high impact years became our four goals and um also a lot of the coincide with the four departments we have so curriculum side of the teaching and learning department and global access as puberty personnel technology innovation that's all is technology department and fiscal planning and responsibility is from the business department if you look on page five and six you sort of break out those kind of big ticket items that we wanted to look at um performing arts well stem first of all we

034did a lot of research on this before we looked at it conferences kyle and i attended men conferences heard students who were college-age students speak about it we went to conferences in which industry people talked about the importance of stem and i don't think anybody really argues the importance of that performing arts you know one of the things i've noticed is the sixth district i've been in and everybody uh leadership team would agree with this is that you can have a good district with a mediocre performance you can't have a great one and so you know extracurricular activities are important we look at performing arts as something that really is an extracurricular i know a lot of districts too but so we thought we'd make some improvements it was a new building it's got lots

035of technology built in and we felt it wasn't really being used um to its full potential equity is a big is a big piece of the plan um we started out everybody worked sort of in earnest with consultants from consulting teachers21 located in massachusetts we started our work really last year with them and you know originally we thought it was going to be maybe a one year maybe one and a half but i can see this being at least three years out as we start to involve more people in that family and community engagement i think most people will agree that you really can't do you can't do enough of that stuff it's a that's sort of an ongoing and ongoing piece so um let's look at some of the highlights here [Music] so so

036that first goal will strengthen student achievement by advancing curriculum opportunities not being alignment that's a goal out of the teaching and learning department you see the first thing there is uh stem science technology engineering that we've really made a big uh push here one of the things we wanted to do is um on page 7 you could see we wanted to build a shadow and internship experience and the reason for that is this it goes back to the explain what that means goes back to the question and julie answered um which is and this is this came up along the first meetings i was at was like why don't we lose so many students to remove students from the vocational english students to the science academy in marlborough and the reality is you know we

037can't be everything to any we can't be everything to everybody but we still think thought there was a place we can improve so we can't offer carpentry we can't offer electrical if you want that stuff you have to go to a vocational school and and we also can offer some of the depth and science that the science academies offer but we do a pretty good job with the academics so we thought well what is it that we're we're missing here and and we and again doing some research i did a lot of work with the central mass stem pipeline carol followed up with some work with them i'll be getting more involved with them this year and we thought one of the things we don't offer yet is any kind of shadowing experience where our

038students have the opportunity to go and follow a professional and see what they're doing and then an internship where students have the opportunity to actually go and work with those professionals and over the last couple of years we've had a lot of contact as you might guess with the physicians and the healthcare providers and the community who all work pretty close to us and many of them have volunteered to actually help us with this and so um we were thinking in terms of you know an 11th grade you could do a shadow you'd be eligible for shadowing experience so if you're interested in microbiology we actually have someone in this district who is a microbiologist and and works in the field that they could they could um shadow that person or one of the labs

039and and in that facility and then in their senior year they could actually go into an internship and sort of do some unpaid work with that with those people and so we thought that that would be something that would help us keep more students is one of the things that a lot not a lot of academic schools offer right now but we are small enough that we should be flexible enough to offer those experiences one of the things we did is um we had an old um sort of outdated list of contacts and so we put something on this year just just sort of works from home and worked with us before who's going through that list and building the database that we're going to need when we hire somebody full time or at least

040a part-time person who acts as the coordinator for that program the last thing you want to do is say you're offering these experiences when you're like a co-op like northeastern a co-op and then a student wants something and they can't go anywhere so the first step was to build the database which we were gonna i started working on a couple years ago um it's kind of you know kind of fell by the wayside last year and now we sort of picked it up again so that's one of the that's one of the things that's one of the things you can see on page 7 you can see that that progression of what we're trying to do here if you look on oh if you look on page eight one of the other big things we

041try to do is we try to create a vertical pathway in computer science the one always in the elementary school up through the high school we offer a often now a advanced placement computer science course it was a little spotty it still needs to work but just by chance um the department of ed or another group offered some some grant money in a company that would help company they did some consulting work and they wanted to find schools that would want to put a computer science program in place in the middle school and it's what we did have one so we've been working with them you know carol and her group meets with them on a regular basis to try to complete that to try to complete that that vertical pathway um and again i

042think you know one of the things kevin and i went to a conference the superintendent's conferences a couple years ago and there was a it was a boy there from he was a sophomore at harvard i think if i remember correctly and one of the things he was saying was that the the computer the basic computer science course they offered argument so powerful that they had to stop offering it online and so many kids took it because they needed it that they actually now made it a requirement and that was kind of the last goal we thought you know we really need to have a pathway so students have exposure to some some forms of computer science from the time they're in elementary school to the time they're in high school so we've been working

043on that we've got a good pathway still needs some work but again if you look at page eight you'll see you'll see that um and that's one of the big things and kyle will talk a little bit more about that and what she's doing with her um virtual reality you know one of the things we're having in school is we have a lot of we have computer labs and those at one time used to be innovative you know you'd have to go in and be all the stations the kids don't learn like that anymore i mean they do stuff on their phones and but they do play a lot of games and they do seem to learn that way and so we wanted to we thought well maybe those spaces that's not the best use

044of that that space anymore that we're going to one-to-one paul's department has done a great job due to a little question covered but a great job of going one to one like a lot of districts have uh and so those even though those computer rooms are used it's not like it used to be and so we explored um we explored through a company's z space some virtual reality i actually have a bus that they brought and uh you let the kids go in and things and but one of the things the kids said to us this is kind of it's kind of like old school you know they're used to the headset so carol got some about a dozen of these headsets [Music] and they've been sitting there for a year because we couldn't use

045them last year so um that's another thing we're going to be working on to say okay is this done but we think we think it might be something we're going to pilot out of the program and see if if this is going to work and one of the other things we found is that these companies are starting to build a lot of curriculum through this virtual reality learning so they're starting to build curriculum we can actually use that's aligned with our standards that could be could be worked through the virtual reality so um it's one of the experiments we're doing you know again we're about to get behind that now because we don't touch anything but yeah the question that's about this step if we explored opportunities in some of the universities in worcester area

046to see how we might be able to leverage their presence in a way that could help our students we've looked through we've looked at wpi to the central mass this central mass stem pipeline um i've been involved with it for probably the last 20 years and different evolutions again carol has been involved so we haven't looked at the wpi they have some they have some curriculum we're open to other you know that's that's certainly something we're open to um but again wpi but not no other school so far if you have any ideas on any connections or anything like that we've been more than happy to take a look at it um let's see i'm not going to go over the curriculum alignment piece i'm going to say over the last since 2018 to update

047curriculum to do curriculum mapping to bring in the software we need to to get all of our units online so uh let's see on page 15 i didn't want to address something um [Music] yeah just that's the performing arts piece there and i didn't we did hire some new teachers in that area at the elementary school and um you know the teachers here were very involved in developing this was keith lewis who who did a lot of work on this and helped consult with this um so and he was actually in he was in the process to hire the processing i will say that school community members are usually not involved with hiring anymore you know but when you get someone who's got that specific uh skill set that it's crazy not to say well

048maybe we should at least be in there and just kind of listen to what's going on and give us some advice so um again coverage is sort of focus sort of pushed us back up a little bit on that but you know we did have a five-year goal when we did this one big production about the high school the development band about the elementary schools high school middle school and we're still hoping to do that i'm convinced we've done a lot of great one-act plays in school so i think we're on track there let's see family family community outreach which is on page 19. um the web maps that we don't need is always to keep our websites updated and so we're doing that with parent camps that's something that we've been doing for the

049last few years it's really just a way to bring parents and to to introduce them to the school we do tool home we do a preschool preschool decay which again many of those young parents are free you know they're just afraid of schools they haven't been in schools before last time they were in schools when they they attended and so it's a good way to get them in we'll be doing that we will have one in the spring and the other one we do is the step up from elementary school from five to six and again we take we take advice from the parents we take input from them we do surveyed at the end i'll give you an example um one of the suggestions was for two of them why did you give tourism

050to school we just do right out here once you get tours of the school and um you know how about sports signing silence it's a big deal parents don't know you know it's their first time in high school in middle school and they don't know how to sign up for sports and things so we had um we had some of the students give tours and we had a map macaron here along with a group of people from we had our guidance department so we had more staff parents to interact with after-school buses you know previously this school once school's out it's shut down and really these are community schools they should stay open um so but but the problem is there's not a lot of sidewalks around here if you notice but you can't walk

051home uh so we started running out the school buses uh i believe we started that i get messed up with the code yeah i think it was 2019 we did a pilot and so those buses are up and running it allows kids to stay in to go again and just to play it allows them to go up and do things up in the locker room that allows you to get extra help it allows them just to have time to just sort of hang up before the buses come and that's that's important you know they're going all day long so so that's that teaching and learning those are the kind of highlights and again we'll go more into those i think it's the blue section now which has the personnel um karen has done an amazing

052job and very good with this we reinstated the full-time elementary special education coordinator we just saw up there we had a part-time person who we painted that just the just the um just the workload has increased so much just the amount of paperwork yeah it just just keeps on going up so we did do that karen did a great job of doing some research to keep some of our students who have what have we severe challenges in the district where they should be to have an exclusive education so we developed a uh called the bridges programs that started pes and that's been very very successful keeping our students in the district um it's also a big money saver too um the equity work we're doing [Music] yeah this is again this is going to be

053one of my goals the principles of all having an equity goal as with all of this rectus carol we all have an estimated goal and it's just kind of done at different levels it was a big push you know a lot of people think they look at our district and they say well you know it's it's really homogenous mostly uh white students but there's still memories that happen and uh you know we we really committed to this and each school this year we'll have an equity project that they do that's something they're going to take a look at at the school level and um for the last year has been just the leadership team who's been involved with the professional development we've hired two consultants to help us with that again for teachers 21 which

054is a massachusetts professional development group we're going to expand that out to the school and get teachers involved this year and some of our guidance personnel to help with the project in school so i'll talk more about that when i talk about my goals [Music] which is technology um i gotta hand it to paul you know last year was a tough year but we were able to work on getting one-to-one devices and you know these things like zoom which we've never done before which a lot of districts haven't done something like second nature to us we are working on digital policy and computer science skills we find a new teacher this year in the library the media meeting goals many of the digital literacy goals are inside next year no next month if you want

055to move on though to the the section four which is the operation management [Music] so a couple of things here that are important the first is um when we developed this there were a lot of district improvement plans out there but when we developed this what what the thing that was important for us is that we can actually pay for and we could show the community how it was going to be paid for there's some great plans out there and you think we're like how are you how much does everything cost so what we did is went through and said we want all of this stuff and then we gave it to bob and his department and said how much is all this gonna cost so he spent uh he spent time going through it

056and what we did is we said well you know we know typically what expects in terms of spending and we just paid it back so aesthetic given is a plan you know it's grandiose and it can't be done we think we could do something and as we start going through this document we realize that you know to expand this department one of the things we're doing for example as we continue to benchmark salaries and to report has not been done in a long time um our cows positions has changed [Music] and so we continue to look at those those things also as we expand it requires more staff and so we try to put most of our staffing needs in the buildings but there are times when we have to expand within the central so

057if you haven't done um over five years we actually cut some positions but one of the things you're going to see from me is a recommendation to now for example has a clot time first i think it's 0.25 a person an assistant to help her so they have christy equivalent not nothing if you look at this plant a good portion of it is teaching and learning so and any any of that expansion um really falls under carol's domain so you'll be seeing that the other thing i want to do the final thing i want to do is i need to turn to page um i have 37 i hope you have 37 that's the plan that um yeah that's the payment plan and again bob will be going over this [Music] but every single item

058there on the left is in that plan some place um and we continue to update it this one this is about bottom needs to do some updating on it i'm going to keep saying you're getting very careful about going through and making match um some of them like the red is something we just couldn't do we knew that on the outside well let's keep it in we'll just read it so you know you know we can go back to what we will um but it's all right here now i think i think it's probably you know really the whole market's plan is that we have a you know payment plan so we have a way to pay for it and we've been again i think since we've been very very close on our numbers um

059you know what we saved the cost and what we've actually spent to uh to expand teaching and learning in the district so that's basically the highlights of it again next and if you have any in-depth questions of any of these things just struggle directly will be going over a little more and um certainly if they don't go over something answered then please bring it up again [Music] this is the document that we um you know all our goals come from the school john john [Music] you know big picture um and we'll save uh specific questions for october or departments um right exactly departments in this level are there any kind of questions you want to be asking tonight about this this as a tool in the history jeff what is it it's not a high-level

060question what would the numbers stand for is that the signage of the thousands is um yeah most of these most of them um serves as a tool when you meet with them right and i think they appreciate the fact that we you know we we stay with them you know we stay pretty close to what we said we'll be able to do this again something's been added but it's a living document so you further information at this point thank this month's report really highlights the summer learning activities for our students our staff and our administrators i wanted to bring these to your attention we had a couple of activities for our students this summer that are key to questions we received last year about student learning gaps because or coming into highways so we attempted

061to address that in two ways one was through an online practice program through online instructional school we've been using in the schools called freckle it's math mathematics and ela and we ran that program and invited all of our students in the district to participate in the activity we had coordinators who were in the program and they gave students some incentives to get on and just practice skills that they would be using for their grade level related to their standards and so that they would practice or improve preparation for coming back to school this fall kind of staying on top of it keeping them keeping them fresh keeping them continuing to think about those subject areas so we ran that program we also received an unexpected grant from the department of ed and that was our

062acceleration academy grant for 26 thousand dollars and that grant afforded us an opportunity to target students who made me that little extra dose of instruction who would probably have noticed through some data that we had collaborated some extra support um so we invited those students into the acceleration academy called jumpstart um but we also said well let's see about our kindergartners well we didn't have that kind of data on those students because let's see you know what are we going to get we got an amazing amount of kindergartners 39 out of our how many we have like 50 or kindergarten students they didn't participated we were overwhelmed in fact we had to add on extra teachers up beyond the grant and pay for that through some funding additional funding we had we never thought that

063parents who may not have had the experience in preschool um with their children going in last year or feeling some students have no experience at all any preschool experience and they came to us without anything just really needed to come in their anxiety about sending their children in the following weeks the first day into kindergarten so this group came in and really notice from the feedback we got from parents and we did do a survey from the parents how supportive they were of running this program particularly feedback from kindergarten parents who don't believe to be able to have their children settled in an informal setting all the teachers were involved were highly qualified teachers and we also offered a little special each day which was art and and they seemed in the half day program

064so the students did this in the morning we were still able to go home and enjoy some of their summer afternoons so we didn't know how it was going to go this first year but we were pleasantly surprised about the success we felt and we enriched the students we needed to kind of got our eyes on those students so we could talk about possible possible supports and advance for those children as they came in at the beginning of the year and also certainly for any of the kindergarten students who participated who just benefited from the social emotional piece which is a lot of what those teachers focused on so that was the acceleration academy we called jumpstarter i asked the question carolina sure on two things how were those kids identified was that through teachers

065that needed those kids that needed to jump start them oh good question so we used basically the we've heard a number of times about games but we've looked at it and also some of our channel one students that we had had serviced uh i think those were mostly for grades because we had data from grades one up to five the grant read that we could only use literacy for grades um k through two you know so i came to three and then four and five had to be mentioned so that's how we ended up focusing on after the upper grade the funding wasn't didn't enable to do the kind of medical services so i think perhaps because the department really saw department that really saw they need more literacy than mathematics and then was there

066a certain number of kids that have masked out that we had to keep it to between well we tried to the department asked us to keep it between 10 and 12 but we exceeded that by a couple of students in each of those cases oh did you grade or each class 10 to 12 was in 10 to 12 per class or per grade per per grade book it was per class so kindergarten three classes the first second and third we had one class we only could afford to have one class because the brand is so small and then five is between four and five through 175 okay so we could only have one class for each level we'd love to do more i mean we also didn't know through any of the teachers this summer

067i mean the teachers were really fatigued um but the incentive for them was also strong to be able to participate um i think if we had finances to be able to a large number of teachers the opportunity um and we also knew about this sooner had more time to plan and he literally just got the grant in july we were writing this in august which seems like well it's a month but there's a lot of logistics to making sure that everybody's safe we had to get uh offer transportation to students because it wouldn't be fair students couldn't come um because they couldn't get blessing to the schools if their parents couldn't drive into we had to think about transportation feeding students while they were here even if it was snacks safety issues we had the

068program over here in san francisco to kind of afford people access from both school districts it wasn't planning to become the other so um a lot of things had to be put in place i think there's materials for the teachers too if they needed to order to bring over here for that particular purpose because otherwise we were draining their materials particularly the specialist the art teacher from her supplies during the media so lots to think about in a short time so all of that being said it ran smoothly i mean the buses were on time the kids came in happy home happy we had the data from those students who participated in the class to be able to look at um utilized so the first year i mean we'd love to be able to run

069it again and we're thinking about that already we're looking for the great funding cap professor three is the possibility we talked about the survey last night we sent out we're looking at the whole community because we have to use 20 of that brand needs to go toward teaching and learning opportunities [Music] and then the other areas i mentioned the staff orientation we have that every year but i think what was particularly important about that opportunity was the fact that we did have two police officers one from rural and boylston who donated their time to come in and provide alice or active shooter training for the new staff members we take the safety very seriously of all of our students and our staff in the past we've run those those drills here with the population but

070we recognize with so many new staff this year that we need to have that more in-person type of training with all of these folks each year the teachers train and reactivate their certification in that area online with these teachers we're getting the first time brand new it's just great to have a partnership with these police and fire departments and i also mentioned in the report about the presidency and the chance that we have to get together with the fire police departments and chiefs and the officers each year twice a year to review what we've been doing in the schools concerns that we have concerns that they have and workout plans and this was the first time we had a chance to have a tabletop that was offered by the berlin fire chief and he provided

071the tabletop opportunity and that was one of many we'd like to do and we can you know get that in one of their articles in the paper um thank you for doing um so we were very pleased to have that and we're always grateful this one in particular um we're not going to share what they are but it really was around them an accident that occurred not something around active shooting because we felt that what might what might really happen like is is something like that that occurs outside of one of the buildings where student buses needs to get rewarded um it could be anything that happens so that was the scenario and then we walked through it step by step what are you doing next and then what happens next who's responsible for doing

072that what do you you know you might they might say to one of the principals okay this is your building who are you going to call first who gets the information to relay to the community to look at who takes over that who's going to be on the scene so tabletops are like in the moment kinds of experiences where you have to think through the problem as it unfolds and you don't know what's going to happen next the tabletop coordinator which is the fire chief might throw in something to you that kind of changes the scene and you'll have to respond to it what to do and then we talk about each step along the way afterwards you know what went well what didn't what do you need to improve on so i think the

073principles in particular took away some things to think about for their own buildings that they needed to to work on as a result good thank you so so that's what we were doing this summer in addition to getting ready for the year ahead and we were writing some grants um you'll see on the next page i put this information in the letter memo to all of you going forward we want to be able to present each year an opportunity to do to approve receipt of our grants that we received which is what the school committee should be doing so this is new to us but this year we're starting this fall and as we move through the year we receive any additional funding we'll do this maybe once or twice a year i think we

074could probably do a mid-year a lot of times we get more private grants mid-year but our federal and state grants really occur um anytime between july and september so the only difference this year is we were getting the esser grants throughout the year and unfolding in fact right now that's what the survey is about bob and i are going to focus on the sr-3 grant that's due october 4th i believe and so we are um actively working on that but we really because of the requirements of the background to the community and actually the great hours continue to kind of get a sense of what when the public in general is looking for us to improve them so we get some foreigners around that in the survey focus on so we have a total support

075834 695 dollars worth of state federal grants and that includes the general grants title potential brands the essa brands we call them and the grants that karen does as well for special education they're all listed with the amounts that's the second item in the business section okay well that's a phenomenal amount of money that just came into programs but [Music] so does anybody have any questions before we move on uh one question for these grants these uh are there any stipulations with them uh the timeline they need to be used by is it a use at all are you gonna pay that situation there are absolutely stipulations on these grants they do have deadlines that they need to be used by some are multi-year for example the essa grants the title one one and two

076grants and four mostly title one can be used multi-year it depends on the year sometimes even especially because the calls of last year they gave us some extensions on these grants but there is definitely deadlines to use them we do use them all i mean we because we're a small [Music] instructional online tools all of those things are expensive really costly items so they go very quickly karen uses them for many other special education powers when they can [Music] typically it's because some activities a teacher wasn't able to attend professional development or some activity was cancelled so that karen and carol and anybody who's involved in grants do a great job um kind of staying on top of it and then we have regular meetings to look at what's left to spend and find alternative

077uses when we can we talk about what we're going to really need to their market the money for between bob jeff himself karen we're all looking at that ahead of time so we have to we have to tell the state within each grant where we're spending that money specifically thank you well sorry i just want to just add to this safety piece twice a year and um we just talked about things going on in the district they gave us advice they can save the advice from schools if you notice a lot of glass and um and so it's like like that little windows out there so the kid like smashes into them that's a lot of glass coming down on them not only that but anybody trying to so a couple years ago one of

078one of the uh first responders you know brought brought us this technology is very inexpensive to support that as well as you don't even know it's there but they won't shatter like that whether someone's trying to bash their way in or whether kids are flowing around and then someone goes through it we won't have that shatter in fact you know it's interesting we have a we have a parent in the district who's an architect he designs these buildings he works a local architect and then we get a call from them and he said you know i never realized until my child was in that class i'll borrow about some of these buildings that were all over that glass and that's not really what got us started making sure that the program was was secure so

079and that film was on all of the all of the windows [Music] and that's all stuff that we like [Music] um a little longer this time i'm sorry for that but um a couple of things i wanted to share with you the first was extended school year program which is something we run every year for special needs students who will regress if we aren't able to provide some services for them over the summer um this year it was much bigger we ran it for 50 students that it was considerably bigger some students that we felt hadn't had enough access to technology and has been able because family circumstances sometimes to really access an education we included them in the summer program to give them hopefully a better start this year so we had a fairly

080large program this year um i also included the staffing updates as you can see i usually have three or four a year um unfortunately we have a lot of requirements this year and so um we hired some really incredible people and i have a lot of um hope for where we're going with all of these new folks really skilled people um but we've been very busy getting them settled making sure paul's been making sure they get computers and getting them all of the impression that they need so it's been very busy the first few weeks but quite a change in the department the other thing that i wanted to share with you is about the mental health supports we talked a lot in with families last year about mental health supports that were needed not

081just for students but for families as well there's we did an awful lot of family support last year because people just couldn't find the support in the community so one of the things that we dedicated some of our grant money to this year was um the family success partnership which i put a brochure in your folder so for some of our naviest families who really can't access all of the services out there needs some help sometimes through the language barrier sometimes it's just they need somebody to kind of hold their hand and help them figure out how to get through it so for a very small number of families we have this service that we can use so when it becomes too much for our counselors to kind of support them that we have a

082place we you know we can refer them and get some extra help so that we can get them hopefully signed up with community agencies we had in the past and it was very successful for the families that really needed it so we're excited to be having that back again and we also added a part-time adjustment counselor at fullestone berlin has done okay through the past years that she's been able to support our psychologist who's been able to support families there boylston got had a lot more need last year and it was getting sort of the gen ed students work getting as much of her time because she has to work with special ed students so we added this position through some of our grant funding to kind of support those gen ed families as well

083you may remember a couple of years ago we added a adjustment counselor to the high school so they already had another coffee in place so we're feeling better about some of the mental health supports that we have in place for the families and then the last thing i just wanted to kind of share with you um i don't think everybody realizes that we have some students that aren't are unable to access an online education so when we were remote they had some significant health needs they were on home tutoring excuse me right and so i just wanted to share with you our incredible staff that they were in gowns and masks and shields and going into the homes to work with some of these young children really above and beyond never once said no we're

084not going so that's what we need to do and they did a wonderful job and these students really made some progress last year so i wanted to share that with you and that's it any questions for karen just one of the i'm the adjustment counselor at bes and there's also a school psychologist i've understood there as well help me understand the difference between those two roles and kind of what does the day-to-day look like for the investment council what is the typical day so the school psychologist is a special ed physician they are responsible for doing the testing that had things for all of special ed students and they work with students and families on a regular basis on an iep so there's services online any other time she has she works with agenda students

085as needed and helps families get connected to outside counseling her primary role is to support the special agent student so she's always had time for those channels last year there was a lot more janet families that really needed some support and it got to the point where she was you know making contact with them but couldn't really follow through she just didn't have enough time in her day so the adjustment counselor is more like a guidance counselor who will come in and talk to the families and help all our families again her primary role is for janet but she'll also work with specialized students all right thank you karen um go to fall we skip paul did we skip off pause now oh wow yeah please thank you i'm so sorry so um i my

086report uh is funding on the drive c um it's a it's a proposal incentive for drivers um attendance for every assigned shift before i talk about proposal i'm gonna talk about why there's no spare drivers at all right now there's a shortage across the state energy i think specifically has 300 300 drivers short some districts don't have regular auto regular ship staff fortunately we have all of our regulation of staff um the uh so what happened on the third day the driver called in sick um there's some boils then there's 500 boils and buses one of the buses didn't have a driver four of the buses finished the route so four buses were on time the bus that finished first went back and circled back and pick up that one's a hundred bus which then

087arrives at the school about 35 minutes late then when you go to the elementary school which is the next tier that driver that is filling in on a shift there's two buses now boylston elementary that are late both 30 to 35 minutes so when we have one driver calling sick that's going to happen um now there's lots of questions about existing you know there's there's there's some potential concerns and you know you know does this mean should we be paying more for this or contract they should just show up well then drivers do have this you know they can take six days in the contract that they're not prevented from taking sick days um if you have a couple personal days um i talked to another district that uses enmity that implemented a driver incentive

088program and where i think we you know hoping this this will happen here is you know two drivers who have planned days off um later during the month of september in algonquin center program those drivers reschedule their appointments so that they were not during the work day [Music] it doesn't mean that people aren't going to call in sick they're just not going to get an incentive if that happens it doesn't mean we're not going to have any delays i would imagine we're still going to have some delays over the next three to four months since it's going to go on throughout the fall every day i see an email from other business managers other districts about transportation issues you've probably seen articles about it if you've been received following the news the question is what

089can we do and i think it's worth doing this it's a small amount if every driver obtained the incentive from september through december it costs just twenty eight hundred dollars at which point i think we anticipate being in a better place um the talking of the bus company anticipate that um with the expiration of unemployment benefits there might be more drivers they have a pool of people who want to get certified um one of the principals asked about it but i don't think it was serious so anyway so that's the reason we're proposing this and the specific proposal is there a hundred dollars a month to make every assigned shift both elementary and the top to ship in the morning and then both again in the afternoon and if they miss one there's no partial

090there's there's no incentive pay down my only concern about that is if somebody is a little sick and goes into work anyway i know they're all masked on a bus but given that we're in the middle of a pandemic and sometimes people get coped mildly and all the kids on the bus or at least for the elementary school are investigated have there been any discussion about um you know somebody kind of saying oh i kind of don't really want that hundred dollars this month i really use that so i don't want to go in anyway it's just a couple hours of driving so the drivers aren't supposed now i can't guarantee that that would happen but i don't think they're not supposed to go in when they're sick um if they're asymptomatic they're not sick

091yeah they wouldn't know anyways um i can also tell you that if they're on the bus um further guidelines from uh department of elementary secretary ed nobody on the bus is considered a close contact um that's not to say there's some there's maybe some risks but they're walking by the driver typically for a brief period of time um you know we're as part of this we can also include um something that says if you're sick you can't report to work you could put that right um if we're going to create an agreement what they have the policies nobody should be working when they're sick but if we're going to create an agreement that talks about an incentive we can explicitly stay at the state within the agreement even if it isn't listed somewhere else i

092think the cdc diagnose takes that into consideration when they say everybody must wear masks no [Music] um [Music] experience that says that that 100 is actually going to serve as an incentive for people um we we have anecdotal from another district it's just being just contemplated by a lot of districts right now based on their compensation 100 a month is significant um they have a 500 a year incentive from nrt i've been told and for for attendance and for every date and this is deducted so this potentially is 400 or four months some of these people don't earn aren't benefits eligible they're working you know shift in the morning and afternoon um so i've been told um you know i've talked to the bus company too that their feedback don't share this with the drivers

093this is just for something we're considering but do you think this would make a difference yes it definitely would okay thank you okay any other questions it's interesting to hear that there's an incentive in place already related to attendance because that some of the ways of practicing there will be similar prevention statement around whether someone can report to work when they're when they're able to combat the heal so if we're basically boosting that subject in a way i i become more comfortable with it i still do think that as you suggested potentially putting some language in there around explicitly stating or not to report [Music] is why is it so different this year versus last year i think last year was more of a fear or about people coming into the world you mentioned the

094the unemployment ending when does that end as many issues last year um is there any expectation that this will be solved after december that's when you're talking about ending this program there's an expectation but it's not a guarantee i wouldn't necessarily propose this beyond december but they expect that they'll be global drivers they have people going through a testing program [Music] yeah yeah but like that's that's a few drivers they're short of state lines 300. i can tell you that people are going through this program and they're doing it at the hudson area they can pick and say like i am applying here hudson so hudson services and surrounding communities so there are drivers going through the program who are in our area the region um the statewide storage 300 includes you know north shore

095and other parts of the state but they do have people in the pipeline but they need more so the governor just activated the national guard to help the situation in some areas okay so that's not consideration that's like dealing with the help plastic um 200 is they have more than 200 bus drivers in some of the cities yeah just checking if you have other questions okay so we're going to limit the time on this so why don't you pick out the one or two that are most uh important to you and then they'll pull that out i mean i have the i just have the same concerns about you know if someone sees this doubling of their annual bonus what risks are they going to be willing to take to get it if they were

096sick i know you say they're not supposed to come in and get sick but what we write for policies you're not supposed to communicate yeah they're not close contact by definition that somebody made up somewhere is one thing but what happens everybody is a different thing if they are safe and they decide they they need to get this bonus and they take an anvil below their temperature or whatever they do they hold their coffin and pick up the kids in front of the parents or whatever it is i just i wonder how a lot of parents in the community will think about this and what fears they will have versus you know i don't know i suppose we can't hire ubers or anything like that on short notice i don't know i just extra money

097in a contract that they're asking for that they're not willing maybe we could ask them to kick in 50 or something have asked them to pay for the payroll tax social security but they've said that they do that but beyond that you know they have their environmental illness they're paying for they're paying incentives for drivers to go through training and bring people on board but they weren't willing to pay more than this so was this a surprise to them come september you know it's going to be an issue i think they potentially could have communicated a little bit better and more proactively but we knew we were fully staffed um you know i would have liked to have noticed earlier we also didn't necessarily want to you know welcome to the school year watch out

098in westminster she didn't necessarily want to do that if it wasn't definitely going to be a concern with holy staff so kind of tried to balance and want his best to to communicate it um but yeah it's it's i mean we were relatively okay at the end of the school year compared to most districts and now we're still relatively better and better shaped at most districts it's an unusual phenomenon the unemployment benefits expiring the bodies that it will become less of an issue but i think i would like to keep in mind here the please see guidelines [Music] and because they like our roots they like is that so i mean i think they'd just be less likely to jeopardize that bubbles okay [Music] are there clauses in that contract that harm them if a

099plus is late to that extent like do they have an incentive as a company to make sure they've lost a long time i don't know if there's a financial penalty [Music] okay all right we're going to thank you very much and we'll move on to paul thank you um good evening um i again like looking forward to fairly brief just two items um ecf the emergency connectivity fund i just wanted to make you all aware that we did apply for funds we'll be hearing we expect mid-october those funds will be used to replace our oldest chromebooks as well as provide some internet connectivity for families that um struggle to provide um connectivity in the home so last year again we put that out because of cobit we still have um i believe five families utilizing

100it this year again if they don't have connectivity in the home um that really keeps kids from being able to do some of the research and items that their teachers expect of them when they leave the building so that'll allow us to continue that as well and then the second part again as you are aware there is a big worldwide trip shortage um the good news is i think we've stayed ahead of it for the most part so um again between grants and e-ray and just you know being prepared ahead of time um as far as chromebooks and devices we've kind of stayed ahead of the game um on the one place again and again i want to point out you'll hear me a little bit more next month when we talk about the district

101improvement plan um but the one place we are seeing some issues is our um interactive boards um we ordered things in may that are now not due still until mid-october for the most part it has not affected our classrooms um because these were replacements so it was existing boards or projectors in those rooms already it is impacting this building in particular right now we used to have two rooms that we have to have you know temporary solutions and so it's not an interactive board it's just a projector on a card so the teacher has access to something to protect to the kids but it's not that full experience that they haven't noticed in the classroom any questions for me all right thank you um um there's a slightly new adjustment as you can see in

102the drive there mostly senator the fact that the policy is now more in line to have a an education focus versus a population focus of overcrowding focus on facilities so that was in there it was uh last week there are several financial policies out there for first reading there's also a comparison that susan brought up with the existing policy the uh proposed policy and actual changes so that's up here for the first week thank you um does anybody have any questions first on the policy that success creating design but accounting clarifications they want to ask about what the financial policies are up for forced to read all right thank you very much mike okay so we're ready to move on to the uh business items section of the agenda which is uh where our votes

103take place uh so the first vote that i have a motion to accept the divisions proposed for policy fa facilities development goals so don't worry move in a second sorry second by mine any discussion but i have a motion to approve the receipt of fiscal year 2022 federal and state grants adam makes promotion a second july seconds and discussion on accepting the grants um [Music] approving the receipt of the 2022 federal state grants the handbooks the toronto handbooks and the staff handbook we are tabling until october because there are still some updates to make those particularly into the policies in those documents there are some outdated policies so those will come back to the table in october so on to we could i have a motion to approve the amended school committee meeting dates um

104to accept those so adam makes a motion on second glorious second um these uh updates were made to add the governance meetings and to move a couple of millions of students i do have one question about the final meeting of the year which is slated for june 21st and that is after week after potentially the last day of school that's a very important meeting because it centers on the superintendent's summative evaluation and we have to have quorum for that meeting so i want to ask the group if you feel you can commit to the 21st a week after the last day of school or whether you think we should move that back to have a meeting on the last day of school here i'm finally told where's that night i don't know okay julie i'm

105okay so it looks like we have forms so please hold that date i'm sorry but uh to prevent you from flying off to some beautiful place it would be appreciated it's a very important thing thank you all right uh so we have a motion on the table to accept the um dates as shown in the file here school cleaning meeting dates 2021-22 um all in favor of questions oh the governor's workshops can you just discuss a little bit about uh those typically every september and october not necessarily it's not unusual to have one in one in the fall and one in the spring we often have done that um this year i've added more okay they will some of them september in particular looks pretty heavy first few times there yes uh it's a segment

106of the charting and course sessions however most people so far have not are not able to attend the september october the charter of course sessions being offered and also i would like to have discussion of those topics as a whole committee so we're all in sync on that information that's why i put it as a governance workshop they're not online anymore either i noticed that there's been like a full day working out i know so it's not like we were looking yeah i just i wonder if you could commit to a time frame please because i know you do kind of run late yes um yes uh i would expect them to be two hours and not long we're going to plan for that and we will any approval of the school cleaning meeting dates

107for 2021-22 i appreciate it if you would make sure those dates are on your calendar and if you are ever not able to attend a meeting please let me know directly so that i can determine whether we have a form or meeting okay um we have a motion to approve the updated school committee planning calendar this is a this is the yearly planning calendar that we use to kind of look ahead and see what needs to be taken care of during the year when we plan our school communities so thank you lori second by adam any uh questions or clarifications needed on that plan okay all in favor say aye courses and i wonder if maybe first jeff you want to just explain that a little bit or carol if somebody else planning the limited

108enrollment process what that means and why we really hope you approve those why we have to requested is um an advanced class something like that and some in many instances they're fun at the same time the same teacher and do they does the administration ever turn down classes that are long-term i don't know yeah not non-typically i mean they do try to make the classes run particularly with their specialty specialized classes maybe because i think what happens in small schools like ours we can't offer as many of those particular courses about larger schools to do that before okay thank you do you understand the question i yeah i'm wondering about that too i don't know why there's a vote on this i'm not familiar it's not about having not enough all the course i think

109it's above and beyond tightest of courses that they're offering i think i think it's more way to say that it's more of those kind of above and beyond type of courses those are very outlying courses but typically wouldn't be offered i think that some students who want to take foreign languages for example um or a student who is interested you know is interested in an advanced mathematics course that you can do like you just said in the classroom at the same time she's doing another shoot years teaching another course so i guess who came up with these courses the students just decided hey i want this subject or that's part of the normal experience so i i probably have a little more just because i've been here i guess typically they would be courses that

110were in the um the course descriptions and whatever they were part of the course selection in the spring yeah so it wasn't just like they came in in the summer and said hey we'd really like to have band seven um it's it's is existing courses for the most part and it's just they happen to be in a year that it's low enrollment so okay i would say typically it does happen a lot in the languages especially in the upper level languages um some of the upper level amounts but thank you so it's typically awkward if you just don't have a lot of interest this particular year and is that what qualifies for the vote yeah my guess is there's a policy we should look you and i think we should hold up on a vote

111today we do it every year it is for five or less students five eleven yes so there's more than five yeah okay i like that you still want to run these classes because we were just talking about ninth grade and losing students and you know we have very small districts so i like that we're offering you know those that want to continue with spanish three or the ap options that makes us competitive and it really helps the school up so i appreciate that we also offer and we also offer them through learning platforms like agency vhs vhs classes as well also opportunities oh yeah actually i know a student is taking that which is always a wonderful opportunity because there's no other class that she gets to do so it's great i appreciate that thank

112you all right and the last item uh for a vote is to create a motion to provide the superintendent and or director of finance operations with the authority to amend the contract with nrt or add an addendum for the purpose of making the noted incentive payments for september to december 2021 in the amount with no other changes to the contract so until then you know if we're going to be providing a double bonus perfect attendance if they are if they end up in a situation like they did on the third day of school which would have been financial and thank you for penalty yeah you're proposing an amendment to the language yeah yeah and maybe we should put some i think bob mentioned language about uh you know don't mess around with the if you're

113sick stay home situation yeah i agree about uh if you are sick and somebody reports you sick or not or something like that so we need an actual uh emotion so uh a movement adam do you want to put the language out of you i mean to this language to say um [Music] before i do just a question on on the process here so we're giving authority to the superintendent for director of finance to amend the contract i assume that once that amendment is drafted did that come back to us at the end of doesn't necessarily have to come back i have no problem sharing it can tell [Music] i don't know that it's beneficial to get too specific in the language you want here i think if i understand the spirit of your intentions

114intentions i'll be able to do that i think you're voting on the way so what happened [Music] to remove the final section there after the comma where it says no other changes to the contract strike that from this motion and to instead state in the amount noted language in it stating we'll for that motion julie seconds the motion to change that language i mean i just want to ask the question is that i don't see a date because i trust bob but you know when the only change to the project does saying that he can only change the contract with the nature of making a comment stating you cannot come to work for yourself right now you could say with no change contract other than restrictions related to the incentive program and decide whether we're

115going with atoms whether we agree with adam's men first [Music] say with additional language specifying that drivers should not report to work if they are ill and i will make sure we get that with additional language the specifying should not report to work if they are illegal and if they do well this is adam's amendment he said with additional language specifying that drivers should not report to work okay we have a second to that second example for adam's [Music] what or there's a financial penalty to nrp or there is no bonus or is there but we need to be specifically my point is more just reiterating their policy they already have in place from what bobcats yeah bus drivers should not report to work material as a policy the company already has in place i

116think it's just reinforcing that policy as we continue we well that's because i'm shortage let me tell my drivers yeah i think it's new i think it has to do with the fact that a lot of people didn't use buses last year and now there's a demand on the buses and there's less people because of unemployment actually like worcester was mostly remotely no no there was no there was no incentive to stay home for unemployment so i think it's like the perfect storm you have all these schools coming back in that sentence right it just ended up so end of august yeah so is it i guess do they have drivers from the past who aren't currently working because they work unemployment [Music] to add language to the end here this that replace language at

117the end that says with that you're deleting after the comment and adding with additional language specifying that drivers should not report to them if sick [Music] all in favor of adam's revision just that statement adding that statement say aye opposed say name okay adam's motion passes uh we have uh do we have a motion to accept this um original proposal with adam's point of order i think that's already going to give you that would be to discuss the we're back to the entire statement of adam's motion we have a movement a motion to accept the amendment we have them okay sorry thank you for helping me out accepting the original amended the invented statement here we have a second for that is there further discussion about it so does it be clear we do not

118have a motion about a financial penalty okay all in favor of the amended uh statement here say aye should we discuss not voting on this until we have that workup yeah until we add some additional i don't know when we say what i'm saying is they're looking for more money from the district without offering anything that isn't already contracted okay all in favor of the amended statement here that that was put forward amended as out of his before say hi statement and one post and so that motion passes the thank you um items iqr are all the first three policies um and so i believe uh now if i'm allowed to make this motion for executive session i'm going to move to go into executive session discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining with the

119rural boys and education association the executive session as necessary to protect the committee's bargaining in an position session to uh have a second shot worry laurie for a second any discussion about that okay uh we need to have a roll call vote on this so um laurie hi mike julie i am all right and i say i as well okay so we will move into executive session and we will not recommend an open session [Music] all in favor say hi um okay now we'll close this session [Music]