Dover-Sherborn Regional School Committee 9/14/2021

001[Music] so this is our um reorganizational meeting in um in our policy each school committee at our first regular meeting following the town's annual elections elects from its membership hr advice chair and the secretary all of whom will hold their offices for a term of one year or until a successor is elected in the case of the regional school committee because the town of sherborne moved their election to a date that was after our last meeting in the spring in june we were unable to do our organizational meeting so that is the first order of business now on our agenda it has community comments first followed by organization and i would like to take a motion that we switch those two items and reorganize and then continue with community comments do i have a motion

002removed motion by lynn collins we have a second second second kate potter all in favor i i all opposed motion passes so we will do our reorganization first and then we will move forward from there um i would like to invite nominations for the office of chair of the school committee i'm madam chair i think i set the role of the superintendent it is the role of superintendent i sorry like to turn this over to mr smith who will start this process okay thank you madam chair so i'm going to open the floor for nominations for the chair of the region school committee are there any nominations i would like to nominate kate potter uh kate i'm going to ask you for your consent do you consent to be the chair of so elected i

003do thank you are there any other nominations okay i'm going to declare that the nominations are closed may i have a second a motion to nominate k potter as the new chair of the regional school committee one call in second any discussion then i will do a role called vote um kate potter okay yes maggie sharon maggie sharon yes lynn collins lynn collins yeah tracy mannion tracy manning yes okay then the motion carries uh on a four uh nothing vote i'm going to turn this over to you madam chair congratulations congratulations thank you i'm honored and proud and scared uh but i know i'm joining a team of amazing people who care deeply for students staff and our communities we have big tasks ahead of us and i'm looking forward to really focusing on the

004exciting work that we've been elected to do and working all together so thank you and now we need a place chair so i would like to call for a nomination for a vice chair [Music] i would like to nominate lynn collins should i go through the questions that you went through [Music] um do you accept this role if voted in yes i do uh wonderful are there any other nominations for vice chair thank you okay uh if no other nominations the nominations are closed may i have a second nomination any discussion okay and then the roll call vote uh mike and sharon hi lynn collins yes tracy mannion tracy man yes and kate potter yes hey thank you lynn look forward to working together thank you i'm very excited um and i would like to

005make another motion to nominate a secretary and i'm happy to nominate judy miller who is not able to be with us tonight but has um given her consent i promise um are there any other nominations for secretary okay um may i have a second then maggie sharon second any discussion okay um then we'll call tracy mannion tracy mandy yes lynn collins yes maggie sharon maggie sharon yes and kate potter yes great forward to a good year congratulations everyone um okay so now we're going to move to our sec time for community comments and i would like to just read our public comment preamble to remind people community comments are an opportunity for members of the community to be heard we respectfully request that you please make your comments brief no more than three minutes and

006that you move the discussion forward by adding new information please try to avoid repeating points that have already been made for community comments please raise your hand and wait to be called on when you speak please begin by stating your name and whether you live in dover sherburne or boston or rds faculty member community comments are an opportunity for the school committee to listen to members of the community it is not a form for answering questions or engaging in a debate once the public comments section of the meeting has been concluded we will move on to other business and unsolicited comments from the community will no longer be permitted this is standard operating procedure in school committee meetings across our three districts um tonight in order to allow time for school committee to conduct your

007business and out of respect for our invited guests community comments will be heard for a maximum of 10 minutes do we have any community comments okay thank you hearing none then um superintendent smith thank you very much chair um this is my first as superintendent um in-person meeting um i had the zoom meeting in august so i have to say although there there are some restrictions it is so good to see everybody in person and i also want to make the statement that going forward um i think there are going to be some decisions that we're going to make whether in person or zoom really depending on the large group anyway so i want to start by doing something a little bit different so we shared presentation to all of you so first of all

008i'm going to start by talking about i think just like we are excited to be here in person tonight staff many of them haven't seen each other and certainly all of our teachers our administrators for adhering to the restrictions the masking all of the things on board to open up that morning and talked about your special thanks to the mudge foundation for a new stage curtains until they are ir effort for your many performances you're very fortunate to have the type of donations foundations and support i want to thank them for for being present or members from each of the school committees i should say um and i started out by telling people a little bit about where i grew up born and how beautiful it is i told him i was very accepting of

009excitement that you feel like your your couple left but i've met with just a district things they wanted to share with me your priorities about in education this being the start of my 44th year from the student opportunity act for equity in funding for all students across the commonwealth and one of the things i shared could get and i mean as a group not just personally and one of the things i always talked about over sherborne commonwealth you were one of i'm going to guess probably very few at that time you also by october had faith are into my palace evening it was put together by your own when you know we truly had to pivot and i guess i'm not going after that video there's no way i'm going to open the district my

010husband kiddingly said to me i said to my sister all of you at least want to make sure just keeping my notes here for 15 year members 20 25 thirds knowing a long time i'm up in a little bit here you have the errors here people that attained the things that was said to me was you know you're meeting those new members you know welcoming mentioned i can tell that already there's a relationship in people the governor bringing in the national guard for i think four obviously you know some of it people that peter buss's role admitting to every school on opening day so it was great that was your yeah that was your earlier start with your elementaries and right away you know i did one of the pictures that you will see is

011we finally had a whole group of young kids that they can't wait to see her for school uh also with elaborating they were taking part in their lessons they were paying if they were doing of our attention i have to take into account a year and a half so in our state it is required they they're coming back full-time in person students hear about the cares act your sr1 2 and 3 there is funding administrators having conversation is that we will continue to again talk about engineering counselors if that needs to be paid attention to i also want to uh talk about districts all over one over here at 8 46 because there was a moment of silence and come with middle school students there was a moment of silence our elementary students did appropriate

012injury um okay i think at this point we've got the pictures i'm just going to take a look at before we do the video i'm sure i have the right schools with the elementary um utilizing at lunch we're making sure that we're with each other in desks this uh jill the door and all the little kids that crowded into the nurse's office things are happening my favorite were your high school students to have opportunities for lunches with your student always one of the best things i did i meet with them alone without other administrators and we're able to hopefully have some some open conflict as we do opening day [Applause] my [Music] is [Music] [Applause] why i am [Music] [Applause] country [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay [Music] [Applause] i've thank you so much fred i hope

013you did not think i was kidding when i said it's on another note uh one of the things when i came here from telling my editors at w b u r which is the uh productions and they had reached out to ask me to be part of a year from the raymond public schools so i recently had a call about bringing bat director uh kerry jung to invite beth in october so we will be featured along the center of that but obviously bethany can speak to thank you sorry just let me students uh returning to full in-person learning environment for all local distancing isn't required you know but we are looking at certainly on the 19th our buildings um you know our students so one of the things that we're doing and when you look

014at and they turn 12 you know just you know happy birthday and other families if they need any outrage on where to go so our goal is to get a sit and have discussions with your health and hygiene committees cereborn uh pediatricians working in some of the best hospitals in boston so that we're facing here each and every day and that truly has been something that so we continually i also want to tell parents thank you parents i know you continued this or you know i'm i'm not trying to pivot but things change we're doing everything we can to put strategies in place to keep your kids safe in advisory committee state health experts key decision makers using timely data and metrics that are available for department of public health in your boards of health

015so again and you know we certainly welcome finish learning that is going on in your classes right now as students come back to really assess where they are structures put in place um many opportunities so we're looking at your accelerated learning for your students also for those just like oh my god the roar of a crowd you know honestly i kind of looked out peaked around the corner i believe it was your girl's soccer it was yeah tonight's field hockey so upper elementary to your middle school so those are obviously um our priorities i will tell you and um this is information for our staff members the other day we were having a conversation i think earlier this week and i had said to joe um she was talking about being able being a newbie

016she said yes you know superintendent you're in there and when we went to look at my vaccination status it wasn't in there so i immediately had sent the document right to her so again the staff members our custodians our food service anybody that is an employee of the dover-sherborn school districts and we have overall in your district um in the region itself we think it's about a 99 vaccination rate when you look at the district as a whole we still had some with the elementary we would still get at least 97 maybe higher so your percentages are very high with your staff with your vaccination for your staff um and i think let me just just priorities so again i guess in summary i'm going to say that schools have successfully opened students are in

017person working collaborative learning environments and i want to make sure everybody understands we remain cautious testing forms have been distributed for coping 19 testing in schools for symptomatic testing test and stay pooled surveillance testing i believe kate mccarthy is going to talk a little bit about for your students to take part in a number of those programs and i know okay you're going to go into it a little bit deeper but we want to say this wasn't an easy process there were parents sometimes that had concerns wanted to pick two of the programs when you're talking elementary and not a third and one of the third the concerning ones was the pool testing the surveillance testing and we ended up you know making phone calls and i'm not encouraging this at all but there is

018an opportunity if the parent chooses to opt out i think when we see and then the numbers are getting up there we want them there has been concern i've had mem letters from members in the community and we clearly understand when you talk about pool testing for our older students and i can't tell you that that's not something on the horizon so as parents are signing those consents it's important even if it doesn't exist at the middle school yet we have two of the test and stay program um the symptomatic testing program so because of that we are asking for you to sign so if you do have to pivot if we go into using it for secondary students we already uh have those consents uh and i'm going to also remind everybody this week

019on september 16th we have yom kippur there is no school that day um i know that's what i'll tell you i am so pleased to have had the opportunity to meet and start to work with your school committee all 16 members i'm not sure there's a larger three three separate school committees in the state and that takes some effort and i don't mean what i'm saying about that is we have committed and i think i have along with the superintendent and my leadership team talking about two retreats coming up those are going to be publicly posted meetings so the retreats will be on for the locals first which would be ten members two five member committees on september 23rd um it's going to be i believe five to eight in the evening uh the region

020uh will have their retreat on september 27th uh that also is a publicly posted meeting it'll be the same five to eight o'clock and some of the agenda items are going to be overviewing the roles and responsibilities of what school committee members do and superintendent to make sure we have a clear process we're going to develop operating protocols for school committee how do we operate we're going to share that widely with our community so they understand we want to be transparent we want to pay attention to their concerns and come up with our protocols that we commit to doing on all three committees setting goals and priorities with the superintendent i want to be clear when you have an interim it's a very different process so with an interim superintendent that's here for a year

021one of the things that we can talk about are the so-called priorities the so-called big rocks that the superintendent will lead not only in the district with their leadership team that doesn't need anything everything is addressed but these are the things the big walks you want the superintendent to pay attention to i think it's important to note that when you get your new superintendent training is important for all your school committee because you're evaluating that superintendent based on the massachusetts at a val system and it's very different as far as the standards and i know you've done the process before we have a lot of new members and um so that dorothy trusser who's wonderful she's a field representative from for masc mass association for school committees she was a former school uh committee woman

022i believe chair in linfield and i know she's been here in the past i've worked with her before um again i think she will share very valuable information for you for your community um we'll also talk about communication between the superintendent and the school committee um you know communication that works we're going to share that with the public so the public public understands how you receive information and how we're able to communicate with each other and then the other thing and this is not these are not publicly posted meetings when you become a new school committee member one of the things by law that you have to take part in is what's called charting the course and as you can imagine with the pandemic this has not really been held in person and i had

023members when i met with renewal members tell me how frustrated they thought it was disjointed you know they struggled with it so we have the opportunity first of all i know we're going to be working with our attorneys to talk about open meeting law public records requests you know how we can make sure that we're within legal guidelines there that'll be professional development for any of our members that want to take part in that and also masc is willing to come to the district and not only um do it in-house because of how many members we have if we have additional seats available you can invite some of the members that are other school committee members in your locale so i'm really excited about that we'll talk about that at the retreats we'll come up

024with some dates so you'll be able to take part in that that's going to be the end of my presentation and i'll answer any questions before i go on to my team thank you so much i just wanted to take a moment um it's not a question exactly but just a comment um to say thank you i mean for to all of the team for all of the work that went into starting the year you know the retrospective i have had the opportunity to see it already so i've already been through the ugly crying um but it is really important i think that we do pause to take stock of all the body of work that's gone into this past 18 months and and moving on from here and taking away the silver linings and

025so thank you to all of you specifically with regard to the upcoming retreats and the professional development offerings i just wanted to say thank you for your leadership on helping us to organize to do that i think that has been um both with new members coming and going at the region and also with the locals in the context of a pandemic with a lot of things and other pressures on people's plate it's definitely something that has been a need that we collectively have and um i'm appreciative of your leadership in organizing these these opportunities for us because i think that moving forward it's going to be really important that all 16 of us understand how we're organized what our roles are how we communicate with one another um and specifically the unique situation of a

026regional school committee because i think it became clear to me in the last few months that that that's you know not commonly totally understood situation and i think it's really important for our whole community that we're all on the same page so thank you and i'm really looking forward to taking advantage of these opportunities [Music] agreed i i wanted to say um to what maggie said that um it's so exciting to hear these sounds outside i i had a meeting um outside a couple weeks ago outside the middle school and kids were coming in and out to audition for the play um my own boys at the middle of high school are happily back doing their things and it's it's looks seamless but it it's been a huge amount of work and i i can't

027thank you enough and that's the third time i've seen that video and i still cried so i mean that just goes to show it to maggie's point it's so important to stop and reflect on what everyone has been through you know parents students staff leaders everybody so um thank you again for that thank you and can we get a copy of the slide deck kathy oh absolutely you can put it in your communications but i know is it it's up also up on the web we'll i will add it to the packet on the website yeah i know your video is yeah but inspiring absolutely thank you anybody have any other thoughts or questions okay then i'm going to turn it over to assistant superintendent of beth mccoy all right again i'll be brief um

028thank you for watching the video and well it became a mccoy family project and brought the four of us together in various capacities um it really was you know the goal was to capture all of the work of the entire team and all the hard work that went into those 18 months and um i'm excited that we i haven't done my children's baby books yet but we have a time capsule so we'll have that to look back on in 10 years um so just a couple updates about teaching and learning um so we launched our school year actually in mid-august by bringing all the leaders together uh superintendent smith was mentioning how she always looked to deal with sherburne for the opportunities and the resources so needless to say you can imagine her face when

029we brought her to hail reservation for the leadership retreat she had to use the port-a-potty but we had we had a great time um thanks the silver lining of the pandemic is we have the wi-fi hotspot so we brought wi-fi to hail reservation which was exciting as well as some fans um the first day we talked a lot about the equity audit the how and the what of the equity audit um and the second day we spent a lot about the supports that we're offering for students around academics behavior social emotional support especially coming off of a pandemic highlights again i think the port-a-potty team-building activities including rock paper scissors with steve goodwin if you ever ever have an opportunity to play steve in that game um he is our champion so i wish him

030all the best we also had a number of opportunities that we provided to our teachers over the summer for professional development uh some of them were listed here i know it's hard to say um but all in line with the silver linings and our coaching of the graduates so professional development around authentic projects learning in the brain design thinking project-based learning the flipped classroom model and then after the leadership retreat we actually had three workshop days here with teachers one was the instructional leaders k-12 so our curriculum leaders our team leaders our department chairs talking about the equity audit and how we're going to be looking at our curriculum um as a school then we have another workshop day that kate helps lead for student support and how we're going to make sure that we're

031providing all that we can for our students moving forward so we have our guidance counselors again our team leaders coming together and then lastly we had world savvy come and work with our middle school and some of our high school teachers around using case studies to bring together cultural competence sustainability and bringing the maps um and the stories that we read in textbooks and social studies to light so that's that's super exciting so very busy summer [Music] so that said um launching into this school year we have a couple of instructional goals that i wanted to bring to your attention all of them are in support of the four school improvement plans and the overall districts improvement plan and these three goals have been made options for the educators to adopt as part of the

032evaluation process so again you have that that thread that goes all the way through with the entire district moving in the same direction on the silver linings i think one of the takeaways from the silver linings that we tried to tie into many other initiatives that we have going on between the rds and challenge success and innovation and portraiture graduate kind of the common denominator of all of these things is student engagement so we have a big goal around student engagement and we'll be looking at that through observation sharing best practices providing professional development for teachers we've heard me talk about student support you see our frog reaping here so the commissioner and jesse has talked about learning leaps for our students this year across the commonwealth um so instead of going back and reteaching

033what students might have missed last year we are progressing them to the next grade or the next course and then as experts and support personnel figuring out where there might be gaps or needs for support and then filling them in so it's kind of like each frog has their own path across the lily pads to the other shore and as you see we brought our teachers together our leaders did the same thing a team building activity where they had to make their way on the lily paths lily pads across the river and there was a lot of takeaways about both equity and student support in that everybody needs to cross the river that the people who cross first need to go back and help the others so lots of analogies with equity in mtss in

034support of that thanks to our cares money we are piloting panorama which is a data dashboard that will allow us to take all of the data that we have in aspen the literacy benchmarks the math benchmarks that we have k through 8 and have them all in one place and we can look at student profiles class profiles school profiles across all three domains academics behavior including discipline and attendance and their social emotional wellness thanks to the surveys that we're now doing with kids so we'll be able to identify kids through universal screening a few times a year to talk about the kids who in by data need support in addition to the ones that we see you know anecdotally or observationally in person and make sure that we have the supports in place lastly i'll

035mention um again a pilot as you know we've had literacy specialists added to both elementary schools pine hill and tickering this year we're piloting an academic specialist at the middle school who is supporting the mtss work supporting teachers making sure that the practices they do in the classroom are differentiated that it's not one lesson for all the kids but the kids get what they need and then helping identify the kids who might need small group or individualized support and how are we going to do that through small group classes or age block and those sorts of things and lastly the equity audit kathy and i in frequent communication with nyu um they met with our leadership team during the retreat they're coming to all four faculties for their october faculty meetings to talk about the

036what and how of the equity audit um and the next step is for us as a district to name a 10-person advisory committee who is going to advise them in their work in collecting data making sense of the data and then communicating the findings to the community so this is not caffeine me on the advisory committee this is representative of all the stakeholders there's like three students a parent a community member an alumni a teacher an administrator so once you fill all those slots that makes 10 but then we want to make sure that we're representative of diverse perspectives diverse backgrounds and identities and bringing together people who you know are not only invested in kids and supporting all kids but are also willing to listen to other perspectives um some might have been part

037of dsa but we want to make sure that at least half of them have not to get some new voices and thoughts in the room so next week will be an email and a short application process to apply to be on the advisory committee and nyu is going to be doing this election to make sure the puzzle comes together well without any input from those of us who live and work here and love our stakeholders so that's that i'm happy to answer any questions you said i don't have any questions you're remarkably thorough yeah thank you thank you okay okay so i'm going to be wearing two hats tonight the first hat will be some special education updates at the region and then we'll be jill and i will be talking about the testing so

038this was special education i think i talked about this a year ago when we were hopeful that the middle school program that we have running in its third year now the grit program would be starting at the high school last year but with everything that happened we just put a pin in it um and so we did roll out the grit program at the high school and we have really mirrored a lot of what has we have done at the middle school in the grip program and the other piece we did this summer was we brought in a group from newton north that has had a similar program in existence for about five plus years so the staff that i had worked with they came and met with the middle school and high school program

039to just talk about their systems their structures and just to collaborate and have that professional development so that was very nice um so we've actually this year been able to begin the program with existing resources so teacher a teacher that we already had on staff and also the school psychologist is splitting her role between this program and her evaluation duties so so that's been nice this year i'm not sure if that's going to be sustainable long term as the program grows but that's been a nice piece this year that it's gotten off the ground so it has similar elements where it supports students with social emotional challenges um that just show up in very different ways there's not kind of one student that this program works for it's very flexible and unique for each learner

040so we do have students uh through all grades nine through twelve at the moment uh so that and we will be collecting you know we're working between the 6 through 12 program for data collection so as it's been in existence even though it's been a funky kind of um 15 16 months within some of the time where the middle school program began we have been collecting data we have been reflecting on that and will continue to do so and be able to really think about if what we're hoping the program would support really is making an impact i'm gonna put my other hand on unless anyone wants to ask any questions right now but i just want to clarify so this is happening in parallel with the bridge program yes and so it's a separate

041program with a slightly separate profile of students yes all students in this program are on ieps yes and it's not necessarily a short term bridge shouldn't really be more than 45 days that's the model of the bright program so there might be students who kind of may go to both like maybe you know we're not sure how that will interact but that program also is in frequent communication together about clarifying criteria and things like that but this program is solely special education bridge would support either student online or not thanks any other new questions you may bring you actual hats to change and the thing that i've been doing with most of my time so we have been able to launch testing and really this week all test um formats are available throughout the district

042i know i've probably everyone seen all my emails but uh we do have i think a higher participation rate than we had first thought at the region than we would have because of how many vaccinated students we we have and so i've tried to provide some clarification i know kathy had mentioned this too this testing is open to everyone vaccinated students at the moment because of the protocols symptomatic testing would be the the main test format that they'd be able to access but we also don't know how long that's going to be the case so that's um so those are the percentages and we also at the region for students who are unvaccinated they would be able to participate in the test and stay program and the symptomatic testing and vaccinated students would be able

043to participate in symptomatic testing and she'll jump in if i'm missing anything um so i know kathy talked about our vaccination rates we're still working on all the student data we know the communication the community in itself has a strong percentage it's just kind of desegregating the the data we haven't been able to give you a solid number right now but we know we're in a really good place with comparison to other communities but just don't know the exact number um and we are um happy to report that the high rate of staff and faculty for vaccination rates and just the last i know that you know this is the region but um this week we were able to kick off pool testing at both chickering and pine hill and um we have had around

04470 um consent rate which is much higher than last year at the elementaries it was around 30 last year so so that's been nice and we've been managing that with the help of our vendor as well as adam henry who's back helping us to um coordinate the testing let me say did i miss anything no that was great yes i think other people questions i've been over talking okay i have two questions um is it is there value or is it worth or is it a headache for you guys to just voluntarily ask 12 and older families to produce vaccine records if they want like i'd be happy to scan my kids vaccine to the nurse if that would make it easier i think we have the capability to find out that information but i

045know that you want to talk a little bit about the holds up there or sure so there's two there's two ways that we can gather the information it's by parents emailing us um actually there's probably three ways parents emailing us or when families need to submit an updated physical exam for say 10th grade students sometimes the vaccine is captured on that physical exam update and then there's a way for the nurses to link directly to the miis which is the immunization database with the state now unfortunately our electronic health record has a bug in their system right now so none of the districts in massachusetts can sync with the massachusetts immunization registry at the moment none who use our the electronic health record that we use which is called snap snap they are working on

046it and they say it's going to be done by september but we all know we're at september 14th and um we'll we'll see what happens so we've kind of held off on asking for paper records in the hopes that the bug would get fixed this month and we can just pull that information automatically as you can imagine like a stack of 600 records to go in and manually enter is just time consuming so we're hopeful that snap gets the bug identified and fixed and that it will be fast for early october and plan number four which is hot off the press is that um just like we have to go in and validate our students health and contact information every year in aspen we found out that aspen is uh hipaa compliant so we are

047working on a survey that will go out to families that we can collect the information of which vaccine brand the data the first dose treated in the second job so that's kind of cool plan d yeah the other ones don't work out um and then my second question is for students who are vaccinated who we i believe this was an open question from our last meeting if a student's vaccine is determined to be a close contact they don't i believe need to quarantine or anything but a would they be notified by the school and b would they be eligible to participate in testing state if they wanted to only because my knowledge of kids who've been positive for it at the high school is that they are vaccines so the question um about notifying yeah

048all close contacts will be notified regardless of vaccination status so if your child is vaccinated uh you'll receive an email if your child is unvaccinated and determined to be a close contact the nurse is going to call you and go through the steps of what needs to happen next it's just a it's just a faster method for us who are trying to cover all of the closed contacts in one school day and get the information out as soon as possible so vaccinated students will be notified of being a close contact by email because no action is needed for those students as long as they remain asymptomatic um and then the question about reminding maggie what the second part of the question can vaccinated students just in testing so that's a really good question we haven't

049been asked that before and i don't know the answer off the top of my head to be honest i would want to say yes like that seems reasonable to me um if somebody wants to participate in that i do know that the state is warning us that supply for the antigen kits is very limited and so they are being very um careful with what they are telling us to do with those kids so i think that would be something that i would have to bring back to my my nurse leader colleagues at the at the health unit at the state to ask them okay so then however that works out my follow-up last question is would you as a medical professional advise on these things advise a family who gets an email that their vaccinated

050teenager has been exposed to quoted to go the beacon and get a pcr test for you yeah probably always it's always a great i mean this is what we want to promote is testing whether it's whether it's us doing the testing because we are allowed to when we have the supply or please go and follow up regardless if you have symptoms on day five that step should be the messaging and um and that's something that we can easily kind of ultimately and students who are vaccinated yeah go to the beacon don't have to stay out of school until they get the results if they don't have something no so our so our rules have changed a little bit since last year remember last year any person that had a pending pcr test for any reason

051whatsoever wasn't allowed to blink until the test result come back and came back we don't have that this year okay so if you're vaccinated and you're asymptomatic but you choose to go get a test on day five because you you are close contact you can still come to school um and then if that test result comes back positive then we go from there but it's not that rule has gone by the wayside from last year that's just a lot of the questions i have had yeah that's great that's good those questions haven't come to me yet so i appreciate it i have one similar one um a lot of the you know a lot of children obviously get their immunizations of their pediatrician and then it's really easy to send it in i'm assuming those

052are all send them to miis yeah but now in code it's a little bit different i see people taking their children to cvs and walgreens and foxborough and all over the place to get these shots are they hooked in to the ad so every single dose that's given yeah in massachusetts is in the system okay great now that being said the same issue that i had when i went to sync superintendent smith's um immunization record with the state database for some reason it didn't sync and i couldn't find her or my system didn't see it the same way the state does so we've had those issues but again that's those are few and far between sometimes it's with the i noticed with staff their uh record is listed under their maiden name we have them

053listed in our system with their married name so we're figuring it out as we go around but everybody should be in the system okay thank you even the flu shot records like some staff members that i've done and oh my goodness that about them every flu shot for the past 10 years has come up in their record so okay thank you thank you any more questions yeah one just what has been what what are the concerns um that have caused the slow sort of rate of participation in the in the pool testing i will say the question so i'm i send most of the communications and some of the things that i got back are the questions about if my child vaccinated so specifically the at the region they say well why why do it

054and if my child's sick i will just take them to their doctor to be tested which is actually what we want to hear the symptomatic testing format we're hoping isn't very frequently used because it means someone's sick in school and really what happened all last year and why we were in such a great position that we were was that people kept their kids home and when they were sick so i think it's why why go through this if my child can't really do any of the three tests so i do think that my answer back is everyone's welcome to consent because you really never know um when we could pivot and then you don't have to do like another blast of emails going out and all of that so i would say at the region

055that was kind of the main hesitation and we're and we're definitely growing at the elementary level and things really i think the frequency of communication kind of bumps it up and the fact that we could opt out i think that was another part where we weren't seeing it at first and then we did see a burst because people said i want to do test and stay that's a big one for us because it disrupts learning so little like you can stay in the building and so that was a big push for consenting but people really were saying i want to do that but my child gets bloody nose so i don't really want to do the pool testing so so that was a lot of the emails i was getting so i think it was

056just a little bit more of education of what actually does this program mean for my child and i think it just knowing that maybe we could shift and maybe you know that piece might be what's happening what's the hesitation of even not getting to 70 at the region yeah okay all right thanks can i just make one more clarifying point about the test and stay program because i can't message this enough the test and stay program is only for in-school close contacts and so if you have an exposure that happened at a family reunion over the weekend your child cannot come to school on monday and participate in the testament's day again i think it's a little bit of a supply chain issue with the tests and they're reserving it to preserve in-person learning and

057so just if we can continue to relay that message to the community too as we start to see kids coming back and participation in maybe some club activities or some youth sports that are happening and there may be exposures there um the rules will be different in those instances and i think that was the same criteria we used for the afc testing it had to be testing that we recommended last year when we had those spots so it's similar messaging it's just i think the test and stay has a quite an impact [Music] great thank you okay thank you so much for your dual rolls thank you jill for jumping in there and now we're going to go to our middle school and scott i hope you're going to introduce dr frank tiana absolutely i

058as you are aware i will be departing in a few weeks i just i want to thank the school committee most present and past the support it's been a fantastic opportunity for me the retirement system is set up in a way that it doesn't make sense for me to continue working here i do plan on continuing working and my wife certainly insists and i try to do what she wishes but this is a fabulous place uh you know the leadership team again both past and present has been incredible to work with and um parents the superintendents i think i counted six superintendents i've worked with and the district both was a teacher and administrator most importantly the students we have incredible students you know it's just it's it it is enjoyable to come to work

059every day this past year despite all the challenges has been incredible wow that's silver lining video sums it up i mean there were some great things that happened here and that's a credit to her and for me the past 15 16 months would not have been doable without anna and she's she's a rock and i'm trying to embarrass her but yeah and you know it's just a great place to work so thank you having said that we have very capable hands to take over and that's dr kiana welcome thank you so much mr keller this is a very great place to work and i'm grateful to be here and i'm also grateful for the opportunity to be able to transition with mr keller uh for a month and and that is unique um a lot

060of districts uh don't have the forethought to do that particularly coming off a pandemic with a lot of changes to be able to have the coherence and the consistency for our staff for our students and our families has just been a wonderful opportunity as you know mr keller he's been gracious he's been um he embodies the school we had a positive meeting this morning and just uh how the parents felt about him and some of the reactions that you folks here are watching the direct students staff and it really is um you're going to be leaving a hole here mr kellett and i agree with you on it as a rock and together you folks have established a great working culture and again i'm grateful to be here and to be a part of that

061and so um thank you scott truly appreciate it and at the middle school this is not the only change that is happening as you've seen the initiatives that are coming to bear um it's great work it's the work that needs to be happening but it's a lot and as if you have students in the middle school you know that we've also changed schedules and we have also changed rooms for the better so the work that was done over the summer was truly yeoman's work and allows this school community to mirror the district and focus on making connections as we start the school year and we felt that that would you know through pictures be able to develop the community connection over content re-engage with students understand their stories where they have been so we can

062better serve them and [Music] that's our first goal for our school improvement plan [Music] and what's interesting just coming here to do for sure very quickly is the location of the high school in the central administration it really is a community and the connection with the high school administration john mann has been great in our central administrators but also the high school students in the picture to the right you really can't see them that's mia and miranda who are project 351 uh representatives from the middle school that we invited down to be part of our ceremony on friday and um and that is skyler in the middle with that mural and that was part of your uh update from the middle school and quite proudly um coming back and just watching our staff interact with

063their former students and the fact that this students want to come back is just a testament to how things operate here and so again that's that's an amazing foundation on which to build and move forward just in the next slide please what you see here it and this is in your report it echoes the changes that are happening uh in in the building um and and across the district so as a staff we're working to implement these changes uh to develop the literacies around that build the capacity of the staff as well as build the capacity of the parents as we move forward so that we can provide students not only with the appropriate curriculum and instruction but gives us tools to better analyze where our students are to assess them to be able to

064diagnose and prescribe and put interventions in place so that we can best meet their needs the work is happening right now in school and it's hard work uh but the teams have been put in place that that foundation's been laid and we're we're going after it and moving forward so um we're grateful to have the leadership from the district in this particular area a couple of quick footnotes um open house will be all virtual and i believe that's uh the occasion last year through padlet and we will have that information of the folks very soon and anna had put out a survey to parents regarding parent-teacher conferences um whether to be virtual and or in person and providing options for our our parents uh my understanding last year parents did enjoy the opportunity to do

065it virtually for convenience sake number one and be able to have that close one-on-one time with their teacher but also to be able to provide the option to invite our parents into the building um because they too would like to be here against it as well um i'll leave it there be happy to take it scott will be happy to take anybody and go uh past my well welcome dr tiana thank you any questions or comments i i really enjoyed reading the report i appreciate all the details and i love the pictures in the slideshow i i just want to specifically point out that i very much appreciated the um tying of the update to the school improvement goals i know that's something that we talk about every year you know that having the school

066improvement plans in the spring and it really was helpful to kind of see how the things that are happening you know it kind of creates a cycle so thank you for the efforts to do that and for linking it to the plan okay thank you that's cool all right thank you miss potter and superintendent smith i am now entering my ninth year as the principal here at dover-sherborn it's truly a privilege and an honor to be the principal here um similar to what beth had talked about i'm really really proud of the work that we did do these past 15 months in keeping education going and keeping a focus on students some things that you'll see that are new at the high school we have shifted to yet another new schedule this is a schedule

067that we had actually put a lot of time and effort into just prior to the pandemic that we work with the middle school and high school teachers with and one of the big pieces of this new schedule is something called the flex block and the flex block at the end of the school day enables us to do a lot of different things it gives us hence the flexibility that flexibility is you can receive extra help from a teacher you can also participate in banned in course and as you know through the herculean efforts of jeff herman and janice barry we have been able to increase our numbers in chorus from 16 to 40. band is now up to 62. when i first came here chorus had eight so that's something that we're really proud of

068we're solely invested in making sure that all of our courses including our electives receive the attention and students have the opportunities to participate in those flexblock also allows students to go down and make an appointment with a guidance counselor where they're not missing academic class it also will allow them to develop closer relationships one of the things that we've seen as a result of the pandemic but then also some of our child success survey results and really even looking at other youth risk survey results and that has been the importance of student teacher connections and relationships so this flex block the way that ms keegan and i set it up is we have three teachers assigned to 24 students in grades 9 through 11. i have a group miss keegan has a group our athletic

069director has a group it's it's really everybody's included which is great and we even have some coaches who are talking about how they can get invested in this too and they'll meet with the students uh for 30 minutes each day and there'll be days in which we have specific advisory type activities and there'll be other days where they can go get extra help they can go see their teacher they can go to guidance they can participate in their music programs and then in some cases because we are really only one of two schools for now that has moved to a later start it also allows for athletic dismissals for our student athletes so they are not missing instructional time to me that was a key component we knew that when we made the shift to

070a later start which really has been incredibly beneficial for our kids for their sleep for their well-being the part we needed to focus on was what are we going to do at the end of the school day because not all of our school opponents have also moved to this an interesting silver lining to the transportation issue that is now being discussed with a lot of schools however is these contests are being forced to start later anyways because the transportation companies don't have enough buses or drivers really to get them there at that time so who you know who knows that that may end up panning out and may end up being something that benefits us um so the flex block is is underway um we've seen some you know some early successes to it already

071and it's something that you know we'll continue to get feedback from kids feedback from parents feedback from teachers on we are asking parents and guardians to not dismiss their kids during the flex block unless you need to sometimes those appointments are unavoidable and you can't because we do feel this is really critical time for our kids to be able to access all these different opportunities we did give our seniors the opportunity to be dismissed they are one step away from that more independent life anyways um i think the seniors appreciated that in this way it helps us to really focus and develop core relationships with the younger students as they're transitioning into high school so that's really kind of the big change you know kate had talked about um finally developing or you know rolling

072out grit uh which has been fantastic i've had the pleasure to hire some new teachers we have a new department chair in the mathematics department which we're really excited about and there's just a really positive buzz in the building having kids back kids are pretty happy they're excited to be back you know we we have never had an issue with kids in their mass you know if it's down it's an accident sorry about that they put it up we have such good kids as mr kellet has said they're just really happy that they're able to have their clubs and activities in person to play their sports to have that their drama program going so it's a more normal opportunity and because we have a culture where our kids go outside to change classes because we

073essentially have four buildings because technically the high school gym is separate you have to go outside our kids are already having those built-in opportunities to remove their mask and get a break so the kids have been fantastic one of the things that we're doing a little bit differently from the middle school is for now we are having our open house in person we are also providing an opportunity for families who would still rather have the virtual option to have a screen castify of an overview just like we did last year but we do want to have that opportunity now you know we'll be flexible and if we have to pivot based on what we see happening with our community numbers we will but as another way to get things back to normal and to get

074our parents and guardians back into our building we are going to have at this point an in-person open house we also do not have the traditional parent teacher conferences so that's partly why ours is just a little bit different from the middle school and then finally i'll just say i also want to say congratulations to scott and what an honor and a pleasure it has been to work with you scott and i've had a great relationship we've worked through some challenging issues these last few years for sure scott has always done it with professionalism he truly loves the kids and they truly come first uh in addition he's got a fantastic sense of humor and is always able to give me a good laugh even more out directing traffic as you've become quite adept at

075that traffic traffic guards i know i know i have i have they're in your contract so we've shared a lot of good laughs about uh sometimes you know what these roles uh sort of roll into uh but nevertheless uh they are being done in the best interest of the kids we're keeping kids safe out in the parking lots and ultimately it is about our kids uh so scott i wish you nothing but the very best it's been a pleasure to get to know frank as well and uh frank and honor will make a fantastic team but scott you will be really missed so thank you thank you thank you spider thank you you happy to answer any questions high school related frank will answer that's right he doesn't know that yet i actually did have

076a question mr smith um thank you for that presentation and it may not be you that needs to answer it but you have brought it up so if anybody else can answer it i did have um a parent come to me and we're talking about transportation issues which we're hearing all over the state and we it seems that we do or we did when she spoke about this last week have transportation issues in dover and sherburne with a handful of kids i think you can count them on two hands or so some are from boston and some were from here um it had come out that there was possibly two people here that could drive and help out with those situations but then that never came through and i was wondering if we're talking about

077making sure those kids have transportation you know especially obviously the boston kids if that's the case yeah absolutely and i know that we work specifically to address uh some transportation issues for some of our boston kids but then also our dover and sherborne kids we this year also extended our late buses back to four buses so yeah we are absolutely focused on that and if at any time these come to your attention and you have a question the members of the school committee know that they can always reach out to kathleen kathy will absolutely let me know and i will get back to you immediately um because it's it's critical that those things are put into place so kids can focus on what they need to focus on and not have the stress and anxiety

078around transportation and things that really shouldn't be their problem right and i think the parents are stressed too just you know because everyone's actually having to drive them and i feel terrible so as of yesterday transportation's in place excellent thank you okay great so we have a hybrid program this week and i think we have found a transportation company who's going to take us um for monday through friday for the rest of the year excellent thank you but they did start transporting um our boston students as of yesterday with one of our employees who's going to continue this week and hopefully we transport something that starts on monday great perfect thank you that's been a project in itself i can imagine i can't actually actually i can't imagine i wouldn't um are there and this

079might not be i mean a frank i'm sure it's a question for you sure um are we going to be doing anything to collect data on the benefits or the impacts of the later start because i know that was a controversial decision that you know those of us who are around for that decision at the region you know are pretty enthusiastic about it my sample of one child is really excited about his current schedule which gives him one day in the cycle where he starts school at 11. which is really fantastic for him spark planning on his part somebody was somebody was planning ahead um but i do want to be responsive to our families who are like is this a real thing and what is the impact on our younger students and what should

080we do is there any like what's i see lots of nodding heads in the morning great but we've identified some data points uh at the school start task force meeting like way back so we talked this morning about going back there and visiting those data points knowing that a lot of them are captured anyway it's just them pulling them out and looking at them right um so we'll definitely um have that on our radar knowing that our base year keeps shifting a little bit because now we don't really have a good year to compare it to um because of the 18 months we've just had so there'll be a little creative maneuvering as far as looking at assessments right so we'd hoped we thought we'd see better so it's hard it's going to be a

081little hard to measure that when we've come out of a happier remote and then hybrid last year um but we'll take that all into consideration and i think there's some data points that have come out of beth mentioned panorama that we're doing now in the sel surveys for at least the mental health benefits of what students are seeing we talked about capturing tardy's absences because that could play into this so we talked it immensely about this um now we just rolled out so we'll just go back and revisit and pull out and pick it up where we left it off um and probably just to have to adjust what bases were comparing it to terrific um and then the flexblock which i know has a ton of dynamic opportunities um with regard to seniors in

082particular while they are not assigned to a flex block so they're sort of freed up move about the country when um they're done their class are they able to access the extra help the meeting with guidance the you know obviously they do participate in the chorus yes absolutely and there actually are times in which they are assigned to their flex block 2 in which we so we held a senior class meeting they were required to stay so at any point i have the authority to say we're not going to have senior release today so absolutely and that's actually when they're doing a lot of their senior seminars for the college application processes during flex we really wanted to focus on you know making sure that we're providing the social emotional support but also providing the

083access to strong rigorous instruction and by taking away any sort of distractions and to focus on that academic time keeping that really sacred and then developing something where we could take care of all those other important things and those seminars are important those assemblies are important but it's critical too that we're not interrupting a math class six or eight times a year right so yes absolutely seniors uh can and will take advantage of that you know in this first couple of weeks i think for sometimes for seniors they have this newfound freedom this is great this is great but then assessments start coming in their seasons start building up drama program they know they have practice right up they're going to start staying more and we actually have set locations where they can go in

084the lobbies that's fantastic thank you so much for that information and the reason i was trying to figure out how to formulate my question the band and the ability to participate in band and chorus the flex block has made has enabled that because it could banned often conflicted with other other academics and electives yeah so a lot of times unfortunately um then students who were you know highly invested in their music programs but also said but i want to make sure i get ap physics so i want to make sure i get marine biology or i want to make sure i'm taking that fourth year of a language because we are a small school and we have singletons this enables them to do you know to janice barry's credit music and um so that's that's

085why and and really the the band and chorus teachers have done a fantastic job with this um you know taking advantage of the time uh obviously if we could give them even more time we would you know but some of that then becomes contractual with the teachers association of having an even longer day which i'm not opposed to but i don't know necessarily if there are others in my camp right right that's really great yeah i just have to add to that so um my daughter who's now in college was a abandoned chorus kid and um got exactly we were talking about got to senior year and because she took french she her junior year she couldn't do chorus and her senior year she did online ap french so that she could be in chorus

086because that's how much she loved it so i love hearing the numbers have gone up so high and that we've been able to do that for the kids but also um for years now we've been talking about and i think through maybe the um the student health survey about having how important it is for kids to have at least one person in the building who they can go to and you know that's different for each kid and sometimes it comes up organically but i love the model of allowing them to to build over time these relationships with teachers so i think it's great yeah and i love the three teachers assigned to a group because i think to your point about building a relationship you know sometimes kids have an advisor you know i work

087at a school has an advisory program but you might not jive with your advisor and this gives you some options and also like if a person has to take a leave or a process to come or go it does provide that overarching continuity absolutely that was the the research that ann and i looked at we looked at you know where were some programs successful and they kept saying to be as flexible with advisories you can because if you try to say student a and teacher b are going to be together it might not just be the greatest connection they both may be very respectful of one another but when push comes to shove they may not lean on one another or the student towards the teacher for you know that close relationship there might be

088somebody they respect but maybe not necessarily they'd go to whereas having that flexibility of the three we felt obviously gives them more choice within that and it also helps our teachers too because for the first week when we did all those advisories all three of us were in there and we talked together about ideas of how to get to know this group and you know we did some icebreaking activities with our group so we sort of learned from each other some things that we can do and i think that that really helps too because sometimes teachers may be highly skilled in teaching biology but establishing strong relationships might not come natural to them right they they might if somebody's passionate about biology and we've made this connection but other teachers have maybe said i'm able

089to really connect with kids and here's something i've tried what do you think you know and we've done that so uh it's definitely a focus of ours and we think it's really important and just another piece there are i think almost no trios all from the same department so i think just that other level of feeling like special education sometimes could feel like an island but they're in the mix with the english and spanish you know and i think so just getting to know people and being part of a team outside of your department just more like collegiality pizza's been big yeah very intentional yeah i'm with a biology teacher and a french teacher that's great thank you any other questions or thoughts okay thank you so much mr smith everyone and that's our report

090this evening i also just want to chime in and also mention when i talked about standing ovation at the opening day when it was announced that scott kellet was leaving as you could tell genuinely whether it was his own staff members people in the district um yeah again round of applause you know just uh it just serves to show what kind of uh you know colleague he's been a leader in soccer so i think he would understand the whistling the european style of cheering him so i whistled i always kidding when i came in the first day for my interview it was raining i came in the wrong way and he was very gentle with me and he didn't know who i was out in there is there is lots of work out there yeah

091um all right moving on to the character so in your package you have the words to close out fiscal year 21 and we'll start off with the fiscal year 22 warrants um next month i um whoever will have a new signer now i don't know who's assigned to sign whoever is going to be a signer if they want to come in and give them a mini training um i do have a little staff here um to be signed so let me know we can uh you know set up a short appointment and get you going on that and again these are any questions you have about the warrants or wanted to see them in detail they're always at central office available for review for you guys okay thank you any questions on that before it's

092still you but okay okay perfect so um maybe i'll get some standing ovations i think we have a pretty good financial report so um luckily um you know we we ended june at our last june meeting pretty much the number stayed where they were um just to give you a recap you have your general fund revenue statement your state status of appropriations with your expenditures am i into the roll forward so you can understand how that'll shook out after the operations were closed for the year and then again your quarterly report for your special revenue revolving fund so we'll walk through each of those just briefly if you have any questions just stop me on the revenues as you remember in june of 2020 dussey was recommending that all school committees be extra cautious about

093what was going to happen with the state budget and so you did take that vote to reduce your chapter 70 revenues by 200 000 and use an extra 200 000 of emd in its place well luckily the budget did finally turn out to be a little rosier than we all anticipated so that additional revenue we really didn't need to account for and so that's going to make up some of the surplus that we'll talk about as we roll through all the numbers the same thing happened on chapter 71 reimbursement transportation and if you remember we took your excess of regional transportation reimbursement and put it into your reserve fund just to cover any shortfalls that we might see in chapter 71 revenues for fiscal year 21. well a couple of factors played into that one

094think about how many schools did not go to school necessarily last year where we did and we used our buses really all four days because the same amount of regional transportation money was stayed in the budget there was more money to go around to the schools who did provide transportation so we ended up getting 95 reimbursement which is sort of an unheard of number we may never see that again but for this particular year we did and because of that not only do we not have a negative variance we had a positive variance so that's also contributing to the money that we have in excess at the end of the year um they you know all in all we had some unfavorable variances in that we didn't charge as you saw and you did see

095lower participation in some of our activities um so we did have a little bit of that bonus money offset for the fees that we didn't collect but all in all you finished your fiscal year 21 revenue budget with an excess of about 109 000. on the operating side we actually ended with a surplus of a million one and that's made up of some of the things we you know just to refresh your memory um 400 000 of that was really based on salaries we had a lot of changes in positions where we had savings approximately 100 000 and just staffing changes a lower use of substitutes obviously because of the hybrid model we had quite a large savings in our facilities and custodial salaries mainly due to the director of facilities position being vacant we

096had lower overtime needs and we had no utilization of all summer staff it's almost 20 000 right there and that we normally bring in additional staff to help us in the summer which we didn't do because of covet of course i mentioned that the 85 989 and transportation funds that we had set aside we had to you can you have to use that in the next year so although we had budgeted for transportation in full in the general funds we had to put allocate 85 000 over to the regional transportation fund and use that money so that completely fell to your bottom line along with an additional hundred thousand dollars from athletic transportation we just didn't have as many athletic buses running and we had a small amount of savings on your regular education transportation

097because we had those eight days that we didn't go to school we also saw savings in utilities the hybrid schedule and having the buildings closed for all weekend activities to generate savings and utilities and just to let you guys know our net metering credits for this past fiscal year were about twenty five thousand dollars so that's netted in your utility usage [Music] and then there was a lot if you scan your expenditure your status of appropriations i mean there were savings in every line and mainly that was due to one being the hybrid model um we had stuff left over here in march when we closed that were supplies materials that we were able to use so we didn't have to order as much in 21. so all in all that's how you a little

098bit here a little bit there gets you to your million dollars so adding your revenue and your expenditures together if you want to go to the roll floor and you can see how it all comes into play um so at june 30th of 2020 your certified emd was your millionth rate so your results of operations and revenue adds 109 000 to that your operating surplus adds some 1.1 million dollars to that but you did approve a couple of uses of emd one with capital for fiscal year 22 and the other one we've found our tradition of a snapshot in time before the budgets approved any excess revenues we have we usually apply that to the town's assessments for the next year so that's the 210 000. so your projected emd at june 30th is vermillion

099956. you remember you're allowed to keep five percent of your fiscal year 22 operating budget which gives you your million three 118 so that leaves us with projected xf and e d um of a little over six hundred thousand dollars so we don't have access to that though until our emd is certified i.e our certification packet has been submitted to the dor remember last year i think it took us until february to get us certified so unless we have an emergency there's no push on their end because they're busy doing all the tax assessments but as soon as we get that certification back and we know what the number is uh we will then apply based on fiscal year 21 assessment percentages we'll apply that to the following month's assessment um for the towns so

100we'll let your treasurers know any questions on just the summary of results of the operating budget i mean it i mean it seems to me this was extraordinarily rosy and it was rosie because we got a huge amount of money back in the states that we were specifically told not to bet on right that was one piece of it so that wasn't us like over over saving no and keep in mind i think both towns last year were sort of saying where's the savings from the closure right part of that fell out in fiscal year 22. okay i mean 21. one is you know that 200 000 that we took away would have been savings in fiscal year 20 had we not pulled it so that's coming back on top of um just the hybrid

101model in general is a less costly model to pay for and so all of that savings then did fall out so it's it's it this is a little bit more than we've ever seen but some of the line items and where i'm where i'm happy with where we landed if you look at healthcare we're finally right on like we had a little bit left but that was what's generating a lot of savings for us in previous years right so the things that we have control on that are going to be on a normal cycle came in where they should have had it's more the variable cost based on how we are operating that generated the savings so and we clearly wanted to give back all the savings to the town so they can take advantage

102of the opportunity that um we were able to in this one particular year um not utilize the whole 26 million dollars right so and because most of that savings are related to hybrid we can't count on that for next year we have to assume full operations substitution oh absolutely so just you know when we built our fiscal year 22 budget those were the budget you know those are the assumptions we're at five days in person regular operations so this is a one-time situation based on the circumstances thank you [Music] um so any other questions on that okay so um just a couple highlights on your um statement of uh special revenue and revolving funds um if you remember i just want to highlight my cafeteria they were running they were going to be running a

103deficit but so we took that norfolk county assessment that they usually are able to absorb and move that over to the general fund so you will see on the line item for retirement contributions on your general funds how that was over budget but you cannot end the year with a revolving fund with a negative balance so and we didn't want to leave them at zero so that um transfer then brought them on the other one i was gonna you can see the regional transportation how that's in and out um and something that we haven't seen definitely in my tenure is the use of the unemployment fund so as you know unemployment was a very liberal process this year where more people than normal were eligible to apply for unemployment so we did see um at

104this point we've uh paid about 25 000 unemployment i have some additional claims we're still disputing um but that's one of the highlight to you that that was actually beneficial to have it unemployment fund we sort of self-fund ourselves so we don't pay the state and for unemployment we pay as we incur the claims and just to give you a little flavor the claims are coming from say coaches spring coaches who weren't employees of ours employees who had worked for us unless and left in less than a year they then subsequently become unemployment as you know they go back in time to assess unemployment cost so it was a conglomerate of things that sort of brought us up to the the 25 000. um but i will have to say that was a job in

105itself for my payroll coordinator along with the fraud um i know most of central office was even though we were there at work every day showed up on the unemployment reports um so there was a massive amount of fraud and then just sifting through all the claims that were there definitely was women's work so i want to thank my payroll coordinator because like i said that was um a very nasty sort of meticulous task that she had to deal with um and then i think i'll highlight the miscellaneous gifts if you look at the back page detail you will see that what makes that up and the mud funds uh you can see where the curtains were purchased not yet paid for june 30th but that's where you can sort of see that activity distinguished

106them and then as far as where we stand right now as i said our emd packet has been um uh filed um the auditors start on monday and um i feel like they were just here and um we are currently working on our end of the year report um that is due to dusty by october 1st um and so we're on on schedule to address all of that the one last thing that i will just highlight is why we had some savings even though we were in a year where we might have had some unbudgeted expenses is that the state and the federal government did provide us with funding for those unbudgeted expenses so you had the two grants the cares reopening grant of about 280 000 and then a smaller state coded prevention grant

107of about 35 000. those had to be spent by june 30th and we did um expend those by june 30th and i listed the primary ways that we utilize those funds when we jump over to the fiscal year 22 update i'll highlight that there's um three grants that we have that will two of them that we didn't spend last year that would carry forward and a new one that had just come out so we can talk about that [Music] so that puts fiscal year 21 to bed until you have the audited financial statements uh presented to to the committee hopefully in january okay thank you okay any questions for don [Music] all right so just briefly on 22 you'll have your first set of statements at your october meeting but i wanted at this meeting

108just to attach a summary of the status of our capital projects i was pleased that so many say completed now we actually had a very productive summer and if you look at um at least what we had put on the docket for fiscal year 22 we had both water systems both at the middle school and high school have been replaced the middle school floor hallway so if you look now all the floors and the common areas have been replaced and that if you go into the inner stairs you can see on the exterior stairs you'll see new stair treads which i think actually look really nice okay um and we're going to paint the stairwells just uh the railings to sort of bring it up to par with you know with the mouse equipment you've

109got to continue to bring it out so we were very pleased to get all of that work done before school reopened uh the two projects that we have left um i could not get a paper um to actually join us this summer to do so a little bit of paving so we'll we'll pick that back up in the spring and we still have to do some duct work insulation on lindquist the biggest project that we had outstanding from the previous years was our big ems project and i'm pleased to say that that has kicked off we'll see all those numbers encumbered now on the amounts all the way back to um fiscal year 18 because that's where that first set of funds were set aside and now all the funds in 19. i mean in

110fiscal year 21. so um that i will keep you updated on how that's progressing a lot of the wiring has been done now that we have students back in the building they're going to be working you know different shifts because now they have to test all the points and they also have to wait until it's almost time for heating season right because that's important so we're slated to have um at least everything up and running on the region's campus by the end of december um and that will be fabulous because um we're at the point now where it's um we know that there's issues with our current ems system and so we're just you know partying along until we can get this one up and running but we know it's going to be so much

111better and everyone's going to be trained to be able to use it so um the high school will be just as taken care of as the middle school so that is all in play and you can see most of our years are actually at zero so we finished them out you have a little bit left in fiscal year 17 of um it was supposed to be a feasibility study but we had a little bit down so there was only 3 400 left i think we are going to go ahead and return those funds back um the state doesn't like to see you holding open projects for too long of a period and if we ever decide to do a feasibility study in the future we would probably cover that not as a capital but as

112an operating expense so i don't have any qualms that we wouldn't that were giving something away we could still take care of that at some point down the road but i think just to close and clean our books we plan on turning that 3 400 actually back to the towns because that wasn't under an ima or some of these other years if we have any extra funds it'll just go back to the region because we funded it um and other than that i gave you i've given you a summary of the um esr grants um sr1 sr2 sr3 sort of our thought process right now of how there's gonna be how those are gonna be spent and how much each of them are so as we get further um into the year we'll provide you

113some updates on that and we will definitely be talking at a future meeting more about the sr3 grant that was a larger grant that came out of the american rescue plan that has a few more stipulations around how it needs to be spent so we're working on that right now it's a little early in the process we have until we have almost three years to spend that grant so there's no need to rush right out of the gate and spend it and i think we're taking the fall in order to accumulate the data and really synthesize what we need to use that money for so i think we'll be allowed to sort of file the initial grant application that it's due on october 4th in more of a broader bucket type scenario not knowing that

114we don't have all the activities clearly defined yet because it's still early coming back to school and trying to figure out where where we are [Music] you so much thank you for always leading the charge and doing such an amazing job [Music] questions for dawn thank you so much um okay that brings us to our second read of our mass policy this is um we have the first read at the end of august and it's our face covering policy um we always do a second read so this hasn't changed do it does anyone have any questions before i entertain motion okay um then i will say in accordance with the cdc desi and our town sport of health i'd like to make a motion to approve the second read of the dover sherburne face covering

115policy as stated in our package that requires all people to wear masks while indoors on our campus and on our campus until further notice for the second so moved second thank you elaine any more discussion all in favor bye so can we do that again all in favor say mr reed or is it an approval from this okay thank you um okay um that leads us to our consent agenda [Music] which includes the approval of the minutes from june 8th and the communication about the high school field trip um do i need to read the high school communication shelter but no we just okay um so i'd like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda actually i have a comment on the minutes there's one set of minutes that are not popping up

116on my screen right now but there's a set of minutes that reference uh uh community comments and it's describes uh ethical violations discussed at the meeting and i want to say alleged do you want to look at my copy sure there's a different set of minutes if you look at the june 8th community comments there are multiple comments from community members addressing the recent election for a regional school committee in dover falling school rankings curriculum content and the ethical violations that were referenced in the resignation of a committee member earlier this school year yeah i think we should say alleged ethical violations okay yeah [Music] okay thank you um so i'd like to make the motion to approve the consent agenda with lynn's um so moved second thank you any discussion all right all in

117favor thank you um [Music] i know the hour is getting late um we have communication in our packet um for our own information um and then um items for october the october 12th meeting please feel free to reach out to me um with any items that you want addressed put on the agenda maggie i do realize that the night is getting late but before we adjourn i just would like your point of permission to just share some gratitude for our um as they departed as a retired school committee member which has been our practice um for really all the history of time that i we have worked many of us have worked on the school committee um is that a no please yeah so thank you so much for the opportunity to speak to the

118community and gratitude for the work of our two former school committee colleagues part of i think what's been lost in the zoom meetings and the sort of constant emergency is an opportunity to stop and thank our former colleagues for the many many thousands of hours of volunteer work that they've done on our behalf michael jaffe served our dover and regional community over the past five years spending three years on the dover school committee and two on the regional committee during this time michael has been a fierce advocate for the needs of all our children he was the driving force behind the return to examine the school's start time issue and was the co-chair of that task force for quite a period of time his research skills were unparalleled continue to be unparalleled and michael would

119always be counted on to do his homework and to present carefully researched analysis and support of issues related to student mental health and the positive benefits that might come from providing our adolescents with a school schedule that more closely matches their need for rest it is not an exaggeration to say that without michael's leadership the challenging of the the challenge of addressing start times would have never made it out of committee meetings we are grateful for his work in supporting all our students his commitment to examining our programs with a critical eye at every juncture while michael is no longer serving with us on the regional school committee the lasting impact of his dedication to students remains evident across the region we wish him well in his future endeavors and appreciate his continued service to

120the school community community as the co-leader of the guidance advisory council this year i'd also like to take a moment with deep appreciation to recognize the service of our newly retired colleague anne hubby anne has been a tireless volunteer for the sherbourne and the regional schools i believe she served two terms on the regional school committee as well as one year as its chair during that time anne was known to advocate for the whole child and to ensure that our schools kept student needs at the forefront of all that we do when joining the regional school committee in 2016 anne used her institutional knowledge to inform all that she did to serve to inform everything she did to serve our communities her thoughtful and thorough approach to sensitive matters was appreciated by all of us

121who worked alongside her ann prepared meticulously for each and every meeting and served as the de facto chair in her second year when her chair needed to be away frequently to attend to some unexpected personal issues she assumed those unexpected responsibilities with grace and diligence ann led the regional school committee as the chair through the first stages of our covert emergency and facing with us facing the need to implement remote learning she worked collaboratively with our leadership to bridge the gap between the challenges faced betw by a school system in response to a health emergency and to our families escalating concern about the state of their children's school experience undaunted by that challenge and transitioned to lead our superintendent search last fall she collaborated with our local school district search team members and a search

122farm to conduct a thorough and thoughtful search in the midst of an ongoing growing health emergency though that search did not yield a successful candidate anne's graceful leadership and attention to detail has continued to serve us all as we completed an interim search and will begin the search for a permanent superintendent this fall while we are sad to lose anne at the regional school committee we recognize the long and lasting positive impact that her work has had on our school community and wish her well in the future please join me in offering our appreciation to former members for their dedication to making our community better for the countless hours that they have volunteered in service to our school our community and most of all for the betterment of our children thank you maggie thank you

123and finally you thought you were going to get away with no thanks from us um i would also like to extend a huge gratitude to scott kellett who will be retiring in a few weeks after several years as a teacher three years as assistant principal on eight years as principal of the dover-sherburne middle school did i get that correct yes scott's quiet strong and supportive leadership will be deeply missed by students staff and parents middle school can be a tough couple of years for many kids that was certainly the case for me it takes a special person to understand and love that age group scott the depth at which you care for your students and staff has created a happy and thriving place where kids are supported wherever they are in their journey of academic

124and social learning there are numerous obvious ways in which mr kellett has supported his students and staff but i think many of us will remember him for the quiet and thoughtful things that he did that might have gone undetected mr kellet has always loved the underdog like the child who quietly managed their personal challenges on their own he always found a way to support them daily with a joke a welcome a story or his own special hello so with tremendous thanks we wish you a wonderful retirement you will be deeply missed thank you very much [Applause] all right thank you everybody it's late um make a motion to adjourn [Music] so moved seconded all in favor bye thanks everyone thank you