Board of Education Meeting

001foreign [Music] regular board meeting of the Brookfield board of education for Wednesday September 20th 2023. to start please join me in Rising for the Pledge of Allegiance to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you um all right thank you um so um we have five of our members here our sixth member is running late because they're at an open house and I think for the teachers who are here tonight they're all all know about open houses these days because brookfield's been running them now for the last week I think but Rosa will join us as soon as uh she can get get here you know before we start tonight I'd like to recognize an individual who will be retiring from our district in

002the very near future Ken post is retiring at the end of this month and uh foreign you know Ken and I are Finance guys we uh we share we share a love of numbers and spreadsheets in some ways but we also share a love of schools um Ken joined us in 2016 Ken from will with the Wilton public school districts um and I think being a resident of Bethel it made us commute a little bit shorter and of course loved working with the staff here um can you seen us through a lot of Journey you know when you arrive we were still trying to figure out how to improve our business controls and our financial systems and our financial reporting to be you know the top world class that it is today and also link

003and connect to the town so that we had a single Financial system that worked well with the town and the school it meant changing accounting systems changing How We Do planning changing How We Do presentations changing the system uh everything we did you touched and you handled it so well with your team so I wanted to thank you personally and on behalf of the board for everything you've done to help bring Brookfield public schools to where it is right now yeah yes you can please and those of you who know me know that I'm a man of a few words so I'll keep it brief um I appreciate the kind words Bob but I have to acknowledge uh obviously the support of the board and the support of Dr Brill and especially the support of

004folks like Eric and Joan and the other administrators in getting all that stuff done because you know I might have been leading the charge on some of those things but there was a lot of heavy lifting done by a lot of people and I agree we did accomplish a lot and we've it's night and day from where we were before so I appreciate that and I also want to make the comment that I am leaving and Bob will appreciate this most uh I'm leaving for good reasons I'm not running away from anything I have a grandchild out in the midwest who's going to be turning one next month and if I'm going to be a significant part of his life I need to get out there frequently so I'm running too good stuff and not

005away from anything I just wanted to make that point yeah public thank you before you leave we've got a little gift for you oh unnecessary thank you [Applause] and I had a few words I want to add that you're in great hands with Casey we've been working together for the last two and a half weeks and I'm I feel very good handing the Baton off to her I would just add we do have your cell phone number Ken yes Mr Bell and I I um if I may I just want to thank you for those kind words on behalf of the board um and um it's really important I said this one Ken announced it but um it should go without saying what I need to say again you've been an incredible partner for over

006seven years through all of the things Bob discussed the leadership the loyalty and the dedication and the commitment and they weren't always sunny and pleasant days there was a there's been a lot of challenge to get through to get to the point where we're at to really be world class and frankly a model of business controls and operations uh regulatory control but also some things we didn't mention is all of the capital work that we've done in terms of working on our buildings and moving forward and being a significant part of all of that work as well and just recently moving to the healthy school start times and changing the bus contract and the bus runs and all of those things there's just so many pieces to the back office essentially of running a school

007system and um you've been a great leader a great partner a great friend and from the bottom of my heart thank you and just all the best in retirement yeah as we as we said the other day taking the rest of your life off God bless you thank you Ken well yes the board members any of the board members want to say something sure I just want to say thank you I've asked you a ton of questions over email over the years and I some of them might have been really dumb questions but you never remember you know never made me feel dumb so I appreciate that and uh best of luck in retirement yeah thank you Ken I've been on the facilities committee since I've been on the board and you've been a huge

008support um it's been great working with you especially with capital and Facilities thank you I'll add I hope you can get to some more baseball games and I hope that the Mets start playing better [Music] some difficult times running all kinds of different numbers and scenarios but I appreciate that you were always calm and patient and even came with a smile so it was great working with you well join me in one last round of applause for attention [Applause] so next on our agenda we have the opportunity to be introduced to the new certified staff members and John I don't know if you're going to combine that with the opening of school report so you're going to do the introductions and then I was going to ask if that's okay if we can combine them

009while the principles come up if they could talk about their introduce them however you'd like to okay so um maybe we could start with principal balanda start with the high school this time and come up and tell us a little bit about the first couple of weeks and opening of school and introduce his staff members who are a new certified staff members who were able to make it tonight all right thank you for it's not usual I don't usually get to go first it's usually elementary school so um Good Luck Dave Dr Dr paid us off clearly um so I I really want to start with introducing my my new staff I think that's the the right place to start um and so we're very pleased to have uh three of our four new uh

010teachers here tonight uh one unfortunately is homesick um that's gonna happen this time of year it's happening already I think across the district so I'll introduce my three teachers uh to my immediate right is Mr Nathan Wilde he is our tech ed teacher if you could stand up [Applause] comes to us with many years of experience from Bethel High School so we're glad to have him here next up is this is Donna Lesh she's our chemistry teacher comes to us from Woodland with years of experience at high school so that's awesome and then also to her right to her left my right is uh Mr Dominic moroli who is new in our English Department um he came to us uh from years of experience in Oxford High School the person who is not here tonight

011could not be with us is Shannon Martin an English Department and she comes to us from Amity Regional with plenty of experience so um I'll apologize to the three of them and to um our student here tonight for quite an interesting first couple of weeks um I wasn't gonna say it but you know Mr Roland might have brought up previously he goes oh you got heat issues and it's let out early and then the the sprinkler and fire alarms today and you know it sounds like fire and like water issues and then I did tell we did have frogs I mean this is not the ten plagues of Egypt but I think we're on the other side of it I think we're gonna make it through I appreciate your work today as we dealt with

012the um the Techno strobe lights from the uh fire alarm for most of the day so I appreciate that uh it's been an interesting opening for sure um and then you know Monday we got to get out early like same old two o'clock like it used to be so um quick updates uh that we do typically every year in terms of enrollments uh this summer we had uh from the end of school to yesterday 38 new registrations uh and 20 withdrawals kids going to different districts uh our current enrollment numbers in each grade and 12th grade is our largest class 231 kids in 12th grade uh 220 and 11th 209 and 10th and 213 in ninth grade with a total of 8.73. so that's very similar ironically with all that movement up and down in

013graduating class we're pretty close to where we were last year at the same time I want to offer thanks to and and my school counseling team who got the schedule together so much faster than we ever have before Cindy Wortman Sue Griffin my counselor is Jen Julio Deb Birch Bianca nasello and Caitlin McCabe um you know as always thanks to Carol Ann and Karen and Lisa for taking care of the main office and making sure that stuff goes well um I had Rosa hop Croft and Lisa Lisa Missouri who are currently stationed in room 109 and not even in their own office while we redo the roof so they're down on 109 and mobile sitting at the back of a science table at a repurposed room so they're just staying positive and doing a fantastic

014job down there in both School counseling and special education Mary negri was out there announcing for the field hockey this afternoon so I appreciate all her work that she's done you'll hear from Steve Baldwin a little bit later on tonight Kathy who is in the back and would definitely not want to be recognized but I know has done amazing things I actually I'll admit I gave her a hug the other day and said I thank you so much for being you because you've got it started and ready to go this year so she's been great and our custodial maintenance staff who cooked this summer to get everything done as quickly as they possibly could we got some new guys that came on we had some people coming back and you know I also want to

015give a shout out to Laura park and rec who's not part of our staff here but has really worked on this project out there which is one of the three new things I certainly want to talk about if anybody looked out the back window some of the new things we have the new Turf is down the pavement is down as well and they'll be hopefully putting up some fences and we're looking to get the rubber down on the track in the next week so it's coming fast and Mr bald will be able to update but that's thanks to the work Mr Baldwin did you know in working with park and rec and Mr Caldwell as well the locker room is coming along you know I thoroughly enjoy having multiple construction sites during school it's really

016awesome but that's almost done the which is and it's fantastic you'll see a couple pictures tonight the school counseling and soul studies roof is well underway they worked I think till 8 30 last night and they're there again for those of you that came in and saw they were there there again today just working trying to knock it out and get that roof ripped up and replaced so we appreciate that and the work that they've done this summer there's also two new renovated bathrooms student bathrooms a couple other things our physics enrollment has exploded our community has said we really want to work on science and so we really had enough to run we could have run seven or eight sections of physics this year that's how many kids wanted it so that's one thing

017I like to share some positives about enrollments we're planning for the 11th graders going to take the PSAT in October and we are tweaking things a little bit uh we're actually going to be giving the pre-act to 10th grade students and I want to make sure I ever explain that to people it's going to be in the spring it's something we've never done before but in the age of standardized tests and all the things that are changing across the board the ACT is a different type of test and we want to give kids an opportunity to demonstrate you know their Mastery and their understanding and get some quality feedback and maybe Act is an option for some of our kids so we're going to do that in the spring as well I wanted to share

018that as part of the PSAT that happens in the fall last fall the 11th graders took it so our current seniors and we have a student Dia gurish Kumar who is a National Merit scholar semi-finalist so she is up for that which is fantastic she is one of like 16 000 in the across anybody who took the national mayor test last year so that's pretty awesome um so she's working under scholarship application right now and hopes to finish it soon um the senior student parking lot we're going to be working on painting that we thought we could maybe do it Saturday but there's rain coming so we're going to be postponing that a little bit um the senior classes want to do something new and different so they're going to try a I think it's

019Phantom Fest or something and Ava will talk about that maybe a little bit they're going to take a trip to Lake compounds those of you that knew we were working so hard on trying to get Civic to work with a get a social worker from outside to come in and work here um you know part of the day starts on Tuesday of next week soft opening we're going to start nice and slow two days a week and so we're excited to have that resource and thanks to the board for the really I looked back to my opening year report and last year it was like she'll be starting soon and now we're a year later but we're finally there starting on Tuesday and we're excited about that I realigned some classrooms so we have student

020services so really in the school counseling Wing although they're not there now is all our school counselors and our two social workers so we've got all the student mental health support is down in that area and our school our speech language Pathologists are now grouped together and we've done a little bit of moving to make sure that happened new start time and able certainly talk about that a little bit um you know it's I'm hearing a mixed bag I hear like I couldn't tell you like yay or oh my God this it's from the kids side it's a little bit of everything right there's some some ups and downs so I'm going to come back I talked to Dr Royal today probably come back to the next meeting in October maybe give more an update

021about some data and some things like that to help share where we are there and pretty pretty much I think that's it I think I you know I would definitely leave you with um what open house and some parents were here so they got to hear this so I have to ask the question Dr Burrell what's the difference between a man wearing pajamas on a bicycle and a guy wearing a tuxedo on a unicycle I'm not sure one wheel perhaps a tire you're welcome attire well done thank you Mr belanda and we're started and here we go we purposely didn't record convocation because of what these gentlemen do to each other and everyone else when they have the opportunity with the microphone but I think it's time for a whisk in your middle school maybe

022Mr Renda you could come up share a little bit about things favor we'll have Ken do an icebreaker there you go okay good evening I'm Dean Randon the principal at Western Air Middle School this is always a very exciting uh year every year is such an exciting uh way to come back and see the smiles of the students the new staff that we have so this is one of my favorite um am I hitting something here it's one of my favorite meetings to be able to talk a little bit about the start of school but I will start with I have a couple of Staff here because like Mark had mentioned we do have a couple of of our staff out sick and I think I was the one who started it so I feel

023really terrible about this um I have Kara reisky she comes to us from Danbury she's a sixth grade literacy teacher we have Julie Andrews she is our seventh grade social studies teacher and she was had worked at Fairfield Woods Middle School we also have two staff like I said that are not here we have our new dean of students who are very excited about Nicole Buxton and we also have Fallon Campbell who is a sixth grade science teacher so and we also have two great pairs Tara mana and Reed Duff so I'm very excited the new staff is phenomenal love it do you want to talk did you want to say I was like a little nervous that they're gonna have to do a dance or something so of course it's my show now all

024right always start off with a thanks to our WMS secretarial staff for all the work as everyone knows the amount of effort and time it takes to shutting down the the previous year and then getting ready for the new year uh for anybody who's been in our building they also know Mary Liz my secretary who is able to keep me on track she's absolutely she's out this week and I've had numerous people tell me I look like a chicken with my head cut off walking around so I Gotta Give a big shout out uh for for them the custodial staff are always being doing a great job cleaning the buildings getting ready for the new year it's not an easy task uh staff that came in for interviews and students that came in for demo

025lessons for our phenomenal new staff central office for helping us the whole hiring process it's very time consuming tedious and we're able to get that done in a timely manner of course Mr bednarik as you know I did not have Miss G this year Miss Gordon she was in the building actually still in her office waiting to get to the new school but I didn't have her services this year so uh Mr benark and I um you know you're really helpful with the state reports things that we have to do and anything with interviews references paperwork for hiring student handbooks scheduling issues and scheduling a pair of professionals and really our whole admin team that that we have at central office and the administrators for all they do to help us we keep each other

026sane even though we do pick on each other because someone actually did say to me God you guys are mean to each other at the convocation and I said no come on we love each other don't we come on you're supposed to shake your head mark um Debbie an All-Star this is the first time that I can remember we did not have one student Mr bus so that's huge yeah obviously all the new routes and everything that they put together we'd have one student Mr bus the first day at least first day and Laura from park and rec uh I I've been meaning to post I haven't done it yet on Instagram or Twitter for our Courtyard it was very very overgrown and they came in and got a company to come in and do

027that so that's really awesome we can have classes and people can go out there uh as always beginning of the year our PD days we have our mandated training grade level meetings team meetings things that we talk about students that we have if it's IEPs 504 so on and so forth really getting ready for that first day so they're comfortable and ready to uh be ready for the students on the first day excuse me and also set up classrooms our first faculty I mean I just want to just talk quick about we spoke about again we we uh as we come back to a new year we talked a little bit about the Transitions and how truly important our job is especially the interactions that we have every day with kids also how sometimes you

028know we don't realize as as staff members not just teachers and I truly mean it's not just teachers it's everybody that kids come across in a building and bus try everybody that they come across how important uh excuse me or realize the huge positive effect that we have or we could truly have on our students um for you know it's for them to to think that we changed maybe someone's alive and the things life's and the things that we do and uh help them in amazing ways so we watched the video it was called life without teachers video starts by asking students What would life be like without teachers it showed some kids a little perplexed by the question making comments like um uh one kids goes that'd be crazy sorry can you give me

029a minute I need to think about that um so a little perplexed like why what do you mean what would life without be without teachers video goes on they talk about they teach us and help us move forward I don't know how I'd get through my day without my teachers they encouraged me all the time they teach discipline responsibility there'll be a decrease in a lot of dreamers and that they don't know what they want to do in their lives my teachers told me and showed me how to Chase my dreams and find Passions my favorite ones were one student talked about how her teacher's passion for working with special needs students really pushed her to want to major in special education in college another little girl star started to get a little emotional and

030cry and said that her teacher changed her life and taught her how to be a better person again the the idea of it's not just the academic part of it it's the whole picture my favorite one student says school was not for me I skipped I walked out I didn't care but there are teachers that just kind of make you come to school because they brighten your day and make it positive and make it positive and truly the only reason you come to school is to see that teacher he also states she pushed him and said without her he could not decide what he wanted to do in his life and was proud to make sure he told her and let her know that he was going to be the first person in his family

031to go to college so imagine knowing that one of the reasons a student might only come to school is because you brighten their day and make it positive that that's amazing to me it has to be the ultimate compliment as a teacher we ended the activity with just a little quote that I thought was meaningful it said the meaning of life is to find your gift the purpose of life is to give it away again as we start um into our new year so we welcomed 590 students each class about 200 uh 200. it was definitely different first time we haven't had uh fifth grade and I know it's over 30 years because I've been there for 29. I I actually was on the internet trying to look historical aside I was trying to find

032out what the exact date was that fifth grade came over to Whiskey in here but I couldn't find it does anyone know 1990 no way yep was it 90. my son was in the first class that went from fifth grade at Huckleberry it was 90. yep oh gosh that was awesome but thank you for sharing that um we also 28 new students and again that's it's funny because we usually um we're usually in the 30 range but we didn't have fifth grade this year but we had about 28 new students and and ones that I know that um left starting in in the summer we had I think it was only like five students that left in the summer part um that we have for registrations and leaving the user students IAS Magnet School AAS

033Magnet School area towns Newtown Milford New Fairfield Bethel Danbury we did have some come come from New York and as far as Ecuador Brazil and New Zealand so that was pretty impressive some exciting things about our staff that I just talked about is I'm very excited about that um we are now truly a six eight Middle School we are true middle school and having only three lunches is really weird because usually I'm used to over two hours of just a lot of noise near my office so it's kind of weird um our new parking lot which was uh which was really exciting now we have a new parking lot new side of the building we're looking really good uh our new UNH schedule which is a unified Arts where our banding course now our choice

034for the students in their specials rotation what does this do well students were and also excuse me students were able to get a chance to make some other choices for their specials which we haven't years ago we did for only our eighth graders but we're given a little bit more choice but with this change our band and core students will not be pulled from their content classes where they would be pulled for lessons and things like that and during our elt time which is I always say like our study time for for people that are old like me um that they would miss two or more of their elt times to go to Whole band and chorus groups now they'll only miss one for a lesson so that I think is going to be very

035impactful very exciting also over the summer and again today our mental health staff received some training in what they call DBT dialectical behavior therapy it's a great way for our mental health staff to have a set curriculum to help our students understand how they how their thoughts affect their emotions and behaviors and through this work we'll be able to help our students manage and regulate their emotions this is something we are adding which again as exciting as new we're adding it to our behavioral Serbia intervention process which I know we've talked about interventions before in the survey process which now is actually referred to as mtss which is multi-tiered support systems so as you know we currently do have lessons throughout the year we use ruler the ruler approach and ruler Twos for all students

036which we figured that's our tier one instruction that's a regular instruction for everybody everyone gets that this is a process that would you we would use for our tier two and tier three for students that are really struggling in managing and regulating their emotions so much it's affecting their academics social emotional well-being and really their ability to be successful so this will help all our mental health staff and really our whole staff to have a Common Language and approach with behaviors and how to deal with them and handle them in the use of common strategies for our students to use so that is something we're very excited about um geez I'm almost done I thought I had more um a proud boss story as always every principal feels that they have a great school and

037staff we're very biased at times I know but we do we think we have great school and staff so every year our new teachers come and I say to them one of the things I say to them is I feel that so many people in on our staff are so inviting and welcoming they're going to be coming asking to do something can I do something for you sometimes one time one teacher told me she had to shut the door because there's so many people coming which is funny in a sense but like that's really awesome that people are doing that so um one day after school I go to one of our new teachers room and I noticed that she had all this stuff to be able to decorate her bulletin boards I say something

038something effective oh God look at all that stuff to do the bulletin boards she says to me that her grade level staff the people on her grade level had come by and gave it to her to decorate her boards so just came to we want to help you to give it now I don't know if they helped do the boards but I did ask but I was busy um but to me again I think that gesture of just you know someone new here I've always had this uh things to put up for your board because I know it's one of the stressful things as you start the year also that a staff member gave her a binder that said this is why I teach on the outside of it which the inside of it you

039put thank you notes or those positive emails from students and families and look at it when you have a real tough day so again not something that people have to do I think just is so inviting about whiskey near and I know I've talked to each and staff members and they have felt that they have the you know the the other staff members are so inviting and welcoming to them which is really an awesome thing so proud Papa's story I guess now you know I can't leave without a funny one so I hope no students are listening one student said to me you really did I know yeah probably not you really did a great job Mr end of picking my teachers and my good friends are in a couple of my classes my response

040was I knew they were right for you as you may know there's so much involved in scheduling I really had have to say and it's misuse goes magic I guess but of course I couldn't let him down and I have him feel that I did pick every class for Him special so my staff made a little fun of me because I couldn't give that credit to someone else but seriously uh to the start of the year I don't know I didn't want to let him down they want to let him down so to start the new year at Whiskey near has been very exciting many students and and parents have have made comments to me about just the excitement around it so I'm very excited for the whole year to go thank you appreciate it

041thank you [Applause] into the best principle in the principle in the history do you know the joke best principle in the history of Candlewood Lake Elementary School Dr Dave pepsoski and I'm so proud to introduce a member of the best recruiting class in Canada Lake Elementary history Tracy dressel an absolute Superstar preschool teacher [Applause] watching you with your children and what you do with these three and four-year-olds is nothing short of magical your patience your humor your kindness you're awesome so thank you for that uh it is open house this week so unfortunately a lot of my teachers were not able to be here tonight uh Taylor Albert I'm sorry I'm like Albert Taylor no it's Taylor Albert wonderful Superstar fourth grade teacher crazy report Casey gruposo Jen O'Connor Judy Sanborn Nicole Guerrera Dean makes

042fun of me every year because I have so many teachers to announce I make them announce themselves and he says well it's because you're older you can't remember them haha Dean uh before I talk about the first two weeks I would like to say to the new teachers please go home and get some rest you you've come we've introduced you we love you and value you please go go [Laughter] thank you for coming thank you for coming [Applause] so for the past year or so I've been coming to the board of ed meetings and talking about the awesome beautiful physical structure and interior designs of Candlewood Lake Elementary School rest assured it continues to be the most beautiful building I've ever seen Bar None I challenge any Elementary School in this world to be a

043more beautiful building however tonight I would like to recognize something beyond the physical beauty of the school I want to recognize what really makes the phenomenal structure so exceptional the people within it and around it thank you to our secretary Sandy Deb Lisa and Claire they came together this summer doing schedules setting up procedures fixing up the main office ordering supplies materials and greeting everyone with smiles thank you to our custodians Julio Barb Greg and Frank working while construction was happening helping staff members set up classrooms keeping and that are keeping the building looking beautiful thank you to our cles PTO one PTO two schools United they did a wonderful back to school breakfast for the staff a nice little grab-and-go thank you to our amazing staff consisting of CES hes and or hhes and

044WMS joining forces to create one cles super staff coming in whenever they were permitted over the summer unpack and get their classrooms ready for day one now I already knew hhef staff were exceptional and I quickly learned that CES staff and WMS staff were equally exceptional and I'm beyond thrilled to be leading the cles super staff thank you to the cles community parents Guardians whose patience kindness and understanding have been nothing short of legendary changing tour dates not once not twice three times due to construction leaving Labor Day as our only option for student family tours before school started and yet they still came out in droves and were thrilled and excited to have the opportunity to see the building with their children before school started on the subject of those Labor Day tourists huge

045heartfelt thank you to Dr Burrell Dr Mann Mrs d l from central office Dr rodel Miss Gordon Mrs fehner from cles Mr Baldwin our athletic director Mr Renda WMS principle and Mr Belden our board chair who gave up their Labor Day to spend seven hours at Candlewood Lake Elementary School giving tours and I'm not going to lie there was a tour group that I was ready to take around and they actually said I would kind of rather wait for Mr Bell to give the tour fine we'll wait for Mr Bob to give the tour what else there we are in addition Mr Belden gave countless hours of his time helping teachers unpack boxes dismantle boxes move furniture anything they needed he and Mrs Belden were there and happy to help thank you to Mrs Greenstein

046who also came in over the summer and unpacked the classroom for a teacher who was out on maternity leave and now day one day one we welcomed 40 Pre-K 162 kindergarten 165 first graders 193 second graders 178 third graders 193 fourth graders and 180 fifth graders Mr render that's a grand total of what [Laughter] 111. I thought you would know that one one one one our students enjoyed the fine dining in beautiful cafeteria spaces impressed by the quality of the cheeseburgers with four lunch waves in our K1 calf and four lunch waves in our two five calf teachers gave tours of the building to their students during recess in the wonderful air conditioning Mr Belinda instead of heading outside in the miserable Heat Wave I'm so sorry Mr Belinda teachers continue either have recess inside

047or outside in our Courtyards playscapes will be delivered next week and should be installed shortly thereafter our kindergarten hallway is magically transformed Dr Burrell saw it today into Legoland or dinosaur world with students playing in groups of three to five building awesome Towers robots airplanes and spaceships and then dismissal growing pains were definitely felt with our first dismissal with our final bus rolling out over 90 minutes after school ended due to the volume of parent pickups almost 150 27 buses and limited space because of construction and having no north parking lot yet I stood watching what could only be described as a colossal colossal disaster Dr bro witnessed the debacle brainstormed with the admin team and he had Gerber paint some lines and put up some Jersey barriers and poof we had two separate areas

048one for parents and one for buses day two and we shaved off 70 minutes we were on part of shave off another 10 minutes on day three but one of our Jersey barriers had other plans and decided it was going to snag one of our buses delanis another 20 minutes that being said I understand the board might receive a negative correspondence or two but with every communication I sent to parents the responses were overwhelmingly positive in fact when we were 90 minutes behind schedule and I sent the communication we're going to be about 90 minutes behind schedule over 130 families responded you know you kind of do the only three were negative three one of the negatives rescinded the email when her child came home with an ear to ear grin the rest consisted of

049positive affirmations many remarking that the smiles on their children's faces due to the above and beyond work of the clas teachers and support staff providing wonderful experiences for their children immediately put their minds at ease some students didn't realize there was a delay I just was hanging out with my friends for some time after school that was awesome my notification I sent for the jersey barrier incident received about 50 replies with only two negatives it was the same two who were negative before which is okay we're all entitled to our opinions all things considered the past two weeks at clas have been incredible and I do feel like I'm living up to the awesome responsibility of being the greatest principal in cla's history but rest assured my sons continue to keep me grounded when they're

050quick to remind me that I'm also the worst principal in Seattle yes history in any event the facility is beautiful the staff and Community are amazing and students are learning and laughing reminding us why we do what we do every day thank you [Applause] those were awesome reports so thank you guys thanks for having that on the agenda tonight thank you um do any of the board members have any questions for the principals on the first day you can talk briefly about the Healthy Start times and what kind of impact that's had on your buildings yeah either of them um I can honestly say it really we're only a difference in five minutes from what we had before so I haven't actually we the kids get off the bus before 7 45. now we're seeing

051uh students get off the bus at 7 50. so it's really it's been pretty easy for us for you yeah like I said I will be coming back uh next next board meeting talking a little bit more in terms of data in terms of looking at tardies and attendance and that sort of thing to give a more concrete specific uh to see if that has changed anything um just anecdotally looking at kids as they get off the bus in the morning um it I will say and I said this to Dr Braille it's hard to judge teenagers any morning whether it's 45 minutes later than it was before but it's a pretty typical look they're good they always say hi and but it's a lot of you know air pods in and walking into the

052building and so it's hard to really engage from that perspective I'll be able to get more data from that um during the course of the day you know I like I said I hear a mixed bag I think one of the challenges has been a couple athletic events right is some early dismissals and some kids that have to leave because uh whether it be golf or there's a couple other sports set to leave a little bit early um and miss some some class time so that while it's the only thing I can definitely point to seems is certainly a negative because kids are missing class I don't know how long that's going to last and how long that's going to perpetuate it may it may change as you move forward um but you know I

053did I did get a call from a parent who was um a little concerned because the 45 minute uh late start time later and her child was only out to the bus 10 minutes later than they were the year before and I think what I explained was basically we have consolidation of routes of you know you have fewer buses and so that it does take a little bit longer sometimes to get around um but that was the only call that I got in terms of that but I'll have more specific data in terms of tardiness and then some other things and some information from staff I haven't had a faculty meeting yet we don't have that to the beginning of October so by the time we have the next meeting I'll be able to get

054more information from that specifically so can um the number of missed classes be part of that data I have I have all that including also some additional stuff that um Mr Baldwin and I have talked with Mr post Ms DIA uh in terms of Transportation what it costs some of the costs for buses because we can't we're at this point using very few I think I only saw on the list one or two um school buses everything else has been land jet or uh Connecticut limo for athletics yep so that's another part that I'll share for regular Transportation can you figure out maybe what the earliest pickup time is for students or maybe the average pickup time in the morning for high schoolers sure that would be Miss Dion yeah we can do that okay

055thank you absolutely so we we were told that when the Athletics wouldn't be affected by the school start times is there anything specific that got in the way of that well I don't think it was ever said that Athletics would never be affected I think it's it was one of the conversation was as we talked about Healthy Start times at Athletics anything could if you're playing a team and another in another town that has an earlier dismissal than we do which is there's certainly numbers um right now the biggest issue we're having was golf but they oftentimes do leave early um anyway uh that's just kind of what it is um you know that I know for example and again Mr Baldwin can speak more to this in terms of Athletics um but for example

056we were at the mercy of Sacred Hearts field because we were playing a team at Sacred Heart and Sacred Heart said you can have the field at three o'clock if you're gonna play the game and the T other team had no other place to play the game so to get down to Sacred Heart for three o'clock we have to get the kids out earlier so they can get there so that was one case certainly this year um so it might be venue specific but I'll be able to share all that data um you know for the next meeting any other questions okay thank you um yeah actually very similar to uh what Mr Renda had said it's a 10 minute difference instead of 8 30 it's 8 40. and honestly the bus is coming to

057our lot at about 8 30 2 ish and we just unload them because by the time those little kindergarten features go from the end of the sidewalk all the way to their low class it's about 8 40. so there really has not been much of a change so what time are you loading the buses so in the afternoon we are beginning our bus load around 3 25. and our last bus has been rolling out around 3 47 right now so uh we're pretty amazing what they've accomplished with 1100 students moving and the parent pickups remain steady about 134. and what time is parent pickup it runs simultaneous yeah so 325 for both have you had any issues with subs or uh no I mean there's you know we're always going to have some some coverage

058issues but I have to say been we've been doing great you know we have our uh four building Subs uh and we have some great long terms in that we've hired so we're looking pretty great okay thank you all appreciate that all right why don't we move on um next on our agenda is public comment um the board of education does welcome public comment each speaker has up to three minutes to provide input to the board and at the start of every meeting a maximum of 20 minutes is allotted for comment on any item included on the agenda for the the meeting at the end of each meeting time is allotted for comment on any item under the board's purview um and that would also include overtime you know overflow time if we ran out

059of the 20 minutes so um just an important Point discussion of school personnel any individual students or individual members of the board is prohibited by our policy so we have three people we should we should be able to do this within the 20 minutes and I'm just with one of the people did not put down the topic I'm just going to do all three at the beginning if the board's okay with them okay so first up is Mrs stepniak short Oak Drive and this is my third time speaking so I'm hoping third time is the charm um good evening I know that all of you are invested and dedicated to our values and our school districts School District might come and pertains to the recent resignation of one of the board members um and um

060what I was going to say is the board member was elected as a Republican it is my belief in conviction that this vacancy should be filled by another Republican member of the community with the five members departing in November we are in desperate need of someone who is knowledgeable in finance maintenance and operations and someone who works really well with parents and legal Guardians we do need a partner right now from my seat and because of the con conc Ern we right now we experience lack of collaboration and of an opposing view which is apparent if you closely follow actions of the board lack of accountability and refusal to take necessary actions poor attitude and continued refuse of listening to the parents and lack of transparency um I hope for your understanding and thank you

061for your time thank you and have a good night next up is Mr Montero all right Austin Montero 17 Dairy Farm Drive also commenting on the board of ed vacancy that just popped up and you know it's a thorny issue I'm not going to get into how it was handled but I want to talk about first after speaking with the state yesterday they referred me to this should be a local Charter a town Charter decision so with that I just wanted to read two different parts of our Charter c2-6 and appoint you to a vacancy in an elective office Shall Serve until a successor elected at a special election or at the next regular Town election qualifies and then the bylaws of our board if if a vacancy occurs on a board of ed it

062shall be filled by the remaining members of said board until the next regular Town election at which a successor shall be elected for the unexpired portion of the term the official ballot specifying the vacancy to be filled so without going into um you know some back and forth on how it was handled and the timing of everything I like to talk about moving forward and what AGA just mentioned I believe this must be a republican seat she was Republican um on the border now we have five members that are going to be gone in the next few weeks so to me that is a tough decision to make with a whole new group of people coming in I think the best decision will be to make the people of Brookfield their voice heard or at

063least weighed very heavily in this decision and again if it's not filled by a republican I feel this would be a very political politically driven move which I don't think will be a great thing to do um so a couple ways we can weigh and measure this would be I think to choose um with the way in measurement to choose at the same time to have the people of brookfield's voice as part of this to either go with the 2021 election results we had somebody with 31 less votes than the exiting member um they can fill the seat and that's a lot of the people of Brookfield speaking for her or we just had a primary last week Republican primary the top vote getter in that I think those two folks should have first and

064second right of refusal to this vacancy and then after that if they both decline I think we're due here for a special election for this seat I think whenever we can give the people of Brookfield more say in a decision that is this important I think it'll give us all much much more trust in the board and in our local town government and I think that is lacking I know that is lacking in this town so if we can do that and bring back trust that is our top priority that is my top priority and I think that this would be one huge step forward together to do that so I thank you guys for your time and I hope to speak to you guys more about this soon thank you thank you and our

065third uh public speaker is uh Mrs prendy hi it's Anna prende seven Crossroad um I've been here a couple of times I think and I always kind of feel nervous but especially today when I walked in and I recognized some people I'm like oh I'm between friends because I do know half of the board and I don't know I feel like half of the staff but the topic that I want to talk about you kind of just shut it down because you said not talking about uh um School personnel and I don't want to talk about school Personnel but the handling of a member of this District the worker has affected my family correctly that's why I sent an email to the board of ed last week and I didn't even hear an answer back

066that hey we got it or we heard it or heard you so that that's why I'm here um as the handling of the job of my husband has affected my family greatly and for a couple of reasons first I want to talk about the schedule and second the salary not knowing the change of salary and the change of scheduling has put everything uh in this area in my family and the thing that hurts the most is the person that we are talking about has nine years of experience in this District so seeing the new stuff coming in I am happy and excited for them because I have worked in the district the kids are marvelous the teachers give a hundred percent the administration give a hundred percent but My worry is like the administration in

067the office is not supporting these employees you are losing good workers and I feel like if they are targeted they will find a way to get rid of them I'm sorry to say it but that's the point that I feel at and that's all I have to say at this point I have much more to say but that you know like being the spouse kicks in and I don't want to put that in here because I get very very emotional and having three kids in the system and being around the system and having an eight-year-old asking why is that it's not a head custodian is a very uh hard question to answer okay you're getting into individual personal matters and Mrs brendy you probably saw all of our reaction we never received an email from

068you so could you could you could you resend it that would be helpful for all of us so ah yeah okay thank you okay so that's it for public comment um let me get my agenda I had it there it is sorry all right so next up is uh to welcome our new student representative Ava Canton so welcome Ava we look forward to having you at our meetings and hearing what's going on in the schools and so I guess the question I have is did did your principal tell you you know give you a training on what what to expect or you're like here going oh my God what am I going to do well so we were supposed to have a meeting this morning but two minutes after the bell rang the fire alarm

069went off um but it's okay because I talked to him briefly about it so I have a good idea and plus I know a couple of the people who've had this position before so I have a pretty good idea of just what to go over we really really value your input and insights and to the extent you can stay and listen to the meetings we would love to have you and you can participate give and give input to us all as we have some of our discussions but we're also all sensitive to the fact that high school students have a lot going on and so if after you give your report if you need to up and go that's perfectly fine so I just want you to know that we welcome whatever time of yours

070that we can get so go ahead so a lot of what I have to say overlaps with what Mr bolando was talking about before as a senior in high school my class advisors Mrs Howe Mrs nidri are doing a lot for the senior class they're calling it like the senior experience um we have the painting for our senior parking spots which was supposed to be this weekend but the rain date is October 7th so seniors just come in for the whole day to paint their spot and all the designs are pre-approved by Mr Buckley so everything went through him um we're also going on a senior trip in October on October 6th to Lake Compounce for their Halloween like Phantom Fest um and again this is how and Mrs Nigri um along the student government

071are working to coordinate this um we also have a cloud Fair coming up that was supposed to be today but um the fire alarm thing kind of also set that back but it's going to be rescheduled I think to next week um Tuesday okay perfect um so yeah that's just where all the different clubs um set up tables where all the students come in they can get a look at all the different clubs that our school has to offer a couple things just related to the start of the new school year um we talked about this before but the new school start time uh like Mr volando is saying I've heard a lot of mixed things from students for me it seems to be working out fine and the only thing I think is as

072a student involved in athletics and I'm also working a job there's sometimes little like back to back where I don't go home between practice and work or school and work um but that's definitely something I can adapt to and from the teacher's perspective I've talked to a couple teachers who said it's nice to be able to like they can say bye to their kids in the morning or like send them off on the bus before coming in here um there's also as we see the roof construction so a couple teachers in that Wing were displaced but I think they're getting used to it by now it's an adjustment but I think they're making it work and the new field it looks really nice um so yeah going off of that into Athletics I wanted to

073say I'm on the dance team for the high school I'm a senior Captain so I can speak a little bit to what's going on for the Athletics for our school we have our first home game on Friday which is really exciting with our new field um and yeah in terms of dance team we had our first performance at the convocation earlier this month and we'll be at the game on Friday I'm also in a couple clubs for the school I'm on youth commission which is more of like a town government group um we're planning our candidate Forum which is going to be on October 10th so tomorrow at ilt all the different IELTS are gonna go log on to I think a Google me or Zoom where Mr Belinda is going to give a quick

074presentation just so some students have some background information going into that Forum we also organize are in the process of organizing our career fair which we did last year which is a really successful event so we're excited to do that again um I'm also in National Honor Society and we're just getting the year started with collecting dues and we had a Dairy Queen fundraiser in August and I think that brings me to the end of everything I had to say but I'm really excited for this position thank you welcome welcome nice job Anthony thank you hit a home run on the first first step back well that's great have a good night have a good night Ava thank you all right written correspondence um agastapniak wrote regarding the digital Locker Andy Korea and Robert Scalera

075wrote regarding the Director of Business and operations proposed hire Irene Korea wrote regarding the BHS main entrance Melissa Yeager wrote with questions about CLE s Construction and Food Service Peter Girardi wrote regarding the budget for cles Denise rice wrote regarding concerns at cles a student concussion at cles work being done at CLE s and an incident report Elizabeth Pryor and Gene Jaquith wrote regarding the demolition of Huckleberry Andrew and Jennifer Baum Laura Glenn and Jennifer Berlin wrote regarding bus routes Kristen de Sousa wrote regarding the opening of clas concerns Nick Schmidt wrote regarding cles Jessica Hanson wrote regarding clas opening and arrival and dismissal Tanisha Hutchins wrote a letter of concern Elena Lopez wrote regarding a BPS Facebook post Alana Kavanaugh Elena Lopez and Chris Dickinson wrote regarding the board vacancy and Andy Korea wrote

076thanking Sharon buchell for her service on the board that's all I have okay thank you approval aboard minutes I'll move that the board approved the minutes from the regular meeting on August 16th the special meeting on August 21st first and the special meeting on September 14th second okay moved and seconded any comments or at the Pro's tenants for the minutes okay hearing none all in favor all right okay it's passed next is our superintendent's update Dr Burrell all right thank you Mr Belton first I'd like to welcome quesadilla to our table here tonight welcome Casey you'll hear from Casey she's got a couple of updates tonight that she'll be sharing regarding the budget and some back office support I do want to share with everybody a lot was said about cles so I'll stay away

077from that that's been kind of a every meeting update from me but specific to um Center School it will be turned over to the town this week all service contacts to maintain Center School have been turned over and taken care of to Mr Tedesco the oil tank has been emptied we actually receive a credit on that oil oil that Mitchell took back all supplies and materials have been moved to Candlewood Lake there was while the lower library was being finished the library books were still there there were still some other materials everything is out of the school now I think Dave we just moved some easels finally we got some final easels that we were repurposing that were new to Center School that we brought over and are using over at Candlewood Lake and like

078I said the keys will be turned over by the end of the week so um we're excited about the opportunity to really move forward with centers with cles now Huckleberry I sent the board a picture earlier today all but one cinder block area is is down now and so the real cleanup now begins to move the materials off site and begin the north parking lot in the driveway the other part of the driveway um another update for everybody we collaborated Casey myself and Angela forgel along with Mr Roland met with Aaron and Tracy from the health department last week there is going to be we're already preparing for it you heard Mr Renda mention it there's an uptick right now in covid and they're anticipating a big up Tech uptick in fluent RSV so we're

079just all preparing for that what's really nice about the guidance from the State Department of Education and the Connecticut health department is that they are really turning over uh responsibility for districts to look at CDC guidance look at State Department guidance work with your health department to really develop your own mitigation strategies and so while we'll follow recommendations and they're the classic recommendations we all have we are not going to have any kind of a mask requirement or mandate or anything like that so it's just important and we'll get a letter out on that in each of the principal newsletters in the coming days but I just wanted to make sure everybody knows that we're paying very close attention to that however whiskey near did have an uptick probably about 10 cases right Dean with

080about 10 cases this uh yeah but there was about 10 between staff and students there's about 10 10 12 cases this week so there was a lot at whiskaneer not so much as Center or the high school say again yeah just this week so I wanted to let everybody know about that so we're paying very close attention to that and we'll get a continued information out to everyone really important for everybody to know the security task force we have a meeting scheduled for the end of October on the 26th the two main focus areas the first one will be cles we'll have two months under our belt we invited not only Dr pepsaski but um officer Kelsey our SRO there to come with us and really talk through okay we have two months under our

081belt what does security look like there there any needs we have uh are we in a good place um uh Eric will talk a little bit about without getting into the details of security technology and how all that's interfacing uh at the new school in addition to that the other agenda item we'll be talking about Iroquois they Supply natural gas they're located behind whiskaneer there's some requests going on with Iroquois in terms of increasing their production as I understand it and so we're going to talk about that as well from a security and safety standpoint next thing I wanted to talk about was just engaging with parents and our Educators and with students I'm going to be starting a advisory Council for the superintendent called them just initialing it speaks students parents Educators advisory Council

082to the superintendent looking forward to getting that started I've talked with Rebecca Newman we're going to be working on getting system-wide PTO to together and some representatives from there to help me each school has a a climate committee working with folks from the climate committee and really working on community engagement improving communication hopefully developing more trust and the perception of more transparency I think the board is quite transparent in the administration and the teachers are quite transparent but making sure everybody feels that that's the case and ultimately having that trust like the established relationship that we talked about with Mr post with the board of finance and so forth so we are making sure that our community is supporting resource allocation for our students ultimately is what our job is here so I'm really excited

083about getting that going then my next couple of items I want to and first invite up Mr melanda just to give a quick update on the book challenge that happened right at the end of the school year and you could give us a quick timeline of where things are at thank you Mr Blanda thank you Mr Muriel um so the book reconsideration process for the book fun home tragic uh tragic family tragic comic um was submitted in in may we started the process uh it has been we've already selected the committee um we actually used three three new members we kept some members and brought some new people on including mental health and um and some other people as well to to give a different balance and different perspective for this uh this time so

084we can use the same group the book has been read we had a scheduled meeting I feel like this is a theme for Monday but because we had to leave early because of water uh that so that meeting was canceled um but that was going to be that that was the scheduled big at least hour-long discussion um you know for an initial discussion on you know now that everybody's read the book we'll go through the um text the library selection process and talk about alignment there if there is or there isn't we go through the weeding process and talk about does this book qualify for being weeded or not based on um the criteria and then we also go into the um the actual form itself um which ends up being I think it's 12

085or 13 Pages worth it's gonna take a little bit of time as we get through and we'll go Bullet by bullet through that as well it might take more than one meeting but that meeting is scheduled for next week um I think it's Tuesday or Wednesday we're going to have that first meeting I'm going to take my time with it not to slow the process down but because it's such a significant conversation and we're not taking it lightly but everybody the entire committee has read the book and has all taken notes on it and ready to have that discussion so I had hoped to have something for tonight liked but I apologize we could not have the meeting on Monday that was scheduled so I had to reschedule it because we left early so that's

086the plan where we are now I did notify the the group of people that had put the reconsideration form in I notified them last week of our plan meeting this week and now I'll let them know that we're planning to meet next week I'll follow up with them probably after this meeting or tomorrow to let them know that where we are on track okay thank you thanks Mark um I'd actually like to invite Mr Roland up now to share a little bit about what's going on with um his progress so far on special education strategic plan and the second program review and uh upcoming report from Craig thank you Dr Burrell good evening everyone um the two points I'd like to make tonight uh in my remarks are the special education strategic plan is ongoing

087um one of the points that we're going to use is a special ed PTO meeting on October 2nd to engage parents and elicit feedback and to uh begin to form that parent committee I've had multiple parents reach out to me that's going to be part of meetings throughout October in addition I have regular meetings with the principals and with our special education supervisors to create subcommittees and committees in each building around special education and start forming things like a mission statement and a vision statement that align with our district strategic plan so that's happening beginning October 2nd conversations are ongoing and uh in addition to that in in the November meeting um Dr corvo will be back to speak about the specialized program review so in speaking with her regularly uh weekly she's completed her

088portion of the outplacement portion speaking to our out of District placement schools as well as the parents and together we've talked to the parents and called parents just to inform them of what the purpose is of the out of District placement portion of it in addition she's concluding her interviews with school staff in the specialized programs so on the November 15th Board of Education meeting she will be here to present her report on the specialized program review and I will be collaborating with her on that as well as presenting a more broad update on our progress in this strategic plan as well as some data on ppts I've attended parents I've reached out to parents who've reached out to me and just some of the programmatic pieces that we're incorporating from the correct program review

089that Dr corvo completed at the end of last year so that's my brief uh portion for this evening and I thank you for your time and your and your attention thanks Bill and then finally for the superintendent report I asked um uh Dr Mann attended a conference today um and uh well I'll let you just well thank you all right so on the heels of I'm hearing about where we are with our special education program review and strategic plan and a follow-up to the board's August meeting where we dissolved the subcommittee where you dissolved the subcommittee of the board on equity and inclusion and gave direction to Dr Brill um to you know kind of handle it at a district level and then a school-based level I wanted to give a brief update kind of

090where we are at that with that um so you know we're currently laying the groundwork with the principals we've asked each of the principals to begin considering how this will look will it be inclusive of a school climate committee or will be a separate committee they're going to get some parity on that and we'll talk about that as we go through the next couple weeks and thinking about how to include be inclusive of um you know get gathering information from faculty and from students as well as from parents and then today Catherine Abrego who is our world language K-12 coordinator and I attended a diversity equity and inclusion Symposium held by the State Department of Education and hosted by the commissioner and it was a it was really um it was under the idea of

091kind of cultivating meaning part meaningful Partnerships among um you know District leadership as well as teachers and so it was we took the opportunity to be present and listen to a lot of ideas that were shared with by districts that are currently doing some having some interesting practices and getting some ideas and one of the takeaways that I had was um I can't remember from which district uh shared it but the idea of you know taking um data that has been collected which is one of the things that the subcommittee did a lot of um a couple years ago a couple years back and um so we'd obviously have to update that data but using that as kind of the the foundation and crosswalking it with uh the mission statement and the Strategic plan and

092kind of seeing you know where where we are as kind of like a a starting point so um it was really helpful to go and just kind of get some ideas uh as to how to give direction to the um the building principles but then also as we're thinking about speaks and maybe having a district-wide convene of these um these are these building level committees so um we're excited about starting this work and um you know it's kind of the ongoing embedded nature of what we do you know it's uh We've we've been hearing a lot about uh having involvement from all of our stakeholders so that's what we will continue to do so thank you for the opportunity to update [Music] and that concludes the superintendent report okay thank you thank you questions for

093Dr Barrow okay hearing none we'll move on um uh next up is the assistant superintendent so and just for everybody's uh memory we talked at the last meeting about alternating the uh assistant superintendent and the director of special education to uh and student services to alternate give us reports uh in alternating meetings so this is I think the beginning of that correct it is okay although I'll be back again next month so just as a little preview um so I think I'm going to invite Bill up now oh okay you guys want to Big leave all the principals by themselves right um so um this uh is this presentation that I'm handing out so that members of the board are able to not crane their necks too much although I will probably better um we'll

094do that for the audience at home and around me um is a follow-up as we said on the um I know it's really a check-in on the board's request for information on our social emotional learning Focus including the ruler approach uh in in the schools and kind of just where we are uh coming out of all of the work that we've been doing over the last many years so I do want to just preface uh my presentation with a reminder that much of what I'll be referring to throughout this presentation is kind of inherent and implicit to what Educators do as their everyday work I mean teachers get into the the profession because they really want to help kids grow and develop you know we when I was in graduate school one of my professors

095I went this was for my masters of arts in teaching for English and um you know he he was our the focus throughout the entire degree program was that you don't teach subject you teach kids we're not here to teach English we're here to teach kids we do it through the vehicle of teaching English so all of us are here even as a central office administrator I view my main mission is to help support the development and skills of students um and so that's really what you know any whatever whether we're talking about social emotional learning or we're talking about math or reading or science or any academic skills we're talking about um you know skill development and um it's you know we have a variety of different tools um that we and and approaches

096that we do use ruler is one of the ones that is kind of codified uh in the last eight to ten years um the again that kind of implicit nature of an educator that looks to support students and make sure that they are ready and available for Learning and if they are out of you know and teachers are able to kind of tell implicitly but again just like when we brought in rubrics for making sure we had objective grading practices ruler does um this kind of brings to the the Forefront of our minds you know the general practices that we want to be looking at and some specific approaches that we can use in order to uh you know make sure that our students are with us and available for Learning and are in you

097know a a solid place so with that last year we brought in an attempt to try to begin to quantify a little bit the the efficacy of ruler but also because it's not just ruler that we that we use for our uh to make sure that our kids are doing are doing well and are ready um but so we use we brought in the Desa we presented this you last November and um we were a little bit late to the game the death is really a full year screener that you're supposed to that teachers are supposed to use three times throughout the year we administered it twice in February and then one again in May but just as a recap this is taken from that presentation that you were given in last November the Desa

098identifies these kind of soft skills right and it there it's aligned to the castle Frameworks the castle Frameworks are National Frameworks that integrate academic and social emotional learning it's kind of the foundation for School counseling but it also is something that again is just foundational to all educational work um and the benefit of of kind of exploring this and administering the Dessa um is that there are many event benefits but one of the ones that I've really kind of seen um is that it helps keep in our the Forefront of our minds um that we are looking for uh to make sure that intentionally looking for the skills that our students are you know ready and available for learning so this second slide just kind of shows you the the various areas that the Dessa

099uh focuses on self-awareness goal directed Behavior personal responsibility self-management social awareness decision making relationship skills and optimistic thinking and I did wanna you know me I love my strategic plan alignment I didn't want to let the opportunity to go by without uh kind of calling out where this aligns with the work that we're doing in the Strategic plan and um frankly the castle Frameworks you know which uh are specific to um self-awareness self-management I just have my cheat sheet here responsible decision making relationship skills and uh social awareness or so are kind of nicely crosswalk with our Brookfield Seas which we are in the midst of working on fleshing out and making sure those dispositions have specific characteristics and we're clear on where they are at each grade level but this work that we're talking

100about right here and even just the conversations of us having uh talking about social emotional learning um help us move forward in our work with our strategic plan not only with our Brookfield C's but also that that portion where the portion of the graduate is explicitly integrated into curriculum at all grade levels and across all subject areas we know we're not there yet but this is part of that of doing that work and then finally the idea of research-based instruction and assessment practices that are assured for each student are designed and implemented the Dessa is a research based and normalized uh a screener tool and it's something that you know our students are or every teacher was able to reflect on with our students this is just a brief review of What ruler stands for

101so recognizing emotions in oneself and others understanding the causes and the consequences emotions labeling emotions with a nuanced vocabulary expressing emotions in accordance with cultural norms and social context and regulating emotions with helpful strategies and so that's just what the acronym stands for and I I wanted to also just review quickly that the way that this screener works is um that all teacher the teachers do the Dessa mini which is a seven to eight question um you know mini screener for each one of their students and if the results of that warranted then they would go in for any individual student to a lot a deeper the desk of full which is a 75 assessment or 75 question screener um but each one of these questions is directly aligned with those dispositions that we referred

102to earlier the other thing that is really important to point out is that this is a very contextual screener it asks teachers to specifically think about the context of the in the of which they are with the student so for example at the high school if they're using ilt it's those those teachers as they see their students within ilt So within their that you know dedicated time during the middle of the day we understand that that doesn't necessarily extrapolate to everything every part of a student's life but it's that teacher's observation of their of that student's skill dispositions in the past four weeks which is one of the reasons that we can't administer it until or we can't take time for it until at least we've had we've had at least four weeks of school

103so it's very specific to a time frame and again it is it's an opportunity to kind of just get a snapshot of where uh you know a student is we um however did decide to use this screener screener tool as with aggregate data we're not digging down into specific data for any individual students or even classes of students we looked at we brought this to you because we're getting used to this we wanted to make sure that this is something that we are interested in continuing to use and get used to the uh you know the calibration and make sure that our teachers are comfortable with it and so um I wanted to share with you because I was trying to kind of think about how I could share this data with you that would

104be somewhat meaningful and so I'm going to share with you the data that that we have gleaned again this is a very kind of large you know about a 55 000 foot view of um what's going on with the results of our uh screener um but we are using this more as Trend uh information this is not going to give us any specific you know details on um on any particular students but it is looking at you know more Trend data so this first bar graph that I'm sharing with you is the entire District overall you'll see the pre and the post results here and so the green is the students that were identified as having overall strength in those seven or eight areas the blue is having very typical and strong skill dispositions in

105those areas and then the red is the need for instruction so those students who have demonstrated in two or more areas that they you know could use some specific instruction on that to give you some context just that were kind of clear on the percentages um 25 in the end so obviously the left hand is the pre which was done in February the right hand is the post which was done in May um and so we for that 25 that represented about 560 net well it represented 569 students in our district the 71 in the typical was 1587 students and the uh four percent in the red was a total of 90 students throughout the district I do want to let you know that I only put um total total numbers on this slide because

106in the individual uh grade level slides the numbers are so small that I didn't want anything to be identifiable at all and so um particularly in that need for instruction range so I I kept with percentages for the rest of the presentation but I just wanted to give you a sense of how many students were talking about and it's about 22.50 um and so this kind of again just shows you that for the most part across the district our students are demonstrating pretty strong dispositions and skills in uh their social emotional competence the next slide is an elementary report remember that last year we had CES we had ajs and we had fifth grade at WMS so I'm not calling this yet a CLE s report because that would be not exactly true but these

107are all the grades that would have been represented at cles had we moved in last year and again you kind of see you know across the across the way where our students are um and the you know pre and post changes which were not significantly different from pre to post but there were some changes some of the uh you know sections went up sometimes the need for instruction went up sometimes the strength went up and sometimes typical went up across the pre and the post for K through five the next slide is WMS which but just the current WMS 6th 7th and eighth so again you'll see that our in our sixth graders were in the lowest need for instruction and had the strongest typical and strength across the um across that particular cohort and

108our eighth graders were demonstrating a little bit more need for instruction um than the other the rest of the school however still significantly strong in the overall social emotional competence across the school and then our high school students which is the one true one that is consistent it's 9th through 12th um you know we had again very strong results across the board in terms of what the Dessa social emotional competence results were showing for both the pre and the post um so I wanted to just highlight those so now kind of what does it all mean right because uh you know we I gave I did share this with cape the other the other night and when you know we've talked about the fact that when you're looking at this very kind of aggregate data

109this trend data it doesn't give us anything kind of specific to sink our teeth into however what it does offer us is show us a few kind of General ideas right now and also puts us on a path for where we want to be by the end of this year um and now I think the number one takeaway is that our teachers are seeing positive social emotional competencies with our kids across the board that's pretty much what this is showing that the teachers feel that the students are demonstrating these skills and these are the observable skills from what are from what they you know can see in those past four weeks so the majority of our students appear to be prepared and available for learning when they're in that particular context they're ready to actively

110develop skills and creativity critical thinking collaboration communication and change making um you know that's our Brookfield sees we are well poised to um help continue to develop those skills um and again with those if you're thinking of that castle framework that integration of academic and social emotional um they are they are part and parcel of a whole they cannot be uh pulled apart if you if you can't just do one and not do the other it's just how Learning Works um one of the other takeaways is that there are specific instructional strategies and activities that we can employ to enhance this skill development specifically that is one of the benefits of being a part of this state-sponsored cohort is that we are afforded resources through aperture which is the company that employs death that does

111the manages the Dessa where teachers and administrators and can go in and pull specific lessons or ideas from the platform that is shared with us and I'm going to actually share one of those with you at the end of the at the end of this presentation and so there it's not as though we just kind of are winging it and hoping that kids are you know demonstrating this and that it could be a totally different aspect this year we are able to intentionally do some of these uh different you know do some different approaches and different uh skill building activities um the ruler approach which is one of the aspects of what we bring into Brookfield particularly pre-k through eight ruler at the high school is a is a different look uh it doesn't it's

112not exactly the same um you know it's it's because there it it gets a little bit um juvenile for kids to come in and put themselves on a mood meter um so teachers do it in a little bit different ways like kind of really checking in with their kids for example during ilt which is one of the reasons that we decided that Mark and his team decided to have it done through ilt but the ruler approach as it's used pretty ubiquitously pre-k through eight um is a foundational part of our school system and while I don't have I don't know if any of us have pre-data we don't have any data from before in implementing uh ruler we can certainly see that it is not doing any harm it's it's certainly supporting the work that

113our teachers are doing in fact um Tracy dressel when the Pre-K teacher during uh new teacher orientation when we went over ruler was thrilled because she is so excited to do to do some of the ruler things like the mood meter with her Pre-K kids and she couldn't wait to she saw that on the agenda and she couldn't wait for Dean to come and give her his presentation because she was all about it um teachers and support staff intentionally focus on student availability for learning within the classroom pre-k through 12. I think that that is one of the things that we are seeing with this uh again Trend data is that the T the teachers are comfortable with this language and comfortable with this idea and again this by administering the Dessa or talking about

114these kinds of things whether it's through ruler or um you know through developmental counseling lessons or even other different programs that we could bring in it helps teachers it helps remind teachers to be intentional about this and not just kind of have it be something they do implicitly because by calling it out and making them very aware it helps them recognize if a student is off and then that student it doesn't matter what awesome lesson you had planned for chemistry that day the student isn't available for learning so that's what we want our teachers to be aware of and then um and also you know this this kind of dipstick shows that we're ready to take the next steps in capacity building so what are those next steps they are um that our school-based teams

115will reflect on the approaches that they do including at CLE s and at uh with skaneer using resources from ruler and from aperture and then at the high school what they can they can glean from using aperture for all students again we said that this is you know we're looking at Trend data this is a tier one approach that we're taking we're not looking to pull kids um to tier two or tier three interventions specifically based on this we will continue to implement Odessa with three teacher screening windows for the 2324 school year so we'll do fall winter and spring the first one is going to be starting on October 9th I'm ready to send out a parent letter this week or maybe the beginning of next week um which will include a form for

116parents if they wish to remove their children from the screener they won't have to go back and forth through email they'll just be able to attach a form or fill out a form so that's going to be sent out next week but it'll also give us the opportunity then by the end of this year to have 18 months or two administrations of the um Dessa mini and just kind of get a sense of where things are and we also should have more information about where the state is in terms of supporting it through this cohort um utilization of available resources included including the ruler crosswalk which again I'm going to show just at the end of this presentation and an opportunity as we embark on fleshing out our portrait of The Graduate as one of

117our Pathways our professional development Pathways um really kind of using this as another resource to develop those dispositions and then as we go through because we will be maintaining this data we'll be able to compare the cohort results from previous years so similar to what we do with our student achievement data we'll be able to kind of you know continue to um house this data and look at year to year development so the last and I apologize because this is hard to see but maybe you can see it better than I can on my screen but the last uh page that you have and it's definitely going to be hard for you to see on that little the little slide that I gave you is one of those resources that aperture provides and actually this

118is just hot off the presses because they just did this this summer but this is an example of something that I think can be really valuable for our district that does do you know does subscribe to the ruler approach so what you see at the top of the columns are the eight dispositions that are assessed through the ruler so self-awareness self-management social awareness relationship skills goal directed Behavior personal responsibility decision making and optimistic thinking and then on the left hand side you those are the various ruler skill building activities and so for example if you were interested in doing incorporating The Meta moment into your school building you can see that the meta moment which is here the the work of the metamor you know everything that the meta moment in corp encompasses also incorporates

119all of those aspects of the Desa or aperture you know so in other words you are covering Castle um skill building in in the use of the meta moment so they did this work for us by crosswalking ruler and the Dessa so that we can then kind of reference this and see where we can get kind of the most you know impact so that's just one of the resources that they provide and again these are teacher resources that can be used as PL as PLC topics or grade level topics or Department level and even at an admin Council so that's where we are with this presentation you ready perfectly happy to take questions good question um for the Dasa mini the screener so like for example for items like one and six in particular so

120like who deems like what's important like for number one remember important information so is that part of their training so yeah teachers go through a academics or is in their personal life like or is it a combination of both so it would be what they observe basic based on the context of you know where they are observing the students so for ilt or homeroom or in their morning meeting you know it would be within that context so the teachers go through a brief it's about an hour-long training um to review all of the different items and to give them the specific you know the look fors for each of these item Banks and then they're very you know focused on the context of which they are in which they are assessing the student so the

121serve as an important role at home or school I just it one in six are just difficult for me to kind of don't seem like really subjective well I think that's one imagine how being a teacher myself how I would really look for that so I think that that's one of the difficulties of trying to quantify something that is more qualitative um but as I said you know based on the this is there are um four or six different decimal uh iterations um because you're not supposed to give the same exact one at each uh for each one so this is one of the this is for our training purposes um but they you know I think that based on what they what we have learned from the folks at aperture um and the State

122Department of Education um you know their research has they've been able to call down the 75 item screener to these seven or eight sometimes they're eight many questions that are you know and with this kind of uh with the preparation that the teachers get right before assessing um it's supposed to be you know it's supposed to be research based so so I had a question on the data and you know I'm a data house so uh um if I kind of summarize this about four percent of our kids are in need of some sort of instruction but it varies actually healthfully across the grade levels right so as as high as 10 percent if I kind of scan across this so the two questions I had when you when you say the the first question

123is school-based teams reflect on approaches are they actually going to come out at a grade level and say okay I have a grade that has a lot more need for kids to have some sort of training and here's three or four specific things we're going to do is it actually get that specific or is it more of a general where we're taking it well this has really only been reviewed with the ad with the district leadership team um so it's really been only at that level of conversation at this point but certainly I could see I mean and this is not reflective of any interventions that are happening with this is you know inclusive of all students and um so it's not necessarily many of these students may be getting some specific interventions and we're

124not looking at a specific student level no no we're not I guess it's more of a okay in third grade we ought to be focusing on these three things team really wants to come say something but yes absolutely you're on the right path yeah District you know the grade levels and even um you know cohorts K2 could um look at this platform and pull some things or also go to their training with ruler or with um you know other you know intervention aspects in terms of counseling and uh do some general just kind of expanding on it my my thinking is that you know the kids in these grade levels are experiencing different things and therefore they need different strategies so I was going to help I don't know if uh Dr Mann remembered we

125when we did this last year and again this is just one shot right where do we go through but as we go through continue to do this we I know I spoke with our mental health staff and we talked about exactly what you're saying um is if we see large pockets in maybe certain grade levels that um that we could focus on because again six the difference between a fifth grader and eighth grade at the time or a difference with a sixth and eighth grader and the things that are that they need to work on could be totally different um yeah and that's a good point too eighth grader going into the high school maybe exhibiting some different behaviors than an eighth grader at the beginning when that eighth you know the eighth grade group

126felt pretty comfortable an example when you looked at our our data the sixth grade you notice is like three two percent four percent three percent and our highest happens to be in eighth grade six to seven percent because as kids get a little bit older they may be less to participate you know in class or for whatever reason maybe a little more Moody whatever um and maybe give a little more attitude at times so again you know sixth grade I look at or fifth grade you would look at it maybe where they want to make sure they're following the rules more as as teachers know I mean that happens as it goes up and again it's not a knock on any grade level it is what it is that's what I love about middle schoolers

127but I just want to make sure that uh you you knew exactly what you were saying is what our thought process is to be able to make sure that this is successful or useful I should say as we move forward sure and I think the best way to make things useful is to have something concrete that the teachers could say this is something we can do right that will help improve the situation so my second question is is this is all about kids being ready to learn right have you correlated any of this with any of the standardized testing we have not yet but um as we and I think that I would be a little bit uh reticent to draw direct correlation lines um but I will be as I'm preparing for next month's

128presentation um I am going to have have that be part of my exercise of looking at the third through eighth grade um particularly uh the 11th grade sat data is a little bit of a different animal um but certainly I would that I'm going to be interested in to see based on their Readiness to learn are we seeing that as another one shot one you know one snapshot of their assessment in SBA Ela no it's it's funny I spent had a chance to spend an afternoon looking at the states database and I actually dissected it by cohort by grade right so you could see the the fourth the fifth the sixth and how they were doing and and uh over over time over the four years that they had published what caught my eye on

129this report is the there was a big bump up for most grades in Brookfield that's a you know attributed to the recovery coming out of Cove had and that's what we had hoped for and I am looking forward to your report on that when we get there but I just it caught my eye on here that some of the grades that didn't bump as well happen to be the grades that have the higher score here and I just I think caught my eye so I definitely suggest you look at that absolutely so yeah and they're moving on right there yeah and look also looking at this and like for example the numbers are very low in the high school but one of the higher ones is eighth graders and now they're gonna be ninth graders

130so right so be interesting you know it's a different world so when you moved to high school from middle school so we all know that anybody else informative report thank you thank you thanks Dr man my pleasure I'm saying okay so we're going to move on to subcommittee reports um and we'll start with finance and and Rosa there's two Finance reports there if you could maybe cover both of them yeah okay so uh our first of the meetings I'll talk about um and I'll kind of talk about them concurrently um was on August 14th uh the bulk of that meeting was talking about how the fiscal year was going to close out um at that point it had only recently just closed out so um and as you know we were looking we ended the

131year at um about a four hundred thousand dollar over budget mainly due to special education substitutes health insurance um and so at that point we were trying to figure out as I keep trying to use Bob's sayings all the time but how do we land the plane right how much do we ask the town for in an exact number um and so we were having that ongoing discussion all year where we would finally land and we ended the year at that point in August we were estimating about a five thousand dollar Surplus so it's a very small amount um after what the town had given us as an appropriation by our September meeting that was 7 000 a little over seven thousand dollars so um it's um which whenever you're talking about sort of a

132fifth nearly 50 million dollar budget that's um very very close so we thank the business department um for their really hard work and communication on that so thank you um at both meetings we discussed the current year that we're in I'm already looking to be over budget due to less staff turnover than we usually budget for uh issues with athletic transportation that we heard about um particularly the driver shortage also keeping an eye again on health insurance special education special education transportation um and then finally the year-end audit at our September meeting was currently going on um so at our October meeting we will have an update on that so we'll have that and that's it questions for Rosa sweet so the 400 was from town okay yeah it was we had a special Appropriations

133we asked for I think 397 um and only ended up needing 390 and I by the way I did send Ken's updated report to the board of Finance so there there happened to be meeting concurrently with us this evening so there I believe uh that they're representative on our committee will give them an update on how that landed so and that Surplus money goes right to the general fund yes do you know how hard it is to end up within seven thousand dollars from where you were in in June to where you ended up in August well done guys that was uh Ken left it all on the field this year thank you Ken I love it okay so next up is uh personnel and negotiations um and there's actually nothing to report it was

134all done in the executive session there were no motions taken so um and uh and so the topic we were talking about was strategy and negotiations relative to collective bargaining so um and as those usually are done they're often in an executive session so next up is policy okay the policy subcommittee met on Wednesday August 16th and um really the two main items that we focused on was continuing to discuss policy 6162.51 the survey of students we've spent really kind of extraordinary amount of time on this survey just really getting everybody comfortable with um opting in opting out what kinds of surveys there could be what parents rights are in those situations so I think we're in a good place now and and we're ready to send that to the board we also had a

135lengthy discussion on policy 6563 School library media and the reason we had that discussion and presentation was because of parent feedback and the recent requests for reconsideration and a petition that we received to make some policy make changes to that policy so Mr belanda and Mrs Roca from the BHS library media center came in to talk to us about um how the request for reconsiderations went how the review committee's Review Committee was assembled how they deliberated what factors they considered and then Mrs Roca um really did a thorough review of how she does her Acquisitions of the books in this media center we talked about every issue that was covered in the um petition and got lots and lots of great feedback and input from Mrs Rocca so we actually met again tonight and continued

136to discuss that and we'll have um we'll have a new policy to slightly revise policy to bring to you at our next meeting then we um we talked about the current school year Communications just briefly and um the potential ribbon cutting ceremony for Cle s which will still be a little bit off into the future as they finish to finish finish up all the work that has to be done and get the parking lot ready [Music] um but I think that was about it okay thank you any questions for Debbie okay hearing none uh next up is facilities okay got a lot to report so we did meet on September 6th but I've been updating it since then so I have all the updated uh reports so building condition study Mr post reported the final

137report from Marx acubo has been received and distributed to us um they'll be using the report to develop the 10-year Capital plan for the community's review at our next meeting on October 4th and the full board's consideration at our October 18th meeting we asked that technology Pro projects as well as non-structural projects to make the schools look better be included in the plan we asked for a review of the past five years Capital plan and history of the maintenance vehicle request we feel we need to like package a story better and we'd like to see it as more like little projects like for example doing sections of the roof out of time um we'd like to see technology playing a role embracing quality upgrades to the other buildings possibly adding natural light to make the

138buildings look less dingy and doing some Hardware upgrades and we'd like to get feedback from the community and the NBC here at the high school the guy in swing roof as Mr belanza stated work has started um so they had their pre-construction meeting on the 14th of Barrett Roofing architect Tom Hibbard Casey and Ken they met and prepared the staging areas prior to construction or work um however it was determined that the ground condition outside the guidance Wing is unsuitable for the contractor to move equipment materials so the start date was pushed to this week and the work has officially started according to Mr Hibbert the OSHA regulations restrict students and staff from occupying the guidance Wing during this portion of construction so the staff did have to take from their classrooms and offices what

139they needed to work with and go elsewhere during construction it's estimated to be completed in 10 days but that's contingent on good weather so an update on our capital projects the HVAC the project is complete Mr Caldwell reported that the high school HVAC project is complete in a waiting warranty sign off he also reported that the scope of the project did not allow us to connect to all of our HVAC units and that funding for this should be included the first year of the 10-year Capital plan so we have the letter from Jules and AV sent and Amy sent the warranty over the Heat this winter should be much improved and the new system will give us a lot of information on diagnostics in order to fix problems that arise locker room we're still waiting

140for the inspection to take place so we can begin to use it construction is finished other than two doors and a bench that are not in yet we're hopeful we'll be able to use it this week Paving it's complete at the high school the middle school is very exciting looks great we actually gained 10 spaces at whiskaneer and they're all aligned at BHS we replace some pipes under the sidewalks near the main office also Stadium track and field we heard um that they've done a lot of work there on Saturday 23rd they resumed work we lost some of the front feel for most of the time during this part of the project but if the weather is great next week we might be able to use the field back for next Friday then work would

141resume the following Monday High School restrooms they completed two more and there's a surplus Surplus Surplus for the next set so that's good electrical service at the middle school is still an active project we're trying to be proactive it's not a project that we need to do right away we want to switch the Old Gear with the newer one we're ready to go out but eversource said no because they said we need a socket so we need a minimum three-day shutdown of the building so it may need to become a summer project and we need to consider heat and any storms seminar room seating there's no change with that flooring at the middle school we need to add that to the budget for next year security upgrades door alarms are done we just need the

142training cameras and security film have been installed broken windows have been fixed repeaters have been ordered no concrete barriers yet High School auditorium entrance to make a Sally Port is up next so as you can see we've got a lot done so Paving parking lots lines Fields locker rooms Etc and a new school and a new school the air conditioning here unfortunately there has been no progress in getting the contractor and engineer to review the project and report on why the bid came in so much higher than the original quote um the project cost has doubled a key component that drove the project cost higher was a structural specifications to support the equipment on the roof so the committee requests that Mr call Will engage another engineer to review the bid specifications we had only

143one sole bidder Edgerton they also give us the specs but CES came back with structural design changes so this included opening the roof and in order to do the CES said we need to get a structural engineer so we haven't been able to get untouched Edgerton so a lack of response from engine is forcing us to move forward without them Casey Ken and Dan have met to review and determine what the next step should be delivery view the specs and prepare to go up back out to bid for that which school was that again here that's right yeah this room about like Dr Brill said all the materials have been moved from CES to cles and we have vacated that building yes turn the keys over there wasn't any new business we had some miscellaneous

144discussion we got an email from select women Tower car regarding the turning over CES to the town so like I just said we and Dr Brill stated we pumped Mitchell Field pumped out an estimated 800 gallons a product from the heating oil tank and hopefully you'll get that credit back the heat can be turned off and everything's been moved and we we did request additional information and Clarity regarding the additional truck or replacement truck we discussed the youth commission and their Grant the benches that they selected need to be mounted somehow and the installer is going to look into finding the price for the mounting plate Mr Caldwell reported that he was working with the contractor to install the bench selected by the students no word yet on the timeline for the removal of the

145Portables at whiskaneer and playscapes for cles have been manufactured I heard that they should be arriving shortly that's it lots of report a lot of upgrades okay any uh questions for joy okay thank you thank you for the thorough report and by the way just one one input um because I've been talking to the capital committee chair the capital committee was only another no they were only appointed through the end of August so the board of Selectmen actually has to go take an action on either reforming or extending so so that we're kind of on hold on actually having a capital committee meeting and for the board in terms of our timing and joy it's just perfect all your report thank you it's a lot there um I talked to Mrs Carr I think it

146was just yesterday and shared with her that at that early October facility meeting we'll be in case you'll have a Casey and Dan will share a um Capital Improvement plan 10-year plan and then if it uh committee has any input certainly we'll make those adjustments at the committee meeting then hopefully bring that from the committee meeting to the October 18th board meeting where the board could review it and the timing would be perfect if we can take a vote on it at that meeting and move it forward um and I know Mr Belden the formality of that committee on the town side the capital committee but we want to as a board get our share our department if you will plan out there for the town to conserve okay all right that's it for subcommittee

147reports uh next up is the consent agenda which are new hires resignations transfers degree changes and the June financials second and seconded uh uh Dr Burrell any comments you'd like to make super brief uh to Rachel Cohen Carolyn Reinhardt and Kayla Denault want to congratulate them on continuing their graduate work as you can see their degree changes here other than that nothing to report okay most of these these reports are always long and especially coming out of the summertime yeah coming out of the summer time so any questions from the board okay all in favor aye okay I just took care of a page and a half of our agenda um all right so we're on to new business now um the uh the first item is the Board of Education board member vacancy um

148we actually met as a board as a special meeting last week to kick off the board vacancy process but our policy requires that it be formally announced at our next regular board meeting so what I'm doing is announcing tonight that we do have a vacancy on our board um and with the resignation of Mrs bhuto we we are accepting applications through September 29th by mail to the uh to the by hard copy mail to the school offices or by email to Boe brookfieldps.com I'm sorry or dot org right yeah and screw that up and uh and uh we will all have access to the applications we will then schedule interviews and we've established the dates for interviews for the opening on October 5th and on October 12th and deliberations on a selection process would happen

149after that the position uh per the town clerk will be the served until uh until December early December of 2025 or the remaining two years on Mrs bhutoster and that's not just for clarity that's not our decision that's a that was a town clerk decision on the term with consultation at the state I know that's been a point of discussion but and people keep asking me why did you make that decision we didn't so and uh so the uh um so we have deliberate we have interviews and deliberations ahead of us and we invite anybody who would like to apply to that position to apply and we did get input as you know tonight from the public on how we should make that selection which of course we will take into consideration so so that's

150the announcement next is our Athletics update and there we have an action to receive a report from our athletic director Steve Baldwin hey Steve thanks for being here Mr Baldwin good evening um tonight's a great night so it's actually my favorite night of the year I'll get to that in a second um I'm going to start with these slides just a few things from last year a few of our championships cheer one that's WC Championship dance came and then runner-up in the state and obviously baseball was state champions for class style and girls the cross was in the final four last year tonight we had our Class Act pledge night where the students go to Chick-fil-A and sign the Class Act pledge that they will act right at games they get a t-shirt they get

151free fries and a free ticket to all the games we actually had anybody want to got so many kids we had there tonight 600. wow wow 600. I was getting reports while I was sitting there and Mark you said 873 kids as of yesterday 873 kids and 600 were at Chick-fil-A think about how great that is for school spirit incredible and that was tights next year you gotta go it's just it's so much fun uh Mr Blanda Dr Brill came a few years ago it was actually on the news that year but it kid our kids do a great job it was hard for me to walk away to come here but I know that we're trying to teach kids to take things over ownership and I'm like they got this they got this they

152got this and I left but I still get worried can I ask a simple question how did they find parking 600. I got a couple text messages saying it's I can't find a parking spot you know I'm trying to go help because a couple teachers went and helped out I don't know wow full if it falls on a board meeting next year perhaps we change the venue I was gonna I was gonna also say that if uh if Chick-fil-A can handle 600 students then Dr Dr P could handle uh whatever he needs to in this new parking lots it just it just shows how great our kids are and I'm gonna get into some more of that later um stayed in project so this is actually Eric took this maybe a week and a half

153ago but we're we're at the point right now where the The Field's done we've been playing on it we got it back um so what what the next part is is they'll start putting the rubber on the track and it was they're actually going to start in the rain on Saturday the guy called me today he goes he's come he goes I'm committed to getting you that game and next Friday and I was like there's no way we're playing at home but he's gonna get part of it done where it's able to cure for a couple days we get get it back for Friday's football game and then they restart next week and then hopefully by the end of next week hopefully there's a lot of rain next weekend so I'm praying we're all praying

154for no rain roof track so let's go so but that's where we're at um we've been we're lucky we like we had our way to graduation but I don't know like if you look in the papers West Haven Sheehan and there was um another high school they don't have access to their facilities at all we plan that I we Laura from park and rec was awesome Chris Hulk from field Turf we meet every week to do everything we can to make sure our kids are on that field and we haven't missed much we're going to miss a little coming up but we're going to get there and you know it's we're lucky we got lucky because we had some people who did what we asked them to do and get our kids on the field

155all right so all good news today all good locker room project like um Joy said um a little fuzzy here but this is the piece of the of the benches in the team rooms that they were waiting for and then there's a couple doors otherwise we're just waiting for the inspection uh the middle picture is one of the bathrooms that's the male bathroom from outside I couldn't get into the female bathroom because they have new locks on it and I don't have that key so I couldn't take a picture and then that's the last one all the way to the left is as you walk into the locker room all right so um this year again we were Michael's cups winners this is due to the hard work that all of our kids do um

156we have a very very strong athletic advisory and you can see um in the last eight years from 2016 to 2023 we won it every year except for 2018. no school in the state has gotten this award more than us in those eight years um it's our kids do a tremendous job we are leaders our kids actually go to conferences and teach other high schools how to do this all this work the ciec actually sent me to Indianapolis over the summer to speak in a national conference about how we do things because we do them so well and we're actually still waiting confirmation but I will be on a National Committee along with another student as soon as I get official word we'll make that announcement for that student because it's way more important for

157her than me all right another big award even bigger Mr Renda School and there's only two middle schools in the state that have been named National unified Champion Awards with Skinner Middle School is one of them with Korean Rafferty that is a major major award um we will celebrate that with a banner in the gym um this just came out yesterday yeah so we're still waiting on some other stuff but had to add that today all right so there is no school in the state that has more people on boards at the ciec than we do and this doesn't even mention Mr Randall I'm sorry that's you're on the cast side it makes everything a competition yeah um but Dr Rand is the co-chair of the indoor and outdoor track committees Mr belanda is on

158the cast board of directors and the chair of the cic hockey committee um I'm on a couple um it's it's not about me we have Ava wasmuth who is on the student Equity Advisory Board we have Riley McGee who is on the cic's sportsmanship committee and we have Vanessa Greenstein who is on the ciac athletic advisory committee so we are well represented at the cic again our kids do a lot of work and obviously so does learn administrators um that's why we get a lot of great things here all right now to the transportation issue just to go over it um we have been very lucky that we have not missed any games um Debbie is working very hard after the first couple weeks to get us back to somewhat normal and you know it's

159not it's not all-star's fault it's ever since we came back from covet there's just bus issues everywhere School in our league reached out today and said I can't get a bus till five o'clock so we end up having to cancel a JV game because they can't get there luckily we have not land chat and carriage limo have been very helpful again as I think Rosa said before it is going to cost us a little bit of money but Debbie's going to get us there I know I trust her and we're going to be okay and um I'm going to talk about some other bus stuff when we got to the school start time all right school start time and I put a picture of the golf team there for a reason okay so um and

160they start out the season very well okay so with fussing I actually have this you're going to be surprised so this year in the fall there's 16 times when students need to leave early of those 16 six are golf regardless of the school time left early last year they left early golf courses have leagues have memberships so and I showed off Dr barildas I showed him the schedule for the state most golf times are anywhere between two and two thirty some three o'clock it's which we try to push it to but most ninety percent of the schools in the state have golf matches before us so no matter what time we get out of school golf's leaving early so for those of you good in math 16 minus six is ten so now we're down

161to 10. times we have to leave early and six of those we would have to do last year now minus two more which are unified which would have to do last same as last year because those events always start early because um some of the kids with special needs it's hard for them to wait around so they always take them out of school or get them to a vet so they can get home close to a regular time now we're down to eight two this year were because of special circumstances like Mr belanda said before we were playing um Notre Dame and they were at the mercy of Sacred Heart University and they said you have to start this time so had to let them out last week in football a scheduled game on on

162a holiday where we had to be back before Sunset we couldn't move our game to Thursday because we played on Saturday the week before so you have to have so many days between couldn't play on Saturday because we still had to it was still part of the of the holiday so we had to play early so now we're down to six so when we look at it you know you know listen kids come to me all the time our bus is a three I gotta get out I'm like you have plenty of time like they want to get out they want to get out early it's just in the kids nature but we can't do it because obviously we're a school so again back to the start 16 events in the fall really it's six

163and that's and then when you look at those six um I think three or four were cross-country a sport that doesn't have lights and and the distance for them to get there so now it's three and then those three are distance games so it's it's not as bad as it appears and there's reasonings for it but like I said golf was getting out regardless early because that's just the norm and then obviously with the Unified is that clarified a little bit thank you for having me all right um now to I always do this every year get to um some things that people are bringing up and I'll go I'll go um one by one of new sports with interest um and I think for for the district the first thing that we really need

164to look at is adding a spring Unified sports um we have fall and winter we do not have anything in the spring we were looking at that progression and um we just couldn't do within the last couple years budget but for and you know I'll talk with Bill about this but I think this is something very important for our special needs kids to give them that opportunity in the spring that they don't have um Esports program I talked about this last year this is like evolving so much and like I never thought it was going to go the way it is but there is so many college scholarships available for Esports which I never thought that that was going to happen and schools have like 75 to 100 Kids in their programs and it's very

165cost effective you know it's not a huge there's no Transportation need obviously when we look at adding new programs we where we are with transportation we have to think about you know maybe this is a good one because we're not going to add Transportation but it also it's going to you know it's a program for some kids that who may or may not have played Sports um track both men's and women's track teams are growing and Dr Mann can help me out with this because she was a track Superstar so in track you have running events throwing events jumping events so that's three main events you have two coaches so from a pure supervision standpoint and teaching kids it would make sense to have three people one for throwing one for for um jumping events

166and one for running events it just helps complete our programs and helps those grow and again that's another thing that looking at adding it doesn't add towards transportations adding a coach um every year I ask for a strength and conditioning coach just something I like to have so our kids can be in the weight room all year supervised our coaches salaries as we know are not the best in the state it just would just help get our kids in the weight room help us compete um a ski team I mean we had it a couple years ago a very large number of kids have have shown interest in ski I believe that's something we need to look into um we could look as maybe possibly starting as a club I did have somebody who was

167going to volunteer to coach and do it he was also coached the paparag but then he resigned when he got a new job kind of kind of hurt that but I'm still looking into options for those kids and a student came to me last week about women's flag football there's that's on the rise in in a lot of schools it was just something to look at so just wanted to make everybody aware of programs that kids are asking about or what we kind of think our needs are and Steve this would be something you would share uh you and Mark would work on and then as part of budget processing about next year you would prioritize what you know what you're thinking about correct okay well sorry and Dean because it involves with Skinner um

168and last um I was contacted by this company Capo health they come into schools and they do um heart monitoring they do EKGs and Echo Carter grams they work with students and parents insurance and they do this at no cost if somebody doesn't have insurance they cover it um I spoke with superintendent assistant superintendent um what's our doctor's name I forgot Dr Garcia um Mr Roland and the principles and we feel like we would well we are going to sign up to do this voluntarily for kids um it's it's one more step in helping you know prevent anything bad from happening you know I put impact testing on there because we still do that um I just really no bad thing about this again it's voluntary kids don't have to do it parents don't have

169to sign up for it we're going to send all the information home I put it all in your packets for you if you have any questions you can certainly email me um again I there's nothing bad about this you know if they catch anything they give it to the parents and you know the parents go to the doctors it's just like our impact testing where somebody gets a concussion we have data where uh you know even if somebody's not an athlete all the 8th graders take it in health class this year we're going to do with the 11th graders in health class and we always have data to help the parents and help the kids and that's it great idea thank you Steve Dr babsoski said I can act like I'm a new teacher and

170go home normally Steve one question um so they come to you yeah they will they're going to come here I believe it's November 13th and 14th and they will set up and um we're gonna set them up in the team rooms in the locker room and everything's done online again it's completely voluntary if parents want to do it I mean I might do it yeah let's get my health card like their database that they keep it in or it's something that they release to us they would give they would give all the results to you to the parent oh okay yep and and if obviously if something came up they'd report it to the nurses how are they funded say it again you said this is no charge so how are how are they funded

171they work with they work with they work with the insurance insurance companies yeah so they deal with insurance 100 no pays no anything yeah else okay nobody gets charged that was our biggest question when they said it was free thank you great idea thank you everybody thanks Steve great great stuff I invited Mr belanda to uh just as a Segway um from Mr Baldwin's reports that give a status update on the athletic program review yeah so Dr Bill asked me to give a status and athletic program review we've worked with ciac um you know Mr Baldwin and I just have to put some finishing touches on Final self-study reports we've got all surveys done we've got draft stuff all different all four or five of the dimensions essentially done we had to put some finishing

172touches on it I spoke with ciec and they're likely going to come out probably the shoulder season between um the end of The Fall season beginning of the winter season well they'll come on site they'll have they have an athletic director is willing to come on board and I think at least one other coach and I think somebody else from ciec will come and do a walk through and identify and and help us really enhance our programs and make sure that we are if there's any suggestions or thoughts or input you know we did student surveys we did athlete surveys coaches surveys family surveys it's a little last spring right all last spring yep all done and so they'll go that information and give us some some highlights just kind of like a knee ask

173visit very similar to what that was a couple years ago for those of you on the board and that happened give us some highlights and some possible recommendations my conversation with um Glenn langerini who's the executive director of Cass who's in charge um he anticipates a ton of highlights like this is more of a highlight than anything else so I'm really looking forward to that I mean based on the Michael's cup I mean you know just when Michael's cup because you know to have that kind of record is pretty impressive so there's a few other things that they'll certainly make suggestions and Steve and I may ask hey what do you think about this so um we're excited to have them come and uh that'll happen in between Seasons so I want John asked me

174to give an update on that if I may just to add to that um just the concept of the ciac program review it was one of the spotlights in at the niask National Conference last year because Connecticut is the only state that has a formalized process like that it was actually I think Chris and Niehoff is the one who actually started it about 10 or 12 years ago Carissa is now the the director of the national Federation of High School athletics and so she is trying to and Glenn has continued it but she is trying to make it a more National um you know kind of at a national level highlighted at a national level so what we're engaging in is something that has held up as kind of like the gold standard for program

175reviews oh good yeah and and personally as a former High School principal about 10 or 12 years ago when Carissa first put this together um I invited ciec down to conduct a review for us and it was incredibly helpful now the highlights and accommodations are wonderful it's affirming but the recommendations going forward um things on how you work with your coaches um things about training things about the number of sports you have all those opportunities for kids give you great feedback and gives the community great feedback so when we think about our priorities over time how could we build budgets going forward to continue supporting the athletic program so exciting stuff thank you Mark thanks okay looking forward to that so next up as a technology update from our director of Technology Eric Conklin okay

176good evening everyone um before I start the technology update I have to tell Mr Baldwin um that if anything ever happens with a ski team I'll be your man I'll uh volunteer to be coach oh and Esports too I mean it seems fitting but Esports yeah I don't get paid I don't need to get paid the ski so um so just a few updates I want to provide for you tonight um Joy you mentioned in the facilities report uh the last time you guys had met the uh repeaters were ordered uh those are actually completed um so a fun little update for that project both schools have them a couple Kings to work out um little things to figure out but again those are for more reliable and consistent radio communication throughout the buildings so

177we're excited that that is done and uh in use for the start of this year uh Smart Boards uh for whiskaneer uh we just recently awarded that bid um it just came in uh we're shooting for installation in October which is about the same time we had them installed last year um once that is done um every classroom in the district will finally have a smart board um and so we're very excited um to have that done and then we'll look uh in the next year or so to start um the new cycle of upgrading the older boards so it will be a never-ending process but we will be 100 Smart Board um really interactive touch whiteboards some we have different models but uh we're really excited about that uh we finally have a new

178phone system it has been many many years in the making we've switched over to voice over internet which is the new standard for phones uh cles was completed over the summer as part of the project um due to some various delays with um transferring of phone numbers between carriers uh the high school uh whiskey near and TSO central office did not come online until um September 7th but um I have to say uh that thanks to the work of our vendor the support of all of our staff and administration I think the entire process went incredibly smoothly you know only only minor issues maybe a phone not working here or there um excuse me um maybe some some work on the auto attendant we did have a major change everybody got a new extension um

179so there's some learning curve um next coming up though is some training for everybody training's already been happening our vendors been working with each main office and showing them some of the things on how to use the system um and then the next big thing is we'll be switching from physical fax machines to an eFax system um and and so we're excited about that um the last the last big thing is part of the contract with the phone vendor was to integrate paging throughout the building with the new phone system cles is done working they're using the new phone system with the pager the vendor's coming back he's taking advantage of the fact that we won't have school on the 25th upcoming Monday and complete that at the high school and whiskaneer so we're going

180to make a huge step forward with paging within the school and excited about that Eric when you say paging you mean the PA announced the PA announcing systems correct sorry interrupt does that include this all the phones in the classroom so they have the ability to do an all call yes in case emergency yep okay yep absolutely which was which was one of the probably the most important features we wanted in picking our phone vendor so um the district website we continue to prepare to upgrade the district website we still don't have a firm date from our vendor on the upgrade for that unfortunately um it has been frustrating um in light of that we're looking at alternate Paths of maybe a redesign of of our current um you know the look the uh the

181feel the navigation maybe we need to look at something better there um with Civic plus uh or um uh looking at its entirely different platform together um all together and that'll be a priority of ours um you know you know this fall um the town does currently have the same provider so we are working closely with them uh maybe something of a partnership um in a website platform but we've had the idea of having a um consistent experience across the entire town and so we continue to work together on that as well um along with that um adding updating and changing the content of each School website is actually done by webmasters in each school um and uh and by TSO staff along with me um so this year we decided uh in in light

182of the upgrade coming um and uh the desire to keep more regularly updated with the data and information that's on the website I'm going to create a Web Master committee that's going to represent some I.T folk and the webmaster chosen by each principle of their building that have experience in updating the website and so we'll be meeting soon to um kick that off the idea is that we're going to keep consistent updated relevant information and a consistent manner throughout all three schools and then finally the full District website the committee will also be an integral part integral part of the upgrade when we we actually have that date and we can do that um I have to note the the consolidation of the buildings as well um the full Tech Team worked hard uh this

183summer to not only remove all of the technology uh either redistribute it recycle it accordingly uh plan for where it's going to go in the removal of Huckleberry and Center School along with that also required the merging and creation of cles in PowerSchool which then led to the creation of all of our back end systems infrastructure tools resources learning platforms all of that had to have Huckleberry and Center School data shut down closed transferred and moved over to cles it's quite an undertaking and I could go into excruciating detail of all of those systems and all of the things that this incredible Tech team has been working on this summer but um I don't have that much time um and and again I thought this was a good point to just point out the incredible

184team that works behind um works with me uh that together we do this and together and without each other we can't do this what we do here so that's Kathy colavito in the back I know Mark mentioned her before Barbara McCarthy at Whiskey near down at cles I have Rich Squires and um Seth Craig um Logan white came back to join us this summer very excitingly and uh you may have seen her around the building but Sue Schmidt has even come out of retirement for a little while to uh to give us a hand in the big undertaking that we've had with with CLE s so um and then a lot of the back end stuff nobody realizes the power school the sinking of all the stuff that I talk about is is Denise Walsh

185and she's supported by Mandy usko and Cindy warpman and um it's it's it's an incredible team so um now I have an entire page here just for cles it has been our biggest undertaking um and it's been it's been exciting work um and still a lot left to be done but um the copiers most of our our 23 copiers that are going to be throughout the building have been installed we await Canon service to return and complete the installation of some of them they're inundated with start of the Year service requests and issues as well I ended up putting together a number of machines and uh so that staff could have them each grade level Wing the upper main office the lower main office the conference rooms the upper LMC all have working copiers and

186so the staff is uh able to find a copier anywhere they go now um doors Badges and cameras as with any new implementation or project we continue to work through small issues changes training adjustments I do want it no it is important to know that none of the items that we're working on have ever compromised the security of the building uh the building always has and remains safe and secure the security vendor assigned to the school project will actually be on site tomorrow and Friday to work with myself the I.T department and the schools to provide support and training as we fine-tune some of those changes and um gain all of our access to the back ends of all of that stuff um outdoor Wi-Fi we've been working and continuing to work with Ong and

187their networking subcontractor to provide some temporary outdoor access points on the campus the ultimate plan is to have um wireless access points installed on two poles that will point to each parking lot but those polls don't currently exist yet because of the demolition of Huckleberry and the cabling is not run to get out there and so what we've done in the meantime is it's it's not the prettiest thing but we ran a cable out through the door and put a access point on a tripod and uh I think day I don't know Dr P if you were or you're dedicating someone right now to uh to run it outside ahead of uh dismissal and then bring it back inside it is Dr P doing it so um they were able to get about halfway out

188the parking lot with it so we're exploring different options um you know we've talked about doing it against the building but we have to test the distance from the building to the parking lot and all of that stuff um so uh it's it's been difficult to add the outdoor access points because no matter what solution we want to look at and do it requires wiring outside whether it's on the poles on the building wherever we end up putting it we just don't have that yet so uh Dr Burrell and I are pushing to um a solution sooner rather than later even if that's temporary and has to be changed later we really want to get some outdoor access point because anybody who's been on campus knows that not only do we not have outdoor uh

189Wi-Fi but um cell service is um well I should say non-existent yeah it's very limited in that area about the Wi-Fi and the wiring it's really important for the public and the board to understand that is an Ong responsibility with their subcontractor and they need to do that and so we continue to work with them and look at their schedule and so forth and when they can get that done for us yep um and my last update um is uh digital signage the floor projectors that are going into the multi-purpose and gross motor rooms uh the live stream cameras and the loose systems in in the gym um these have been awaiting the the work of Ong to complete specific areas um some of which are ready uh but we're trying to work with our

190uh the vendor that was awarded all of these installations r b Enterprises on I'm trying to schedule them to come out at a time where they can come and do it all in one time in a consistent instead of kind of doing everything in in pieces um they're ready to go once we get an updated timeline from OMG which I'm hoping to sit down with them tomorrow and and figure out um but that like I said that'll include the loose system that will include the the cameras going into live stream events um and maybe meetings in the cafeteria and the multi-purpose rooms and then uh we cannot wait I know Dr P can I can't wait to fire up all the digital signage and start um you know getting getting messages across the building so

191Eric can you talk it's really important because we said you know cell service is so challenging in that Huckleberry the old huckleberries Candlewood Lake area which has always been the case can you talk a little bit about um getting cell phones to work in the school and on the Wi-Fi network and how their safety because we all have cell service when we're inside of Candlewood Lake I think yeah for everybody no families to know that we are in contact with the outside world so yeah so a couple things we're going to do long term let me start there and then kind of work backwards a couple things we're going to do is we actually had um them in Huckleberry they're just not plugged in yet at cles we had um uh cell boosters inside the

192building that used a GPS so you weren't relying on cell phone towers that used a GPS to give a sell signal inside the building that worked on Verizon I heard you can kind of get T-Mobile um and a t might might feed off of it um but uh you know in clas we're going to look at um uh there's actually it was a conversation around the state among Tech leaders about this exact thing um and there are some new Solutions out there to bring cell phone service into the building so we will be looking at that um inside the building now uh everybody does have access to Wi-Fi we'll be posting up we have a visitor Wi-Fi um that is password protected and we'll be posting that password up in all the schools um staff

193has access to Wi-Fi uh and can access it or log into it anytime just as they could with the other buildings newer phones um probably in the last five years or so introduced Wi-Fi calling um and so we're instructing our staff to all turn that on their cell phones what Wi-Fi calling does is exactly what it sounds like it uses wireless internet to make and receive phone calls and even works for definitely for iPhone text messaging because that uses internet but it actually can send and receive regular text messages as well um so so we have an option our phone system will also have while it runs on our internet our phone system will also have a dedicated back up in the next month or so where should our internet fail for any reason say

194at the state level uh Power well power would affect everything but um say we have a specific internet issue um there is a failover that will fail over to a dedicated connection with Frontier actually that will provide uh phone service going forward and we're going to have that in all the buildings yeah Eric can you also just uh let the board know and the public know about uh kind of internet speed with the student Chromebooks and how that's going I know you're over working on fourth grade the other day can you tell us a little bit about that and just how it's all interfacing over the first couple of weeks of school um yeah we we've been um working we have found some areas of the building where um speeds are not running um nearly

195frankly nearly as fast as they should we've done a lot of work with our fiber providers our the folks that install their wireless access points our switches we've narrowed it down to some wiring issues within the building so I'm working closely with Ong uh there are some contractors net Services we're making them aware of um the wiring we found and identified that is is reducing the speeds and um we're gonna sit down probably one day in the next week and review all of their tests show them what we're seeing and come up with a game plan to get everything up to a full gigabit internet which is what we should be at so thank you yep incredible amount of work Eric thank you is there any questions stunning stunning what you have to do to

196bring a high-tech School online like like I said it's I said well it was our biggest thing I think it's the biggest thing any of us have ever experienced I know that so I did have a question which you may not know the answer to um I was driving up Vail Road in Brookfield and there's been a lot of talk about the new cell tower going up and I noticed it's it's up it's starting to have a little cell you know cell transmitters and transponders on top of it yet but the tower is built do you have any idea if that cell tower will extend cellular up Candlewood Lake Road or not I have been I have been told actually it does so I am part of the town wide radio project upgrade I'm the

197board representative for that um and that is that Tower is is while it's being added for cell phone it's also was specifically put in for um emergencies well one of the reasons was for emergency radio and communication and based on its location um and the known fact that the Huckleberry area cles area has has been a dead spot um the understanding is that is that it will so when they put the regular commercial cell on there it will help we should start to see better service as well yep because I was looking at it and where it's located is right up you can see right up Candlewood Lake Road yeah it's Clear Vision right up there which is what's missing now Eric on that committee do you have any sense of a timeline of when

198the sales service part of it might be ready I I do not I'd be happy to have the conversation and uh get the information or what I can be told and shared sure with and and I'd be happy to share an update in combination with your outside uh the Wi-Fi it'll be the best uh it'll be the best uh coverage in the area well and it'll also help with all the you know the pickup and stuff with the apps that we put in so okay board any questions for Eric all right thanks Eric great thank you all thank you thank you I I I became famous showing teachers how to swipe to turn on and off their uh Smart Boards yeah the boards are fun aren't they they're fun yeah yeah okay we've got four

199new four more uh new items the next item is setting the class of 2024 graduation date I'll move that the board approved the sending of the graduation date for the class of 2024 as recommended by BHS principal Mark belanda second okay moved and seconded so what's the proposal mark s had more time at the podium tonight than I think he's ever had to make sure I get the date right so the proposal is to hold graduation because the last day of school currently is June 13th correct roughly and the proposal is to have graduation on Saturday June 15th time to be determined it's one of those things I've already been working with field Turf we've worked with Laura Murphy has also shared with Steve and the actual the fields of organization has guidelines how to

200protect your Turf and keep it under warranty because that's a huge piece so we're going to have the ceremony on the turf there's certain precautions we have to take okay one being the types of chairs you use that to be specific so they can't be digging into the ground they have to be rounded bottoms and so we have you know sample chairs coming so take a look at that to make sure we have the right chairs the other issue is the possibility of a stage and depending on the size of the stage and the expected capacity of the weights on the stage there are certain requirements of what you need certain thickness of material to cover the turf before you put the stage down so we have those General requirement the general outlines of what

201we use this past year it looks like the tip of the chairs that we had rented previously will still work that's something that we do believe that's but they're going to come out and make sure we do all that right because the last thing I want is with that Turf project to avoid any warranty you know if I have to give piggybacks up to the stage hop on board you know board because we're going to get up there but we're going to make sure that it's protected and and those sorts of things but the plan is to have it on uh the 15th so that is the plan okay so the motion is to approve the 15th as a graduation date any questions from the board all in favor all right you got it thank

202you very much thank you okay next me and I already have it in our calendars uh next is the 2024-25 budget planning calendar I'll move that the board approved the 2024-2025 budget planning calendar as presented by Director of Business and operations Casey diet thank you very much oh oh second second it is emotion um all right Casey thank you very much um and I know it's a very hard last night it is pronounced Dia just in case but I understood um okay so the budget uh calendar first of all I want to thank Dr Brill and the whole board for incorporating into this year's budget this really incredible time that Ken and I are able to have together this month in September of this overlap I thought it was so well planned and it is

203a gift that not most people in my position don't get to have I never had in a previous position that I've had and it's I'm hoping that it will prove to be very very valuable um and Ken and I have been working great together I'm grateful for that um we will be spending the next um cheese can seven days six days we have together um updating the various budget templates for the 20 24 25 budget and those will be sent out to the district administrators on October 2nd and due back to TSO on October 27th I'm thinking this calendar probably looks very similar to all of you have been through the budget process here in Brookfield which just from a cursory you know first glance at this is an incredibly transparent process I'm one thing

204that really drew me to Brookfield was you're you're very transparent process of governance and the high standards you have for that so it's outlined very clearly here um so I'm appreciative to to keep that momentum going um so October end of October and November will be sort of internal um Dr Burrell and I working with administrators and department heads reviewing the budget the status quo will be presented to the board on November 29th um the finance committee will meet um several times between the November 29th meeting and December 20th an important change um to this calendar timeline is a move from the um the Board of Ed Roundtable was originally I think in previous years um it took place in November it was moved to the November December 20th meeting uh this year uh proposed

205so that the board had more time to really sort of review it on their own review it in finance and come to that round table at the end of December with really thoughtful Deep dive questions that we could get into together um December 20th at the regular meeting will also be the continued discussion of the superintendent's budget um moving along uh January 3rd will be the uh Boe public hearing at six o'clock prior to your regular board meeting and then um with the anticipated adoption after discussion on your January 17th I did connect with Marcia on the town side on a couple dates she was able to update the May May 7th um date was the is the date that the town meeting to set the referendum will take place March 2nd working back from

206May 7th March 2nd will be the board of seleckman's budget due to the board of finance and then the rest of the dates are still TBD any questions that's great this is always so useful as we kind of go into it and it's especially useful this year as we'll have some significant turnover on the board membership and John will scare the Dickens out of him in his presentation on the uh try not to the the first meeting in December and one of the other reasons um that in talking with Casey with a new set of eyes on things um and talking with the team for the December 20th decision for the round table is um we don't typically get a we have one or two people come to the November Roundtable we haven't presented the

207budget yet so if we if I present the superintendent's uh recommended budget at the first meeting in December the public has something to to talk about you know that what we're thinking about for plans for the following year and so this way they could come out on the 20th and and again deep dive as a as a board of ed looking at the budget but the public has a chance to come out and say Hey you know you put this as a priority why is that or can you can you think about this this is a real need I see that kind of thing thank you yep okay everything will be fixed by that joy we won't yeah all right any other questions on the budget planning calendar carrying none all in favor okay next

208up is authorization for a signature change for the csde I will move that the board approved Director of Business operations Casey diat as the designated representative authorized to sign the agreement for Child Nutrition programs and to sign claims for reimbursement for the Connecticut State Department of Education School Health Nutrition and Family Services second do you want to say anything about it or sure there's not much to say about this other than it's really technically a formality um Mr post right now is the designated representative for the district um for us to there's various uh agreements reports that have to be certified to be part of the national school lunch program the sponsorship agreement which enables enables us to be part of the agreement has already been signed by Mr post one of his last formal

209certifications he's had to do um but then there are monthly certifications for reimbursement and then um and then another report in the spring so this just enables me to to act on on the district's behalf in that capacity thank you for that okay any questions all in favor aye okay and uh the last item in new business is uh action on the 2024-25 school year calendar and and this we're receiving A draft copy um we're not acting on it tonight because usually we receive it we get a chance to internalize it and and ask questions that uh to Dr Berlin a staff and uh and then at an upcoming meeting we would actually approve it so uh Dr Burrell you're gonna make any comments so thank you so this is the earliest we've ever brought

210the calendar forward and I think we've talked about every every year trying to bring It Forward a little bit earlier but this one Lisa could appreciate this this was spurred on a very hot first day of school um and we were 90 minutes late on our dismissal at Candlewood Lake and came back to the office and I looked at an email from a person I'll just leave it at that and I was spurred on by their desire to know if we're starting after Labor Day next year because they were looking at ways to get discounts on vacation and so my response in jest of course was I'm glad you have time to think about your vacation next year but but I looked at Lisa and it got us thinking he said you know what and

211and Lisa what do you think and she said I got it Boston she started getting right to it so we started playing around with a draft but it's important to know this is not done in any isolation between Lisa and me frankly we put a committee together we have several teachers from the different schools secretaries from the different schools and admin from the different schools and so we we put a start draft out there and then get lots of feedback in every piece of feedback that came back was incorporated because it was very important whether it was something we may have overlooked or a suggestion or an idea key takeaways for this draft as you take it away for the next couple of weeks and then we talk about it again in October is one

212every bit of anecdotal feedback that I personally have received and that I've sought out and asked from staff and also our team here has heard from staff and families everyone loved the after Labor Day start so that was the first thing that's what I've heard so far anecdotally there's no survey on that so taking a look at the calendar this one does have another after Labor Day start and it Labor Day happens to be on the 2nd of September so it's actually early so we still get going on things it has the same number of professional development days um Columbus Day is still a professional development day students have the the day off but staff is in for professional development we end relatively early similar to the current school year I think it's June 13th

213and in addition to that what's really I want to just bring to the attention of the board is typically December 23rd is an early dismissal and then the 24th Christmas Eve is a day off that's how our calendars typically run and so many of our contracts are lined up the way December 30 23rd falls on a Monday uh in next year's calendar in the year 24 is it falls on a Monday and we didn't think it made sense no one on the committee thought it made sense to come back for uh a full day or even an early dismissal day on a Monday so we would have a full day on December 20th and then have that full week off um for the the recognition of the holiday so those are some big pieces I

214wanted to draw your attention to we still have a full April vacation and a short long weekend a short February vacation exercises president's weekend so very very typical and you'll see conference dates and those kinds of things on there [Music] they're not on there at least I thought we had the conference station the conferences I mean it's early but no conversations they're listed on the bottom here but they're not oh they're just not colored they're not colored yep and that's why it's a draft okay yeah if I could just add one a little um part to this is that having new teacher orientation bleed right into the convocation and the start of school that was really really helpful this year because the new teachers were right just like in the mindset of going to school

215every day and then you know going from TSO over to get their um it just worked out really nicely it really did and we're able to we're going to replicate that again another thing we're doing differently in it there was uh some scheduling conflicts that worked in our favor actually for convocation typically the way the professional learning was scheduled for our paraprofessionals was the first two days that the teachers are back and since we've moved convocation to the last day when the teachers are back that Friday before Labor Day our pairs weren't able to come they were invited to come but it's not a work day for them and so working with Mr Roland he's working with uh with our pairs everybody liked the idea of their pddas being the Thursday Friday so they could

216participate in convocation as well we can have all of our staff together so that's another uh piece to this so thank you for saying that document had helped me [Music] so if you have any questions now or you want to just digest this and then we'll talk about it in October so or ask some questions in between I have a question right now um it says CLS ends at 3 3 35. but they get on the bus at 3 25. we missing school time so yes sir Dr P could come up here for a little bit and just talk about how that mechanically Works um [Music] yeah so just given the number of students that we have to move in transportation just with all the buses uh Crown pickup so the dismissal starts a little

217bit early uh it was if you remember back in kova times when we had similar problems we started the dismissal process a little early as well I will say teachers have been very creative and they've uh in fifth grade for example they have kind of uh not redistributed but we did some creative scheduling where they do the math science and literacy during the course of the day and they incorporate some of the social studies standards within literacy and they all teach social studies at the end of the day so it's that 10 minutes is technically taken but not in the overall big picture and Dr P typically at Huckleberry and at Center School dismissal started before the technical end of the school day correct that's my understanding because remember contractually the teachers are done at

2183 35. gotcha so we have to if we my teachers left at 3 35 and I started bus dismissal I would be left with just me and 1100 kids so I can't do that and our teachers have been great about volunteering their time yeah teachers have been fantastic about amazing helping yeah so that's it Mike so how would you like to get how would you like to get input you want us to uh when do you want to bring this back and then when do you need input for almost um probably if if in the next week before next Friday the board members could email me individually Lisa and me individually we'd love to get your feedback on it and then if there's any adjustments we can make based on that you know there's some

219oversights or some ideas we'll talk to the committee about it and then I could bring we could bring back a Incorporated draft okay draft two I guess for the October 18th meeting we haven't heard that from anybody wow there's because now the next year it's the 20th that's the 20th I'm surprised we fight for that I know Mrs Burrell puts on a big Easter spread and always wishes she had the Monday off but um but that if that's feedback we'll certainly take it [Music] would happy to okay or if you're not ready to the November meeting exactly it's nice you can look at how long that agenda is but I can tell you I did get back to that uh individual who emailed me and let them know you could start planning your vacation even

220though the board hasn't approved it gave them the process it looks like we'll be starting after Labor Day they were very relieved let's tell you the truth so it's very happy I'm glad someone's planning a vacation all right thank you again taking the rest of his life off there's no old business uh we did public comment at the beginning next is the three main points that do you have any thoughts on I have lots of thoughts um yeah we did a lot of different stuff um I'd like to highlight some of the opening of school updates from all three schools try to combine it into one big update um I thought the Desa update was important and then I thought I would combine um I don't know how but combine Athletics and technology updates that's

221the third one [Music] no we don't have to we don't have to cram it like in order to get everything it's sort of like supposed to be sorry supposed to be sort of like I guess the three that we want to highlight right so in that sense I would kind of lean more towards Athletics and all the awards yeah um yeah were you gonna say I was I was gonna say it was a long meeting we had one this month and the board could call it the four main points for this month to three main points we can also give yourself a little flexibility here so if you think it's that important right yeah I like Rosa's idea though of highlighting Athletics is the third one and maybe not so much Tech and why don't

222I just suggest we just do a separate post on the graduation date that could just be a little blur post that your District puts out there well because I feel like the 3 three main points really affects every grade level right and I'm sure Mr Blanda will be putting a note out quite quickly about the graduation day because I know he's got a lot of he's receiving quite a bit of email as well as to when the graduation date is so just to recap well the school opening then Athletics yeah everyone okay with that yeah all right Tom sounds good and upcoming events all schools are closed this coming Monday September 25th for Yom Kippur and Monday October 9th for professional development cles has picture day on October 17th whiskaneer has open house coming up

223grade six is tomorrow night grade 7 is Wednesday September 27th and grade 8 is Thursday September 28th I believe those are all 6 p.m Mr Renda uh 6 6 30 6 30 in the cafeteria and whiskey near also has picture day Thursday September 28th and the walkathon Thursday October 19th and Brookfield High School has the Lake Compounce trip for seniors on October 6th and they have a spirit week coming up October 16th to 20th with the homecoming game on Friday October 20th and the homecoming dance at the Amber Room on Saturday October 21st that's all I have [Music] okay thank you all right so without objection we are adjourned thank you all for staying with us thank you everyone thank you everyone [Music] thank you