Board of Education Meeting 3/16/22 @ 7pm

001[Music] i'd like to uh i'd like to call the regular meeting of the brookfield board of education for march 16th to order um uh please start by joining with me uh for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all man it's great to see so many people here tonight and we're not going to be lonely tonight ford so we have all of our board members are here this evening um and we'll start our agenda this evening with a student spotlight from huckleberry hill school john would you like to say some opening words thank you mr belden so i'd like to bring dr pepsoski up the interim principal of huckleberry hill we've

002got a student with us tonight and we're going to talk a little bit about technology we also have mrs paltoff here one of our huckleberry teachers and mrs whiting our technology integration specialist who just joined us this year so we're really excited to have jackie with us as well so dr pepsosky i'll turn it over to you because you're going to get to do the introduction of our special guest student so i'll leave that to you terrific thank you so first of all thank you i'm dr p for those of you who don't know me i'm the interim principal uh very proud of what we have for tonight especially in light of i'm going to share a month ago we used some technology in our building it was our 100th day celebration so as i'm

003walking around the hallway looking at these wonderful presentations uh in second grade and it just chokes me up thinking about it our math class was doing hundreds and counting by hundreds and skip counting and how wonderful and breaking up in little groups then i go to third grade third grade is writing and they're writing about what we're going to do when we're a hundred i was like oh how awesome and 100 we're going to do this and and one teacher had an app on her phone and this app made the kids 100 years old so she took a picture of the transform to 100 i walk in the classroom they're excited stay by the mic oh i'm sorry and they're showing me their pictures and some of the kids you know silver hair some are

004bald they say some are wrinkled and they're like look this is what i look like when i'm 100. and i said awesome and they said dr p what would you look like and i said i don't know so the teacher came over and took my picture and she hit the button poof i'm transformed to 100 years old and she holds it up to show the kids and there's an awkward silence five seconds ten seconds and a little boy says um dr p you don't look any different awesome and bless her this little girl in touch with ruler and our emotions notice that doctor who's very sad that he looks 100. dr p watch watch guys guys look if you look really closely they added a wrinkle to his forehead and his glasses are thicker thank

005you [Laughter] that being said fast forward now one month later very proud and very pleased to introduce zach in third grade jackie whiting who's our technology coach has been doing amazing work with our teachers because of the amazing work she does with her t our teachers our students benefit so zach is going to show you tonight how he benefited under the jackie whiting guidance and also jackie if you don't mind i want to put you on the spot okay so we're really highlighting book creator yes but if you don't mind just briefly maybe some of the other wonderful technological resources you're providing for our teachers and students absolutely and andrea's a good example of this so you got to come to the bike thanks jack you got it so andrea is a great example of

006this because while i'm using book creator with zach this evening andrea has also used a program that used to be called adobe spark it's now adobe creative cloud express and that helps students to make slideshow animation videos we also have teachers who are building google sites with their students particularly in elementary school they're doing biography web pages and we have teachers now who are also exploring using green screen technology with their elementary school students so we've got a lot going on at huckleberry now and did everybody get a chance to see the microphone did everybody get a chance to see the teaser that we have in the board agenda there was a link to a book creator didn't see okay at your leisure in the agenda please click on that link not necessarily now just

007a little teaser about the wonderful work people created in our school and we have natalia in fourth grade all right there you go good so this is a library in book creator right and if we scroll through the shelves we come to zach's book all about cheetahs talk to them they're your audience over there can you lower the length a little bit yeah it's right next to it all right zach you ready cheetahs by zachary rank like all the other books my book has a table of contents tonight we will be looking at the habitat of a cheetah and cute little cubs anything you want people to notice about your um those are hyper links i can just click it and it takes me right to the page so i'm talking to the microphone so

008what's this a audio text box where do cheetahs live cheetahs primarily live in the white plains of africa and some still in india live in india africa is one of the seven continents of the world they live on the white plains white plains or grasses cheetahs live there because they eat gazelles grasslands is a domain specific word so when you click on it it takes me right it takes you right to the glossary i'll show them that on the next page right a mother cheetah can have three to five cubs at a time they are about 10 inches long that's smaller than a ruler they are helpless when they are born they need their mother to feed them her mom they can crawl up to 10 days old they begin to eat me at six

009weeks old they learn how to hunt from their mother they leave their mother at one year to 18 months if they live on the room for the rest of their lives and if i click this what's going to happen it brings me right it brings you right to the glossary where you have to find all of your words excellent zach can you talk into the microphone and tell people if you would like this your notes just in case you want your notes zach's going to tell you how using book creator has made him a better writer i wasn't really a big fan of writing before book creator it made me enjoy writing because i can make links you don't have to figure out how the author wants the author wants you to read because i

010can record it for you thank you for taking your time to watch my presentation tonight all right and now would you like to go to the microphone natalia and while i get to your bookshelf you can introduce yourself okay tell them your name i'm natalia pegan natalia help you find your book um are you top shelf um oh this one the blue one are you ready yeah all right what's this project about natalia this project is about george washington today i'm going to be teaching you about his about life leading the army and as president and life leading the army and being president george was one of the delegates at the first and second continental congress the continental congress was a group of representatives from each colony who decided to fight with the british together

011they appointed george as general of the continental army in may 1775. he didn't have an organized and put together group and now what would you like to share and now i'm just gonna share um my about the author natalia pegan is nine years old she is in fourth grade and her teacher is miss hair she has three siblings one golden retriever named chip and two cats oreo and cookie natalia likes to dance in her free time and play with her pets and that's a picture of my pet can you tell them the same thing the answer the same questions acted how does book creator make you a better writer it makes me a better writer because text features are easier to put in and text features help readers a lot excellent job thank you well

012i'll speak for the board that's fabulous i i wish i'd been able to play you know work with that kind of uh making a book when i was your age guys so well done well well done thanks so much thanks everyone thanks dr p another round of applause for them okay next up is our student representative report so ben i'll turn it over to you hang in because there's a lot okay so starting with um school-wide events so we have the senior six flags trip which was just announced so that's wednesday june 15th and it's a hundred dollars for a round-trip coach bus park access all day the private pavilion two catered meals and unlimited soda so the bus would leave at 9 30 a.m and this is for anybody as a part of the

013class of 2022 and again it's just adding to our like week of events at the end of the year to make it so that obviously the graduation date was moved so there's a few days there where might get a little slow towards the end so this is our way of kind of bringing light to those last few days we also have actually friday this friday our fundraiser for again the class of 2022. it's a hockey game the danbury hat trick so they've run a bunch of fundraisers there where we get a certain percent of the profit when it comes to the tickets and other sales and people can buy tickets online and there's a certain code bhs22 and that goes to the senior class it also gets a certain percentage of tickets on sale and

014that's again working towards the senior activities which those funds would end up going towards something like senior prom or other activities at the end of the year then there's the penguin plunge on march 19th at 11 30 and that's a fundraiser for the special olympics then there's also the distracted driving program save life tour wednesday march 23rd for 12th grade students the musical is coming up on starting says the 23rd but i looked into it at the 24th until the 27th people can reserve tickets online and then the sat which i mentioned last time they're doing it across a week since it's online and they're separating it up so that way there's less people taking it each day and the schedules change according to that and then also the college fair that's taking place at

015newtown high school on wednesday march 30th which they'll go through colleges trade schools and other training programs moving on to the next section there are four national merit scholar finalists samita shersat sam cotron zane kaiser and sophia kemp and then also for voice for change that was a grant that's given by the state they had i think it was 1.5 million dollars that it was part of getting students to have more of a voice in the changes at their own schools so myself and jackson sharp submitted a proposal to the state for approval and they ended up approving them both so now what would happen is we move on to the campaigning stage where we'll spread awareness of our proposal throughout the school and then on march 28th we would end up voting as a

016school so every student would get a vote into the election or election or ballot whatever and that would then choose one proposal to move forward and receive the twenty thousand dollar grant um mr blanda recently has announced the top 10 students for the class of 2022 those specific names will be released later and some more graduation updates so the caps and gowns have been ordered and paid for by the school and students who want to receive those have to just make sure that they submit all of their school property or pay the replacement costs for outstanding property there will be a voluntary grad walk for students to wear caps and gowns and walk through the hallways of their previous schools and current school so center school and huckleberry for the last time wms and bhs

017so obviously this is something that was done before and didn't happen during covid but we're trying to bring that back and it will happen and there'd be bus transportation for that we're also going to keep the car parade tradition going so having those cars go from one place to another we're trying to figure out ways so that it's not as chaotic as sometimes in past years but making it nice and smooth and planning ahead so that it's something good for the seniors and then the ceremony itself is saturday june 18th in the morning time to be determined at the vhs stadium hopefully as long as the weather holds up otherwise we would move to the auditorium and the idea is to have if it is outdoors to have more audience members able to come so

018each senior would get two tickets that would access those audience members to the fields but then there were also more seats available in the actual bleachers themselves that other visitors could come and see the graduation and then also the grad party planning is taking place which might look a little different from past years but still it's taking place so then with the clubs key club will have their district district educational conference from saturday april 9th to saturday sunday april 10th national honor society is continuing to plan for our annual mother's day we care 5k that takes place at the school here and it's we've chosen um sandy hook promise as our beneficiary or our fundraising we're fundraising towards um that organization and i think in past years we've had like multi-thousand dollars that we end

019up donating so it's a nice fundraiser for that future teachers of america is working on a play date at center elementary school for students on a thursday evening run by the members of fta brookfield youth commission had two new official members brought in we have mr davila who's actually here tonight um he was he's always been involved with the youth commission but now he's an official member and also sean turner club e is partnering with tree planish to plant 150 trees which equates to bhs's total paper usage for the year trees are five dollars each for families across the town to purchase so it'd actually be for their own homes and they can either be brought to their homes on may 1st which is the planting date or you can pick them up from i

020think it might be the school or some location and then there's also the option to volunteer on that day to help plant trees and then national art honor society is running a fundraiser right now to paint portraits of families pets across the community moving on to athletics boys volleyball tryouts which is the first season ever for vhs um is this saturday the ice cats played in the ciac state semifinal this past monday the brookfield dance team actually hosted new england's last saturday which although they didn't compete it was all the concession proceeds went towards the bhs dance team so they got to i know like a few of the dance team members made posters for the other teams to help root them on so it's a nice way to boost morale and then the swim

021team state trials are um where last sunday and i know the swim team is also competing right now as we speak so and then finally student government invitations for senior prom have been sent are being sent out this week and once those get out to families we'll have more information to post and then um we also attended a casc high school leadership conference on friday march 11th unfortunately it was virtual but um next year we're looking to do our the underclassmen will be looking to do a lot more in-person events and then also outside guests for the junior and senior prom um have been allowed for this year any questions on all of that i hope you had quite a list this morning yes i'm working hard there ben there's a lot going on at

022that school yeah and i have to say because dr burl asked me to update i have not decided on a college yet but we're working on the process thank you ben we can't wait to hear any questions for ben all right thank you ben appreciate it really appreciate the update okay next up on our agenda is uh written correspondence okay deborah case wrote regarding the fourth grade class aaron scalera wrote regarding an foia request stephanie lownsberry wrote regarding an employee concern and sherry styronovsky wrote regarding concerns at bhs okay thank you um next up is uh approval aboard minutes i'll move the board approve the minutes from the regular meeting march 2nd the special meeting expulsion hearing march 4th a special joint meeting march 8th and the special meeting the continued expulsion proceedings march 11th

023second it's been moved and seconded you all have had a chance to get those minutes any questions or edits hearing none all in favor unanimously approved uh next up is the superintendent's report so dr bro i'll turn it over to you thank you mr belden so i'd just like to start with my typical covid report not a lot of information um but um our new information just so everybody knows as of last week uh our dashboard indicated that we had four positive cases at center school for at huckleberry uh one at wisconier and one at bhs i'm aware of about two cases right now this week but the nurses will have me fully updated by the end of the week and we're we're staying the course of the numbers for you know the last three

024weeks uh staying in that range and we're obviously watching it closely and in a lot of contact with dr sullivan to make sure we're monitoring everything the other piece um that i just wanted to mention is that dr sullivan and the health department continue to encourage vaccinations and so he has made a recommendation there is a mobile vaccination van that might be available to schools and so he's made a recommendation for me to take a look into that and so we will it'll be something perhaps after school that we can make available to families if they so choose um and we're not sure if it'd be something that might be in the town hall parking lot or in one of the school parking lots but we'll uh we'll work with the health department on that

025that is all i have on the covet update and in terms of special education director search update just to let everybody know that the first round of interviews is tomorrow so just to keep everybody updated we're moving along uh with our progress on that and we continue to receive applications for the assistant superintendent position in terms of security i have a nice little update here for everybody we are going to be working next week for a little bit at our principal meeting with wescon in the connecticut center for school safety just to work with our administrative team talk about our crisis plans and he has some new threat assessment training that we can take advantage of so we're going to be looking into that this hopefully this spring getting all of our crisis teams trained

026and or retrained in threat assessment and we've worked directly with the brookfield police department as well to make sure the state requirements the brookfield police department and our westcon connecticut school safety team are in alignment and what we're learning is commonplace and uh accurate in terms of the different agencies so we're all working together and uh we are consistent another piece to that is uh letting uh speaking of uh the youth commission and i heard sandy hook promise earlier uh mrs greenstein is on the youth commission uh a couple of weeks back mr conklin mr renda mr belland and myself met with mrs mcniff and some other members of the youth commission and we talked about the say something app which is an app that is a 24 7 app that is for students it

027is grant funded through sandy hook's promise is something we are looking into seeing how we can implement at the middle in high school for next year um and we'll give you more information on the app itself but we're pretty excited about that it's something that uh our administrative team is looking forward to in supporting our students when they might be in crisis or in need or have to present something off hours especially and then finally just a reminder from two weeks ago at the board meeting i did uh put out there so everybody is aware that the last day of school at this time is monday june 20th and i just wanted to let everybody know that and lisa and i will be putting a little note on the front page of the website just

028to let everybody know that that's the last day of school so there's no confusion out there um and we have a lot to do with the equity and inclusion uh presentation this evening and we also had a spotlight so i will end my remarks there i don't know if anybody has any questions for me any questions for dr burrow okay hearing none thank you very much i appreciate the informative update as usual thank you um so now we're going to go through uh board uh committee minutes um and uh we'll start with facilities okay we reviewed the school dood reports and specifically discussed roof leaks hvac issues and ceiling tiles that are missing and are clearly damaged in the hallway in classrooms at the high school one classroom is due to the fact that the

029heating coils had froze and then busted the ceiling towel in the main hallway has been a recurring problem it's an extensive job and it's a mechanical project that we may possibly need to bring a mechanic in for the problem is that the heating units cool and then condensation comes down so it's the main heat line and we can't isolate it at this time update at the middle school water update no changes and the most recent sample came out fine and showed acceptable levels of lead possibly one more sample will be taken before april as recommended by a water systems operator we can then re resubmit it to the state and close out the issue we reviewed our capital projects so the hvac we received four bids the lowest coming in from abs and that's who

030we're going to go with to do the work and the installation since the bid was over budget we're going to reduce the value of the scope of the work um the boys locker room project i'll come back to that at the end the guidance wing roof we received three quotes to update the specs one was for 8 thousand one was for 24 25 000 and the third came even higher um but they have since declined the work so it's it's and it's not a highly technical re-offense flat so more discussion will be coming with that we discuss plumbing and fixtures and equipment and discuss the security measures we discuss paving 60 000 square feet needs to be paved we only have 150 000 budgeted so we're going to wait and bundle it electrical service at

031the middle school we're waiting for the specs so we can go out to bid we talked about the wall at the middle school the rfp for the restoration work will be going out if it hasn't yet already buildings building condition study the project was on the town's arpa grant list the contractor estimated that the study would cost up to 200 000 and could take three to four months to do the middle school and the high school custodian staffing update um now we just had we hired a new knight custodian at the high school who who was at huckleberry so now we just have one vacancy at huckleberry but we transferred green light to huckleberry until we get a full-time custodian to fill that position we discussed some new business mr colbert reported that he provided

032hillyard with floor plans and other information needed for them to develop cleaning and staffing protocols for canada lake elementary school and hillyard will be their analysis that will present their analysis to the committee at a future meeting from miscellaneous discussion we discussed the board of selectmen's capital budget and that was submitted to the board of finance back to the boys locker room project so just some history so 1.3 million has been approved for the project but the bid came out at 2.8 million so although we're very disappointed at how high the bid came in we felt that we really kind of needed to weigh our needs versus wants and supported scaling back the project in order to get started on the work because if we continue to wait around we may never get the funds

033so the new plan is to do the locker room only and take out the weight room so i made a motion to use the 1.3 million that has been approved and moved forward with a plan to rebuild the project at its original scope which would not include air conditioning or increasing and enhancing the fitness center and the motion passed unanimously but it is important for us to mention that especially for the community to recall and understand the high school was renovated 18 plus years ago and this portion did not receive all that much as far as renovation the boys locker room hasn't been renovated since 1974 and the project was cut in 2006. so some of the larger needs of the boys locker room were are the showers that don't work there's insufficient ventilation there's

034no separation in the locker room so teams can hear each other which builds a lot of tension there's only one bathroom that's to be shared by both teams and they must cross paths to access the bathroom in the locker room referees have no privacy and most important there's no handicap accessible amenities plumbing lockers or benches and most important our athletic program problematic needs have changed over the years and we need to reorganize the existing space and repurpose this area that houses some obsolete showers and toilet rooms to provide a more appropriate setting that aligns with our program and most important provides safety and security measures measures but we can't forget and dismiss the important and necessary work that still needs to get done the fitness center affects our entire student body it's utilized 345 days

035a year for athletics pe and health classes so about 250 students a day use it and the fitness center alone is utilized during all four seasons by every sport so on average each athlete spends about two hours a day in the weight room so however the weight room is overcrowded and is only able to be used for a third of the year because the current equipment doesn't address the needs of pe classes we're restricted to the size of the current weight room and lack of fitness and cardio equipment we only have one bike one treadmill and a broken elliptical this is just as important as any other space in the building and it's about fostering the health and well-being of our children so although we're moving forward with doing the work it's just as important

036to complete the project and find a way to get the rest of the work done we've got to get this back on the agenda yeah right it's a new project for the weight room adjustable by itself yep does anybody have any questions any questions on that i have a question only because i was on the committee before so i'm i'm just remembering some of the other stuff we talked about but i thought initially when that higher estimate came in we only got one bid right at that point only one bid came in so there was talk about sending it out again but giving a longer lead time because we felt that maybe only one company responded because it was a short response period so did that ever happen that we tried to never it never

037happened i'm not sure why we never went back out to bed but um because it it's just disappointing to see parts of the project already being cut from it before we tried to get additional bids that maybe could accommodate those features i think we assumed too with um the increase in cost and materials and things that we didn't anticipate a bit that would come in lower can they at least give us um sort of an itemization of add-ons so that if we if it did come in like sure we can everyone is going to give us submit yeah yeah mr checo from the mbc is working directly with eddie from techdon you know we've all met eddie to scale it back but also we can talk about um the pieces yeah sort of an a

038la carte again you know some do when you do these projects and i can't speak to this specifically when when you don't move on one or move a certain wall at a certain time it becomes a whole different issue so that's what the architects are for to figure this out for us and it'll be harder to go back later and decide to add air conditioning if we want to so i think it would be nice to set it up for that but although like i mean trying to spin it in a positive way and have like the hopefully get the building condition study to do a really i mean that's not the only section of the school that really needs some serious attention yeah and so maybe this is you know a way that we

039can we can fix what really really needs to be fixed like right now and get like a nice long-range plan for the rest of the building okay okay any other questions for joy all right just moving us along we got a full agenda this evening uh i'll report on the strategic planning committee uh next it was a very brief meeting on march 8th basically was just getting organized you know talking about the dates and talking about the makeup of what we would like the committee to be we settled on somewhere between 15 and 20 individuals split probably 60 40 between educators and members of the public in various ill you know whether it be pto representatives or at large representatives or board members so um and uh we have some time to get organized we

040asked dr uh barrel to talk to john costa about setting the date for when we'll do the formation meeting and then which we had targeted for may june and uh and once we set that date i don't know if we think we're looking uh may 24th i think going forward will then launch us to start recruiting members for this commitment so both educators as well as the members of the public so that but that was the entirety of the meeting it really was a pretty short minute so okay next up is uh kate another another short meeting yeah so we started meeting uh dr ruby discussed the open positions for special special education director as well as the open position for assistant superintendent and around the special education director we talked a lot about the

041outplacement experience that the new person would probably have to have but also we had a long conversation about how the new special educa special education director needs to really coordinate with uh with parents and have that as a valuable skill and that's that's pretty much it okay any questions right short meeting um all right the last one is equity and inclusion not a short meeting but a short update since we'll be presenting shortly we just um mrs holly reported that she and mr hill are gathering the programmatic and achievement data and there will be some information forthcoming on that and then each teacher quality and stakeholder just went into breakout rooms reviewed their slides practiced our presentations then we regrouped and did mock presentations each for the other group and just received some feedback and

042planned for tonight thank you all right next on our attendance to consensus i'll move that the board approve the items on the consent agenda which are new hires second moved in second any questions all in favor all right okay new business first item our equity and inclusion presentation i'm sorry new business first up is our equity and inclusion presentation and the recommended action is that we receive a presentation from the equity and inclusion committee so uh yeah so amy if i could just say a few opening words before turning it over to you and just just to bring um the board and the public back through a little bit of history and process to you know what's gotten us here tonight as a reminder um about a year and a half ago in response to

043the board's decision to establish the equity and inclusion uh subcommittee the core team we initiated a process to establish membership where we were focused on board objectives and to that end we had a robust response we had about 34 uh people that sent in letters of interest in regard to being on the equity and inclusion subcommittee which was wonderful after reviewing the letters of interest we settled on a number i think amy around 21 maybe it was 22 i don't know but it was there so um we were a bit selective there and really trying to look at the different stakeholders uh additionally the committee um it's important to um just credit them with how hard and diligently they have worked we had a um retreat in the summer where we did a little bit

044of redirecting as a board and we talked through some of the kind of a really want to go to a fine-tuned data approach to do some fact-finding before jumping into initiatives and so on on the board's recommendation after that nice retreat that we had we had a good long talk about that we've been in that focus in that direction going forward we've um unfortunately due to time commitment we have lost a few members but we've gained a few members so right now the committee is around 18 or 19 folks um because it is there is a lot of work in between each monthly subcommittee meeting that has to be done and you'll see that this evening in the uh the presentations the committee has really worked hard this school year they're ready to present tonight

045um each powerpoint as amy said one is on stakeholder um and teacher the others on teacher quality it really reflects the board's priorities and the objectives and then have some recommendations at the end so um we're really looking forward to it we're excited to have a number of representatives from the team here um it's good to see them in person it's our first in-person meeting we've been on zoom so it's great to see everybody in person i'll turn it over to amy just probably i'm going to turn it over to mrs holly who i would like to give sincere gratitude for stepping up as a co-chair and an admin lead on this very large undertaking of a committee thank you everyone and uh just to give the subcommittee members a bit of a heads up

046due to the positioning of the laptop since it's not here if you want to bring up your device bring up the presentation on your device so you can refer to it that would probably be optimal so we're facing the board and the community so good evening members of the board dr barrell dr ruby and the brookfield community my name is kevin hawley and i am the k-12 curriculum specialist for world languages and english to speakers of other languages and i'm also the co-chair of the equity and inclusion subcommittee along with mrs foster so tonight you're going to listen and view the two presentations each one presenting one of the four identified focus areas that dr burrow was mentioning so we still have to deliver on programmatic equity and achievement equity as well but tonight we're

047going to start with teacher quality and then move on to stakeholder equity and i'm charged with introducing the teacher quality presentation this evening in collaboration with miss whiting who's going to help me out and also mrs fernandez uh and last but definitely not least our two student representatives uh trem and belokio and nora graphgaard so during this presentation we'll be uh discussing why we're focusing on teacher quality what are equity assessment yielded and a recommendation for future direction [Music] so firstly in an equity assessment where we're tasked with identifying problems of practice in relation to educational inequities it's important for school districts to equitably distribute quality teachers among their schools to reduce the likelihood for inequitable outcomes among student groups we engaged in a data driven approach by analyzing existing and historical data regarding teacher

048quality to ensure that we were perspective taking and making teacher quality claims that were as unbiased as possible we want to increase transparency to the brookfield community about teacher quality data and from national data we know that quality teachers are unfortunately not distributed equitably and we wanted to know if that was the case here in brookfield you can't say around the world and we know that quality teachers positively impact the social emotional and academic outcomes of all students [Music] the historical and existing data we examined were socio-demographic data and teacher qualification and retainment data we did so because nationwide data and research indicate that minority student groups such as students of color and low-income students are at higher risk for not having access to high-quality teachers additionally we know that increased diversity along with high

049quality teachers has multiple benefits for students including increased high quality relationships among students and teachers due to their asset-based views of students particularly diverse student learner characteristics student representation and curricula and lower dropout rates and higher expectations for all students okay so what we already know understanding that this is the very beginning of the potential work in equity and inclusion we began investigating what we already know about teacher quality in brookfield from readily accessible sources of public information with uninterpreted data to do this we primarily used edcite which is the source of publicly reported educational data in connecticut being that our variables of focus are teacher and student demographics teacher qualifications and teacher retainment we have concentrated our initial research to understanding these particular aspects in brookfield we discovered significant limitation factors as well significant

050specifically the manpower required to do this level of research many districts have employed full-time professionals with experience structuring the investigative and directorial tasks that are required to yield true organizational improvements across a complex system like a school district later in this presentation when we question what we need to know it may be that the information exists within our own systems but tasking our hr professionals and others in central office to do significant work in this area requires board support and prioritization according to the state of connecticut to be considered a highly qualified teacher a teacher must be fully certified in the subject area and grade level that they are teaching in brookfield all of our permanent staff as well as most of our long-term substitutes meet this criterion questioning what other qualifying information brookfield collected

051of its teaching applicants we found that only marital status was gathered in the state of connecticut there's an average annual treacher turnover rate of just over 10 percent about one third of this turnover is due to retirement another third leave pre-retirement which may include leaving the profession altogether and another third to those moving these statistics are far more favorable in this state and region of the country compared to others teacher retention is vital to instituting educational policies equitably and with fidelity when teachers feel supported and valued they're far more likely to stay and in brookfield we generally have a smaller annual teacher turnover rate compared to the state average nationally the highest teacher turnover appears in the area of math science and special education which contributes near fully to the high demand and short supply

052of qualified teachers for those positions considering the most direct student-facing positions being teachers and paraprofessionals we calculated brookfield's ratio of students to those positions as you can see over time brookfield has prioritized manageable class sizes and support for teachers and students more importantly you can see that this that it has mirrored this priority as it concerns our students with special needs but to be forthright about the limitations of this descriptive analysis i must be clear though it does seem equivalent visually we cannot infer from these data alone that this response is equitable and commensurate to the needs of this population unfortunately it is far beyond the scope of this committee to produce a meaningful analysis where we might be able to determine the cause of an increase in support for students with special needs or

053even a quantifiable relationship between special education needs severity and support provided so the next thing that we looked at was the demographic makeup of both the faculty and the student body across the district so in the chart on the left what you see is the demographic makeup of the faculty k-12 excluding faculty who identify primarily or entirely as white so it's actually african-american asian native american or hispanic and latino identifying faculty members in the graphic on the left then we added in or in the chart on the left then we added in faculty who identify as white and we see that the overwhelming majority of faculty members k-12 identified themselves as white so we then wanted to look at how that compared to the student body k-12 and what we found is that there are

054more students of color in the district um as a as a proportion of the full student body then there are faculty members of color as a proportion of the entire faculty makeup in the district and then we compared each group individually and what we saw is that while for some groups within our community while both the number of students and the number of faculty seems to be increasing in general when it comes to students who identify as black or african american those those students are those families their numbers are increasing in the community but their numbers among the faculty are decreasing so on this slide you can see what we also know from brookfield's professional development and minority recruitment plans for professional development we see on this timeline that we understand the socio-demographic differences between

055our staff and our students therefore we can see on this timeline that our district prioritizes strengthening adult and so and social emotional skills and competencies with cultural competency considerations by infusing a trauma-informed approach so for the past couple of years staff have been working hard to examine their mindsets their biases and make sure that they're affirming our all of our students identities experiences and assets that they bring to the classrooms additionally we know that brookfield has a minority recruitment plan and that our former hr director attended a minority recruitment fair uh last school year um so next we're going to go over questions that we have and what we need to know so the four questions that we have are what other credentialing data would be beneficial to collect in the public schools to fully

056represent the expertise of the staff how can we increase transparency as to how the teachers are placed in their positions that match their expertise the third question is as brookfield public schools has a minority staff recruitment plan can it be reviewed and further analyzed for effectiveness and the last question is as brookfield public schools has a professional learning plan to develop the staff's cultural competency can it be expanded okay before we go over our next steps that we suggest it's important to note that these recommendations do have limitations as a lot of them do have responses but due to our subcommittee bandwidth we're still emerging in our data analysis because of factors like the pandemic and time and lack of volunteers so it's important to note that these are questions that we paired with recommended

057steps but they shouldn't be taken as district deficits and things our district is lacking but instead of things that we should further explore so the first question is what other credentialing data would be beneficial to collect in the brookfield public schools to fully represent the expertise of our staff and the action steps that we recommend are to determine if there's additional credentialing criteria for educators that brookfield does not already collect and values in highly qualified teachers and another action step that we recommend is if additional credentialing criteria is identified we should develop a plan for collection and analysis the next question is how can we increase transparency as to how teachers are placed in positions that match their expertise and the action step that we recommend is to increase the transparency as to how teachers

058are hired and placed in their positions and to determine if the current process is effective in the distribution of expertise when assigning faculty to their courses especially at bhs when teachers typically are teaching multiple courses the third question is as brookfield public schools has a minority staff recruitment plan can it be reviewed and further analyzed for effectiveness and the action step that we're recommending for this question is to further review and analyze the effectiveness of the recruitment plan and then the fourth and final step that we recommend is as brookfield public schools has a professional learning plan to develop staff's cultural competency can it be expanded and the action step that we're recommending for this question is to further develop the plan and incorporate it into the district's updated strategic coherence plan and continue funding

059it thank you you've got to introduce yourself too oh yeah i'm nora gravgart um i'm a senior at brookfield high school great job thank you that was awesome thank you so much and i thought we were gonna have trem tonight i don't know oh okay okay by the way grease next week on thursday just another plug for grease the music is there right now um so now uh we're gonna actually take questions at the end of the second presentation from the board so i'm going to introduce mrs foster for her work on the stakeholder equity good evening everyone i just want to introduce our team and thank everyone again and as i'm introducing and i'm looking at this i feel we have a really good representation of stakeholders um the people that have been working

060on these slides and some will be presenting to you in a moment for this group we have wisconsin mr dean renda we have um two teachers from brookfield high school mr ernesto davila and mr chris buckley we have community members miss logan solander and mr jeremy farrell and we have our students julia roberto and mahidot i want to thank everyone for your hard work on this and i will let you guys take it away hi everyone i'm mahidote as ms foster said i'm a senior at bhs and so why are we looking at stakeholder equity a stakeholder would be any student staff or family member or community member in the district and we believe that we need feedback from these stakeholders and community members to make brookfield more representative representative and inclusive as a district

061we think stakeholders need to be represented and heard in the community and we have yet to determine which stakeholders have to have their voices elevated yeah through this work we strive that we will be able to provide services to parts to have our school committee participate in all um equitable mannerisms sorry so what do we know our main source of stakeholder information it's currently the panorama survey and we currently use two types of panorama surveys we use the teacher panorama survey and parent panorama service so these are not equity-specific surveys these are surveys that have general information and uh the data collected from these surveys potentially uh might be non-representative as they are non-equity-specific service and um we currently don't have any direct community or um or a student survey so uh some issues that

062we have with a panorama survey are that we have uh difficulty triangulating information and acting upon the information that we collect uh we also have some challenges with direct and indirect question mix we have some questions that um only contain limited demographic information due to confidentiality and uh we also have some all that applied questions that result in more uh responses than respondents so uh besides that we're also uh seeing a low uh response rate and we're not really able to see uh what um demographic groups are responding more than others so um on the next slide we have uh some examples of uh some of these questions are troublesome to us so uh the first one is a question that has been asked on the parent panorama survey about a student experience so as

063we see right here is an indirect question that results in a 25 percent of don't knows so that's a an example there that you know it's being indirectly parents don't know uh how to uh properly reply to that another example that we see is uh all that all um all that apply and a question on the second one so that uh for example generates more responses than respondents and uh finally uh an example that we see on the third one is um a question that has about mean-spirited behavior that's a very broad definition right that is difficult to triangulate so um yeah you know as we don't have that defined we don't know how to like join it or evaluate against other sources so in trying to address uh issues as far as what we

064can do to add to this information and find out additional pieces of the parameters that will help us focus our look at equity we thought about the the following concepts that are up here we thought about asking new ways in which we can find additional expanding the parameters is what we can ask and what kind of data we can collect and things along the lines of finding new ways to engage with people who maybe aren't participating in the surveys and finding ways to get more people to participate so finding alternate ways to engage community and parent we need community members and parents in the collection of our data also finding ways to to address some of the questions that have multiple meetings like the question of respect some of the questions that were addressed in

065the survey talk about respect within the classroom and that has multiple different meetings depending on who you are and even within the same like what teachers think about when respect might be different what kids think about respect we were really curious about finding additional ways to collect data um questions can be very very stark and the questions the data can be maybe not as clear uh and so finding uh qualitative and quantitative data so are there focus groups that we can do are there ways for us to put some humanity behind the questions that might give us some additional clarity behind some of the information that the surveys that senor davila mentioned might be able to give us a little bit more clarity also addressing um oh sorry i looked up um our current system

066so in in collecting new data are the are the surveys that we need to collect do we need to use existing surveys to to do that or should we be writing our own that we might be more specifically tailored to the needs of brookfield and the public schools here so can we add new questions to an existing survey or given the fact that there might be some survey fatigue do we need to do this in a different way because we're not turning out enough people because they just ignore the surveys that we're asking so we had some questions along that lines and then lastly at the bottom are there ways to engage people uh differently right so finding maybe extrinsic motivations to get people to participate in the surveys to help collect the data one

067of the things we found is that our numbers are pretty low and so if we can find more people to participate maybe that would engage and give us more accurate data when it comes to stakeholder equity thank you throughout this presentation we have laid out what we already know and what we need to know in order to perform stakeholder equity work at the level we believe we should be in brookfield while the barriers to getting this information are complex and therefore require complex solutions we have come here with three solid recommendations that we believe if brookfield takes will improve our equity stakeholder work each of these uh recommendations also come with an action step which we can take to start fulfilling that recommendation and putting us on the right track as a town the first

068of these recommendations is to seek qualified input from seek input from qualified individuals with experience and equity work there are people who have done this work before there are people in this state who have done this work before and know what they are doing we need to identify and connect with those people and learn what we can from them in order to jumpstart our own efforts the action step for this recommendation is to identify individuals to collaborate with as a resource our second recommendation is to develop an equity survey reflective of the needs of brookfield brookfield is a unique town full of unique people we need a equity survey that understands and reflects that however for an action step for this we believe we need to start by connecting with neighboring districts to collect comparative

069documents while brookfield is unique the towns and districts that surround us share a lot in common and we can learn from them in order to make sure we don't have to figure this out all out on our own and can use their understanding as a foundation for our own work our third and final recommendation is the collection of complete and qualitative data as we have talked about earlier in this presentation we do not feel we have holistic enough data as a town to truly do this work as effectively as we think we need to our action step for this recommendation is the development of focus groups to be held at varying times of the day and in varying languages by doing this we believe um brookfield can make um stakeholder equity work more accessible to

070make sure all of the community and all the stakeholders are involved while also getting qualitative data that will complement our quantitative data from the surveys and help us paint a fuller picture of brookfield and its stakeholders we believe that if brookfield takes these three recommendations and works towards fulfilling them brookfield can strive forward in our work for stakeholder equity thank you so much for listening tonight all right so good mr puzzle so mr baldwin asked the question yeah sure is i think it's time for discussion um for the second recommendation action step what kind of comparative documents would we be looking at as for from neighboring towns like would be an example i don't want to you know speak for the stakeholder equity group but i assume that um perhaps whether it's other surveys we

071know that there are equity surveys uh that other towns implements even like panorama has an equity survey that is student facing and teacher facing and we have a relationship with them so even just implementing that i don't know mrs foster did i so to answer joy's question that was really we were talking about jeremy there wasn't other documents it was mostly on the server the survey end i didn't think about what we were referring to is there are tools out there that we could use and have been used by other caps in other districts if we can learn from them by comparing or having to try out that we think we can make sure we know what's worth trying and what may not be thank you [Music] so the question i had as i was

072listening which by the way very nicely done presentations i could tell you guys practiced and rehearsed you guys did that really well both presentations were rooted in i think i walk away with we need to design better information information so we can make better decisions that i gather that correctly out of the both presentations yes do we have in our head what the goal of the data and what actions we would take off it if we had better data so i i.e you know projecting what the what it might look like and feel like when we do collect data what types of different decisions we could make as a as a district and as a community what sorts of actions would come out of the better data would be very helpful i think in designing

073the data you need so and i completely agree and i think just to echo dr burrell's point during the retreat you know we're trying to define problems of practice and we can't do that with incomplete data so i don't know if my answer is going to fully respond to your question but we can't even have those goals materialized in our minds without looking at complete data and i think you know what you took away from both presentations is completely accurate both in the teacher quality and stakeholder equity even within our recommendations we kept highlighting the fact that um you know there were limitations within our own body due to the pandemic and time and volunteers we had absences that that's true but at the same time the the capability of our um of our subcommittee

074membership uh not to disparage anyone's intellect because we have amazing amazing membership but um we felt borderline uncomfortable making assumptions about data when you know we didn't have necessarily the expertise to analyze that data to the fullest extent to make evidence-based uh to even formulate evidence-based goals so these recommendations are more so how to get more data in order to get those goals that you're asking about yeah my question was actually a little bit different than that it was more like what kinds of questions would you be wanting to ask for example on the first presentation should we be hiring different types of teachers should we be assigning different teachers to different you know types of courses and and that that that type of question if that's the type of question we're answering that defines

075a little bit the type of data you would think you would need on this one if the question was um are we reaching the right constituencies and listening and getting feedback it's one set of data but if it was are we examining demographics in in depth enough you'd ask for a different set of data right one you're asking more of my listening to you types of questions and the other one you're asking more about tell me more about your profile and so i would think that the types of questions you would want to ask are very pertinent to the types of data you would want to collect i i would think that in order to formulate those questions and to make sure that in the questions like if we're asking for example to what extent

076do diverse teachers impact student outcomes let's say for example if that's a question that we wanted to ask i wouldn't feel comfortable asking that type of question because i wouldn't want to put the perception out there that we are trying to infer causality between those two variables without having a look at the data first both quantitative and qualitative so you would want to have data that would help you understand the causality yes in order to formulate the clear that kind of goes right to the point which is if you know what questions you're asking you'll you're going to look for causality questions right and and i would love you know i think as you continue to refine the both of these it all you ought to start with what are the questions we're trying to

077answer and not you know this one was a little bit of i wanna i wanna go get an expert i wanna go look at what neighboring towns do i want to look at others i think we ought to have a stronger opinion of the types of questions we're trying to answer as we go into it because it would help you set the world-class bar of the type of data you're collecting right and it's not to try and presuppose the answer it's to try and say if we could get this type of data we could answer these kinds of questions you know if you think about it that way and and what are the important questions right now what's the hypothesis if you go to the scientific method my friend here who is the expert in

078scientific method you start with a hypothesis or a problem statement and then you go after data to help you understand it better so and i think the issue there too is that after our assessment um you know as both groups emphasizes that uh you know if even if we were to identify those hypotheses the data out there as our capacity as a subcommittee isn't they're incomplete right now so um you know that's why our recommendations are based on how to complete that data i understand we can't because we don't know you don't even have preliminary data you don't even have preliminary data we can't i mean obviously the ultimate goal is what we talked about last summer at the retreat was to identify some of these problems and use data to do that but we

079can't even i we can't even identify the questions to ask that are necessary to identify those problems so we're having this sort of you got a chicken and you've got a chicken in there you're a foundational problem with the completeness of and again like i said you know the the some of the data is what we have we can scour our human resources records and things like that that requires an incredible amount of time and quite frankly money because of that and so that's something that you know we don't know how to ask a particular question or what kinds of questions we want the data to address because we don't know what we already have or where that where those data might take us so it's a bit of a problem but i think i

080think the point that that you're is right in front of us and jeremy started to talk about it a little bit is um this committee and frankly now our board we start to own this issue and how do we go about solving it to the questions bob was asking and there are some neighboring districts that are uh maybe a year 18 months ahead of us on this work and we could we could talk to them and learn from them and see what kind of surveys they started with they may have more pertinent data they may have a more community approach rather than just a school district approach to how we we get at this information so there's a lot of ways we think we can get there and i think if we're creative and we're

081open and we learn from others um and we go at this with the database approach i think we can get there and start to realize okay now we have this data and to um ernesto was talking about triangulating that data and figuring it out from there but a lot of it starts with the stakeholders um as mr buckley was saying they've got to be comfortable maybe there is survey fatigue there's a different way to ask the surveys we certainly could work with panoramas the vendor that puts the surveys together for us to design something update the survey whatever the case may be add questions that kind of thing so i just i just find when you have a data centric project it's so much more fulfilling and effective if you have an idea of what

082questions you're trying to answer right um specific questions as opposed to okay what's the best type of data collect and then we'll go find out what it tells us right you start with a body of knowledge that you understand i understand and then you formulate these questions we don't have a complete body of knowledge to start with and so we need to first gather all of that before we can figure out what what are the important questions and i think that's that's sort of i i would i would argue that you could come up with the important question the important questions you could come up with now and say are the questions we're collecting the right ones to help us answer that right and and i think that would be a foundational point of improving

083data collection i don't have an issue with the actions i mean i really don't i think understanding expertise and understanding what others do and things like that but i just think it's a stronger play and more fulfilling right as a project if you said here's the five questions i think we want to be able to answer right high level right without bias right in the questions but this is the topical area i want to be able to generally ask answer now are we asking the is we our neighbors our experts do they even address those types of that type of data right then i think if you go into it with a little bit of an opinion a little bit of an opinion of what information i need it helps an awful lot in terms

084of you know driving the process right i don't disagree that we have to we have a lot of work to do obviously on you know finding out what data's out there and how can we improve it right so i think we're so foundational i think of my maslow's hierarchy we're way down here right in terms of you know how do you how do you get data but it's uh i think this is just keep having a uh opinion not on what the answer is but what the questions are right i think it would be helpful just my two cents worth well i want to kind of add to that because you do have variables so with variables you can formulate hypothesis so i mean you've said the term problematic practices uh hiring transparencies uh you

085know just with you know just the general term stakeholder equity there are variables so you can build those questions off the variables to help formulate the beginnings of the data exploration because then it's that's a little bit more guided uh but yeah going to having a hypothesis is you know you you prove it and you cannot you cannot prove it you're not doing that something that specific but if you start with the variables that that becomes the makeup of those initial questions well i mean we did ask those questions example if we wanted to understand if our minority parents are feel represented or are represented in our district in terms of do they feel like they have access to administration as an example we have no idea who is answering these surveys so we cannot

086even ask that question because we already understand that we don't have the information to do that but that's a that's a perfect example of what i was just saying right which is you had a question in your mind therefore i need to be able to do something with our data collection that gets us more better structure to the information right that's exactly wrong that's all i was saying that's all i was saying yeah and we can we can certainly highlight some of those questions we kind of took this presentation as um sort of our presentation of the back work that we're doing to get to that point okay cool well yeah and that's exactly it because what we're recommending in both of these uh presentations is pretty much the foundation of how you start with

087an improvement science framework to complete this work so in order to formulate a problem statement you would need to engage in end user consultations empathy interviews examine historical and existing data but have it be complete in order to then formulate um an evidence-based measurable observable problem statement and we don't feel comfortable uh uh formulating those problem statements without conducting those which is why many of these recommendations include uh focus groups and you know within those focus groups there could be end user consultations etc so the second question i have um or it's probably it's a question more than a comment but the timeline on both sets of recommendations right is uh there's great recommendations to go attack the question of better data right is this something that we it's a one-year effort a two-month effort

088a three-year effort it was hard for me to tell kind of what kind of timeline and i do realize this is a group organized with volunteers and that's always the challenge with it but the uh i'm just kind of curious what your vision is well i wouldn't uh feel comfortable just basing it on my soul vision since we have a community based approach the timeline that we formulated already for the beginning of this work we're a bit off because of as i stated absences time commitments we had members drop off because of that and um you know and that's also why we mentioned in the recommendations perhaps uh partnering with uh experts who could actually because i know um in conducting environmental informant um consultations for example in another school district where i spoke to

089an administrator who happens to be an equity in inclusion you know hired by the district an equally inclusion expert is working with a myriad of stakeholders but not on a volunteer basis and has a whole network of data collection and of course this individual would be able to better formulate a timeline and i'm not comfortable to put forth that timeline it's something we need to talk about as a committee exactly we have recommendations the committee hasn't sat down and timelined this out just that's a great question but we're just not there yet there's two other deliverables as well two other presentations can you talk a little bit about what's coming i think that'd be really helpful so um the other two presentations are gonna be programmatic equity and achievement equity and mr hill and i

090and i'm going to be asking for the rest of the committee's help to do as much as we can to collect the data that we can given our you know our roles uh outside of this committee as well uh but in terms of uh achievement data we're gonna be looking at sat data and desegregating it uh mr hill is helping a tremendous amount with that along with ap data as well for achievement data we're going to be taking a look at some of our discipline data we're going to be taking a look at our special education data that already mrs wygonic has provided thank you so much for that and uh we're going to be uh taking a look at um other uh our you know gifted and talented program um you know we're going

091to be taking a look at that and uh we're going to be doing something very similar with doing the best we can collecting that data and giving these presentations i love some of the data you presented that's very helpful i didn't want to uh when i asked kevin to to present that i wasn't sure if there was any other questions either i didn't want to cut anyone off or and i really it's important to say just to thank amy for her uh stepping up and coordinating this being the chair of the committee and i have to thank mrs holly for her leadership she really stepped in this year and coordinating the group and as you can see she has a real command of the material um and actually has a lot of leadership and organizational

092skill and making sure this went on and while we say mrs holly we're looking forward to soon to be dr holly she's working very hard on that as well so she's had a very busy year this year but kevin thank you you deserve that thanks thank you appreciate it thanks to the committee for coming tonight really thank you guys thanks everyone great job okay very informative thank you all right next up on our agenda is uh item b which is the healthy food options certification and apologize in advance i think i i know i think you have to actually read each one of them so you can make what you if you'd like you could make two recommend two motions as one and we can vote on them together no thank you pursuant i'll move

093that pursuant to cgs section 10-215-f the board of education or governing authority certifies that all food items offered for sale to students in the schools under its jurisdiction and not exempted from the connecticut nutrition standards published by the connecticut state department of education will comply with the connecticut nutrition standards during the period of july 1 2022 through june 30th 2023 this certification shall include all food offered for sale to students separately from reimbursable meals at all times and from all sources including but not limited to school stores vending machines school cafeterias culinary programs and any fundraising activities on school premises sponsored by the school or non-school organizations and groups and i will move that the board of education or governing authority will allow the sale to students of food items that do not meet the

094connecticut nutrition standards and beverages not listed in section 10-221-q of the connecticut general statutes provided that the following conditions are met the sale is in connection with an event occurring after the end of the regular school day or on the weekend the sale is at the location of the event and the food and beverage items are not sold from a vending machine or school store an event is an occurrence that involves more than just a regularly scheduled practice meeting or extracurricular activity for example soccer games school plays and interscholastic debates are events but soccer practices play rehearsals and debate team meetings are not the regular school day is the period from midnight before to 30 minutes after the end of the official school day location means where the event is being held and must be

095the same place as the food and beverage sales second moved at length and seconded well done are there any questions on the motion or any discussion the only question i have and just as for the administration are we executing on our our operations in the district in order to comply because the board is a certified network complying and i just want to confirm from the administration yes verbally that we are complying yes okay without any further ado at all in favor any opposed unanimous okay that's it for our new business old business uh we have um the first up is just a discussion on uh board of education adopted budget status i understand the board of finance met last night and there may be some new information yes no it pretty much confirms the finance

096committee conversation that we had last night in addition to that mr post um did some sharpening of the pencil and had additional information you can share this evening as well uh in regards to some of the discussion we had last night did they take a vote on the board of finance i don't think they did no they did not okay so mr poswana you share the savings opportunities with the uh with the board i know the finance committee had a chance to review it yesterday so i think it's just appropriate that you know you share they share that we probably ought to turn off the presentation that's being shown behind you i don't know if this is the first mark thank you so i uh in uh looking to refine some of the estimates we

097have in the budget i found four areas number one i looked at the energy consumption at huckleberry compared with the estimated energy consumption at the new school and since we're moving huckleberry over to the new school mid-year i calculated about nineteen thousand five hundred dollars of savings from february through the end of june and finally uh being able to look at a full twelve month period of copier usage without interruptions from the uh the pandemic it looks like we can reduce our estimate of copier costs by about fourteen thousand dollars and it certainly appears that uh people have learned to do a little less with paper and a little more with their computers in the high school we have extended duty for guidance counselors in the summer contract requires us to provide them with up

098to 10 days and that's what we budget for it but looking back at the history we tend to not use that much so i think we can remove 9 600 from that line and then similarly with our teacher mentor stipends in the extended duty we budget for a certain number of them every year and we tend to come in lower than that so i believe we can lower that estimate by five thousand four hundred forty dollars and that's a total of forty eight thousand five hundred forty dollars and i don't have specific data from eric yet but he said he's been refining estimates with some of his software programs and he's got about fifteen hundred dollars in additional savings there so the total is about fifty thousand yes so thank you for that you're welcome

099well we did last night as a finance committee is we reviewed this with ken we've been asked by the board of finance at our last discussion with them to could you go sharpen your pencils and see what you could do and the report we received back from the from our board of finance representative and from the town controller is the board the board of finance would carefully look at our what we what we could do and try to put back some of the money that had been previously uh removed no promises they still are deliberating in fact i believe their meeting this evening as well they were meeting last night and then again this evening tomorrow also and tomorrow as well yeah the meeting all week yeah so the we sent them a note last

100night saying okay we found we believe fifty thousand dollars that i we all felt was a relatively safe you know reduction we could take and that's the feedback i gave him them was anything past that we're going to start dipping into programs right including the things that we presented at our february mid-february presentation and we would urge them to please not do that and the board of education would ask for their support to keep that money in the um so i sent that note last night i'm on behalf of all of us even and i did tell them we had not voted on any reductions right so that's still on us but my sole limit was reasonably safe at 50 000 given the things we knew um so um so we so we and we

101won't be voting on those tonight right because that we won't vote on an updated budget for the from this committee until we know where the budget target in the end will be so we don't know anything particular about whether they've actually voted or agreed to do anything relative to our budget because i think some of us had heard maybe some other things were brewing that there was no no vote that we know of we just continued conversation uh in a positive light to support the school budget as best they can yeah okay the other thing by the way they we heard from mrs koch coach cook that that they were not asking us to do pull aheads or adjustments to the our best or stuff because we had talked about that at our last meeting

102and the reason was they had discovered a number of one-time spend opportunities on the town side and they would rather do those pull ahead types of things on the town side than on the school side so they have they actually so i asked very explicitly do you need any input from us on those types of options and the answer was no we do not so that discussion seems to have you know it's fallen on the wayside for now only because they have other priorities on how they're going to saw you know use that type of opportunity to fund balance so and i hope that's a positive energy signal to us so anybody else have any answers a quick question i thought about it after our meeting last night any savings from now that we don't

103have a lot of appliances in all the buildings that were being used in the past that were personal items oh that's a good question joy i had not factored that in that would probably be a few thousand dollars or an additional we could do okay so any questions on the on the budget update so we'll know relatively quickly what the board of finance decision process will be because they have to finalize a proposed budget that they'll take forward to their public hearing so they have to actually publish that so that will be i believe by the end of this week they have to complete that so correct [Music] okay thank you well thank you ken thanks bob um okay that's the only old business item next item up is public comment and i'll just read

104this the board of education welcomes public comment individuals or groups may address the board concerning any subject which is within the board's jurisdiction three minutes are allotted per speaker comments and questions at a regular meeting may deal with any topic related to the board's management of schools discussion of personnel or individual members of the board shall not be considered appropriate so i've got my handy-dandy timer here that i will use and we did have a sign-up sheet we do have one uh member of the public who would like to speak and mr fentress i think uh um to the up to the microphone the uh john could you just make sure the microphone's on and i need uh name and address um for you to speak definitely ready yeah i'm going to start my time

105or two hi okay so uh in brookfield we're in a bubble and um we're coming across some real confusing times uh from the information i'm sorry we needed name and address i'm sorry what's that all right let's pause the time yeah we'll start the time again yeah so uh i'm warren fentress uh 137 173 bart street torrington my son goes to wisconsin okay uh so anyway brookfield's a bit of a bubble and these times are very confusing we're inundated with a lot of bogus information there's going to be a lot of truth coming to light this year that's going to be difficult for a lot of us to accept i think and uh but we've really got to stay focused on truth honesty integrity and um one of the things that i'm concerned with when

106i see things like the recent emails saying that you guys are still going to be like doing covet testing and the information that i'm reading is that these tests are not reliable they don't do any good and therefore there's no point to doing testing it's a waste of money because they don't offer anything accurate and that's the cdc's even acknowledge that now that's that pcr test and uh so a lot of these things are gonna as we see of the year evolve right like we're gonna learn things that kovit was a fraud all along and we're going to learn that the government authorities have been trying to murder the citizens with this vaccine this mrna drug that's called comranati by pfizer this is a toxic gene therapy containing graphene hydroxide which is a very toxic

107substance by the way i'm an ex fiser executive and i was a medical engineer at the beginning of my career so um if anybody parents here would like some facts i've got a fact sheet here with a lot of this information in here but um so i'm just very concerned with the you know if the schools or where our kids are here i know you're taking your cues from the state board of education but honestly like uh i don't want my kid getting swabbed by this test there's a the gel on the end of the swab on the pcr test is toxic as well so you know if you guys are just taking your decisions from the state that's not going to cut it because you have to look out for our kids here i

108don't care what's happening in the state so uh i really hope you're going to stop the testing because it's moot and any other thing related to covid look this is going to come out it's going to change society but it was a sham from the beginning this is the most grievous uh crime ever committed blows 911 away this is uh really sick demanded people in our government that are really literally trying to reduce the population killing people there's over a million people dead in the united states from this drug already a million people it's unheard of it's it's worse than nurnberg so uh we need to work together to uh make sure the truth comes out and i think that should be important for our children in school to get the truth and not the

109the politics thank you thank you very much mr belden may i make something very clear i want to be crystal clear the brookfield public schools has never and will not test students for covid or frankly anything else we have not done that on direction from on direction from the connecticut dph and state department of education sorry they provided they've provided almost 8 000 at-home tests for this particular school district but all over the state every single school district and it was strongly recommended by the state folks as well as our local health department to provide the boxes of those tests to the students and to the staff to bring home and if people so choose use the test that was it doesn't administer any school has not administered a test and will not administer a

110test i just got an email though saying that because we're going to do testing for someone sick i don't know what you're talking about there mr fentress we can we can address that and mr rend is here as well so we can address that but we were not absolutely but we are not testing anybody i'll make that crystal clear you have to worry about a thing we're not testing any student i want you to know that thank you i appreciate that you're very welcome thank you for that clarification sir okay so um next up is an update on the candlewood lake elementary school project okay um so last time i reported we were the roofing materials had come in and we were excited that they were going to be able to get started on that

111and they have they've started roofing and it's even finished in one of the sections and because of that then some interior stuff has already started so framing mechanical electrical plumbing it's all happening and it's going to start going very fast so it's very exciting herpetologists will start resuming their routine checks of native reptile and amphibian species that live near the site the nbc is going to probably start moving their meetings back to huckleberry so they can start doing their monthly walk throughs again and hopefully we'll be able to join them at one of those and techton and arcadis are still working to finalize some parts of the ff mini package like small wares so thinking like anything from like clocks to like door handles and all of that including a technology package that eric has

112put together is going to be sent to the state for procurement so exciting stuff and to build on what rosa said um i love when i was told about small wares i've never heard that term before i love small wares and all the flags for every classroom and the garbage cans i mean all the things when you're moving into something new you have to start fresh so that's always exciting and um speaking of moving the meetings back to the huckleberry site um it looks like i've worked with the construction manager as well as mr checko it looks like and everybody put this on your calendar for the elected boards they were thinking of a tour on may 17th it's their may meeting tuesday may 17th would definitely be i'm going to say after 5 30

113p.m their meetings start at seven so we can get a walk through uh in obviously daylight savings time we anticipate it would be warmer as well as light out and drier on the site this is quite a muddy site uh at this point so we're excited about that get through and i think rosa it was either by the end of last week or this week and i haven't confirmed that wing you're talking about may have some heat flowing through that too so i mean there is there is utilities moving into the the facility now actually working so pretty exciting excellent so when we go through a walk through we'll actually be able to see framed out classrooms and i mean it's going to be moving along with the better weather and more daylight and everything

114else that'll be exciting yeah timeline is still as it had been still on track exciting okay any other questions on that okay three main points well i was thinking um the huckleberry spotlight was very exciting i think i'd like to write about that sure for sure the equity and inclu inclusion presentation i thought was awesome um and then i guess probably a summary of the candlewood lake elementary school yeah people like to know what's going on with that that sounds great [Music] and rose if we work with eric for the candlewidth update can we get one of your labeled drone pictures can you would you mind yeah i like doing that right i knew it wasn't a chore to ask you that okay upcoming events um center school has early release tomorrow and friday for

115conferences and i believe is mrs diamond still here she is [Music] their community meeting is the 31st that will be streamed huckleberry has early release tomorrow and friday also for conferences and next week the book fair is back in person during library classes at an after school family event on thursday from 4 to 6 30. at wisconier there's a parent meeting on monday the 21st at 9 00 am in the seminar room march madness for 7th and 8th grade students after school on mondays and thursdays through march that's volleyball handball and badminton tournaments and march 31st is a pto assembly for eighth graders on public speaking brookfield high school has tomorrow night the danbury hat tricks game to benefit the senior class the school day sat wednesday the 23rd through wednesday the 30th and the

116musical greece the 23rd thursday the 24th through sunday the 27th and then all schools have an early release for a plc day on friday april 1st that is all i have okay any questions all right so that takes us to the end of our agenda and so unless there's any objection we're adjourned for this evening and thank you all for coming and thank you for all the people who came here in person today and watched in on the tv thank you so much [Music]