Board of Education Meeting 3-17-21 @ 7pm

001okay go ahead rosa all right thanks good evening everyone today is wednesday march 17th 2021 and i call the regular meeting of the brookfield board of education to order in accordance with executive order 7b suspending sections 1-206-1-225-1-226 of the connecticut general statutes the public will not be able to attend this meeting in person but will have the ability to view or listen to the meeting in real time by way of the brookfield board of education youtube channel furthermore such meeting will be recorded or transcribed and posted on the board's website within seven days of the meeting and made available as required by law all speakers taking part in the meeting are reminded that they are to clearly state their names and titles if applicable before speaking on each occasion that they speak individuals wishing to

002participate in the public comment portion of the meeting may do so by calling the following numbers area code 301 301-715-8592 or area code 929-205-6099 and the meeting id is five 913-5460-0656 and let's stand for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we have all of our board members except for mike murphy here tonight and the first item on our agenda is the student spotlight and thank you rosa i am going to turn it over to mrs laprashana to introduce her faculty and wonderful students we could see them all there um to talk about student council and some of the great work they've done this year so mrs labrasano

003please take it away sure we do have a lot of excited friends here this evening for sure good evening everyone this evening i am excited to share with you all the great work that the huckleberry hill student council has been engaged in during the school year this school year definitely looks different and our student council and student council advisors have been working very very hard to support our huckleberry hill and brookfield communities i would like to introduce to you our huckleberry hill advisors miss june hartel mrs annie benz and mrs cara giametta also known as miss albersi and our students will be introduced by our advisors our advisors and students can't wait to share with you all the fabulous work that we have done and continue to do so i believe miss benz is going

004to be sharing her screen or i'm sorry miss albersi and we will get started so the first two students we want to introduce to you tonight i am thrilled to introduce jordan lucasy and she is in my class ms artel's class in second grade and evan vacco and he is in miss miller's class in second grade and they are going to talk to you about how student council has changed this year jordan i think you need to unmute hello there my name is jordan and i'll be reading you this advisors and members meet on zoom instead of in the hhesgm meetings are at 4 30 in the afternoon instead of at 8 in the morning hi my name is evan vacco i'm in second grade from miss miller's class members from every class can share

005their thoughts and ideas on our google classroom page we have to brainstorm extra creative ideas because because we need to think outside of the box this year nice job evan thank you jordan next we have gracie marciniak and hadley um sorry marcolus from actually from my class and from mrs jemeta's class and they're going to tell you a little bit about how student council has helped the brookfield community this year actually sorry the huckleberry hill community in february we created we created a kindness challenge on flipgrid where students and staff could share messages of love encouragement motivation and kindness hi i'm gracie to honor the one-year anniversary of going remote we came up with ideas to acknowledge how much our community has gone through and how far the students have ideas include reading books on

006perseverance writing a thank you letter to someone who helped you over the past year in creating your best self we plan school spirit days for example today was green day for the saint patrick's day sorry i thought when i clicked the oh that's okay sorry i thought when i clicked the uh space bar it unmutes me not uh moves to the next slide um so now we are going to share some examples from the flip grid that the students created videos of to share words of encouragement and kindness during the month of february here's our second grader delaney giving advice on how to show kindness mrs jamada just make sure you share the sound mr meadow we mr better we had no uh we had no audio on that can you re-share your screen with

007audio and then do it again yeah so sorry about that um this is uh nothing new this happens every day um let me share the sound and then i will re-share the slideshow okay let me go back to the turtle but you're not let me go back hi huckleberry i just wanted to say stay safe and if someone looks down in the dumps help them they don't have to be your friend help them because you never know what they're going through at what they're going through bye and this is louis one of my third graders he decided for the kindness challenge he was going to read um a part of one of his favorite doctors books yurtle's a turtle by dr seuss on the far away island of salimba sand yertle the turtle was king

008of the pond a nice little pond it was clean it was neat the water was warm there was plenty to eat the turtles had everything turtles might need and they were all happy quite happy indeed they were until yertle the king of them all decided the kingdom he ruled was too small i'm ruler said ertl of all that i see but i don't see enough that's trouble with me with this stone for a throne i look down on my pond but i cannot look down on the places beyond that this throne that i sit on is too too low down it out to be higher he said it was a frown if i could sit high how much greater i'd be what a king i'd be ruler of all i can see those were the

009two pages of yertle the turtle by dr seuss you're doing so we wanted to also share with you just how hard the students worked on the speech that they would give to the whole school on march 12th when we celebrated the one-year anniversary of going remote so at our very recent our actually the last meeting that we had as student council the kids all got together on zoom and decided on what they wanted to say over the announcements to commemorate the one year of going remote we had two fourth graders then read what the whole student council came up with and we had julia koch and owen glenn from student council read this and here's what they had come up with one year ago on this very day we went home not realizing that we

010would not return for the rest of the school year last year when we first began learning from home it was hard to do our assignments without our teacher or classmates there and then when we started the school year in the fall things still didn't look or feel the same we had to figure out how to learn on the computer instead of in the classroom everyone has been through a lot of difficulties but we have finally made it through and we should all be proud of ourselves since we all worked together teamwork made the dream work yes some days were bad this is true but you got through it by just being you we never gave up always looked on the bright side and supported one another along the way today each class will take some

011time to recognize and honor how much we have accomplished during this very unique year from hhes student council and finally our two fourth grade student council members katie and ace line are going to share a little bit about what h um what the hhs student council has done for the greater community outside of huckleberry so katie whenever you're ready you can share hi my name is katherine zigglemeyer but you can call me kb for short and today i'm going to be telling what student council has done for the greater community during the holiday season the student council collected donations for the women's center in danbury the knights of columbus and brookfield and the new fairfield animal shelter we successfully donated over 50 bags of coats multiple gifts and gift cards and food and pet supplies

012we also created cards for brookfield's nursing home communities awesome job katie and acelyn whenever you're ready you can share um the upcoming events that um our student council has planned hello my name is a fun and i'm going to be talking about upcoming things that will be going on when the new school is built we will be working with center school and listening middle school for our future second graders and fifth graders to experience a virtual tour of the schools and to understand what they should expect when they enter the new building at our next meeting we will be planning a way that hhts can celebrate earth day on april 22nd also we will have also we will have begun brainstorming ways we can honor teachers and staff during the month of may all right

013and acelin you can read this slide too any question i have one um and you guys did a fabulous job presenting my question is what's your favorite part of being on student council this question for me or any of you well mine is just that i'm helping other and i've always wanted to be on student council because it's a it's a lot of responsibility and a good way to learn what the outside world will be like but learning it in a much more smaller way but still getting these can i say something so boys and girls thank you so much for being great leaders for our district you did a wonderful job and i love that we're embracing a really challenging time in switching our mindset and celebrating this one year anniversary it's so exciting

014to turn kind of a negative experience into a positive one thank you for doing that and reminding all of us that we can overcome you know hard challenges when i saw your hand raised did you want to share something yes i wanted to share that being in student council is a way of participating and you get to have fun by making new ideas can anyone share a thank you letter that they wrote to someone that helped them get through this maybe gracie or catherine who did you write a thank you thanking them for helping you get through this or hadley or evan looks like jordan wants to say something quiet sweetie oh jordan um my mom and dad have helped me when i was on zoom they would help me get on zoom when i

015didn't know or they would help me do a math question if i didn't know how to do it that's great thank you for sharing jordan gracie did you want to share too i wrote a thank you letter to my friend justin because he plays the game after school with me and i would probably be lonely or bored after school friends are important that's great hadley you have your hand raised go ahead at school i made a thank you letter for my sister emma for um playing with me through through 2020 when we all had to stay home go ahead acelyn i wrote a thank you letter to my third grade teacher mrs johnson for like helping me and giving me like extra help that's great that's some classmates that's wonderful thank you for recognizing our

016teachers yes they're a wonderful thank you to the teachers for putting this all together and supporting our you know children to this difficult time great job to everybody you guys are quite an inspiration and it really was nice to see how everybody found ways to stay positive during a very difficult year so thank you for sharing with us thank you for having us yes thank you thank you so much thank you everybody thank you we're so very proud of all your work and mrs lavrochano and faculty thank you so much uh for being here with us we really appreciate it keep up the good work guys all right uh the next thing on our agenda is the student representative report hi guys i'm tanvi chandra as the brookfield high school student representative um so the

017winter sports season is coming to an end soon and spring sports are officially starting on march 29th and recently another email was sent out to parents which you guys probably all know about about possibly starting in person school for four days a week for high school students so fingers crossed because that would be great nhs is continuing their tutoring services including ap study nights as ap exams get closer the deca competition awards were on march 9th and we had three teams that qualified for icdc which is our um national competition the students of brookfield is hosting their annual trivia night through zoom on april 7th nhs started recruiting candidates who will be probationary members this year and official members in the following years and their applications are due at the end of this week so

018they'll be starting that soon as well um key club is looking to do a fashion show at the senior center as some community service and they're also looking to do an outdoor game day or a bowling night as well the sophomore student council is selling selling slides which are sandals with the brookfield logo on them and they're available to purchase for the whole school so that should raise a lot of money for them on april 1st um we have an official event which will be a bhs faculty game bhs faculty faculty versus wisconier faculty game with a bonfire after for seniors which will be our first official senior event as well which is super exciting and lastly the senior student council is um continuing to work really hard to get in as many events as

019possible for like this last quarter of the year and we're super excited to get some things in motion and that's all i have if anyone has any questions anything what was the night of the faculty game on the bonfire april 1st yep feel free to avoid that mrs brooks you know you want to see mr render or i pull a muscle please i will talk to mr baldwin we'll see if we can get that on the national federation of high school website what do you think about that mr renda i i actually just think it's great that it's on april fool's day because we will be fools out there you're absolutely correct all right any other questions and just can you get us information about the fundraiser for the slides um yeah i can send

020that to you yep you get a lot of athletes to support them absolutely i can send that out to friends i'm sure would love those sure absolutely i'll send it out okay anything else for sandy all right thank you okay our next item is written correspondence okay i just have kim rachel wrote regarding the school calendar okay thanks and approval of board minutes i'll move that the board approved the minutes from the regular meeting on march 3rd and the special joint meeting on march 9th okay second thanks joy all in favor okay thank you that's unanimous uh the superintendence update thank you rosa i was going to acknowledge the fact that we made it one year since the the world shut down and we moved into remote learning and so forth but the students did

021such a great job i will not make one more comment on it except to say boy you can't help but smile uh listening to those students and that that wonderful uh faculty advisory team i mean boy are we lucky here in brookfield just incredible um just have a few items uh there's a couple of presentations tonight so i'll be brief um the first thing i wanted to share is that the smarter balance assessment is coming up um administration uh third through eight is beginning to schedule um uh scheduled development that's an annual parent notice we'll be going home we have been through this coveted year and it's important to know that the the federal department of education along with the state department of ed wants to assess learning loss we all know it's been a

022very difficult year schools um although we will be conducting the smarter balance schools will not be evaluated on smarter balance for the spring of 2021 and schools will not have to meet the 95 participation uh requirement therefore if brookfield or a school does not meet the 95 participation requirement it won't be a penalty like there is in a more typical year it's important for everybody to know schools also have to plan for remote learners who will be taking the smarter balance um and while smarter balance will give us some data there obviously are questions and concerns about when kids take a test at home and reliability and so forth so we're well aware of that and paying close attention but like always parents do have the option to decide if their child will participate in

023the smarter balanced assessment or not and again if we don't have the 95 participation which is a typical year requirement um the school system and the district will not be penalized so i just wanted to make sure everybody knew that that was coming up uh in addition to that mr belanda and his team are energetically working on the massive uh logistics for the school day sat which will be taking place next wednesday wednesday excuse me for our 11th graders um and i really have to thank uh he and the team uh i know mrs shy is working very hard on the schedule um and and the teachers that will be monitoring and proctoring the assessment and that really works out quite well for us given the schedule where it's a remote day on wednesday for

024the high school so we're able to work on that mr bland is certainly working with plus company and so forth there's a lot that goes into that so we wish the students luck in addition to that just to add to what tandy was just talking about in terms of mr belanda sending out a survey a second survey actually to parents regarding choosing remote or thinking about students coming in five days a week he and the team are again really working hard on the plan and now that they have the results of the second survey they're actually going through 400 rosters to look at the way students fit into the classrooms and how they could break that out so we are looking forward to that plan um hopefully we will be able to accommodate a five

025day a week in person schedule again it all depends on the number of students desiring to be remote versus wanting to come into school and how we could actually accommodate that in a safe way because what we all need to remember is we didn't create any more space over the course of this year so nothing's changed since beginning of the year and the requirements on physical distancing are still there so we really there's a lot of logistics that has to go into this and so everybody knows if 100 of the students wanted to come back in person it would not be possible to fit into the school so due to the fact that we have the remote option and less students would want to come in than a 100 percent model um gives us the

026option and the opportunity to try to plan for a five-day a week model for those desiring to come in person so look for more information on that and i believe mr bellander shared with his families that by the beginning of next week a communication will be forthcoming so i wanted to get that out to everybody and we're really excited for that and thankful to the team for working so hard and thankful to our community for being so patient uh then the last thing i wanted to share was a vaccine update last week was this the second round of uh brookfield educator vaccination clinics held by our health department so again we're very thankful to the health department for arranging that for us we're really in a good place and um come the beginning of april

027will be the kind of final round of brookfield educator clinics for those needing their second dose of the moderna vaccination so we're really excited that we're getting closer and closer to probably over 85 percent vaccination rate of our faculty and staff the last piece on that i wanted to share with you that mrs laforge our nurse coordinator has spoken with our health department and subsequently is connecting with other health departments and even local pharmacies to see what we can do regarding uh being a liaison as a system to have our 16 year old and older uh high school students whose parents obviously would give permission to help them um expedite the process of getting vaccinated come i think it's april 5th and so what's important for everybody to know in brookfield we've talked about having

028a much smaller capacity health department than some other communities we actually checked with our health department and one we don't have the pfizer vaccine which is what is approved as we understand it for the teenagers at this point and we also just don't have the capacity with the freezers and so forth for storage so we we couldn't do it as a health department here in brookfield uh we have reached out to the ridgefield v a and i know mrs laforge has like i said earlier looking to collaborate with whomever she can to help liaison that for our families if they so choose to have their children vaccinated so if there's anything we can do please know we're working on it um hopefully we'll be able to help in some way some small way and that

029is all i have i don't know if any board members have any questions on anything yes no no john um what percentage of our teachers at this point have received the first vote um i would say in general faculty and staff bob it's uh 85 or just over 85 and we're basing that not only on just over 400 full-time employees that's also coaches bus drivers and everybody's all the people who interact together we had that we did the mrs cavanaugh conducted the survey that was the response rate was about 85 of all the people who had the opportunity to become vaccinated were saying they were interested in definitely getting the vaccine oh that wasn't my question my question is not how many are interested how many actually have it well we i won't know that

030because it's not man mandatory and through um medical confidentiality we will have that information okay so it's not something we can ask them about um they don't have to answer it so i would say that i think i would love to know as a board member that figure maybe not immediately but i'd like you to consider whether we could collect that information so we would know and the public would know you know how how how far how broadly we've vaccinated in our in our educators i just think that would be a good thing to have or sure i can get you the number of vaccinations given at the clinics like at the educator clinics that's probably the best i can do but we'll look into it and see what is possible okay i just think

031it would be a good thing for us all to know so i just think it's a it's surveying it even if it's optional survey it's probably not a it's a good bit of information to have so john can can you just go back now and clarify what was the 85 percent then is that people who staff that indicated that they wanted to receive the vaccine but it's not necessarily the people who did receive it is that what you're saying yes okay and you might that you might they might say i don't i don't i i don't need it because i already have it right correct they could have gotten it especially with the age ranges our older employees could have gone out on their own terry cavanaugh our hr director terry did you have something

032to add no i was just going to say we when we surveyed folks um it took into effect those who already received it so the 85 percent are those who wanted to receive it um then you would add on to that those who were already at the 65 plus or 75 plus age range for when we got it so to john's point you know we can survey but as a district we didn't make it mandatory to get the vaccine and hipaa would really not allow us to tell you who is vaccinated um they can offer it up but i will tell you that they offered over the brookfield clinic offered over 500 vaccines to brookfield um just to the education sector personnel so that included our teachers our powers our secretaries every single person that

033works in the school district um and then anyone who drives the bus the food service prepares the coaches um so all of those folks were vaccinated or were offered vaccine so we can tell you how many people were vaccinated that would also however include some of the daycares in town um country kids kids castles they were also eligible in that sector um so i think 85 is a really good number um and we can certainly ask the question um but i think 85 percent is a really decent number um to say who got the vaccine uh i would disagree with that it's anecdotal given the way you just described it it's anecdotal well i i i think uh we know who signed up and we know who was in the van system um to receive

034a vaccine um but i i would consider it a little better than anecdotal but um certainly uh that that's where i would start okay i'll leave it in your hands i'm interested in learning more thank you thanks bob there any other questions for me with my report um i i follow one question to that once the vaccines are finished and you have that a couple week waiting period right that we all know about that you know to build up antibodies after the second vaccine what happens from a staffing policy in the schools if there was an exposure do teachers now continue to teach if they're vaccinated is that how it works or does that what is the cdc guidelines once one's vaccinated which is like you said bob um i i in particular have the

035johnson johnson so i'm told that two weeks after the johnson johnson vaccine um you are considered fully vaccinated if i was a close contact of someone who was infected in my case i would not have to quarantine so it's similar for the different um like you said a couple of weeks after okay absolutely and as you know about that that's the key question right because of the quarantine issues that's where this we had the staffing issues after uh people had to quarantine and and that caused us uh to move into uh remote several times the past year yeah i just you know i'm not sure that the public hears all these different things about why schools are open or hybrid open for brookfield everybody wanted to be in person and teach right it's always just

036been a question of could you keep the schools open on staff due to staffing or did you have to go remote so that's never been an issue of desire it's always been an issue of of quarantining right and so i'm actually really excited that this gives us a uh an opportunity to have our teachers feel safer and in in this environment and at the same time be able to stay open for uh for education i think it's wonderful no it really is bob and you made me think of something and adding to that you know our mitigation strategy strategies of distancing and masking and all the cleaning we're doing um have really put us in a position where we have no evidence of in-school transmission throughout the entire year when we've been in person so

037i mean that speaks to everybody's commitment to implementing those strategies with fidelity so you put that on top of having these vaccinations really positions the team well sure and it's kind of the root of my first question which is if we're 98 vaccinated but by either our own clinics or other means it's different than 80 vaccinated in terms of the impact on the school so i just statistically there's a big difference between 80 and 100 percent and knowing where we land on that actually helps us think through staffing dynamics just that if you want to know why i was asking so thank you also may help um families feel a little more comfortable um i know the governor announced um i believe it was today that virtual learning may be part of education indefinitely and

038i don't know what that means entirely yet but i know that a lot of other districts are really concerned with you know are we going to have to keep this going next year even when most people will probably be vaccinated um and that would i think it would go a long way to sort of comfort families and saying you know like at least x percentage of our teachers and staff are vaccinated and again we have no transmission in schools and all that stuff so agreed we'll see what the governor's announcement actually means in the detail of that announcement from today and what what the impact really is on local districts yeah very careful is remote learning going to be some kind of state function or the local rests might take it on rather than putting

039it on the backs of each of the individual districts so we'll see what that what comes with that any other questions for dr burrell thanks everybody all right uh subcommittee reports first up is facilities okay so we reviewed this we'll do reports and discussed work orders related to heating and cooling and hand sanitizers the whiskenier water update we were on track to submit to the state but then there was a lot of technical data still to go through so we needed to apply for an extension and was granted 120 120-day extension to file a plan with the state we discussed the possibility of tying into the aquarian water line on route 25 we're looking into aquarium to add a large-scale water system to address these ongoing issues mr post and mr caldwell will do a

040cost benefit analysis and report back to the committee the water systems specialties company will be doing the work they have a very optimistic response to help and tom our water systems operator will continue to take the lead on this unfortunately we received another issue we an elevated chloride level at the middle school so we'll need to do additional follow-up and testing and analysis so in addition to addressing the lead we'll need to address the chloride as well and we also want to be very open and transparent about the level of benzene that was found in the drinking water at center school we will need to do follow-up testing and research on the surrounding properties and quarterly monitoring from april 1st to june 30th no further action is required at this time we still have two

041staff positions open one lead at the high school and one night position to be split between the buildings and scheduling of interviews are happening soon or possibly happening at this time the hvac control project at the high school is moving forward the town has formally engaged tecton to do the engineering design work and construction documents there will be a project kickoff meeting on the 11th to explore existing conditions and to get the specs out there to bid our expectation is to go out to bid so we can move forward to be a summer project and be ready for the winter we discussed our upcoming special meeting with the board of finance as it relates to the boys locker room project which we had mr checko from the municipal building committee will be attending the meeting

042as well we discussed the issue with the mice at the high school we've made a lot of improvements and they have greatly diminished we haven't been finding mouse droppings and we want to reassure employees that we're being proactive and many mitigation strategy strategies have been put into place does anybody have any questions no mice jokes all right let's move on to finance i was going to start by saying we had a little mice crawling all over our budget reports but i guess not um so uh our finance committee met on march 8th and it was focused on really two topics and the same two topics we've been focused on all year one is the current year budget uh outlook and the second is the uh where we are on next year's budget um and i'm

043gonna hold off on the report on the budget until we get to that item on the agenda but it was uh you know at the core it was some discussion with the board of finance about where we could you know carry some things on our on our shoulders versus what the board of selectmen had suggested um in terms of the february financial report it was actually really good news um and you guys have in your package tonight the updated copy but at the we've been tracking our spending overrun this year um due and you know we're spending more due to covet and we're offsetting that with underruns of normal operating things and we move we were at 140 000 overspent um which the board of finance would agree to cover because it was more than

044it was like three hundred thousand dollars of covet related stuff of that we offset 150. well this month we dropped that overage from 140 some odd thousand to a hundred and seven thousand so it was good news well received by the board of finance uh that we continue to find opportunities of open offices on that we've had to spend this year so that's good news and so what changed um we're under running our legal fees budget we're under running uh we have salary savings on leaves vacancies and overtime and the special ed tuition actually came in yet another notch under and if you remember the last couple of months i've been reporting that's been uh coming down uh which has been good um and then field trip transportation i'm not spending a lot on field

045trip transportation this year so that was another under run those were offset partially by some in-district special ed costs for a student that had returned to school and some additional costs on nursing services and less reimbursement from the state on the excess cost grant all told it was about a uh 34 000 decrease to our projected deficit which is good news and uh so we're in good shape and continue to operate very appropriately given the environment that we're in so we all i think as a committee all felt very good about the report that mr post gave us and then uh mrs fernandez shared that with the board of finance who also felt very good about the continued efforts that we've that we've had this year so i want to thank everybody especially the administration

046in the district who are really focused on you know good prudent financial control which is you know what this just shows so um other than that and i'll hold off on the budget discussion uh we did have a briefing from mr post on the options being explored on the water treatment uh conditions over at whiskenier which you know are a variety of options and so it was just a briefing more to come on that subject down the road as they flush out so um and uh and that was the total of the meeting uh it was about 45 minutes it was a pretty quick meeting any questions okay all right thanks uh the next uh subcommittee report is equity and inclusion okay um the committee met last week on thursday march 11th and we spent

047the bulk of the meeting completing our committee charter the four feeling words that were chosen by vote after the february meeting are respected challenged impactful and heard so we returned to the jamboard tool to add some ideas on what behaviors would help achieve those feelings and then we discussed those and dr ruby summarized some of the ideas that we landed on for respected showing up on time and forming of an absence monitoring your own air time engaging in active listening for challenge stepping out of your comfort zone stretching your critical thinking skills and problem solving skills being empowered to disagree with an idea and not a person for impactful making informed decisions and following through setting realistic goals defining measurable success criteria holding ourselves accountable and for heard giving time and opportunity for all voices

048to be heard acknowledging all perspectives keeping a log of ideas and utilizing different mediums such as padlet for ideas and concerns to be shared offline or anonymously for someone that might choose to do that and not want to speak out during a meeting so that took the bulk of the time as time was winding down four members volunteered to work together we actually met today and um just kind of polish up the wording and we're going to bring the completed charter forward to the full committee next month then to close out dr bruhl just shared and revisited the board's vision for the committee the statement and the objectives and we charge members with reviewing the document and bringing forward some ideas for actions and goal prioritizing at next month's meeting and we also set our

049future meeting dates we're going to continue to meet on the second thursday of the month for april may and june and that's it so amy could you um maybe what's sort of the next steps for the committee that's pretty much it i think like we're so like i said dr burl went over the the board's vision and some objectives that he had already come up with for the committee and sort of where what lies with the committee what lies of policy what lies with administration so we should have like a shared google folder for everyone to look at so that they can sort of come forward with ideas and sort of make some prioritizing i don't know if or doctor wants to add have you guys decided that you would break up into your own

050subcommittees i know that you were thinking about that at one point i had not yet i don't think we're there yet i don't know if you want to expand on that dr ruby or dr barrella save dr puppy's hand up so yeah but maureen please jump in so based on the um the information that well that dr royle shared in terms of the charge of the vision statement that the board um created what are the things that are um you know policy things obviously the policy committee works on um there are certain things that the the tso and administrators work on and then the bulk of the work for the committee um was shared and so after we approved the charter that the subcommittee that was our first subcommittee uh breakout for completing the the

051formatting of the charter as amy described the next um action that we would be taking is having the committee um review um the items from the vision statement of the board of education to prioritize that the committee has to prioritize what they as um teachers parents community members and the board members that are on the committee believe um should be done first you know what what is what should we tackle once the committee identifies the prioritization list because i mean we i think we've uh really um shared the um the long-term commitment of this committee that this is this work is going to take you know years to do and so we need to have the committee give their input on and and there's probably going to be discussion um on what it is that's

052um the most important thing to um to really work on for the end of this year and planning the work for if people are going to work in the summer i i you know we we have to determine that and then what's going to be done next year and so once the committee members prioritize the um the work that needs to be done then they will have to do i think we're we've been talking about using uh providing some pd for the committee members on design thinking so that we can uh really have a strategy and a format and and there are people on the committee who have background in design thinking so that we have a real a real structure that it's not helter skelter that everybody is has a methodology for working together

053because we are during this time of prioritizing it's going to be a really important charge of all members of this committee to build relationships that are centered on transparency and trust because the content of what we're working on is a lot of it is really very sensitive um in terms of the nature of the topics and so all of that will be happening at the same time but the committee members are going to decide what is the number one priority and so we don't know what it is because it's going to be a committee decision okay all right so so it's very process driven and we want to make sure that everybody feels supported and we have very we have very people who are obviously very comfortable in in sharing their feelings and their um

054you know what what they're interested in and we want to try to get to some level of equilibration so that everybody's comfortable and as amy shared we also discussed what other um uh venues would there be for people who just really aren't quite comfortable in speaking their mind you know in this checkerboard square situation that we have when we meet in zoom and i think amy mentioned padlet and other things and so there's a lot of really um really diverse thinking in the committee membership which i think is very important and um you know we're we're we want to go slow so that we um so that people gel and that everybody's heard and we can really work on things that they feel is important to supporting the board's mission okay well we'll look forward

055to hearing your next update amy thanks you're welcome all right um let's move on to the consent agenda okay i move that the board approved the items on the consent agenda which are new hires resignations and the february financials second thanks for all in favor that's unanimous uh we can move on to new business and the first item is the brookfield youth commission presentation so eric are is someone from that group a co-host so they can share or do yes i know somebody from the group was going to share and i can if there's any issues or somebody can i can certainly do that okay okay ron is you're all set to share ron i am okay great i'm uh marnie mcniff i am the chair of the brookfield youth commission and we are very

056happy to be here tonight to share the results of um the survey we sent out to the students of brookfield high school and wisconir middle school i'm actually going to turn the presentation over to our youth members who are students of bhs who are going to run the presentation tonight are we ready i need to be able to share so eric ron jaffe is the one who will be sharing the presentation yes i do have it set for are you getting an error because i have it set for all everybody to be able to share this screen uh okay i'm not seeing it there we go okay all right uh hello um my name is matt anson i'm a fellow member on the brookfield youth commission uh i am a senior and uh who we

057are well specifically um if the other uh members would like to introduce themselves now you guys can hi i'm matani nala cherry i'm a senior at brookfield high school as well i'm nicole zurkan i'm also a senior at brookfield high school i'm siesta a senior at brookfield high school as well and um so all of us uh make up the youth members on the brookfield youth commission we provide an advocacy and information platform for youth representatives to get more engaged in town issues we also work to identify gaps and services to youth and their families through an ongoing assessment of needs um you know continuing on from you know with the the uh huckleberry hill students i said earlier you know this will be focusing kind of on the issues that with you know distance

058learning as was in the title slide i know we kind of skipped through that really quickly but you know we help to recommend new programs events craft initiatives and partnerships with other town boards and departments and suggest ideas for new policies or regulations to consider we also share news and information about important talent and school projects and programs within the youth of the community um so the surveys you've worked closely with the school's principals and the brookfield youth commission's board of education liaison we created surveys to get input from high school and junior high school students the input was saw on how students felt about our new coveted reality its impact on their education and whether they feel connected or not survey invitations were sent through the schools and participation was voluntary okay so to

059start with the high school survey we'll start with the multiple choice responses so it's important to mention there were 171 responses uh and the first question was what grade are you in so as you can see here there's about equal representation between all grades with mostly seniors i believe all right and the next question is what method of learning has benefited you most most people said that in-person learning has benefited the most followed by virtually and lastly neither so the next question uh has to do with technology and access to technology specifically and it is on a scale one through five one being poor access to technology five being easy like good access to technology and as you can see the majority of people said five followed by four three two one uh next about

060the connection between particularly students and teachers so how they have connected uh that's the question how all of your teachers connected with you the most common response was a four on the five point scale followed by a three then a five two followed by one and the next set of questions were open-ended responses so how this worked was that it was open-ended so students could say whatever they wanted and research by keyword to get this data so first question having through technology was what aspects of technology have been most beneficial during online learning uh the most common responses have the keywords of google slides or google docs followed by zoom and breakout rooms and then multiple other aspects of technology such as jamboard padlet edpuzzle and earpod the next question is what aspects of technology

061have been most problematic during online learning most people responded with wi-fi connectivity followed by zoom and breakout rooms then camera and audio issues followed by google jamboard ed puzzles and lastly too much time online and distractions being tied with teacher interaction the next question has to do with challenges that students felt so how have you felt challenged during the school year was the way the question was phrased uh the most common responses were having to do with focusing or learning virtually followed by the workload and the academics themselves then a loss of motivation followed by loss of activities and loss of extra help like opportunities for extra help followed by time management and lastly feelings of loneliness and depressed then on a later note we asked how have you felt inspired during the school year

062the most common responses had to do with college aspirations and more independence followed by growing academic or personal interests then tied is support from teachers and great improvements then the school's efforts and lastly support from friends so that brings us to the question how could we improve your learning experience many students thanked many teachers and staff for the work that they've done to adapt to hybrid or virtual learning and while there is a strong consensus that returning to school in person is desirable suggestions may include reduced screen time increased communication with teachers reduced distractions and consistently which means either being 100 in person or 100 virtual i terms think vince middle school survey we sent out uh these are the uh when we first sent out are we good here or yeah i think we

063can hear you okay thank you so uh like i said out of 289 responses uh as you can see when we first sent out the survey we did not receive any responses from seventh graders which uh can be attributed to i think uh just a technical error so we did go back to whisker middle school and ask that the seventh graders retake the survey but uh for some reason when the results came back they came out as eighth graders but rest assured uh all grades are represented here so in terms of what method of learning has benefited you the most in person is the majority as can also be seen in the high school survey in terms of access how would you rate your access to technology uh thankfully enough the highest chosen responses were

064five and four showing that most students did not have problems with technology in terms of online schooling and then how well have your teachers connected with you the plurality of responses uh came into number four followed by five three two and one and then surprisingly enough as notable as students age the responses on a scale from one to five did decrease a bit so during or for grade five the average rating of teacher connectedness was 4.32 well grade 8 had a average connectedness of 3.88 now for the open-ended responses so for most helpful what aspects of technology have been helpful during online learning uh peer deck took the majority of responses with 41 followed out followed up by breakout rooms google slides and docs and jamboard and for most difficult uh what aspects of technology

065have been most difficult for online learning uh the top three responses were zoom which can mainly be attributed to the fact that it's the most widely used technology app for online learning followed by why high connectivity and issues with google so when we asked the students to explain their responses and how their teachers have connected with them thankfully many of the students did respond with saying that their experiences were positive and they were thankful for teachers work with these sorts of conditions and some of the comments did address issues including loneliness separation technology challenges timing of response to emails difficulty of personal connection increased distraction at home and more and while many responses dealt with learning in general some discuss difficulty maintaining focus increased stress too much time or too much screen time and learning

066on zoom so how could we improve your learning experience many of the students expressed happiness and gratitude for their experience thanking the staff for the work they've done to adapt and the uh suggestions they uh included were increased interactivity and group work more individualized contacts allow cameras to be off on occasion flexibility on due time and dates and more breaks from screen time so as we discussed in the beginning our role as the youth commission is to use us provide an assessment of needs of the students and work to address those needs so we stand ready to work with the schools and community to continue to understand and advocate for these needs of students through assessments like this survey and our next steps that we suggest are meeting with actual students to discuss what they

067told us because they did provide suggestions of things that would make this easier for them to build on the district's current caring environment that they have provided and i believe that's the end thank you so much for listening we really hope that this was a helpful survey and assessment of needs for the students right let's open it up to board members for any questions or comments i just want to thank you guys for doing this and pulling it together it's uh you know it's always useful to get information you know directly from our students so i appreciate that and and we'll take this on board and figure out what to do with it now so thank you so much all right thank you guys for being here the next item on our agenda is the

068healthy food option certification okay i will move that pursuant to cgs section 10-215 f the brookfield board of education 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 2021 through june 30 2022 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 that was a lot do i have a second a second all right thanks joy uh is there any

069discussion on this ken did you want to explain or anything i think it's pretty self-explanatory i want to apologize for the length of the motion that the language is uh provided to us by the state and it has to be word for word so basically we're just certifying that all food offered for sale to students within the school will comply with the connecticut nutrition standards uh doing this allows us to get extra reimbursement into the school lunch account which last year totaled about 17 okay and we do this every year right yes yes and it's and it's this long every year i think it gets longer all right so uh all those in favor aye all right that's unanimous uh the next item on our agenda is the healthy food and beverage exemption i think

070in our agenda it says food food but just food and beverage okay that's another mouthful i will move that the brookfield board of education will allow the sale to students of food items that do not meet the connecticut 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 a 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

071rehearsals 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 okay do we have a second anyone second thanks troy all right um i believe this is pretty standard too right ken it is basically the board the board has two choices with this you can either approve the motion allowing the exemptions for for events or if you do not approve the motion then any all requests for exemption for like for every football game or every soccer game would have to come before the board individually okay either either way the exemption has to meet the criteria in the motion okay question bob oh all right so all in favor aye all

072right thanks that's unanimous too uh moving on to old business uh let's talk about the board of education 2122 adopted budget um first i'm going to turn it over to dr burrell to kind of um talk us through uh the sr2 grant uh updates that we've been um kind of chatting about for the last few weeks so dr berle the floor is yours all right thank you so yes i'll i'll i have a several slide powerpoint i want to review the plan i know several people have asked about this over the last few weeks and we were even asked at our joint meeting last week from the board of selectmen and board of finance what the plans were for the esther grant so share my screen get in presentation mode all right hope everybody can

073see that so um we really want to as a as a leadership team we've talked about the different grants that have come in over the course of the year and i'll review those on the next slide um or two the esr ii grant is a pretty significant grant coming from the federal government um and many of uh kind of more well-known is last weekend uh gosh ten days ago now congress met and passed the 1.9 trillion dollar uh esser uh relief act which included the sr-3 funds for public schools and i'll mention that as part of my presentation this evening but it's important to go through this because we are we really want to be strategic with this opportunity um for for this additional funding that has come through that none of us were certainly

074counting on so let me start by walking you through and let everybody know what the sr2 funds are supposed to be prioritized for um there are four key areas that are priorities for the state of connecticut as they implement the yes and release the estro ii funds academic supports addressing learning loss addressing uh the fact that we want to make sure we're accelerating learning for our students and recovery school safety and social media social and emotional well-being not only of students but of staff school safety isn't necessarily what everybody thinks about school safety like security it also is for things like healthy environment hvac air quality things like that number three remote learning staff development and also closing the digital divide or technology professional learning things like that and then connections with family and community

075and certainly with students and on the slide for people later um i have a link to the actual priorities as there is a four-page narrative that explains uh and gives us guidance on how to use the funds uh also when you hear the word esser it means elementary and secondary school emergency relief so everybody knows what that stands for so i have this slide here i also have it as the at the end of this presentation as a summary of how we plan to use the funds the total amount that brookfield is receiving is 328 thousand dollars we've talked about several areas that are in white where we will actually spend plan to spend the money um for items that are already in next year's budget um and and we are allowed to do that

076based on the nature of the particular activities as i just listed them out so our first ever um regular education summer school is planned for this year it's actually in our budget at a cost of 50 an estimated cost of 55 and summer school is subject to the grant um you can imagine learning acceleration learning loss so we plan to reduce next year's budget uh by that much along with the technology pd that's in the budget already 15 000 and the math tutor for center school at 25 000 so that amount of money is about 96 000 and we plan and we've already worked with board finance and board of selectmen to reduce that out of the 2122 budget we would like to take the the remainder of the grant funds in next year's budget

077and move into an instructional coach model which i'm about to get into and that would be a science instructional coach a social studies instructional coach both of those would be initiated at the middle school level and then eventually transition to the k-8 level in year two there'd be some supplemental coaching and science in social studies professional learning we estimated about ten thousand dollars and for parent engagement we've talked about parent university and some other activities we want to continue to to work out with our parents once we're out of the virtual mode um and there's uh printing and materials and things that we anticipate we would need with programs like that um i should say that we do have uh through the fall september october ish of 2023 to expend these funds and then um

078not spent in the 21 22 year is about 40 000 and we would like to use that toward the uh offsetting the coaches in year two all right so it's important i thought to share a brief summary of the different funds that have come in because there's been a lot of puts and takes and conversations from the summer time where we're getting ready to open school and lots of news stories about different funding coming in and governor press conferences and so forth so very brief review of what we've received here in brookfield thus far there was cares funding of 74 000 some people referred to that as sr1 i don't think technically it really is under that uh emergency term uh for secondary schools but it was called cares uh act funding that was about

079seventy four thousand dollars we purchased chromebooks uh a good number of them uh along with operating budget chromebooks in the uh over the course of this year uh some fees also went to christian life academy very small about two or three thousand dollars so that's just important for people to know as a summary piece in addition to that the coronavirus relief fund was 54 000 we use that to offset the additional bus runs we had at the beginning of the year with kindergarten uh you may recall we had a very different model than the typical hybrid model to start the school year with the rest of the grades um so for those bus runs for some cleaning supplies uh and also cleaning services in white under the line there is sr2 which i'm going to

080outline in the presentation uh this evening and to remind everybody we've been very careful to look at the guidelines and requirements of the grant everything we're putting forward tonight is in alignment with the grant and then just passed as i mentioned earlier as part of the 1.9 trillion dollar relief package is sr3 the information that mr post dr ruby and myself have received from a memo from the state department of ed is that it looks like brookfield school district will receive 815 thousand dollars but we're awaiting federal and state guidance there's a lot of talk out there that it might be up to nine hundred thousand dollars there's also talk out there that it's multiple years uh that will have to spend the money but then i'm also hearing we only have two years so

081we just don't know yet no guidance has come out on the sr3 rescue funds yet so i want everybody to know that but i also want to be upfront in addition to that the town will receive um from that sr3 grant it could be well over a million dollars or into the millions of dollars in relief as well we don't know the actual um final decision on that and so all that information as it comes out everybody will learn about okay so i want to talk about building instructional capacity and share the rationale for why we want to go with the coaching model which we're really excited about the instructional coach model so i want to do a quick review what have we been doing in district as you know although we talked about the

082strategic coherence plan right before the pandemic the board worked on the portrait of the graduate and we're really moving forward almost the second phase of the strategic coherence plan so briefly i'm just going to just go over these bulleted items here we've been working on differentiated instruction all of our tiered interventions sometimes referred to as srbi um assessment literacy has been a major uh initiative in our district all the curriculum development work we've been doing um technology not only infrastructure technology but technology for learning um integration of science and math and english and social studies for stem and humanities all the the ruler work and the social emotional work and trauma-informed instruction and then um working toward personalized learning and of course always working on instructional leadership whether that is building administration central office administration

083or uh teacher leadership and we've done a lot of tremendous work there it's been a major focus of strategic coherence planning and the achievement of all of our objectives and goals um so where do we want to go now we want to ins uh really strengthen tier one or what's called core instruction what happens first that instruction in the classroom and how we the next level of that in brookfield considering where we've been is um the implementation of the instructional coach model we're really excited about that and what an instructional coach does is it's going to be able to provide embedded uh personalized pd um that's driven by student assessment data and it's just in time feedback uh with our teaching staff um also helping with planning and aligning standards and and uh ensuring that

084the the talk curriculum is uh the written curriculum is a talk breaking on the learning curriculum uh maximizing the the leadership uh in our organization developing our collective capacity and uh certainly aligned with the efforts in equity uh engagement learning acceleration uh sel and technology integration which are all part of the grant and things that in brookfield we really want to continue to move toward and master um we want to capitalize on that personalized learning um the concept uh you've heard mrs farias often talk about self-navigating learners a student that's really student agency voice and choice and then certainly maximizing opportunities for differentiated instruction coaches can help our faculty with that and be real partners in planning and executing on lessons so what's the actual plan how are we going to get there with the

085grant money i talked about two coaching positions in the earlier slide so what the plan would be is to bring in a one 1.0 fte in science and one in social studies who are instructional coaches starting next year in grades five through eight and these positions in year two would transition to a science and social studies instructional coach for k through it um each coach would possess a content uh expertise um to really help and continue to elevate the work we're doing here in town all right so looking at reorganizing when when we make you know there's always a domino effect or uh the other visual for you is when you push on one side of the balloon the balloon moves out on the other side so everything we do has to be coherent and

086everything in the organization needs to fit together so we have some other uh teacher leader positions that are impacted uh by by a move like this and that we would want to make sure everything fits together to help more holistically so not only would we bring in the five through eight science and social studies instructional coaches and transition them in year two to k-8 but we have some existing roles that we need to take a look at how we might reallocate them to support this model so as you all know in k-4 we have two curriculum specialist positions um and we'd like to transition those two specialist positions which are both in math and english language arts to do much more coaching than they do now um really personalize that coaching versus some of the

087the major uh group professional learning that they do um and so they would transition into a math and language arts coach at k4 and then we want to maintain the coach position we have at the middle school which is in mathematics and that is currently shared by two different uh faculty uh a half time and a half time they split some roles there uh it gets a little complicated so i don't get into too much detail and confuse anyone and then we also want to look at our reading ftes here in district and transition one of those positions into a fifth grade to eighth grade ela coach and so you can see through this what we would do is we would add to the math coach at the middle school we would then bring in

088the ela coach from an existing role add the science and social studies and we would cover all the subjects at the middle school we already have the elementary covered in math and language arts and then in year two when we transition to candlewood lake elementary have science and social studies also handle the elementary level and we have the four core subjects covered k-8 in this coaching model the key thing for everybody to know is we maintain all teacher jobs through the grant we would add these two additional positions new positions will be posted with job descriptions and all the other subsequent information that would go with that and nearing the end here for everybody so the next steps is the leadership team needs to really dig in on the detailed planning we have to work

089on staffing plans for the transition to candlewood lake elementary um everybody knows that's fall of 2022 but we have this is all integrated into that we're thinking about that and we'll really talk about the transition plan as we get later in the school year and into the fall and then the other piece we need to do is think about as i mentioned earlier taking the s or three funds that we know will be coming in and we'll have guidance on shortly um integrate them with s or two and look at how it transitions us with the candidate lake elementary plan with his coaching model and how we could continue to support things for next year and then one last piece on the sr3 funds um some uh there is some thought on collaborating with the

090town with the funds they're going to receive to make sure we look at maybe some one-time big capital purchases as well so there's a lot to think about um but i don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with sr3 that's the plan for sr2 and i just have a final slide to put it back up here for everybody which is what i started with is how we're uh planning to allocate the funds uh in the first year which is quite a bit there um in those first three items summer school tech pd and center school math tutor will help reduce the 2122 budget um i have a question on this uh is there could you maybe explain i'm thinking of summer school in particular why you know these coaching positions might be a

091better use of this grant fund as opposed to funding summer school for multiple years well one of the things we we talked about is learning learning for students happens over longer periods of time one of the pieces with summer school is summer school in a lot of ways is it it's for some students it turns it could be acceleration but really for the most part it's really a prevention of loss and keeping kids engaged and so that that is the thought process there is we can get more bang for our buck with improving core instruction uh throughout the year rather than putting our funds into summer school after summer school because at the end of the day and i think we talked about this maybe at the last board meeting or it was at the

092finance committee meeting is managing the operating budget as grant funds peel away and how we could integrate things that we know we need for our next steps into the operating budget so i hope that answers your question rosa yeah yeah it does um so we would i assume plan to keep these coaching positions even after we've expended the funds so we would figure out how to essentially invest in in keeping these positions that that would be there if they're all working out right yes if it's working out and we believe that we can show uh data and we could describe what's going on and we share um we are going to we believe these positions are going to work out and um as you all know we're we're very responsive as an organization and when

093it's time to move uh adjust uh we do and the the key thing to know is we've got the grant funds it's a way to start up a position like a coach position and from there manage that operational budget so there is no um i think the term people use this financial cliff you know we don't want all of a sudden funds to dry up and oh what do we do we need to know this and see into the future and manage that over the next couple of years questions on this from other board members well so so when i i'm feeling like we're building a cliff um dr brown i really do um you've got um the summer school is something we'd like to keep going on the math tutor we'd like to keep

094going on these coaches we'd like to keep going on and if i add that up it's like almost a percentage revenue if you had to stick it into the budget um or most of a percentage of revenue and so are you prepared to um when it comes to the end of this grant that year there's zero new initiatives right because that's what you're gonna be faced with because you're gonna be trying to jam this stuff into the budget and uh i just i feel like it's a cliff we're gonna have to deal with and we're making a bed because the town's not gonna approve this getting into the budget they might not even approve this under the budget but they might not definitely not going to prove this and a bunch of other initiatives that

095we would be wanting to carry forward so i'm worried about this i mean i i i think i answered that before bob so i i agree with you we need to manage this and be prepared for that but it's got to be we gotta simulate it out and say what's that budget year gonna look like i mean i i really think we gotta anticipate what this is gonna mean as a board we're making our bed for the next budget i mean or the budget after i'm not sure which one that'll hit but i think this is really important it can't just be you won't go work yep and we have we have um and again it gets confusing but we have s or two would have in the 22 23 year we'd have funds to

096offset you know half of uh one of those coach positions and then we have the sr3 funds coming in that would be able to support the positions depending again how we want to phase those into the operating budget the other thing is i'm struggling with this to see how it fits directly against the objectives and priorities in the connecticut priorities list that you put up in your first chart um i mean it's a great idea i by the way i'm not disagreeing with the coaching model i think it's a good model but it's too general compared to how we're going to put academic supports to deal with the learning loss that we've been dealing with the learning acceleration and recovery it's too gen it's too broadly general and not directed enough against that and all

097the other ones don't seem to fit that so um i'm a little are we really feeling like this fits in the guidelines that we have actually yes and i i really tried to keep the powerpoint as brief as i could but there's all kinds of training in instructional coaching another really interesting thing we are we're initiating this spring um and we're going to hit on all of those items in the uh in the grant requirements but at this point it would be perfect i think dr ruby could do a really nice job answering uh that question bob because it's a great question how it all fits with coaching again specifically let me just restate my question slightly differently we're getting this money from the government to help fix the situation we're in and do it

098as rapidly as we can and and when i listen to the words on the coaching it feels like this is a good structural thing that we're going to help us over the long run it's building capacity which i think good but i can't see how it's fixing the loss in the short run for our kids right and and it's more about coaching our teachers and i'm not getting it we're going to connect with us right now i'm not connecting these thoughts yet okay guys john um have you looked at other um other supports that we may need next year other than academic things like additional social workers counselors you know how to get kids can i have you just hold your question really quickly because i think dr ruby was going to answer bob's question

099and and i think deb i think we're going to this it's a great question because it's connecting the dots and again my my powerpoint was designed to be more general but we were prepared to go into more detail depending on the board's questions and what direction they wanted to go with so i'd ask dr ruby to just jump right in on that and help connect those dots okay so the um i don't want to get into a bunch of research here but the best tier two which is intervention to catch kids up is a strong tier one and having uh pd is the way to support teachers to be able to solve problems of instruction problems of practice in their classroom to meet the needs of students and so going from what we've done we've

100done and with thanks to the board a tremendous amount of pd that's gotten our faculty to a very a very good place but just like a star athlete you know you always have a coach to get you to that higher level so the type of pd that we've been using to be of to be as efficient as possible which is you know more of those large group pd's um pd's with numbers of teachers in uh plc's etc is has been working but now in order to meet teachers and we have teachers on the board who probably can relate to this teachers reach a point where now they want personalized individual pd that's going to help them be able to solve the problems that are in their classroom and that's what a coaching model is designed

101to do so having a a schedule where teachers are working with the coach who has um experience and expertise in that content area but is a learner as well so a teacher has something that's not working to move those kids that are behind or the kids that need to be accelerated and now has this coach as a partner who comes in here's what the problem is that the teacher wants to solve get either has information to provide to that teacher or gets the information and then works with the teacher to solve the problems in the classroom so the whole the whole goal of coaching is to support a teacher in problems that they've identified that they need to solve in their classroom with students so it's very student-centered so it really does meet that first

102bullet of learning loss differentiation and accelerating student learning that's what it's designed to do and there's um a great there's a lot of research evidence on the efficacy and the impact that a strong coaching program has on student learning and meets the personal professional learning needs of teachers and i think that's where we're at and what we're what we've heard from teachers is they want more professional learning that connects to what they have to do in their practice and what they're interested in learning more about because of the need that they have as an individual teacher so it's a it's a um it's a more sophisticated type of pd that our teachers are certainly ready for to solve the problem dr ruby maybe if you give like a specific example that would help i was

103like thinking about myself so you think of it like a triangle so your base is your tier one which is your general classroom your tier two is you know what i provide tier two interventions it's your reading specialist your math specialist and then your tier three is your special education uh population so we wanna keep everybody on that tier one and provide those interventions with those classroom teachers i don't want all the kids to come to me and then we have to fix the problem so um you want to provide those supports and give those supports to the general education teacher the general classroom teacher to service those her his or her students first before they become they spill out and then the second tier we don't want kids going to tier two we want

104we exactly we only want kids who absolutely need intervention literally bleeding into intervention um because when we have too many students going to intervention because you know teachers need more tools in their toolbox and they're not going to get them from any place if we don't provide them with individualized supports because um they're generalists there and and that's what coaching is designed to do the people that are the reading teachers and other support teachers they're not able to service the kids that really need the help if kids that could get help in tier one are bleeding out into tier two and it becomes so in it in a healthy system uh a three-tiered system of a multi-tiered uh system of supports in that coat in that core one where the tier one or core um

105instruction theoretically should serve 85 percent of the students with differentiation and there should only be 15 of the students then that are in tier 2 or tier 3. so you want 80 to 85 of the percent of students having their needs met in a very strong differentiated core one 10 to 15 percent in needing tier two and only five percent of our students needing to that's our goal and we're at the we're at the point in in the i mean we've been working our teachers have been working very hard um and we've accomplished i think i'm very proud of the work that teachers have done and the administrators have done and this is we we talked about this in previous years and now with the the catch-up that we have to do for some students

106we looked at data we have just to you know i don't have the numbers in front of me right now but we had our district data team meeting um our mid-year meeting this week and i will tell you that the work that our teachers have done in in reading because that's where we've had the most pd in reading because we have the biggest problem in reading and our reading scores in some grades are better than they were last year and in overall are we're very close to where we were last year except for a very few things in reading it's it's remarkable um math we have um we're like the rest of the country where math is uh we haven't done as much professional development in math and math is a different animal to teach

107and i think it's a you know when you do when you give a math lesson to students in a zoom class it's not like afterwards they go and do math problems um if you're teaching reading and students know how to read students do read on their own not all students but some students so exactly what joy was saying and i think i heard jen kind of echoing we we really want to make sure that we are providing teachers with what they need in a very specific targeted way so that they can service children in their classroom and they might be able to service children in their classroom in a much more efficacious way when they have somebody else who's coming in and supporting them listening to what their problem of practice is that they want

108to solve for these children that are in front of them this week this month this year because with little with tweaks to their instruction they can differentiate and there's plenty of research that supports us because it's been looked at intensively for the past 20 years because this whole um coaching model in education really came into play in like around and the jury was out in 2000 2001 2002 3 and whether it was whether it was worth um worth investing in and then there was there were huge studies in 2004 and they've been replicated since then that when done well this works and so i if this was if this was my money in my school i think that this is the best investment in our teachers and ours for our students that we can make

109at this time i don't think our teachers are going to um have their problems or practice solved in the way that that we want to solve their problems with them you know not saying they have problems but anytime you're doing any any any type of teaching you can always learn more and you always have a different crew of children in front of you that are all individuals and as teachers we're not jacks of all trades and i'm gonna say it sounds trite but two heads are better than one and this is collaborative problem solving to meet the needs of the students um i sound like a used car salesman i know but um i do want to jump in and sort of ask a question though so we don't feel or are you confident that

110throughout this crazy year that we don't have already a significant number of kids or even just more kids that doesn't have to be a very big number but more kids that already need tier two intervention oh we have to that doesn't solve that problem right if you can be if we if we know what we know we have data okay so we know what children need we want teachers to be able to provide that in the classroom we don't want kids to all have to go out to someplace else because when they're out of the classroom they're missing things that are going on in the classroom i mean we can right we can talk about that however we want but that's the reality of it when you're playing in the classroom you miss right but

111it sounds like these coaches again are are great for improving tier one instruction right and preventing them from needing sort of our specialized interventions um but if we still have we still have our tier two instruction right now i'm thinking at that level and there's more of it what i think i think we might be just worried about is that we get to next year and we have all these coaches and that's great but we need a lot of kids that need like a little more special intervention and now we're gonna have to add tutors and you know other specialists that sort of you know come in that we didn't budget for but maybe we needed sort of as an emergency type of situation but if we don't if we don't continually supply supply our

112provide our teachers with see that's the bleeding out that will happen so if you if we're not providing professional ongoing professional development of the type that our teachers really need they don't need any more group big we've done that okay we're we're i think our teachers really know you know what they as much as they could have possibly ever gotten and quite frankly there when you or when you're at that level you check out when you go if you just keep having big you know one day bring in somebody to talk about something that's aligned with the curriculum i mean we've done that and our teachers have gained from that if we don't if we don't continue to professionally develop our what we invest most of our budget dollars into which is hr and we

113just we did more i'm not i'm not saying we could always use more tutors i mean there's nobody on planet earth who's going to tell you that they don't that they wouldn't welcome more help but if you put your money into that so you're taking care of these kids but if our we're not continuing to ever improve our tier instruction those kids are still going to be bleeding out and then you end up having an overload of kids needing intervention if you're not continually supporting teachers to be able to provide better and better core instruction in their class i don't know joy or jen if you have anything just just if i could just may i say something so just for a sec so um just the one like big takeaway is that this model

114reaches more kids than a tier two intervention so we know that all kids are struggling in some way as a result of the pandemic so a model that's centered on in the classroom is much more effective and reaches that did you say 85 percent of kids i forgot the stuff 85 yeah so you're you have an 85 of kids that you're reaching through this model versus the kids who are getting pulled out is a much smaller percentage so if we're looking to maximize the impact on a larger percentage of kids because we know all kids were impacted in some ways that's the purpose of this type of a model versus just adding more tutors and things of that nature but it's still generally just preventative right preventative in terms of the bleeding out that you're

115talking about i wouldn't call it preventative i would call it it's intervention in the moment okay you know so you're making instructional changes in the moment so kids so and so you're you're making fixes and adjustments so so whatever learning loss is occurring you're fixing it in the moment versus after yeah rather than saying oh my god all these kids they need to go out you're working with your you have a thought partner who is able to support you in a different way than you ever had before when you don't have a coach and so rather than saying oh my god these kids need to go out they need to go to srbi they need to be you know have a plan and what where where how can we what can we do how can

116we differentiate this how can we do the guided instruction the small group guided instruction in the classroom to support this problem that's what that and so i'll give you an example teacher could say you know john could be a teacher and i could be his coach and we it's our time together and he goes you know i i just don't know what to do i've got a group of kids and they they're i i just can't figure out how to move them from here to here in let's say multi-slavic word uh decoding and then i'd say well tell me what you've done and then he tells me what he's done and i go you know let's talk about their data we talk about their data and then we in through that talking you know i

117make some suggestions to him well did you do this you did that did you try this blah blah blah and so then we come to some conclusion and then the question in coaching is because coaching isn't like um uh it's not evaluative it's not because there's something wrong with you it's actually because there's something right with you because you're you're asking for help because you're seeing problems in a problem of practice then the question usually with the coaches so how would you like to do this you want me to come in and observe you um teaching that a lesson you know like tomorrow the next day whatever or would you like me to look at this lesson that you're going to teach and show me where you think the trouble will be for these children

118and have me come in and show you the strategy that we just talked about and then they decide whether they want to be observed or they want modeling and that that happens and so it's also that there's a schedule and and there's there's not a lot of lost time because the co a coach i've had this job um has a schedule for working with teachers and that's decided at the school whether you're working with one grade level a week and another grade level next week and of course just like a a physician there's emergency appointments where you you know when somebody really needs help like like on the spot so that's kind of how like a there's a that's called a coaching cycle so i either come in and observe you or i teach for

119you and then we meet after we look at the student data to solve the problem bob did you have a question for me i saw your hand i think i know i was going to let you finish because i'm learning something and the more you talk the more i'm learning so um the thing i'm struggling with dr ruby is the linkage of what i think is a very good model generally i will i will grant that to the very specific issues that we're seeing coming out of covet um kids have been remote we we all have heard of kids who are tuned out pockets of kids who have fallen behind kids who are suffering emotionally um and uh and kids who may need athletic you know support because they don't have men up about to

120play i mean there's so many different things that are coming out of the coveted world that the thing i think i'm struggling with is how we're taking the the generic that you've described because you were talking about coaching in general it's a good model and here's how it works and all that focus it in on the issue we're trying to solve with this grant right how do we deal with the pockets of children who need specific support either from their teacher or environmentally how do we spot them how do we uh get organized to attack it i haven't heard once that you might need social emotional support that may not be there i haven't heard that there's uh methods for identifying someone who's fallen behind and how we bring them forward what i'm hearing is

121generic things good this is good and i'll give you that it's good i really am i'm just not feeling like it's focused on what the grants intended for that go back to my first question well i'm sorry that i didn't make that clear okay that's what happened i'll try again okay all of this work is focused on students who are behind students who need more support it's the way to give teachers the support to give those students the support with regard to the social emotional needs um we right now are trying we have um two cohorts of um training for trauma informed sel instruction our technology integration work that we're doing right now is on scl in technology in um teaching online we we've been doing this work uh so we wouldn't be using that

122grant money to to uh focus on sel um because we're already doing that with and we're doing it with other grant money we're doing it with um title money this year and actually that pd is going amazing both the sel in technology and the trauma informed instruction and scl within sel focus so we wouldn't use this particular grant money this sr2 grant money for that purpose because we're already taking care of that um but you think you think we could easily make the statement that the coaches especially in the first year after we're coming back full time will be focused in on the pockets of kids that are in special need of recovery and how they're do what their focus in their coaching it's not going to be general hey you could teach better this

123way or that way it's gonna be no no no differentiated area and here's how you should focus on it and that's exactly what i was trying to say but i must not use the right words because the teacher okay i gave you what a general coaching what the framework is but the specific teachers their problem of practice is meeting the needs of those at-risk kids in their class the kids that are the most behind so those are the things that the coach and the teacher are going to be working on not just general things our teachers our teachers are very good at all of that but what they need more support on is these kids who have those specific needs the ones that would be bleeding out into tier two and tier three and if

124it went on long enough they you'll be going to special ed okay that's what this is about special ed do we the one of the most at risk spots of kids falling behind is in the special ed population so um do we need more special ed teachers to deal with this the the the risk of those kids falling behind and are we ignoring that need or are we dealing with it in a different way no we haven't had a request this year for more special education teachers in our you know we don't think the kids are falling further behind yeah well i think the important thing to mention is there is no doubt going to be gaps and that's well that's but there's going to be across the board it's not going to be like

125a specific amount of kids across the board there's going to be gaps um you know for example i spoke to you know one of my children's teachers about math and they noticed that the scores were low in geometry you know that was taught in the spring so they know so they're using that to drive their instruction to put more a lot more emphasis on it this year when it comes to the spring when they you know do that the topic of study again so they're they're looking at the data as a whole too and they have to be coached in that using that data to drive their instruction and to look at it holistically too and not just you know these certain kids are behind when really there's going to be gaps across the board

126yeah i i kind of agree with that i just i i would that what i was struggling with was the linking between the gaps and the coaching model and just the coaching investment and solve the gaps right and i'm not oh you're saying yes i'm saying no right i'm um and it's not that i'm saying no hard no i'm not sold yet um and so i'm i'm on because i think we've got some gaps out there that are more than just okay we're gonna we're gonna do some teacher coaching um and i don't want to minimize teacher coaching i think it sounds like a good idea but have we identified pockets that we think we need to put uh i mean i don't call it pull them out of the classroom level to support but

127other types of supports that maybe that we anticipate will be needed to help our children come fully out of the cobot world that's the thing i'm struggling with with the whole thing it's just it's we're gonna lay on a general answer to something that i think is specifics if i could just um chime in and this relates to the question i tried to ask earlier and i think bob maybe this is part of what you're asking too is what about stuff like pt and ot and speech and guidance counselors and social workers and all those supports that kids might need you know gaps in in those services that they may have is there a plan oh i'm sorry debbie no go ahead no i was going to say what we had said earlier there's been

128a lot said we we still maybe it was joy who said it i don't know um but we still have in place our tier two in our tier three and you know to to the question about students who with special needs who may have particular differences or gaps in their plans or whatever it might be you know i could certainly turn that over to mrs wygonic to address how the department plans to address that because they work individually with all of their students all year long whether it's been remote hybrid or now in person k through eight um so maybe gina you can share a little bit about that that's a very specific question that that's uh kind of waited to ask so you know and at each point in time we have students we

129have their annual reviews we have triennial reviews and we look at programming and as of right now you know with the programming that we have in place you know this the amount of staff that we have um we did have put in the budget for a part-time slp um because of numbers up at the high school um as of now you know we we have our staff our services are being provided um at this point i think if i can go back to what maureen said the more intervention that you have it keeps the numbers down in special ed because you're giving those kids the services in that classroom in that tier one which is preventing some of those kids to be referred because they're getting that tier one intervention right in that classroom um

130you know the the everyone can always get better at what they do we all know that and i think the coaching piece what maureen said is people want that individual coaching you can get a pd a large pd but that individual coaching on targeting kids collecting data in your classroom um and having that piece within your in your in your class you are going to have that tier one that is extremely strong in the classroom so i think you know that interventions in place special education numbers tend to tend to come down um so i think right now as i said we need a part-time slp up at the high school as of right now um but you know the ppt's that we have we have more referrals i'm not going to say we don't

131um but you know i don't know where that's you know where that's going to come out whether students are going to qualify or not i can't predict that um but as of right now um i think it's a wonderful idea to get coaches in and work with teachers and you know get that instruction um in the classroom where teachers will say this is what i want to be able to do in my room to support these kids by the data and uh debbie you the board probably doesn't realize this yet but um i had asked dr brill to kind of give us um the board an update on what we're doing with ruler and social emotional learning and at our next board meeting yes at our next board meeting um we'll have that presentation um

132so maybe that will go some way into answering some of your concerns for what we have in place and what's going to be planned in the future um and listening to this presentation it kind of it it brought up a lot of questions for me too about the coaching and maybe i didn't quite understand what this whole coaching model is but it does play into the next part of what i was going to talk about with this budget item which is getting back to the board of finance so as you know and dr brill explained that part of the plan for the use of the esser funds at least in our next year's budget um it actually reduces next year's budget and that was very much communicated and part of the plan that we had

133talked about openly with the board of finance so um i don't know if if you want me to go start going into that because then we're going to get away from talking about this grant in particular but you know i don't know how you guys feel about about moving on from from this discussion or if we want to keep talking about it but it's going to be important to have a plan for what we do with these funds obviously so what's the what is the process on the grant just out of curiosity what uh when do we submit our requests and do we as a board need to vote on anything i mean i just i'm not sure i know what the the process here is my my uh my understanding is the board doesn't

134need to vote on the grant and i have to submit the plan for the grant i it's either march 31st or by april 2nd it's a very tight window right at the end of the month beginning of the month of april you mean yes so it's either it's either i i can't remember exactly what it is april 9th maybe the 9th that's it 5th maybe you know it's it's early it is so you got to get on the schedule to actually fill out the paperwork that goes along with it i guess i guess i just want to make sure that in terms of the social emotional needs of kids after this crisis that we're being proactive and not just reactive you know we're not waiting to see how kids are when during the next school

135year and you know i i just think you know maybe there's more we could be doing to identify kids who are at risk emotionally um and i don't know what that looks like but i feel like i didn't hear a lot of that in this presentation but again if if dr brill is going to do another presentation at our next meeting then maybe it's in there but that will be after he submits the plans for the esser grant it sounds like i think debbie i think that's what rosa was trying to say i mean part of this is it's it's just timing of everything to be very candid it's we you know you get as you all know not having enough money is a problem and having too much money come flying at you in

136a short window of time could be problematic i mean it just there's a lot coming at everybody one thing that i haven't had a chance to say yet to this point is one of the things we've been talking about in our region as a superintendent group and i have conversations with folks from all around the state there's a strategic opportunity we have here not only to do exactly what i know some people are thinking maybe we need an extra tutor here or there or but we again we've got a lot of those those pieces in place we've also got additional extra grant money coming in we can't forget about that but we the other piece is the sel work has been frankly amazing and you saw some of that tonight um you know with the

137with the students and the work they're doing how resilient and tenacious they are um and we've seen that through some several of the the student spotlights over the course of the year so you know our our students are doing a great job they're actually so resilient they're doing for others i mean they're just amazing and that's the credit to our staff and our faculty and our administration and and a lot of that has to do with the kind of people we have in this district the kind of people we've brought in over the last few years and in addition to that bringing in the rule of approach and trauma informed practices and so forth i think it's going to be pretty impressive and i think the board will be very excited on april 7th um

138the principles dr ruby and the teams are going to be sharing uh and highlighting some of the great work that's gone on all year long and i think if that presentation was a month earlier from getting these esser funds i think you might have less questions um because you just some of the dots might be connected even more with what we're already doing using title funds personnel we already have in place and how we're handling those things so really i mean by sort of like presenting this to us and the board doesn't need to vote on sort of how you'll use these funds are you just sort of presenting as more of a i don't know to get our blessing or yeah this is the plan you need to know um i i would i

139would obviously love to have the blessing and the consensus um and and to move that forward the other thing that's important to understand with this and not that i'm saying i want to go and do i plan to do this a month or two from now but what's great about the ester funds is they've given us the flexibility yes we have to have our plan in but should plans change we could call up the state department and say listen we've had a change of plans we've got a change of priorities we're seeing x having an issue with with this and we need to do y to try to resolve that problem so while when we make a commitment to a plan there's months and months of planning that needs to go in to get ready

140for execution and implementation at the same time there's the state really has built in flexibility and i understand they're going to build in that flexibility with the additional sr3 funds um and i saw an email today it is not an official email where those sr3 funds we might have three to four years to um to extend those funds so it isn't something that you've got two years you've got to rush spend all this money and then that that there's gonna be a cliff or something like that i think we have we're gonna have some time that actually helps a lot with my first question yes yeah and that's a that's a very real concern yeah because that would maybe allow you to ease out of the of the it's all grant funded maybe we go

141you know it's half two-thirds grant funded and then it's one-third grant funded and then you know it's in our main line budget on these kinds of things that would be a lot easier my big worry about the cliff that actually we have three years to do that we could be very conscientious about how we use them and i think bob you said a long time ago to me when we were doing budget development years ago that you sometimes you have to finance your priorities you can't do everything at once not only do you not have the capacity but you don't have the money to do everything you want so you've got to build it in over time yeah but the grants give you some flexibility here i agree with you and i hadn't thought about

142the sr3 might allow the continuation and and a very deliberate you know phasing into regular budget over time that's the thought process well so so uh mrs fernandez i would suggest we uh give firm direction that that the first three items on the list that we need to lower our but we're going to end up with a lower budget on we give firm direction and leave the rest of the essa grant application in uh in the administration's hands um and then i would also ask that when we do come back on the um on the discussion on the uh emotional and social learning we also have a brief it doesn't have to be long or fancy but uh how does this uh coaching and all the other pieces directly deal with uh come out a

143covered question right and uh because what i've learned from the ongoing discussion here is there's lots of pieces right um and i think all of us would feel more comfortable if we said these are the anticipate-ish issues here's the pieces that we're going to deploy to solve those issues and help our kids right and that's the thing i was struggling with because we went right to coaching is good right and not there's a bunch of pieces and we anticipate here's the issues that we're going to be grappling with in the next year so i think there's a good discussion for us as a board to see that as we get back into full-time school and part of that quite frankly for me is what are we spending money on that will allow us to get

144back full-time at the high school regardless of what happens with govern um and uh you know should we be i mean if the issue is we have too many kids in classrooms how are we dealing with that if the issue is there's too much crossing space in the in the hallway how are we dealing with that right so uh right now we're still hybrid at the high school um and uh i'd love to have all our kids back full-time and we ought to be thinking ahead on what are we gonna use this funding for to help us get there and deal with the kids who've fallen behind they know the kids who have emotional issues deal with the kids that have all this other stuff i think so it's kind of turning this discussion on

145its ear right anticipate what we're trying to accomplish and then what how we were deploying the pieces right and this coaching piece might be an important piece of that i'd be okay with that i really would and i think that's how the team's thinking about it but it wasn't jumping out of me okay is that a fair way to go forward i mean so i think as a board i don't know if we need to do a vote or not but you know i think the input to you dr burrell is firmly those first three items we're gonna we're not gonna get the budget so let's let's deal with it is everybody okay with that okay all right um so there is a few more things i wanted to mention on the budget because the

146board of finances in uh is wrapping up their deliberations which is uh very early actually um normally we are um a lot later in the month um when the board of finance is still sort of uh going through all the town budgets um but last night uh the board had discussed our budget um they're very happy with how we've communicated our process um and so they have planned to restore 24 000 to our budget now none of that is final they haven't voted on that yet um but that was openly discussed last night at their meeting they're going to just marinate on everything again tonight and tomorrow they they plan to vote um and they don't anticipate any changes being made but just to sort of recap for you guys the board of selectmen had

147reduced our budget by 140 thousand um as we've heard tonight dr bruhl has worked out a pr uh plan with these um sr2 funds to address 96 000 of that so that left us with 44 000 in reductions that we would have to find um again with the board of finance restoring 24 000 of that we would still need to consider about um a 20 000 reduction um but i've been talking with dr brill about this we've been openly communicating with the board of finance and he has been in communication with his team department heads um since it has been five months since they submitted their budgets so dr bill i don't know if you want to share sort of like a general sort of overview i know there's nothing specific yet in terms of

148um you know what that you know roughly twenty thousand dollars means um but uh it's it's it looks like it's not going to be something that we're going to have to consider at a board level meaning any anybody no i i think i think uh we're confident i should say and i think terms we've gotten used to as educators financial terms exercising the budget scrubbing the budget these are things we would come accustomed to and i think it's been a skill set that we've all learned um or a value we've really learned to really dig in um and evaluate some of our assumptions and the estimates we have in the budget and so forth so uh just some examples of areas we're looking uh some of our our newer digital tools we're taking a look

149at usage uh but not only usage actually working uh mr conklin and dr be working with the vendors and some of the contracts and the structures uh in addition to that looking across the board at the principals are looking at you know furniture and instructional supplies and looking at um you know have needs changed in the last four to five months since they initially put their six months since they initially put their budgets together and so you know we're very confident that we could you know find 20 the 20 000 necessary without uh sacrificing what we're trying to accomplish in the budget and in the other the other things in rose i don't know if you said this or not um but there is really um and if ken needs to open i would certainly

150ask him to but one of the things is the uh insurance uh agent has shared with the town and with the board uh that the conservative estimate is that four percent increase remember we have built in gosh 11 or 12 percent we have a huge savings across the the entirety of the town and at four percent so a conservative estimate at four percent means plan for that but it really could there's a chance it could be less so if that breaks in our favor there's there's funds right there that are freed up that are just operational costs that are reduce our costs and don't hurt anyone um and so that that could work in in favor of the county and the board there's positives on the horizon yeah so i mean all in all it

151looks very good and it looks like we're not gonna you know usually at this time of year we're sort of we're digging through the budget ourselves and kind of finding where we can take a little bit here and take a little bit there um and i'm really very confident that we're not going to have to do that this year one thing uh they did the way they've been doing the florida finance meetings and i've been listening to them as they do they talk about it and then mr rooney does a straw vote around the table um when they did the board of finance budget um they uh they they landed at this 24 000 reduction instead of 140 000 and 24 000 being put back in the budget which um which you know basically was

152resolved as um mrs fernandez described they were very it was a 6-0 straw vote right in support of that and it was very complimentary of the work that we've done and the cooperation the two boards have had so we should be happy at the investment that we have made and in fact the thing they cited the most was our list of questions that we posted and put in their books of all the questions we asked about the the budget and all the answers the detailed answers that came back so they thought that was wonderful that we would share all that with them and i'm glad we did that um so uh so we've done some things this year that i think have helped the town for the finance board of education it hasn't been at

153all confrontational and quite frankly we we started in a much better place than we did last year because last year remember at the beginning we started at 6.4 i think or 6.5 increase and uh but this year we've worked hard and we should all be proud of ourselves for all the effort we've put in to make sure we had a tight budget so absolutely and i think at least for the first time since i've been on the board the what the what the voters are essentially going to see is the budget that we put forward and without any any adjustments any any cuts any reductions um so i think that's a real big accomplishment for us and um yeah so i mean all in all this is um so far it's going good so we'll

154just look for it so again the board of finance will will vote um tomorrow night um and then all this will be we'll be finalizing we'll start with the i will also say they've been spending a lot of time with capital i'd say half of the meeting last night was on capitol projects and our uh so far our capital has survived pretty uh pretty readily through that process including thank the lord the boys locker room project um and uh they were actually appreciative that we had identified that 55 000 item that we had had a previous capital release on so that helped them a lot um in terms of their overall picture and so um i think that's going along pretty well too so um by the way did we get did we send them

155the answer on the the the planning numbers for the for the boy's locker room the boys like that it was a 70 000 and the 35 was on fire yeah so they've asked me to to come to their meeting tomorrow night just to give them that brief update so i'll do that then okay need to know that when they're thinking about it was very that was the only thing they were confused on last night yeah okay anything else budget related okay so then the next item on our agenda is the candlewood lake elementary school building project um i hope you guys have all gotten a chance to drive by huckleberry um because obviously it looks a lot different which is very surreal and exciting um but uh the construction fencing is up um the construction

156entrance has been made and i believe um that's going to be the south exit once the school is totally built right that's going to be that sort of it won't be an entrance exit it'll just be like the exit right i'd like to commit to that but i look at those maps and then i see where things end up on the land i tell you melissa when i look and we're like we could have sworn the fence was going to be there the site supervisor was like oh no it was here all the time only are you sure about that so i i don't want to make a commitment one way or the other rosa right okay is there a sign outside at all of the construction area i don't think so i don't think

157so yet i saw something that looked like it might be a construction sign like where it would go so maybe they're planning on putting one there i just i i i'm a believer that a future home uh lake elementary school your tax dollars at work you know you know whatever the messaging is there's a important positive message that the town we can bring the town into uh what's going on so if it's a it's one of those construction signs with a thousand little lines of all the contractors that are working on it yeah they can put that up over here right i think front and center we ought to be asking them to put a you know something that says with the name of the school on it so i just think that would be

158a really good thing that would be nice yeah all right i'll talk to i'll talk to paul and see if he can do something about that but speaking of which uh the nbc did not meet uh this week so they haven't met since our last board meeting so there's no other updates on the new school all right uh we can move on to three main points well i was thinking um one point could be sort of a general covet update about the vaccines and the high school reopening plans that are underway and then i thought the second one should be about the ester ii grant and budget and a budget update where we stand in the process yeah the third third one would be um that equipment has been delivered and construction is beginning on

159the school i like those thank you very much bye yeah please drive by but not during drop-off or pick up please there you go what were you going to say joy didn't say maybe insert an image or two john sent us yeah that would be great and there's a lot more pictures now and by the way if the board doesn't know this yet and sometimes so much goes on we assume everybody knows but um eric's been working with the mbc and getting some camera equipment which is going to be delivered soon so not only have we been taking drone shots and still pictures yes we're going to have um a camera mounted and we will have the the real time uh i think it's every 15 minutes it's going to take a snapshot of the

160work site and we're going to see the building go up over the course of the next year and a half so oh then we can make one of those time lapse videos yeah that's yeah that's the idea so yeah we're really you know um and we have to thank the tech team certainly and logan from the high school and our nbc for uh helping this all come together so it's it's great it needs to be just a tremendous collaborative effort so um i'm glad i thought to say that because i probably assumed you all maybe already knew yeah i think the kids got a kick out of seeing the drone i i heard about it my daughter was like we saw a drone there was a drone there today so it's really exciting is there

161a date for the grand official groundbreaking yeah don't have a date yet i keep asking for it i i don't know if they're waiting for sort of i don't know better weather maybe but i'll keep pushing on that yeah and i think one of the things was was a weather issue was maybe maybe waiting get a little more work done um and so that's where where where paul and josh were on that so we're trying to get some agreement on when we think we want to do that yeah all right those are opera press opportunities that's the only that's the most important thing for that so okay uh upcoming events okay at center we have tomorrow and friday our early release 12 20 for conferences on march 19th also friday is rock your socks for

162world down syndrome awareness friday march 26th is a remote learner lunch bunch with mrs diamond wednesday march 31st is a community meeting and thursday april 1st is wear blue for autism awareness huckleberry also has early release tomorrow and friday for parent-teacher conferences and march 24th through the 31st is the virtual science fair on flipgrid and march 26 is a virtual pto meeting at 9 30 on zoom whiskener has an author visit next thursday and friday the 25th and 26th and the end of the marking period is the 31st and at the high school wednesday march 24th is the sat for juniors and april 5th the third quarter ends and all schools will have an early release on thursday april 1st and will be closed on april 2nd good friday and that's it okay um okay

163i guess we are actually at the end of our agenda so um without objection the meeting is adjourned have a good night everyone bye