Board of Education Meeting 10/21/2020 @ 7pm

001i'm waiting for the live stream to start oh okay oh cool yeah yeah no you're good mike all right rosie go ahead all right thanks good evening everyone today is wednesday october 21st 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

002state their names and titles if applicable before speaking on each occasion that they speak individuals wishing to participate in public comment portion of this meeting may do so by calling the following numbers and actually do we have i forgot to write those down um eric do we have those numbers just in case um people need a chance to take them down yeah if you don't see them on the agenda here i'll just read them out for you the numbers are um area code nine two nine two zero five six zero nine nine or area code three zero one seven one five eight five nine two okay and the meeting id thank you the meeting idea is nine five six zero four seven two two eight eight okay thank you um so let's stand for the

003pledge 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 so tonight we have all of our board members present so up first we have public comment and i see one phone number so um eric i'll let you um sure so i'll go ahead and unmute the phone number ending in 846 um and um um rosa do you want to um lay out the guidelines name and address right yeah so um once eric unmutes you just please state your name and address uh for the record and you'll have three minutes to speak um whoever that phone number is i am trying to hit unmute um it's it's not going so it might be

004asking you for permission so if you can just go ahead and unmute yourself you can do your public comment [Music] maybe they're somehow just listening oh here we go hello are you there did you just mute them them or did they mute themselves i did not they muted themselves so um i i think uh all right yeah i think we'll just move on then um up next we have the student representative report hi i'm tanvi chandra is the brookfield high school student representative there hasn't really been many developments since two weeks ago other than the big email from yesterday um i think it was just disappointing for the students who play fall sports knowing that their season was kind of cut short but we do know that it's for the health and safety for everyone

005so i guess we could just look back look forward to coming back to school in two weeks um also the seniors were glad to see the sign um for the class of 2020 taken down because those like really is such a small act to help us see that it's our year as seniors now and the only other thing is that a couple people have asked about what's happening with student council for every grade this year and if we can host any events that have the potential to be like modified to be safer during the virus but that would be all thank you okay thank you up next we have written correspondence hi ron jaffe shared articles from publishers weekly and the journal enquirer and also shared a video regarding slavery and indigenous peoples tatiana preston

006wrote regarding the ais program tammy sylvester wrote with questions about quarantine and jessica jesco wrote regarding the switch to full remote okay thank you amy up next we have approval of board minutes oh that's me again i make a motion that the board approves the minutes uh listed below from the regular meeting on october 7 2020. second thanks troy okay all in favor all right hi thank you that's unanimous uh up next we have the superintendent's update all right good evening everybody thanks mrs fernandez um and uh convi we're gonna keep monitoring everything on code and do our best for all of you please know that um i have just three items tonight i'll end with my remarks with um some things on kobit in the decision making process and some context for everyone it's

007important to have an update it's a big big decision that occurred uh yesterday uh evening uh but first just two quick updates um and then they'll defer because we have lots of new business reports this evening and a lot of committee reports the first one is that there has been movement at the state board of education for this current school year uh to just for this year at this point because otherwise it's legislative is to use any weather-related emergency days where we have to cancel school because of transportation concerns and weather-related issues uh that those days would count as remote learning days that's not in the executive orders from the governor because his executive orders are all uncovered related remote learning so that's something that's in the works um not for the long haul yet

008that would be a legislative decision that has to happen but for this year the state board of ed is working with the commissioner on that we are awaiting guidance on that once i have the guidance on how those uh weather related emergency days will work they'll certainly share that with the board and with our parents and students so everybody's on board and knows exactly what's going on so that's number one number two um just an announcement uh board retreat we have our board retreat uh tomorrow there's two big agenda items the public agenda item is the discussion of diversity with our recently established over the summer um equity and inclusion subcommittee and so we look forward to having that discussion and then in addition to that the board will break into executive session um to

009talk about their board self-evaluation and set goals for themselves through for the year um rose i didn't know if there was anything before i could move on to the covet update if there was anything you might want to share about the retreat no that that covered it thanks okay very good okay so i wanted to share with everyone some context um about uh what occurred um with working with dr sullivan and the spike in covet cases here in brookfield and certainly in connecticut and just build a little context so people understand uh what's exactly what's going on um and so the first thing i want to do is express my appreciation to you know our faculty and staff and students uh the board and the families our administration for all the support during this most

010difficult time uh there's nothing more that we want for all of our students here in brookfield and that is for us to have all of the students back in school and frankly how things used to be uh this has been an awful experience for for almost all of us and we know the toll it takes on family staff and students the administration faculty and i live with the fallout in extreme challenges and constraints placed upon us from kogan every day in our roles as school teachers and school leaders we received emails from parents today questioning the decision to move to remote learning and other emails thanking the district for the decision to close school as far as i know i've been able to respond every single one of those uh today uh we need to

011make things crystal clear for those who might think uh the closing of our schools was a quick decision and maybe even an overreaction no decision in the school district including the strong recommendation from dr sullivan that we should close the schools is made in haste is knee-jerk or considered in a vacuum in this case health data a stream of new positive cases and the multitude of emerging needs to quarantine students and staff were all taken under consideration we also must consider the cdc department of public health and connecticut state department of education requirements that we must live within as we run our public schools as leaders we do not have the luxury of inaction or do-overs when it comes to the safety of our students and staff in brookfield we have approximately 2 600 students

012and their families to consider along with 416 employees and their families to consider when making such decisions none none of this is taken lightly so the question really is why change to full closure in late afternoon on monday on tuesday excuse me when earlier in the morning everything appeared under control simply put in the morning we only knew about our isolated cases in which we could target populations and quarantine by yesterday afternoons things were not under control dr sullivan was trying to figure out what was going on after the two cases we reported to the entire community in the morning more primary contacts began to report symptoms to their administrators in other cases within families these cases were being reported to school nurses dr sullivan took into consideration the significant uptick in positive cases in

013student and faculty and staff and in relatives of students and faculty here in brookfield and also with employees that actually live out of town more primary contacts to exposures continued to be reported to school officials across the district as the afternoon wore on as dr sullivan learned of these matters and with his pers his greater perspective of state regional and town data he recommended that we close the schools yesterday after afternoon this was hours after the information we learned of earlier that morning the case positivity rate today in brookfield is climbing to almost 10 percent here in town in three percent in connecticut right now which is the highest it's been since june hospital hospitalizations continue to be up and mortality is now moving up and dr sullivan is obviously very concerned about this along

014with our neighboring districts in this area of western connecticut we learned today that there may be as many as 14 school related cases in an additional eight to ten cases in town that dr sullivan actually knows about that's not the cases that are delayed in getting reported to him as a result the school district made the decision to transition to remote learning for a period of 14 days the normal quarantine period based on dr sullivan's recommendation we did this the decision was quite rational and in the best interest of protecting the students and their families faculty and staff and their families in all of brookfield we certainly recognize the emotional stress that decisions such as these create we as administration have children and families as well who are enduring the same pandemic as everyone else

015we must rely on the science of disease transmission in the safety of our precious children families and our educators i wanted to share that because it's very important to get the facts out there and the decision-making process and the fact that we listen to the public health experts as part of that a big part of that process and we care deeply about our families um when they're in school and when they're not in school um and of course our students and staff i didn't know if the board might have any questions or things they wanted to say about the decision i know it's a big decision and um it's it's difficult for many of us john i just want to say thank you for being so thorough and you know putting the health and safety

016of our children our staff members and our community uh first because that's the most important um this obviously is inconvenient and um tragic for some but um health and safety first and appreciate all the time and effort and that has gone into it you and along with your team thank you john i also wanted to thank you for um providing that additional detail and background because i think you know there has been some confusion among parents um i think people sort of get bogged down in specific numbers so i think it helped to hear all the different things that you're looking at in terms of people reporting symptoms and having primary contact with infected patients so thanks for providing that detail you're welcome and you know we can't provide that detail to you without the

017great work of our staff the administrative team uh you know our nurses our teachers custodians everybody has a part in this of reporting cases of acting in good faith and staying home when they're not feeling well sharing information it really is taking all of us to do our best and we stayed open for six six and a half weeks without having this um and uh so i really do want to want to thank everybody thank the board for their support these decisions are never easy um in addition to that it's important i was working with mr dunn today while my letter yesterday made it very clear that the buildings are closed to the public that's part of our effort especially when school is in session to um create that bubble we talked about over the

018summer as part of our reopening plans um there is a hearing scheduled for the high school um in the evening next week it's an important one on uh water in the water line uh in addition to that voting of course uh is scheduled at huckleberry and at the high school and those will go on uh like always without a hitch and we'll have our cleaning crews there and be working in total collaboration with the town so no one has to worry about any any of those issues anyone else was that sorry was that it john was that your oh yeah i'm sorry rosa yes i tried to that was a little long but i tried to keep everything else no not at all i really appreciate the clarification thank you and uh debbie to your

019point about the the clarification what we can do with this video is you know we could work with eric and clip it and i could actually send it out as a nice video to everybody so they can they can that's a good idea we'll work on it okay thank you oh in addition to thanking john you and your staff for being as thorough as you are i think we ought to all extend our thanks to dr sullivan and the uh and the health uh team in brookfield and at the state level uh because we couldn't do this without them um and there have been great advisors and great partners and uh and i saw that mr dunn also took action so the partnership between the schools and the town so we act in concert for

020the safety of our children and families is superb so um i think i'd like to just extend all of the boards thanks to the partners we work with yeah and you know what bob i i don't want to forget you know as part of our meeting today you know the leadership team and working on all this and they've been fantastic uh your point's really well taken because uh it's important to mention mr dunn put out today well in concert with parks and rec which is a big partner of ours here in town the parking rec department working with mary knox and the team uh they are putting a limit um and it's all out on the website onto sports and some other things right now to kind of get a handle on what's going on

021with the spread of the virus so thanks for mentioning that appreciate it the only way we'll control this thing right is by owl acting in concert and carefully so thank you okay yeah i just quick add just want to quickly add my uh thanks to john and the whole team um i just it we are in such unprecedented times and i think everyone needs to remember that times run a school during a pandemic and so every first type of decision and it's only by really looking at the science and thinking about our health and safety um that we're really going to for our head so thank you john and his team all right so um we can move on um i'm actually going to make a motion to move item a of old business the

022tecton presentation follow-up to right now we have jeff and eddie and antonia on the line so i want to recognize uh their time on the line here too so um so yes so i moved um to move item a of old business to right now um do i have a second second thanks amy okay uh all in favor aye all right thanks okay so um i guess the floor is yours eddie and antonia if you want to um maybe walk us through the new materials that that you have for us absolutely first of all thank you again for moving us up in the in a agenda and for dealing with us being on the road and not exactly able to host uh last time so uh yeah we're not gonna do a full-blown presentation antonia

023is going to focus really on the materials that have been submitted to try and answer the questions that were asked last time so with that i will turn it over to her wonderful thank you eddie and thank you everyone um for your great questions last time which really were the springboard for the document that we've created today and um eric is it possible um do you have the document ready to share or would you like me to share i'm i'm happy to do it um okay unless you have it up but i i literally just pulled it up on my screen right now and i can pull it up for you excellent that would be great so confirm we're still heading over to section four um actually if we could start just at the table

024of contents which should be the second page that way i can give just an overview of the whole document and then we'll spend most of our time on section four wonderful thank you so much so there are three pdfs in this packet total we are focusing tonight on the resource guide there's also an appendix a and appendix b so within the contents of the resource guide we've given a little bit more of an overview of of well and some more detail about the certification process itself and how it sets it apart from other sustainable building standards so that comprises sections one and two the benefits of well certification we've connected those to the curriculum four is where we took the questions that we received from the group last time and answered those in a little

025bit more detail um this way we can have conversation around those tonight and they're also written in narrative form so that you can reflect on them and if additional questions pop up we can either tackle those tonight or in the future and we similar to the presentation from last time just identified a few considerations in making your decision and gave you a little bit more information on the timeline of well certification and the approximate cost so that is the resource guide appendix a contains some examples of some of the annual submission spreadsheets the letters of assurance that would be required by the owner so if if we can spend some time also looking at that when we get to those questions in section four so you can see some exact some examples of that specifically

026and appendix b has some of the research studies and some links to some other excuse me some other schools that are well certified or pre-certified that you can take a look at so with with that we can move to section 4 eric great thank you i'm following along on my screen here so i'll do the same all right so i think the first question what does it take to achieve well certification um basically i i think the highlights of this are that it's um it's a collaborative process between us as the design team and our design partners and and um the school faculty and you all as as owners and stewards of this of this wealth well-certified school potentially um so what it would take is there are certain policy-based features that we'll have to

027discuss just on the scorecard which we can opt in for or opt out of based on how they fit in with your curriculum and some of the policies that i'm sure are already in place that align with well so that'll be one conversation that we have on the scorecard is which of those more policy-based features we can incorporate and which we can forego the letter of assurance and we can look at this example if we would like but the letter of assurance is really a simple um a simple process where it's a document generated by the international well-building institute so there's nothing that has to be actually written from scratch by the owner it's just a a check box and a signature that those features are met um in in the in the project and

028those are again more policy-based features that we can that we would have already been chatting about relative to uh to the scorecard and um so again just i think it would just be a simple check of a box and a signature on that document and we can take a look at that letter to to give you some understanding what that what that looks like exactly and the third component is the annual submission documents and those are also um in the appendix and essentially those are spreadsheets already generated by wells you can use their templates or you can develop your own and that would involve monthly or semi-monthly checks of some of the building systems and some of some measurements in terms of electricity usage and things like that that you can get from utility bills

029so there's no special monitoring technology required it's all equipment that you would already have at your disposal or things like utility bills that you can reference to get that information um so we chatted a little bit about that owner's letter of assurance which is just the check box and signature pre-crafted by well it's something that you can download and we can just quickly fill out to maintain well certification there are the three components of those annual submissions which again if you're maintaining them on a weekly or monthly or semi-monthly basis would go they would go pretty quickly if you're managing it yourself there's also an option to bring on somebody from well who would manage this process for you at an additional cost of course but that costs could be offset potentially when it comes

030to the second component of maintaining well certification which is performance verification so in addition to the annual submissions and performance verification there's that the actual recertification itself which nothing actually involved for that except the paying the recertification fee but if for the annual submissions you're using a well-performance testing agent then that cost that you've incurred to bring that individual on board does benefit you when it comes time to for performance verification because that those tests that they're conducting count towards performance verification so the scope is reduced at that point um the annual submission process are those spreadsheets templates already generated by well we can have a look in the appendix if you'd like and again it's just simple things like how much electricity you're using um how much how much recycling is going into how

031much you're recycling for example um the maintenance of the air filters within the space making checking those on a semi-monthly basis so there are just some some routine logs and spreadsheets that well has already created that you can use and follow how many other schools in our region are well certified the answer is you you would be a trendsetter because there aren't a whole lot there's only seven schools listed across all the united states and um two are certified one is pre-certified and the pre-certified school is here on the east coast so a lot a lot of the activity related to well is happening on the west coast even though the headquarters for the international well-building institute is here in new york city so the the east coast you have an opportunity here specifically in

032new england to be the first well-certified school in our region and potentially the first on the east coast okay um there are a few similar case studies and the links to those are in the appendix um just quickly i think i'm going to spend time talking about there's one that's actually not yet certified it's the the third paragraph here towards the bottom it's chinook trail middle school and that project is the most similar in terms of budget and square footage to the new elementary school project so even though it's not certified they've used the well-designed building standard to incorporate a lot of their sustainable design features into their project and the way that they've marketed this online the way that they discuss their sustainable goals and the way that they promote their connection to the

033educational environment i think is is a great case study for the brookfield elementary school um some of the design strategies that we've used again this there's more detail on this in section three um but just to let you know i think um we've just identified here a few um i think we can um i can let you read this actually just in the interest of um of your time i know you have a lot on your agenda tonight so i'm going to try to speed up yes and tony this is very important for the for folks to know about the new school design i mean you talked a lot about okay which is important and you answered some of those questions from last time but i think this is one share with the features of

034the school which are the innards in a lot of ways that people aren't necessarily aware of so go take go through that one that's an important one i think okay okay thanks thank you dr brown i appreciate that um so we can spend some time maybe in section three as well but just to quickly look at it here um the radiant heating and the chilled beams the displacement ventilation on the increased fresh air so our mep partners are really spending a lot of time and we're coordinating with them to make sure that we get these systems based on components in the school um to really enhance not only the the fresh air coming into the environment which we know enhances learning but also the energy efficiency and the opportunity for students to experience um these

035systems and and feel the feel the difference um in the school we know that that displacement ventilation system um lets out air at at slower rates so it's a quieter um system so are the chilled beams so again just having the though that in mind in the learning environment to really allow students to key in more to the instruction of of their teachers and have reduced background noise to aid in their to aid in their learning daylight we know critical for critical for learning and balancing that daylight with reduced glare um so you'll see on the elevation exterior elevations a lot of windows in the classrooms to bring in that daylight but also a lot of creative strategies to reduce glare occupant control of lighting and daylight sensors we're using a lot of dimming controls

036in the rooms automatic sensors occupancy sensors so all of these things not only contributing to energy savings but allowing the the teachers and students to individually control their their rooms to really optimize the learning environment acoustics of course critical again not only for for learning and privacy of sound but also just to especially in key spaces like there are larger athletic rooms in that in the central part of the the core part of the school uh making sure that we pay attention to sound in areas where they're going to be performances pay attention to sound in relation to where there's physical activity space is happening near the media center for example so really taking a critical eye on that to not only choose the right sound partitions to serve the purpose of the room but

037be mindful of the the whole experience at the same time and then the softer side of things contributing to mind community and nourishment and we know that there's already sustainable and healthful menus in place at in your school district so we want to monopolize on that and also give students the opportunity to grow their own food and raise garden beds outside accessible design throughout the school but also extending that to the playscapes so that everyone has access to to those those features to enhance our physical and mental well-being and nature walks appreciation of the native plantings the opportunity to again interact with those raised garden beds the natural features of the site the natural wetlands and animal species that are so so critical and the pollinator pathway that we're envisioning incorporating towards towards the main

038entrance of the school the bios whale so all of these sustainable features are doubling as opportunities to engage with students and their curriculum so all that is covered in more detail in section three but thank you for the opportunity to highlight that now did i miss anything jeff eddie is there are there other components relative to the design of the school and its connection to the curriculum that you'd like to offer uh no i i think you can everybody hear me okay yeah okay um no i think you did a good job kind of going through the details that the the project from day one for those that have been with us for the for the entire ride the entire project is about you know embracing the site so once you step foot on this

039property you're excited to go to school and and we talked a lot about every opportunity is a teaching opportunity we want buildings that teach and we want buildings that learn from the students so this i i understand we're going through a lot of detail and check boxes and checklists and all this well is about good design it's about energy efficient design and it's about setting the building design up so that students have the opportunity to learn at every aspect every turn everywhere they are in the building and so you'd be surprised that how much energy the building saves how much fresh air and these these buildings are very very sophisticated nowadays and i think it's a wonderful opportunity to to blend some parts of the curriculum with this because obviously it's an important piece of

040where we are in society today as far as learning about the environment and treating your environment well so there's there's a lot more than check boxes here you know it's really the soul of of the project and i mean for me and i understand it's very complicated how much does it cost does it cost more it's we have a good design we have we have to meet high performance building standards we have a lot of all i'd say majority of these components already in the project this is about basically staking you know you're a flag saying we want this building to be about not only just energy efficiency but about the health and well-being of our students faculty and staff and that's that's the flag that that this piece that everybody could rally around so

041that that's for me that's what well's about um so i i just wanted to kind of give my two cents because i wasn't able to last time but i mean you've done a wonderful job going through this and all the technical pieces but it's really going to represent who you are and what the building's about and what you're what the community is about so that's it's a little deeper for me than just check boxes so i won't take any more time but thanks so antonia i kind of want to just jump in here um because i think i maybe have you know the same question as other board members but is there do you have is the scorecard in this document somewhere because i think like what i'm still confused on is you know how

042much of that is already going to be going into the building and how much you know of course we want health and well-being to be sort of part of the educational experience but you know is there going to be a you know significant further investment that we hadn't planned on in order to achieve that well certification and then going forward you know every year you know i'm talking like very specifically like does this mean we can we only replace light bulbs with a particular kind of light bulb does it mean we have to do water test water quality testing every single year you know i think we're kind of looking at just at least some examples of some of the things that are going to be required of us right thank you rosa absolutely so

043yes the scorecard is in appendix a so we can go there um if that would be helpful and take a look at that there are also other versions of the scorecard that i can send if if after we view it here you'd still like to know more detail about each of the features that that is shown so this scorecard in appendix a will just highlight each of the features within the concept but the detail beyond each of those won't be there so we can either spend some time i can follow up with more detailed scorecards or we can spend some time exploring the well-building standard itself or i can even just attach that if you'd like and the great question about the light bulbs and the measurements and what what all will be involved so

044we can also spend some time looking at the annual submission document but overall um you're right i think that you know the light fixtures would require led bulbs so that would just be i think the only requirement there and i know our engineers have focused on using light fixtures that have bulbs that are easy to replace so it doesn't require a lot of complex parts or maintenance the requirement would just be that they're replaced with the same energy efficient led bulbs that they're that they're installed with and there is a component to measuring the water quality every year for the annual submission and certainly it's part of the performance verification every three years so that that would be a requirement there are some things that we can add to that and things that we can

045subtract that we can chat about for example there are filters that can be added to the water system or not so there there are ways that you can move up to more stringent requirements from the baseline or ways that you can just choose choose to stay stay there for now and the beauty of well like jeff said so so eloquently is that it's really the spirit of health and wellness so it's it's about this continuous improvement process and the continued measurement and verification and checking in to see how the building is is doing if it's still serving the purpose that um it was designed to serve and still being a benefit to the health and wellness of the students and faculty and community um so that's a lot of the reason behind the annual submissions

046and the three-year check-ins is just to make sure that it's not a one and done that this is a process that the students can engage with and learn from and check in and make sure the building is always performing so so with that it's an evolution so if if we start at you know measurements of simple measurements of water quality and in three years you'd like to add those filters and see what more you can achieve there's always ways to build into well more more and more um complexity um and benefit yes yeah i'm just gonna jump in real quick so i i think what what we can do because we provide an awful lot of information to you already on the detailed backup i think what we owe you is a summary presentation that

047kind of hit the highlights of i think throws it to your point like what what do we really need to do like you know from a maintenance ongoing maintenance standpoint is there anything we need to buy in the building today you know this is going to cost any more money in the project so we'll hit it we'll put them into some very specific categories um so that you can understand you know do we need to add the building who's going to be involved and then what do we need to do on a yearly monthly weekly basis and then who can do it can the students do it can the staff do it or do we need outside help so that you guys can see i mean we're never going to hit every every you know

048nook and cranny but we're gonna distill into the major pieces so that you guys understand what you're getting yourself into um and and we'll come back to you because i we could get i mean there's an awful lot to it obviously antonio's well versed in it but in an interest of saving every i know you have an awful lot on your plate tonight too i think we could do we could spend a little bit more time if you're willing for us to come back again or provide something like information we can we can give you a summary presentation on those kind of categories yeah i think that summary would be good and you know in particular when you mentioned you know what would need to be done on a sort of weekly monthly annual basis

049that gives us an idea operationally financially what exactly what we're getting ourselves into so that would be very helpful thank you thank you rosa and jeff what i'd like to add to that is if we could have that you know i'm just putting it out there for the board to consider um and tech time to think about we we are likely to schedule a joint we will be scheduling a joint meeting on november 17th i think it is it's a tuesday with the nbc uh for i believe it's design confirmation and approval so we we will be together then so perhaps uh an advanced summary for the board to consider and prepare for that meeting i know that's not necessarily the purpose of the meeting but also with the nbc there because it's a commitment

050from them they're an enormous part of this uh building project um we have a couple of architects there as well uh on on that team and together you know because this again this is a town project it's not just you know although it's a school um you know there's financial commitments and other things that have to go into this understood yep thank you and i just thinking about structuring it jeff it and antonia it makes sense to me that if you came in and said look the problem is we have too many options and too many kind of general discussions i i would almost love to say look here's what you should go for right if it was me here's what i'd recommend go for these seven you know uh categories and that gets you

051a well certification that you'd be proud of because by the way i like the concept um and here's what has to get be done to get the initial one and what's all in the design on this one or this one's mostly in the design but it's gonna need two or three more things and then here's what it would take to maintain it right um and this you know and then the things i i worry about is when i because i've had lots of experience of doing certifications in the business world you start and then you find out oh my god i have to go and deploy 17 people to go do a bunch of stuff i have to go you know implement these changes to our processing and that was more expensive than i expected

052and i heard the discussion about filters and my alarm bells go off and [Music] because we want to go in with our eyes open um i think it's what all of us want to do i think i'm not going to speak for every board member but i think most of us would say this sounds really cool let's go do it right and the fees you showed us didn't scare me um but the the so the unknown for us is a little bit of what do we have to ask our team to do on day one and then what do we have to do next year and the year after the year after to maintain it and if the answer is oh you have to go hire someone to come in and go do a certain

053testing and that's going to be there's going to be a bill to that those are the stuff we need to know um and i so i'm thinking if you had if you were forthright about here's a here's a absolute base case we would recommend you go pursue and then you kind of have those two columns here's what the initial certification here's what uh ongoing would be boy we'd have a lot and then flag which ones might have some costs or labor investment that would help us a lot right because you're going to get you don't want to go down a path and find out later oh my god what did i get into yeah we don't want it to be a chore it's really supposed to be you know an exciting exciting thing you you

054need roi on this too i mean it needs to that's the whole mission for this piece so we'll we'll we'll get that to you that's a good point yeah i i you know what i'd love to be able to tell our community we've got this very healthy building and it's only going to make education better and better for our kids and when we conduct when we can tell them it's not going to give them a covet and we can uh it's a it's a it's an absolutely controlled environment and then everybody will be exci excited but the uh but i think healthy buildings are cool they really are and i worked in a healthy building that had a bus the business form of this type of certification and it was a much better place to

055work him absolutely um and uh and so i'm kind of a pa i'm a believer in this i just this well thing and when you say there's no one on the east coast who's done it at all tells me there's a hurdle there that i'm feeling like i'm not seeing yet that's my worry we'll work on it thank you any other questions protect on and i had the same kind of piggybacking i apologize if this was addressed but just is the certification process really long like when we're looking at what's certified there's 37 projects listed in massachusetts but only eight are certified so that's a big number between the ones that are actually certified is that because the process is very long is that because like bob said things come up and people just buildings

056just drop it or do you have any insight into that yeah so there is about a year difference between um when you finish actually it could even be more than that so there's a year from the point of construction completion when the design team submits all the documents to the international well-building institute one year from that date of construction completion is the minimum amount of time before certification can be awarded so and that's just because they want to get a certain number of occupants in the building and they're reviewing documentation they're doing performance verification which can take um five to ten business days at times so um there there is a process after that date of construction completion before certification commences so that's a year um but what we also see is that when projects

057those 37 projects that are on that are registered on the website the project directory they'll register sometimes in the beginning of conceptual design and they still got that whole project design cycle to go through so in addition to that one year after construction completion it's a couple years to get through the design process so we might see those numbers increase as more projects move through through the cycle yeah thanks great question sure all right um so i think what we'll do as a board is is sort of go through the information that you gave us we'll definitely look forward to getting some of that you know more specific information from you um and then we'll we'll at least revisit this on you know the 17th when we talk with the nbc but perhaps you know

058before that or we can communicate you know through email if we have questions and things like that so okay all right sounds great thank you thank you guys thanks for coming thank you for your time i appreciate it thanks very much thank you okay so uh let's move on to subcommittee reports and uh first up we have facilities okay so um i'll report on our meeting from october 7th and our special meeting on october 14th so we reviewed the school dude reports we reviewed the most recent proposal from tucton for the boys locker room project and unanimously approved it we continued to review the capital improvement plan we finalized it and voted unanimously to bring it forward to the board tonight the custodial staffing update we still have green light helping us out we're still

059down one night custodian at huckleberry one night lead person at high school and one night person at wisconier so we have three custodial vacancies reopening update all exhaust fans and ventilation systems are working and and or have been replaced they're all working as it's intended to desks and dust shields have been delivered and are ready to go for the expected november 9th full in person learning um some miscellaneous discussion we discussed was that the district received a complaint about mice at the high school the district is taking it very seriously and is working proactively osha a pest contractor will be coming out now once a week set traps at night and retrieve them with bait in the in the morning and that's about it if anybody has any questions in just a little piece the

060capital plan for approval is later on the agenda tonight on your new business rosie you're muted sorry okay up next is finance all right so um i want to just give an update on the financials uh from our meeting on october 12th uh that meeting was dedicated to our first look at how we're doing really on this year's uh budget um so i'm gonna spend a couple of minutes talking about a couple things i will tell you that after we went through our review a couple of days later we actually uh met with the board of finance and took them through some of the same information and it was a very good meeting by the way in terms of sharing of information so let me talk about a couple things first of all our overall

061uh budget situation can in in your packet tonight is a copy of our financial report um and ken reported that with all the give and takes of under runs and overruns especially due to the covet spend he is um outlooking that right now we're about 88 000 over our budget um now the biggest driver in that by far is covet related spending and as you know the board of finance has agreed they will support us on you know making a proper budget adjustment when we get there so don't uh overreact to the 88 000 we're still monitoring it with the board of finance and that's why we went and met with them a couple of days later um so um so all things considered there's been there's not a lot of surprises in the current

062budget um let me knock off a couple of important things if you remember when we did our budget last spring we there were a couple of very specific focus risk areas that we were monitoring one was we took a 200 000 risk entry on our on our salary line and ken's done that done the piece of work given the turnover and uh that we've seen through the end the school year and it is 696 dollars is what would actually uh have it in savings due to turning over retirements of more expensive teachers being replaced with newer teachers so our the risk we took in our budget of 200 000 is almost dead nuts what actually happened so that's really good news because that's a one-time event that tends to happen at the beginning of the

063year when we're doing our staffing for the year so we can almost put that one to bed on top of that though we've had some openings in various roles and uh teachers custodians maintenance and clerical roles that while they weren't filled and many of them have since been filled uh we actually have salary savings and that is we have savings of 140 000 due to what they then can call unfilled positions or vacancy savings um we hate to have vacancy savings we would like to keep our employees and do that but when you do have you know a situation where you have an opening for a period of time uh that actually is savings to the budget and that savings is used to offset our covet spend so um it's about 108 000 of that

064143 was teachers but about twenty thousand under run on custodians eleven thousand on maintenance and three thousand on clara so um and it was like seven or eight positions and they were you know it was three weeks here and five weeks there it wasn't one big bucket it was chunks of uh chunks of time so those are that's another area that is good news for our budget and the third basic area of the budget if you remember we've all been focused on the out out of district special ed spending and mrs wygonick and mr poston have gone through a very exhaustive analysis of the what's happened to our children who have been placed out of district and you know if you remember we always have this issue there's kids who leave and kids who come

065in and you know and um how we uh um how we uh those balance out and we've had some problems the last couple of years that haven't balanced in our favor well this year we had a budget of 2.109 and right now the outlook is 2.115 so about five thousand dollar difference so with the students that we know about right we're actually once again kind of dead nuts to the where the budget was so that's another good news so all things consider those were good news um and then you get to the big discussion we had which was the kobits then and um and i'll summarize this at a high level but there's a sheet that we can share with everybody if you want to see the details but we had told the board of

066finance back in august that we were going to spend a little over a million dollars on coping and that came in the flavors of money that was spent last year um new spends this year and the items that we approved like two meetings ago for the curricular things that would help with the covet environment million 28. um the spend in the current outlook is 905 000 so a reduction in our covert spending by about 123 000 that's also good news so um now that the real reasons for the under running though is an interesting story that one was our cost for lunch monitors we have not been able to staff lunch monitors we've got we've advertised for the positions and uh those have been very difficult recruiting people into the job so while it's a

067savings it's not a savings we wanted to have as a savings and the other is our cleaning service bill came in a lot lower than we expected it was offset slightly by the desks were more expensive than we thought so there's a whole bunch of gives and takes uh but those are the three big drivers but net net we're down 123 000 on our estimate for covet spend and but offsetting that we're hundred expecting fifteen thousand dollars of savings in our regular budget i've talked about the salary savings that's the biggest single line item but between uh the decisions we've taken on the special education extended school year pro the savings there the life skills program uh some of the transportation savings because we um we had five less days of school and so on

068and so forth there's about six hundred and fifteen thousand dollars of under runs in our regular budget items that are help offsetting that million dollars of extra spend um now you might say the math of that sounds like 300 000 not 88 000. some of that spend was last year's budget right it was not this year's budget so it's uh the net impact on the this year's budget's about 88 000 um and we'll continue to monitor that with the uh with the board of finance and there are other opportunities where we might actually have other underruns and that's where we will actually save a little some amount of money when we're actually not having kids in school for two weeks for example um so a lot of things a lot of moving pieces but i

069would say all things considered as a committee we concluded most of the news was good news so um and being well managed by mr post and uh and the entire administrative staff so that's kind of what's going on our budget we came in right up dead nuts on the two big risk areas on our budget uh the cobot stuff is actually coming in a little less than we expected and the savings are a little more than we expected and the board of finance got all our input and they thought it was a really good update that ken did when we were together a couple of days after that so that's kind of where we are on the budget and i'll kind of do it this year's going to be really tricky so we'll do a

070report on this um you know every time every month when we meet um as we as we go through the year i'll try to do it more on an incremental update as we go that was the totality of what we spoke about at our finance committee and i'll entertain any questions you guys might have sorry i took a little longer than i normally do that's all right a lot of information a lot of good information about what's happening and i hope i summarized it in a way that everyone could digest it easily any questions for bob thank you uh now we have uh sorry you probably should have joy did you mention uh your special facilities meeting in your gonna combine the two yeah great um so then we have cape i wanna say i'm

071so glad that bob is in charge of the finance committee because he does really do a great job of explaining things that are really complicated in a digestible way so i want to thank you for that bob um so we had a great uh cape meeting it was just last week and this was really joy had a great idea she said why don't we use the kate meeting to sometimes be updated on the initiatives that we're approving and budgeting so we can then bring it back to uh the full board and then the community who watches the board meetings so we had two presentations the first was from uh it was a stem presentation so it was from andrew hill who's the stem department chair at the high school and robert support who's the stem

072teacher and they gave us a demonstration of a software it's called white box learning software basically what it is it's an engineering type software that the students can utilize either in school at home as they're doing all sorts of tasks in developing you know different things that they would design so they showed us an example of uh something that they would make for somebody who was an amputee so like a design for a prosthetic um and they he kind of took us through the software so we could get a sense of what it might be like for a student so you know when we think about being in a hybrid or remote environment you know you think oh god there's so many disadvantages but with the right technology we can really uh maximize what students

073are doing so that was exciting to kind of learn about and see all the possibilities of our growing stem program at the high school and our second presentation was by dean renda our principal at the middle school and he updated us on a program that began last year this was a grant that um uh that we were a part of to integrate the arts into social studies and it was done through visiting artists and the idea was to bring the arts into the social studies unit of the american revolution and so what's happened is there's been some curriculum planning uh on how to integrate it unfortunately the unit was supposed to take place place last year but with the um you know us moving to remote it became difficult but they've salvaged it and they're

074continuing to work on it uh for this year instead and so um it's really working on really interdisciplinary type work where the art will be within the social studies class they're working out the logistics on whether the resident artist would actually physically be able to come to school maybe more of a zoom meeting might be more appropriate depending on where we are you know with everything but the you know the exciting part is it's really sort of bringing history to life uh through the incorporation of the arts so i'm sure uh our seventh graders at wisconia are gonna really benefit from that so so those were two great presentations and we start to see kind of the development of curriculum and uh get a real taste for how things are evolving in our schools jen

075can i say something on that yes all right um i did speak with uh john michael parker who is the head of arts it's arts for learning in connecticut uh we had a meeting this morning and uh we talked about um having virtual art artists um have it be virtual and what they would be able to do is be able to zoom both of our seventh grade social studies classes at the same time and we are setting up a time for our seventh grade social studies teachers and these artists to collaborate and prepare ahead of time so hopefully uh this will be off and running as long as he has the artists uh right after november 18th i think is the date we're shooting for so we're excited about it that's great thank you dean

076uh and that was the extent of our meeting okay any questions for jen all right thank you okay up next we have the consent agenda i will move that the board approve the items on the consent agenda which are new hires and the september 2020 financials second thanks joy okay all in favor okay that's unanimous thank you okay on to new business um we have the 21 22 budget assumptions and priorities so this is just an action item so i'll go ahead and turn it over to dr brill who can present the the priorities thank you rosa so um each year prior to um bringing a budget to the board of education we set up our board assumptions and priorities um what we want to do is really have everybody on the same page and

077have have very similar expectations going into the budget seasons of those core pieces that we all are essentially in agreement on um and so if you'll indulge me i'm going to just highlight and go through some of these pieces there also is a mention in there under operating budget about possibly budgeting and considering the cost of the pandemic as it may continue um i wanted to put that in there so we could purposely have an intentional point of discussion on that um and thank you eric and um you know when i it's this is a two-pager that's up on the screen right now when i get through with it because it's perfectly dovetailed tonight with the timing of mr belden's very detailed um uh overview uh of the finances and in code related costs and

078uh you know the board could uh if the board could help get some direction to the to the admin team be very helpful as most most of you know on the board the principals have been working along with their department heads diligently on the budget their budgets at each school i'm in each department those are due to tso on friday this week so you know with everything else going on they're also developing their budgets for next year uh it feels like the school year hasn't even started and we're already doing that i kind of say that every year so anyway um what i just want to briefly go through is um [Music] oh joy i see your comment there yeah we can share the screens eric has everything so he can definitely do that um

079so a couple of things that are really important in terms of uh supporting our our strategic roadmap as we go forward is that our operating budget should provide sufficient and appropriate resources promote continuous improvement afford sufficient flexibility to respond to changing needs and contingencies this is a very flexible board flexible team we've talked constantly about that and provide necessary maintenance and improvements to the school facilities and obviously represent value in the eyes of the community um the operating budget itself um the first bullet i put in there and i just wanted that's why i alerted everybody to it that i did put in there and again it's up for consideration this is this ends up being the board's assumptions and priorities um for budgeting is provide financial support required to sustain our operations uh in

080a pandemic and and we're all too familiar with that the operating budget also maintains our commitment to ensuring appropriate district and school organizational structures again align to the strategic plan maintain and continue to enhance our programs although all the while being responsive to any of the changing needs we have and that's why we have the dialogue we have and all the work we do we want to uh attract and retain uh the best employees we can make sure we recruit the best we can we want to maintain um the practices that we have in terms of class size uh and adjust our staffing patterns as necessary we'll change enrollment provide the necessary resources to address social and emotional needs of students uh we brought ruler in and been working on this for quite a few

081years but there has been no no more of a time in our public school history than right now that we need this uh social emotional supports um in addition to that it's moving there uh thank you eric um uh after school programming we want to make sure we have the resources for you know our stipend positions for all the after school activities and athletics and uh all the all the wonderful enrichment programs we do have here in town provide our uh support for curriculum uh instruction and assessment and digital learning that is a key piece especially now more than ever it has been highlighted for us during this pandemic provide the staffing support uh for the changing enrollment in pre-k and special education and we're going to go over the enrollment report tonight so you'll

082see some of the adjustments uh some of the enrollment there and we could talk about that obviously technology infrastructure and pd that goes along with supporting a digital learning environment it's a key piece in our strategic plan of course meeting all the compliance mandates of the state and the federal government meeting funding requirements for all of our contracts not only in terms of collective bargaining but for transportation technology purses purchases and all of the um business items that go into to the cost of doing business in uh in public school providing the funds to meet all the board of education policies and practices so if we have something in writing and say if we say we do it we must support it and reflect continuing cost containment efforts which we always do our best to

083work on including participate in our regional efficiencies group which we are in the western connecticut group gonna start bringing back around um uh now that it's budget season for all the superintendents uh under curriculum assessment instruction this is where you'll see probably um you know more more changes than you saw in the first page um of course we're gonna maintain support for our uh curricular tools the digital curricular tools um that impact hybrid remote learning we just talked about that a little bit we want to continue to support the integration of technology and resources into our daily instruction and we need to support access to digital texts um the kids are on chromebooks even when they're in person in school they are always working digital not always often working digitally we want to expand continue

084to expand our classroom libraries and make sure that they are standard aligned and integrated with our curriculum continue to support faculty capacity excuse me align to student assessments and teacher evaluation data and that's again being responsive as an organization continue to develop assessment literacy of our professional staff uh support our curriculum development align with the standards especially for social studies that we know are moving in that direction support ongoing development of standards aligned assessments to support standards-based rating that has not gone away there's a big project k through four that we continue to have to work on and we'll continue to work on that uh in our schools analyze the outcomes of the standards grace beta standard based grading and reporting and utilize professional development time to enhance that practice continue to research and identify

085our curriculum tools on making sure that we're pushing forward in our high school science and k-12 social studies development of our in-house and elect analytics and data warehouse we were slowed down a little bit last year that is going to be a priority this year working to continue our implementation of rubicon atlas we do want to um update our talented and gifted process that's one of mrs wagonic's goals she's going to be working on that this year uh when dr sapala moved on um that that project uh was pushed to the side and mrs wagon bringing it back to the forefront this year um we want to meet the needs of our english language uh learning students uh and math intervention needs of our students and these you will recognize as enhancement items uh that

086we worked on last year having this year's budget and with obviously the major costs and concerns with um the overage in special education and also the unknowns what was what things were going to cost us with covid um we had to curtail some of those investments and so we will be going forward with our um uh pushing forward with our tesol teacher that we need in the district that we've talked about for a couple of years um the math interventionist vhs and um uh exploring the need for tutors at the center school and at huckleberry in leadership we want to continue the improvement of our leadership through the analysis of instruction and providing targeted feedback to faculty and you can see that dovetails back with under curriculum and assessment working with teacher evaluation data in

087our faculty so there's a lot that goes into that in the student assessments and then finally under operations and facilities uh we we need to evaluate and plan for the transition to the new elementary school this involves certifications of teachers um structural uh structure of the organization in terms of leadership structure and how we're going to work on that and and we really are in that process now a little bit delayed because of covid and all the reopening work this summer but we're gonna be moving on that on our master planning timeline uh this number one is uh due for conversation in january february publicly at the board um we have to look at transportation we obviously got our start times enrollment there's a lot that's going to go into the new school a lot

088of planning number two we want to make sure we implement our safety and security plan inclusive of the security task force recommendations um the assessments from homeland security and of course always working with chief purcell and his team at the brookfield boys department we want to upgrade our classroom presentation and digital integration technology at the high school uh and begin at wisconia that slowed a little bit with some of the curtailing we had to do with budget from last year's development to this year as well as the needs for other digital technology rather than purchasing some of the presentation stations in this current year continue to advocate and plan for the upgrade of our athletic facilities in the ball fields that is actually under the auspices of the park and rex department but we obviously

089they're a big time partner of ours and we want to work together with them and then obviously uh mr post has mentioned this a couple times and he's talked to the finance committee about this um we'll be coming up this year to get ready to bid for a new transportation contract so quite a bit there and we don't even have a budget presentation yet but there's a lot we have to do it helps give guidance to the board guidance to central office and certainly to our dedicated building administrators who are developing their school plans uh budget plans right now so i don't know if anybody has any questions joy raised her hand okay um it's not so much a question but um a comment so you know an expectation i feel that is going to

090be really important to see is an item under curriculum assessment instruction that addresses you know our new gaps due to covid or our current you know regression you know we're going to need a lot of remedial help for so many you know all content areas are taking a big hit but i think writing has taken a huge hit given the challenges you know for real authentic writing experiences so you know before we hit the budget head on you know i ask at least that you really think about you know how how are we going to really truly create a budget you know without solid data to support these gaps or address you know this regression that we're facing right now um like yes we need to continue to push forward the curriculum absolutely but you

091know how are we really going to adapt this regression so i think we really need to have something under that topic um and i don't know if you've had discussions about that or have had that in your mind no joy it's great maybe i can update the language on that a little bit but it really to me applies under specifically under number 14 and it could fit in other areas but those are some of the known intervention areas that we needed to work on and to your point there will be other gaps we are moving forward through this fall with our district assessments to see where the students are and that's one of the things that was on the master planning timeline for last meeting was talking about that and our building administrators um to

092your point won't have all the data necessarily by this friday when they produce their budgets for us but we have to meet our timelines um but we'll be that's an iterative process as we go through this for sure there's no so i know we have number 14 but that was kind what we had really as a budget assumption last year too so that to me that's not like a current need because we had that need last year we've kind of always wanted that i almost feel like we need more yeah no i think it's great is that dr ruby yeah so joy just so you know um we have been talking about assessments um we always talk about assessments people don't always want to hear about assessments but um we've been talking about our benchmark

093assessments and i can tell you that one of the one of the conversations we had this week was um doing the evaluation of writing prompts at the middle school so we are assessing and we are provide when we have that assessment data analyzed we will continue to provide um support for students and i acknowledge what you're saying it's not the same as it was previously but i i don't want and i don't think you're saying this but i don't want anybody to think that we're not assessing students um we we in fact are we changed our assessment window a little bit this year to allow for the integration of children into the system and for our teachers to focus on acclimating kids back into school after having been out for so many weeks you know

094at the end of the spring and the whole summer gap and our focus was on um acclimating integrating and social emotional development but that was not at the expense of our curriculum and so we are as a matter of fact we met today because with the closure yesterday it was just as much of a surprise to you know to all of us as it was to all of the community and we um we had made a decision early on um in the year that we were not going to be doing um remote testing with say for example star we're going to find a way for our remote children to be able to come in so that we could could preserve the reliability and validity of the assessments but given the fact that our window is

095closing quickly for um first the first benchmark assessment we made a decision today to do our star assessment for reading math especially at the middle school in a remote way because renaissance learning which is the company that provides star provides for remote assessment and you know we have safeguards to the best as we can to ensure the validity and reliability of the data that we um obtain so all that said i just want to assure you that assessment hasn't gone by the wayside nor has our dealing with the assessment data to provide support to kids so i don't know if you have any further questions that maybe i can either answer now or get you answers on no well i want you to understand where i'm coming from so i'm not insinuating that we're not

096assessing you know i know that there's a pause on that especially with star um given the situation that we're in i don't doubt that we're going to continue our practices and our best practices for you know assessing and evaluating students my concern is we are facing regression with the students and there are going to be gaps so how are we going to reflect a budget that is going to close those gaps um i'm also thinking personally in my in you know working with children every day i see them you know on the forefront writing being very glaring because it's so hard to do that online and given that so many of our students are remote and all of them right now well yes all of them right now and some are you know homeschooled based

097on the situation so i think that we're entering a you know a new era of we're going to see a drop in scores and things like that so and so joy if i can just address i actually absolutely uh agree with what you're saying and so just to um provide you with some other information um at the middle school because uh wisconsin our title one school dean and i have been working um to use our title one funds and i wrote the grant for um tutors for literacy uh and for math to um because that's that can be considered supplemental it's not something that was primarily the responsibility of the school district um so we're providing um we actually have on our recruitment site um positions for tutors for literacy and for mathematics and we're

098very stringent about what the qualifications are for uh literacy tutors and one of the things that i think the reason why um dr rohl was referring to number 14 is because where we see the largest gap in um in student proficiency is with our um our immigrant students and our el students and we currently are um [Music] you know not staffed to capacity um to to keep those kids and a lot of our al students are remote for um cultural reasons um so you know that that right now right there in number 14 that's very important for closing gaps and we have the tutor situation and then in human resources we look at the human resources that we have and how we're deploying them and so when that um when the benchmark or beginning of

099the year the boi benchmark data comes in that's when i will sit and and deb varys will sit with both um melissa and mary rose in the elementary schools and look at how we're utilizing are our human resources in terms of reading teachers and special education teachers relative to the the alignment with what the data are telling us and uh because we they're not title one school so we can't use title one funding for support there but don't i think you know that um you know people don't always like it but i'm not shy about letting you know what we need so when we have that data um which will be coming in over the next two weeks we will be looking at that with uh very wide eyes and if we feel that we

100need um more support we'll definitely be asking for it i will tell you the other thing dean and i have been working very very closely and we have just recently designed and gotten approved using our title one monies projecting what you're exactly what you're saying and we have just recently actually about seven days ago got an approval for using some of our title one funds for um summer school for next year for um you know being able to catch kids up so it is absolutely on our radar and i appreciate the fact that it's on yours too because we need your support and although i think you know it's important for a wisconnier type being title one but um i think a lot of our energy needs to be at the elementary level too i

101mean our most vulnerable children at such a young age um you know for example first grade i mean they they're coming in really you know i think they're the most vulnerable grade level at this point um so i agree to you know i don't think i agree and so i hope you won't be surprised if you see in the budget um a request for funding for summer school for the um elementary schools so that we can provide um extra support for those children when we look at our eoi data because like i just shared we have it kind of covered for wisconia with our title funding but we do not for um uh center school and huckleberry and when we look at all the efforts that we put forth for this uh current academic year

102given the situation that we're in when we get that eoi data at the end of the year we anticipate at this point in time that we are going to need funds just to support services for um children over the summer so you kind of preempted that i i would be i'm definitely looking for that in our budget request good that's great i have no doubt that you won't be wearing rose colored glasses yeah thank you very much i appreciate the fact that you brought it up it makes it easier for i me do appreciate you bringing that up because that is you know it's so early in the process uh i don't present till i think december second um we're working a little you know after that with the finance committee and then and then

103obviously through december and january before we turn things over to mr dunn so um there's still a lot of work to do and we don't we don't move without our principles and their leadership and what they bring to us you know directly from from working with their staff is there any other questions or anything anybody else wants to talk about regardless does that does you know does all of that sort of um uh is there something else that you wanted does that sort of suffice does that answer suffice from yeah i just wanted to um you know put out there my expectation as far as um these budget priorities and to make sure we had that keeping that in the back of our head in our mind i am curious though when dr you mentioned

104you know summer school for elementary school which um may be appropriate but you know i think just kind of reflecting off of what joy said if there's if we're not just looking at sort of you know special populations of students and if we might see you know more of a widespread sort of issues and gaps in learning you know is summer school really sort of the answer for that or is there you know something that we can be more proactive about you know doing during the school year to kind of so that we're not addressing problems after we are so that's a double-barreled question we absolutely are addressing problems um during the year um but what when we get to the end of the year we know that we're gonna have kids that are still

105needing support and this is not for special populations this is for regular ad populations so if i can expand upon what i was talking about with the title one funds for our whiskaner population since that's the school because of the size and because there's a variety of um variables that go into identifying which which school or which grades are title one when we have money that we can use legally for title what for title one services that does not preclude having other children included in there so this is this is not a special ed um um or solely special um population services we are we're looking at because we have the summer the summers program for special ed students this is a general education um initiative and we're not gonna i don't want to give

106anybody the impression that we're gonna it's like a wait and fail um um program absolutely you know that would be ridiculous we would never do that but we can with certainty say that given all of the variables that families and students and and the educational system is dealing with during this year there are going to be children who will not be at the place um where we would expect them to be under typical circumstances and so we want to be thinking ahead and providing for those and that will be in this budget because that will be for the next budget year now were we to have the ability at this point in time to ask or more tutoring support at the two elementary schools and as well as at the high school we knew that

107we needed last year we knew that we needed math interventionists at the high school which is why we asked for that but if we were in a position right now to say oh board of bed by the way could you help us out because we really believe that we need to have more um support services in our schools because of the situation that we're in it you know we certainly would do that but that's not we're not in that budget year we're with that but that ship sailed so we will be using all of the personnel that we currently have and redeploying them as is most appropriate when we evaluate the the data from the boi assessments but we're not we're not like waiting we're not sitting back and going oh well we'll just wait

108till the summer and i don't i don't think you thought that i said that but i just want to make it clear not saying that yeah yeah no i think i think that was clear i think i just you know i just wanted to be sure that we're we're looking at the sort of proactively and thinking you know is is that the best way to make sure that every kid sort of you know is getting what they need throughout the year so but thank you anybody else with uh questions on this yeah debbie go ahead i guess um what i'm wondering is you know now that we're facing sort of the second wave of covid um is there anything that we can say we've learned from going through this that we would change for next

109year you know we hope that after this year we don't have to worry about covid or any other kind of pandemic but in the event that something else happens next year you know we don't want to look back and say oh well we should have added this or um you know done things differently so i know that it looks like you've included a lot of technology resources but just in terms of staffing or programs or curriculum maybe around the topic of mental health and support for students um maybe staffing in terms of nursing staff you know do you do you feel like we've do you feel like there's anything we would do differently going forward to be better prepared for a public health crisis like we're dealing with now and maybe maybe it's all in

110here but that's just sort of what i keep thinking yeah i think deb um we've been doing a lot of reflecting and have a lot of lessons learned i think a lot of it's reflected in here um it's going to be interesting to see where the principles are coming from on on friday with some of the things they're seeing in real needs i think we had a big discussion on it just now with the things we learned um i would say maybe proactively we budget for a coveted coordinator so i don't have to do it again next year to be very honest with you considering the cost and that goes to nursing and health staff and things like that um the continuous investment in um all kinds of of technology not only learning technology but

111the hard hard technology like devices you know we really need to make a move there i'm going to be working with eric and his department quite a bit because the reality is with being victimized frankly like like many school districts not only in connecticut but across the nation and across the world in terms of the supply chain um it's been very difficult to ensure that all the kids have a proper device at home for exactly the circumstance we're in but also hybrid and in person even when we're hybrid or eventually in person with all the digital work we do and the fact that the kids you know really can't congregate and collaborate like like we used to so um i'd say you know right off the top of my head those are some of the

112biggies um and any evolution and that's why i said the budget development process is iterative as we go through the fall um because we continuously collaborate and generate the ideas based on the data and the feedback we're getting and the questions that you the great questions you guys are asking tonight okay and then i just wanted to i if i have a question for the board i wasn't sure um the board's comfort level um or feelings about how and we don't have to answer the question pragmatically how we go about doing it um but budgeting for a pandemic when i put that on page one as the uh the first bullet under um it's important that the board's operating budget be ready for that is you know and i think we can talk about it

113maybe at the next finance committee meeting and get some suggestions from the group but uh and i know mr post has some ideas but really thinking through almost on is there a parallel budget that we keep track of uh or do we integrate it into the regular operating budget because we we're living through those costs right now we have a great handle on them so um i think it's important that we're paying attention to it and we are budgeting for it and then whether we include it in the actual operating budget or it's a side piece that we're very communicative about with the i i need some advice on that and that's why i wanted to make sure it was in this document so we could talk about it either a little bit tonight and

114then you know at our next meeting as well let me suggest we talk about it at our next finance committee meeting okay uh and bring it back because i i actually think that's a tricky dribble with this budget um and it's gonna need to be very transparent and maybe have cases right you know if we have to be hybrid here's the range if we have to we're going to be out here's the impact i'm hoping it's a lot less than this year because we i did a lot of the physical hardware stuff we needed to this year already but i fully expect there's ppe related things and and some of the staffing things and things like that here okay so i do you know i'd like to hear mr post's ideas i'm sure the finance

115committee would do it but i think in the end as a board we're going to need to be very transparent in our thinking on this topic so thank you bob anyone else have any questions or comments [Music] okay so i think we can move on and um let's move on to the district enrollment report and this is also just another action um and i will allow dr brill to go through that all right so we have a enrollment report the state department of education uh has each school district by october 1st you all know this reporting officially on its enrollment this was quite a difficult task this year with tracking where the students are in the option for remote and again the pandemic is really the the the uh the underlying theme of every decision

116we're making you know it's just changed how we operate so you have uh we do a four-year comparison typically each year uh pre-k through 12 we also include the special populations on here it's important to note that this is a snapshot in time and literally every single day enrollment changes there's puts and takes move-ins and move-outs every single day in our school district is not unusual and so this is what the enrollment was on october 1st and then the special populations that i'll review with you are the number of outplaced children just a general statement on the report on that um and eric actually if you could scroll um to the to the next slide and also a um report on pre-reduced lunch english language learners and our um uh what was it our general

117special education um in terms of the overriding number for the district it's also important to know that next week dr ruby will presenting the class size reports which dovetail with this report it's kind of the order we put this in so there's a there's a coherence and logic to how we share this information with the board and the public um so what you can see is as you go down the very uh the right-hand column um is the comparison of last year to this year which is the 2020 uh october one and as you can see uh in our primary grades um in pre-k and in kindergarten we're down right now um uh by a significant amount in kindergarten we've been talking about that reporting out since july it's been a concern of ours and

118certainly mrs diamond since um the springtime when we were doing kindergarten registration we'll talk a little bit about that i'm sure there's some questions on that i want to finish this part of the report uh as you can see you know there's always puts and takes we're up a little in first grade overall um we're down 53 at center school and again that's because of kindergarten enrollment and we'll talk about that in our and also how it relates to budget and our planning you can see at huckleberry we are down a net of uh what is it about 13 there as we look at things and again our primary students many of those students there's there's kids who parents made decisions for home schooling and other things we can talk about that a little bit

119more detail at the middle school we are we are down um about 42 students overall there was a major bubble grade which was last year's eighth grade that is now in ninth grade and you can see that that is reflected actually um in the the brookfield high school report by grade there's there's an uptick in students there uh on october 1st it was 902 i think last time i talked to mr belland it was 906. so um there's always kids uh moving in now as of october 1st we had a total of 2534 kids which is uh down from last year at this time um i'll play student number um as to being an outpost uh program and many of our other students either coming back to us or graduating or whatever the case may

120be um so that number has remained steady and this is why ghana continues to monitor uh those programs um and i'm sorry grand total 2564. we include our output students and our numbers um special education we have 359 students identified this year that's down 22 from last year english language learners actually let me go to the total freedom reduce launch then i'll go to el students free and reduced lunch those are students that are economically disadvantaged it's down by four this year for 541 students and again much of this is affected by that those primary grades that you see especially kindergarten there's the the students in k those 44 kids many of those kids a number of those kids might fall into some of these areas interesting with english language learners a couple things to

121talk about there number one the state is giving us until november first for the official census um because student immigrant families are not moving into the country right now because of the pandemic you know there's significant limitations on that so we anticipate that we'll get some more we also have a bump in january typically or february because of the differential in seasons with the southern hemisphere um and students moving in at that time so we can't bank necessarily on being 26 down and is there some does this mean something right now in addition to that dr ruby alluded to um you know and not that it kind of doesn't count in the remote students but um there are cultural reasons um that have been shared with administration and with teachers for students deciding to not

122be enrolled uh as well so there's there's a lot of dynamics a lot of the for every student and every family there's a different story and so you know that's what we have going on there but that's the enrollment report and we'll talk about the impact on class size uh going forward i don't know if there's any questions or anything people are wondering about certainly open the floor john i just have a question about the ell is any of those is that number reflective of students that tested out of the program uh what's that wait i don't know we have that number we we always have students that are testing out but in past normal years we always have students that are coming in okay so the across the state the number of students coming

123in has been um decreased due to the difficulty for families from other countries to join their family members that are here that's what usually happens you know one family establishes itself and in our community it's typically in the greater danbury area and then we have people that have come to the united states in the greater danbury area and find residents in brookfield and then more of their family members when they hear about what you know a welcoming community it is and what a good life it is they join that hasn't occurred this year in our community um as well as in other communities in the state um due to the the situation that we're in so there is an overall decrease the it's anticipated that you know this is this is a short-term thing additionally

124um like john said we typically see an increase in our um our el um constituency in uh january when the students move from south america because of the break in their school year which is different from ours we don't know if we're going to see that in january you know it's going to depend on what the the covid data are are showing and what the immigration rules and regulations are but i i just want to make a point if we went back and looked at the data that we had when we were under 100 two and a half three years ago and we requested a second tesol teacher and because of our you know our budgetary constraints we gave you know we gave up that request and we went to two paris i'll parenthetically add

125in here that what we've done is we've developed a really wonderful training ground in brookfield for our neighbors and i'm sure they appreciate it um what we've done is we've brought in the tutors that were in our budget and uh kevin and our current tesol teacher karina um and thank you funding for professional development for our tesol tutors has created a situation where we've provided wonderful professional development on the kelp standards and on psyop and a number of other initiatives that we've taken in the district to our tutors so that they could better serve our children and they simultaneously a couple of them have enrolled in the alternative route to certification program for tesol certification at the state and they've been able to use their time in teaching our students in brookfield as their semi

126whatever is required student i'll call it student teaching because we all understand that and they have um they've become certified tesol teachers and they've been hired by danbury and new fairfield so they've left us so by having our tutors we've provided a band-aid for our needs in district but it hasn't served us well because we've provided them with the opportunity to do their student teaching and to have uh and our teacher tutor them and use our board funds for professional development and they've gone on and gotten full-time tesol positions in danbury and new milford and quite frankly we would have liked to have had those some of those folks as our own full-time employees so it's not while it's worked out um sort of for our children it hasn't worked out it's it's not been

127um you know if you talk about an roi it hasn't been a good roi for the for the district that was probably more than you wanted but i just really need to share it yeah i i really just wanted to know so are the number of students who are tested out is that minimal is what you're telling me just so we can have we do no we do a great job testing people out and that'll be we can give you that in our upcoming report yeah county can give us that people but it's an ebb and a flow as many we actually are one of the better districts in the state because we've had like i just said with our tutors we've done such a great job um and we've exited uh we exited at

128a higher rate and if kevin was here she could give you all those numbers off the top of her head um then other but we have what what goes out comes in it's kind of a steady flow this year the in has just slowed down because of the the variables that i explained oh yeah she can give us that data that information that'll at least give us absolutely perspective as far as dealing with that number and i'll tell you joy that um we actually the state department um in the el division refers other in the state to us to get hints on you know what are we doing because our data are are so strong in terms of the work that we do with our our folks but we put we put a tremendous amount

129of work into um the human resources that we have and then they bleed out so we're constantly redoing the same thing okay so could i ask a question about kindergarten and earthquake so the we obviously have a big drop this year um what do we know about the in any level of detail about why did it drop and then what are the implications about what are we going to assume for our budget next year i mean and let me just paint a picture if p if the parents are are they holding kids back from going to kindergarten and we're going to have a big bubble of kindergarteners next year um because that hold backs all of some are going to come with the regular normal enrollments and then there's more or are they doing kindergarten

130at home and they'll go right into first grade or i mean all of those have big implications for our budget for next year in terms of how many sections we're going to need in kindergarten our first grade absolutely true we have insights on why it's 130 instead of 170 and what we think what will mean for next year yeah so just to start start off and certainly um maureen or mary rose or ken please jump in at any time uh so a couple of things bob to to it's a great question because we need to know where where the students are right um so mary rose has information we are going to reach out uh to this between 40 and 50 number of uh students uh to their families to do a little survey and

131keep reaching out to them to see where they're at and what their intentions are but there there are some that is a very small amount to we have as home schooling we have one right now keeping home for an additional year but indicating that they're not homeschooling so we have those things going on remember kindergarten doesn't have to come to kindergarten um 11 which this is a very good sign are in private kindergarten four are at magnet uh programs right now um three move dot town so that was something we projected but they're not with us now there are six that by age are spending an additional year in pre-k but we have almost 20 that we don't have information on that we need to find out about so to your point bob we're on

132the case um we have some good we have more than half of the information and we know what those children are doing with their families and what their intentions are um in terms of budget implication uh right now i believe we have 18 total sections at center school between uh nine and nine k and one and um our projections for malone and mcgroom have been right on um and i know ken probably has that information with him and can talk to that if he needs to um and so what we've asked mary rose to do is she's been putting her budget together is to think about what needs to be done what do we need to be ready for so if we have that that concept of i'll just keep my child out and have

133them go to kindergarten next year a year older and we have a bubble in kindergarten that probably will impact first grade and we'd have less students in first grade and what does that mean for our teachers um projection wise our total projection for both grades has been spot on so we should know the number of students it's going to be those decisions in that iterative process over the course of the fall and into the winter um but i'd like to defer to mary rose if she had any other insights she wanted to share so we've been talking about this guy john or maureen please do you want to talk about the survey that we're going to do sure why don't you talk about it maureen please so we uh bob we've had exactly the same

134concerns and thoughts that you just expressed and so we have decided to for the you know mary rose and her team have been trying to track down everybody for those i think it was 20 students because that could be a class a little bit more than a class students that we're talking about that we're not really sure of what the status is we're going to send out a survey um it will be by the end of this week the beginning of next week to try to gather um data and intentional um disposition from the parents of those of students so that we know you know really where they are because as as you're probably thinking that could be a whole nother class of kindergartners which will present for the district in terms of future planning

135that um that bubble class that we see from time to time that would be not just for next year but would be a bubble class that would be moving through the system for the next um 13 years well we might have a bubble small class and a bubble followed by a bubble big class and that's equal to that's right i mean it actually has it's it's very and provides very interesting staffing issues that will live with us for 12 years you're right you're absolutely right so we're we are thinking the exact same thing that you're thinking and we are we're we're working on it as as we sit here basically so and so when we come back and look at the budget i think that's going to be a very important set of assumptions of

136what what do we what are we building our budget on uh we don't need the answer tonight i was kind of more interested in your insights for tonight but that was really useful to kind of go through what did we learn and if mary rose has other insights that would be useful too so no as uh that's did summer as we're registering and we had a different registration process this year as well so families because it was online when they were registering they they filled out a pre-enrollment form so we got their information um right at the beginning which doesn't always happen um sometimes parents will prior to that uh prior to doing it online parents could pull a packet they could download information we didn't know who was pulling that information or what their

137intention was so one of the advantages to doing it the way we did it this year necessity but hopefully this will be a positive outcome um is that we were able to really tell who was looking so we know that there are 49 students 49 people who were interested in kindergarten at center school who then did not ultimately you know enroll so we can go back and john was saying we went down we broke it back broke it down that way and we'll we'll we'll do the surveys maureen mentioned um and get more information but as both of them have been saying we've been talking about this since june uh since may really when we saw that the numbers were coming in like what are we going to do what are our thoughts you know

138kindergarten is an optional year um and so there's that whole piece as well you know some parents keep their kids out until first grade anyway so we want to have some conversations we want to do some really good assessments of students as they enroll and we know they're coming next year to kind of figure out where where their skills lie um and you know their age and look at all those those pieces to figure out what's going to make the most sense for each student as well as for us at the school so we're anticipating the same number of students it's just as we're saying it'll it you know how it breaks down and where they end up and and how we configure our our classes and our instruction is going to um be impacted

139by kind of who walks through the door and just to reinforce what mary rose is saying uh combined grade k and one our projection that we built our budget on for this year was 373 students and the combined k-1 projection for next year is 100 or 377. so it's only four students different so it may mix differently but it's about this it's it's more about marriage perception correct and i think mitigating that you were saying we again that that idea that we don't you know again the small bubble in the big bubble uh pose different issues as they go and it's going to get more complicated as they move through the grade so if we can try to figure out how to how to minimize that while also making sure we're serving students um that

140that'll be our our goal as well um all right change subjects i have one other question which was actually for dean um is i i one of the things i was looking at when we were when you were going through the numbers was i was looking at cohorts you know looking at last year's kindergarten to this year's first grade and last year's first grade of this year second grade and they're almost all you know plus or minus you know four or five kids with one exception which is the sixth fifth to sixth and was there a big thing that went in it was like it's double digits in terms of growth or was it just happened to be a bubble of kids who moved into town it's literally like that a bunch of years because

141we get the students that come over from ais um and then in the past i think uh you know we've gotten students from st joe's and obviously we have other moving you know with that move in but the bigger number usually is because of the number of students that we get from ais is a part of that but we average over the years last time i did it probably about 10 or 12 new students to sixth grade the difference from fifth grade to sixth grade and it's all right there is fifth to six that's interesting so when i started asking my question i heard you say fifth to six you knew i know exactly what you're talking about i noticed in fact if i kind of do that the cohort analysis all from in the

142whole district basically the minus 75 is we graduated a class of 202 and our kindergarten class is 132. and so there's 70 fewer net in the district just for that dynamic and and the rest is little pluses and minuses all the way up and down so and that one happened to be the biggest plus so okay thank you thank you anyone else with any questions or comments on the enrollment report okay uh so let's move down move on to the uh 2122 draft school calendar um another um just action item so um we can pull that up eric and take a look at it okay so we have a calendar here uh we built this calendar in a trade assuming a traditional year next year um as we all know we change this current year's

143calendar two or three times because of the pandemic so we need to start somewhere and we have a very uh solid calendar based on those uh traditional pieces just some quick highlights remember this is to receive to digest we could put it on the next agenda and ultimately approve it as a board or if it takes another uh iteration into early december to approve it that's fine too i know our families like to get the families and staff like to get these calendars as much in advance as possible but then again we're in a different world now and people have either become more patient flexible or uh more irritable either one so probably the sooner we get this done the better for everyone so anyways you know the couple of uh highlights there uh the

144um school year still starts toward the end of august and we have our days for new teacher orientation and our three days for teacher professional development uh teacher professional development also uh continues as a work day on columbus day where the students would not be in school but teachers would have pd as well as election day in november we also have built in uh throughout december uh january april and may it's kind of that pumpkin color uh is the uh plc days for more teaching more professional development opportunities uh we have our account our conferences built in we have our typical winter vacation shortened february break uh april recess built in there and um while we start before uh labor day in this iteration of the calendar we end on june 13th so those are

145the really the big highlights for everybody um that i just wanted to put out there didn't know if anybody had any questions or you know you had it in your packet since friday so i don't people have something that's come up that they were interested in talking about this is just a really small logistical can we pick like a different color i feel like the blue family green it's very they're very close and so it's a little confusing maybe like a red or a gray i'll take the blame on that because i have to thank mrs grambling for all of her work on that but sometimes i get a little overly involved in these things and i try to channel my inner artist and so i'll take the blame on that and we can adjust

146we can adjust colors to make them clearer for people and more to be able to differentiate but i do i need to thank lisa as well for the great work on this yes we love you lisa we appreciate it but you know any thoughts anybody's having or um concerns or you know a total different direction the way we approach the calendar any thinking and again we do not have to make and there's no pressure to approve this tonight we give people time to digest it think about it and put it on the agenda again under old business for an approval uh i think it's a november sixth or seventh meeting when is our next meeting guys our next stop we have november 4th yes after election day november 4th that's right and that's the only

147uh regular board meeting in november yep um so our our snow day policy hasn't really changed right and that also might change again because we might not have any snow days yeah um okay yeah so we we we add them till the end and then um it would have to be pretty catastrophic in the number of snow days if we even have to take them this year make up days uh to touch april vacation we really try to keep that safe right with people so people could count on that as the long vacation as well as the winter break so they can get away with their families let's hope people can do that this year next year anyone have any questions or comments on this all right um so john did you want us to

148approve this tonight or do you want to we well that's why i wanted to say that there's no pressure to it's still early we i think i think early in my tenure in brookfield the tradition was to break break this out into december for the first time and it took some time till february to get it approved so we really i was asked a number of years ago to move it earlier so we've done that um we have the gift of time we don't have to do it but again whatever if the board would like to approve it and everybody's comfortable we can again we could wait till the next regular meeting it's totally up to the board how does everyone else feel about this do you feel comfortable approving tonight or do you want

149to just wait because we are a little early in the in the year to be doing this i guess the only question would be is there anything we're gonna learn that might come up that might cause us to adjust between now and say february right because i prefer to just if there's things what might come up that we might say we'd adjust it i'd say hold off and let's learn that thing learn that stuff and then approve it as opposed to having it improve it and then amend it i mean in my view so but if you don't think there's a lot of forces out there john that would change things let's go ahead and approve it yeah i mean i we as as we all know we we never project predicted what was going

150to happen this past march right and then all the adjustments we had to make in june and july on our on the current calendar so other than that um you know we want to spread out our pd days and uh honor our conferences and and you know the different holidays in the year and so that's that's what we have laid out here and they're pretty coordinated with other districts so that like we've done in the past well what we do do is um lisa consults the regional calendar that advance puts out and while we don't have to adhere to that um it gives us a flavor of the region and so it's in relative alignment i would say but certainly not lockstep i couldn't say that do you think we'd anticipate any changes in the

151number of student days this year i mean obviously last year we couldn't predict you know the changes that we had sort of at the end of the year but yeah i mean we plan for the 182. we need to always keep in mind our teachers work on are contracted for 187 so that we have to always keep those those two factors in mind uh this current year so we're not talking about that the state gave us the 177. so you know we only have to mandate for that but next year it would likely go back to 180 days that we'd have to do we have in town before i think we've there was one year we had so many snow days we dropped it from 182 down to 180 so we could finish i think

152on a thursday or friday prior to the weekend uh we did make that move before but again these things the year has to unfold and life has to happen for us to make those adjustments okay i'm okay approving it i am jim joy mike i'm okay i'm fine with it with me okay all right let me make a motion okay i move to make a motion to approve the 2021-2022 school calendar second okay any further discussion on this okay so all in favor aye okay that's unanimous thank you thank you everybody but you never thought you'd have this approved in in the month of october john and this this might be a record somebody else's i think bethel one time approved two calendar two years in advance on their calendars but it was because because

153of their construction project they wanted to do something there but we're okay there okay so uh we can move on to the prioritized 21 22 and updated 10-year prioritized capital projects discussion and a possible approval so if we can pull that one up eric that would be helpful and then ken are you walking us through this one yes all right um ken is actually going to share on this one so he should be pulling up for you now so he can walk through it while he uh has control okay can everybody see it yeah okay good yep so first i'll start out with telling you that um dr burl and i meet with uh mr dunn and mrs marion uh every monday and we found out a couple of weeks ago that apparently the capital

154projects and this has been shared with the finance committee and the um facilities committee uh the capital projects that were approved last year actually still have to go to referendum since they were all going to be bonded they would actually have to go to referendum so it sounds like they will not be holding a separate referendum for the capital projects this year so the facilities committee that's one reason we had to have the special meeting was to move the the projects that were approved in into year one and re-prioritize a few other projects and those projects were the first line in the high school which is plumbing fixtures and equipment so these were all approved by the board last year the third line in the high school which is the additional design funds for the

155boys locker room renovation and the fifth line on the high school which was the replace exterior doors at the high school as well as the second line in the middle school which has replaced the original electric service so in addition to those projects and the with a little bit little background the facilities committee has been discussing the capital plan since i think either our june or july meeting and every every meeting since then uh so in addition on the high school we've prioritized additional paving as you know uh last year we paved the uh the front driveway and this would continue it into the to the front parking lot around the main entrance area uh the library air conditioning has emerged as a need this year as well as the replacing the roof and rooftop

156ac unit and that would be over the guidance area at the high school and then in wisconsin we've got replacing the building management system and i've got mr caldwell here too to help give any details on on any of these projects if anybody has questions we have a hundred thousand dollars for paving and concrete and that would be to continue the paving work that was done there a couple summers ago to um finish the the bus driveway across the front of the building that they put when they did the project they had some uh some space left over and they uh they put some process down for us but we need to have it paved and then replacing the uh seminar room seating has emerged as a need also this year and those are the

157projects that the the committee voted on so if you have any questions about them or how they were prioritized we can answer them for you so so let me just make sure i understand the question the comment about the stuff that wasn't approved it was approved in this year's budget but it never went to referendum so that means we have to reapprove it in next year's budget correct that's what we're told and is it just items that they were going to finance or was it all items it was just items that were going to be financed to buy bonding and they were every item on the capital plan was identified as being either cash or bonding and ours all of ours that were approved were identified as being bonded okay so when we just a

158thought when we submitted we ought to take the things that are um just a carryover repeat they've already approved them once and we're just resubmitting them and we ought to highlight them somehow right put them in a different color highlight the cell whatever you think is right but since i think it just we need to and somehow footnote it so that they understand this was already approved in this in the current year budget but it has to be reapproved because of the of the referendum that's a good suggestion are they going to get ahead of the referendum stuff for next year excuse me well i mean i don't want to have a repeat of this for next year right and this has been always been a problem right because you have to do capital projects

159on a different timeline than your budget cycle so so that means they have to they have to notice it very differently than they do uh the referendum they have two weeks to do a referendum they have 45 days to do it on the on the cat on the on capitol projects so and you know what if this covid stuff continues they are not going to be running separate referendums on anything right i mean that's going to nobody will come out to vote um so it's uh unlike years where we do referendum after referendum after referendum i think we're going to see one referendum a year for this stuff so if at all so i just uh i just hope they're scheduling them now we ought to be pushing on that yeah i mean we're just

160a quick piece of that bob um we know mr dunn you know in our monday meetings has talked about that and he's talked about the schedule and and he's aware of that i i think to your point i think he and perhaps folks on the board of finance are thinking one referendum for the capital and that it might tie that in with the town river in may um i don't know that they'd be doing another one anytime soon so that's that's part of the conundrum here with the executive order from the governor and not having to have an actual referendum in having um our elected officials actually approved the budget last spring that that's because the bond council doesn't accept that they want an actual town referendum the the second question i had is i

161thought we were putting money in the budget for the locker room um last year and it was a big issue and a big discussion and now it's pushed out to year two 2022-2023 is there a reason we're pushing it downhill downstream like that yes last year the board of finance approved 100 000 for design money additional design money for that project and we got an updated proposal from techdon i think uh joy uh mentioned that in her report that that we approved so we still have money left over from the first design money allocation that was approved a couple of years ago and this is this 35 000 in year one is the additional design money we need for them to complete the design all the way up to being able to actually go out

162to bid on the product and get a project and get a firmer number for us to put in the following year and when would we take it out to bed do you think i i i would have to find out from tech on how long it will take them to complete the process i don't know the answer to that we probably ought to have a really good view of the timeline on that and ask ourselves should we be going and asking for the capital approval now right without without the you know because you know it's always a year later you know to start building things and that locker room has to have a sense of urgency right maybe we ought to be asking for the capital approval now and then you have three years in

163which to spend it um it's uh so it's just i'm a little nervous that project keeps getting kicked the can down the street so and uh to me that thing's a travesty i'll get the answer to that question bob yeah i'd rather go in aggressive on that topic and let them go on it again right they've already started gnawing on it and this this strategy would say oh just forget about it for another year we'll talk to you in spring of 2022 right before we even ask you for the capital i i think it we go out of sight out of mind with them and then we'll get a no back at the next board meeting well in so timeline in terms of submission to mr dunn so and this would be kind of for

164ken and joy just to talk about this if the board's in agreement on what bob is suggesting is that something that we want to move now um and you know amend what has been forwarded here and this is a recommendation from the facility committee and uh so we can approve it tonight so we can move it along i think i know there's emergencies to the timeline in terms of mr dunn's process so either ken or george you have any thoughts on that and i don't i don't want to overstep the facilities committee since then i agree with you i think we you know we do need to have a sense of urgency because like you said it's the project is a travesty i mean it's a priority of ours for sure um i feel like

165we're in a difficult position given you know our the circumstance of covet and everything like that um i guess we were kind of torn with you know do we go in and ask for the capital like you said um we i guess we're more trying to be mindful of the current situation that we're facing right now perhaps that's a discussion that dr brill and i can have with mr dunn and mrs marion on monday when we meet with them next that sounds like a good idea but i like your idea bob about the timeline yes getting a specific timeline okay if you wanted to go fast and you want to you push the timeline as fast as you can when would you want to have the capital approval and maybe maybe it at a million

166three it might be a separate capital approval that has to be done right because it's big and they might want to wait until they have it but i wouldn't want to let our calendar year cycle here get in the way of acting fast that's my only worry here right so if you said oh i i haven't finished the design so i need the 35 000 but that that'll get done you know soon enough that i don't want to wait for a whole year before i go to the go forward for capital i'd put it in in the current year as a separate line so you know project and then have the discussion with done that says it you might not want to give the final approval until the design's done but it's still in the

167year so um i just we have get in a habit of doing gear blocks right i i need to i need to find money now and a year from now i'll go off to the capitol at the the actual project money i'm sorry i just i'm pushing you i'm pushing it because i think we need urgency here that's all yeah the the only difficulty with moving the i think if i hear you right you're suggesting moving the million three into year one and is that accurate yes okay the only issue with that is the intention of continuing the design work was to be able to get a real actual hard number to put in the plan so it may not end up being that number and i don't know i don't know with the process

168if that's something that we can just put the placeholder of the million three and and amend it if we can get the design work and the bid done quickly okay let's do this if we approve it i think i would suggest we approve it and authorize the superintendent to move it into the current year after his discussion with mr dunn right if if that's what between the first selectmen and the superintendent they agree so we can make it an approval with a contingency right to move that forward if the our two leaders would agree that's the right way to play it because you know dunn needs to do something with the board of finance right and get them focused on how much capital they got coming into the next year and so that's why he's

169doing it now is to get ahead of the game and so i think he might want it in the current year and then i would suggest can you put some contingency on it right and leave yourself some maneuvering i think that's a good i think that's a good idea i'd like to support that it's pretty precise one three two two eight two four for something we don't have the final scoping on we had a number bob but if i recall the board of finance thought that it was too high they wanted someone else to take another look at it okay um [Music] and so is that what this design work is or is there a another piece of work going on to decide decide if it's why or right the design work is to protect

170on to continue and bring it up to where we can go out to bid for the project and get hard numbers how are we answering the board of finances question well by submitting the suppo the proposal of the exact break they wanted to see the breakdown of you know cost of everything for the project well it's a budgeting question more to me it's more this is more about budgeting and what year yeah i i think in the end we don't want them to approve a project until we have the final estimate you know based on a real healthy design right we want them to approve the project based on that but then the question is what year do you put the budget in right and because we'd love to go fast if we can get

171them to approve that and we'd love to get take it out to bid go get all that done and so i think you almost have to split your head into approving the project versus approving you know putting a budget you know placeholder in and uh so that's that would be a discussion with mr dunn about how it's the best way to play it and it ought to be rooted in what should your timeline be right you know how many games how late in the game can we change our estimate if we need to yeah and talk about that and that's a healthy discussion because in the end you know on a million three deal a project it's big enough it's probably one of the bigger projects the town's embarked on right all things considered right

172a short of our big school project and a a police station renovation and a and a library it's one of the biggest projects the town is going to take on and so and i can see it through all of our stuff there's there's not very few things that are that big so um so i think it may deserve a separate approval eventually anyhow but it doesn't say don't budget it right budget something so we can act when we need to right and that would be how i i'd look the board of finance in the eye and say okay don't slow things down because you just chose not to budget something so and they'll remind us oh we you told us to budget 600k and that's what we budgeted and it didn't turn out to be

173there and uh oh we're probably a lot of a heat on the discussion but i think this is a budgeting structure discussion more than it is an approval project discussion right okay so do we want to go ahead and make that contingent motion if there's any other questions before we go make motions so i i'm sorry i kind of dominated with my questions there but it's uh thank you for that what's everybody else's comfortability questions comments and not just on the boy's locker room but really anything on the capitol plan none i'm good i'm just trying to think back um i'm thinking about the board of finance and that 1.3 million um wasn't also part of the issue with putting it in year two just the timing that's been lost at this point like if

174we if we don't get approval on you know if we don't arrive at an estimate that works for them and can't start the design process um soon then we and we have to do the construction over a summer we would have to wait till the summer of or 2022. you're saying you had to wait anyway so i think wasn't that the other part of the reason why it got pushed into year two yes that didn't come out of the board of finance that came from our well no i mean just because we've been delayed at this point right but i think bob's point is important that you know this is really like a budget structure which i didn't really look at it that way um let's try to budget it so we can act on

175it even though we ideally can't get to it anytime so well let's let's use that as a real example so if you put it in the 2022-2023 budget you will get approval on that in may of 2022. if you had if you're thinking i have to go out to bid ahead of that and i need the budgetary uh approvals in order to go do the bidding that you have to back up from that date and say i've got approval from the board of finance and the town for a million dollar thing before i'm going out to bed that's a 22 that's in the budget year of 2021-22 that's not in the if you waited all the way till the summer of june may of 2022 you're going to be building in 2023 i mean you're

176you're gonna lose all year then that's what i'm worried about um i'm thinking they're gonna have to approve it in the upcoming uh in this calendar year in order to be able to get us to 2022 that's my word and it's a timeline it's almost remember we in the school that you want to build it here then you go out to bid here and then therefore you need the budget approval by here and here's when you have to have the design done there's a whole timeline we have to be able to show that to people that says here's where you need the budgetary approval yay or nay at a referendum and and because of that you better put parking in your budget in 2021-22 that's that's what i'm thinking and that's why the timeline is

177important because i think you need the approval before you can go out to bids there's a timeline to that all right am i confusing well let's let dr brill and i have that conversation with mr dunn and mrs marion and see how we can make it work yeah and quite frankly i think we should see what that timeline looks like you know it does like we did with the school that says we want this period to go start the building what are the steps that have to get us there tecton's really good at laying that stuff out yeah um so i think that would help a lot okay yeah techdown's been great they're very responsive and oh do you want me to make the emotion rosa yeah yeah i think i have it in my

178mind uh i would uh move that the uh um at the board approve the 10-year capital improvement plan as recommended by the facilities committee for delivery to the uh for the town for their purposes and authorize the superintendent to work with the first selectmen to advance forward the one point three two two eight uh way 24 that's in year two of the plane into year one if it's agreed with the first selectmen and the superintendent that that is warranted second okay amy any further discussion on that i just want to be clear that if it is not agreeable and it's not the way mr dunn wants to go then and we're approving it as is gotcha i want to make sure we're all clear on that thank you yeah okay so all in favor aye

179okay that's unanimous thank you okay uh on to old business and uh we just have the we did the um tecton presentation early so we just have an update on the new school project um not too much of an update here the project was recently approved by the zoning commission so the only pressing issue right now is the question of the candid lake road water line um in the actual design of the new school itself tecton had priced out both the water line as well as on-site wells for water but they prefer the water line it's more permanent in nature and this is this is what's preferred by tecton if we if the project were to switch to wells instead of a water line the design team would have to go back and redesign some

180things and that's likely going to add cost to the project the at the mbc meeting the general um feeling was that wells will likely end up costing more for lesser quality product um but right now the board of finance is the entity that's deliberating the financial impact of both of those options and a public hearing for that will begin on wednesday the 28th at 7 pm so that's the current status of the new school rosa what's happening with the wetlands issue since the last meeting when when would we see some revised plans that deal with with those concerns um i don't actually know i don't know if i know that um maloney mcbroom had talked at previous meetings about having some uh rough ideas for where wetlands would go not on-site but off-site um so

181i assume that they're gonna go back to to those plans i don't know when those will be released yeah i don't know that they'll be released you know formally uh i'm sure they'll be reviewed at one of the the the meetings that uh techdown has with nbc um but we do have the november 17th design development uh design approval meeting which is a joint meeting uh that we'll have between board and ed and nbc so we'll certainly know at that point um i imagine they would have the exact spots drawn up and they could show us exactly that um that's what i know at this point i would gotta be asking that they get that on that agenda and not just let it skate by i mean that's that we have this contingent approval i'd

182love to have it so we can say okay here's how we are clearing that contingency and i think as a board we should be insisting on that definitely noted i will contact tact on right now while we're finishing the meeting so does anybody have any other questions on the new school project if not we can move on to three main points oh wait a second rosa we did have one thing on the new school project uh it's it's a newest newly established committee uh that uh mike and debbie mike is chairing that has to do with the new school mike is gonna give a little update yeah definitely sure so a new school committee uh so far we have our members i have made a nice little list here and i can't find it and

183the committees can consist of uh pto president jennifer peralta mercado uh pto president brenda i think her i think that you pronounced that coupler there you go uh eve uh who was a board of a member uh two civilians um eve former board of ed member colette strom former board of ed member uh mary rose diamond who is a center school as well we all know mary rose and melissa we all know melissa debbie myself uh two teacher representatives katie zazza and kimberly uh roccola rachel dracula there you go rachella and so far uh i'm aiming to get a meeting going uh a couple weeks because it seems like teacher apparent to your conferences uh the election day is kind of is is a big thing that's uh kind of coming up the work so

184hopefully get a couple meetings before um before thanksgiving and then first meeting back from thanksgiving we'll have hopefully we'll have a couple names for you and mike this is not history this is for the naming committee correct yes yes can you can you talk about some of the conversations you and deb have had and to talk about including students and so forth and that that i know you guys are talking yeah well i mean that's pretty much it we want to include the students yeah uh really want to discuss that with the principals and the teachers and uh yeah just make them really the guy in the conversation yeah i don't know what we're going to get into actual presentations from kids or do by teachers uh and i don't know if we're gonna have

185a presentation at a meeting it seems like that's gonna be hard to do but if we can you know we're gonna do that we'll try and pull that off around thanksgiving or before thanksgiving rather uh yeah i don't know that's that's about it we're kind of we're still in the baby stages okay a lot a lot of times uh students have been involved in um like sort of um not a naming contest but they picked names sort of that are their favorites so that would be interesting information to get from the kids yeah i think i'd like to have them start making the list rather than have like us get together and come up with three names or five names and have them pick i think i'd rather have them maybe uh you know guided

186by teachers uh give them some examples but then you know move from there yeah you'll get some really interesting names yeah make sure you give them some guidelines the the committee is is aware of the policy so it has to be a geographic location or geographic significance close to the school um so at least we have that there uh i did get an interesting question about naming things around the school um such as like the butterfly sanctuary or uh certain i know foyers or aspects of the school i was like that's let's let's name the school first and then we'll get there right that that was kind of an interesting thing i don't i don't if you want to keep the community around for naming stuff like that uh but i think we can leave

187that probably up to the for later future principal principles that was just an interesting comment i had from somebody yeah i thought you're in it i just wanted to share our board policy just talks about building naming to be friends so i think it right so only be outside the remit of the lord to tell you the truth uh the last line of the policy does dictate parts of the building to uh board of ed discretion actually okay oh cool um i just wanted to share another interesting little tidbit um katie zezza who's a center school teacher who'll be serving on the committee uh wrote back to mike when he asked her to to be part of the process and she said that she's very proud to be a representative on the committee because she

188attended center and huckleberry as a child when she grew up here in brookfield and she feels that it's such an honor that she'll be teaching in the new school that she helped to name so i thought that was a really nice little anecdote that's great absolutely that's good joy is a dream teacher she's just all right good stuff anything else on new school okay so now we are on to three main points okay i was thinking um covid update would be number one uh the tecton well presentation yeah i think that's a good idea and then for the third thing i thought maybe the review of the budget priorities did we have the well presentation last for the last meeting as one of the three members oh yeah we did absolutely yeah yeah yeah do

189we want to have that again or i don't know probably not but maybe since we have the calendar yeah maybe it doesn't need to be three main points but maybe we can um the new school project um facebook page and uh website can be sort of updated with some information on that so maybe you know the community can go there and maybe they can you know write an email if you know they think it's a great idea or they think it's a you know it's a little bit too much um maybe getting some of that feedback from the community would be helpful so we don't have to do it in three main points we can just sort of update the pages with that i think that's a good idea do you want to then do

190the new the uh school year calendar approval sending it out regardless but i mean it doesn't hurt to get it out there as part of the three points i would say that or the capital improving the capital plan and our discussion about the locker room and stuff maybe if we wanted to put that in that might be important i think the locker room has to be i think the locker room has to be on there yeah i think that's important for the ten year capital plan and there was some depth to the discussion and questions too which were good was good and traffic and track you know traffic on that topic okay um john when i'm talking about the the review of the budget priorities i was wondering i meant to ask you this before

191um i think we have don't we have a budget round table in november uh november 4th right before our board meeting yeah okay so should maybe i should put that in there too yeah i think so yeah and what we'll do is we can we can link the budget assumptions and priorities as a link so it doesn't have to be you know attached you know all of them click right to it okay you keep the you know your narrative can be brief it doesn't have to be like yep that's right debbie thank you okay all right so you're good with those debbie yep all right uh we do not have oh upcoming events sorry go ahead amy oh yeah okay all schools will be closed on tuesday november 3rd at center this friday october 23rd

192is a virtual spirit day and there's a virtual community meeting at 2 15. monday october 26 tuesday the 27th and wednesday the 28th are fall conferences that'll be early release wednesday october 28th is where your costume for virtual learning if you choose and decorate your center school pumpkin that the children all receive this week and more information to come from that for mrs diamond and classroom teachers at huckleberry we also have conferences the 26th through the 28th next monday through wednesday with an early release and they're also celebrating halloween virtually by wearing your costume if you choose and the readathon fundraiser is beginning monday october 26th and running through sunday november 8th and for whiskaner and the high school i just have parent-teacher conferences which are upcoming in both schools for november 11th and november

19312th that's it okay thank you all right we do not have an executive session tonight so unless there's anything else without objection the meeting is adjourned good night everyone good night