Board of Education Meeting 7/15/2020 @ 7pm

001that working for us truly amazing they're amazing yeah that's great john ray sullivan here do you want me to come back later no you can you can stand i think we'll probably get yeah you are absolutely welcome to stay um there is the agenda item about reopening isn't for a while so i certainly could send you a text when we're getting close to that agenda item if you want to step off for a little bit right now i'm good right now thank you okay roger we're live go ahead all right thanks eric okay um good evening everyone today is wednesday july 5th and i call the regular meeting of the brookfield board of education tour so stanford i pledge allegiance to the flag of america the republic for which it stands one nation under god

002indivisible with liberty and justice okay i hope i didn't freeze too much there uh we have all of our board members present um so we have first up on our agenda a presentation of literary magazine and yearbook so john the floor is all yours so we are excited to uh if mr rendon mr belanda are here they certainly could speak to their lip magazine and their yearbook um uh things are a little bit different with it was a little harder to get people together and get things together and certainly a little bit later here in the summer um so if i don't see the list is mr there's mr rend i see him maybe dean you can go first and share yeah guys i'm coming in from san francisco i apologize i'm at my son's

003baseball game and i don't know um i'm very excited today we don't have a literary magazine um but we do have our yearbook and i have a couple of students here uh abby mahoney and paulina sanchez and i think miss reece and maybe miss ryan are advisors um i don't know if they want to jump on real quick and speak before the girls i can't tell if they're all on okay if i screen share to show a couple pages the girls you want to talk about yeah i was just going to say eric i think you have it can you either one uh kayla i do have the presentation but by all means if you like screen share you're welcome to perfect can everyone see right then abby and paulina go for it hi i'm

004paulina so i was the advertising and sales leader this year on the yearbook team so every year in yearbook there are separate groups in which students have different roles to accomplish a certain task that's assigned to that group so for example this year my group the advertising and sales group handed out flyers at concerts advertise the yearbook at the book fair and did announcements almost every morning reminding students and updating them on any price changes or special offers that we were having in general everyone's job was to take pictures and work on the pages despite those separate groups when a deadline was coming up we would project the pages that were due on the board for the whole staff to see anyone could get could then give a suggestion or feedback to the students who

005created the page and changes would be made this is how we got everyone's input and opinions on each page overall i really enjoyed working with my peers and our advisors miss reese and miss ryan to come together and create that all friends at wisconsin middle school would enjoy hi my name is abby mahoney and i was the editor of the yearbook this year it was a really wonderful experience for me to be able to work to complete the yearbook since i was in fifth grade i've looked forward to getting your book every year and looking through all the pictures and wonderful stories from that year i loved helping create the yearbook this year so hopefully somebody else could have that feeling and going to high school it'll be really amazing to be able to take

006with me a piece of listener that me and my classmates work together to make few of my favorite pages as you can see on the screen are the drama club page and the swim and dive page i helped submit both of those pages and it was really fun for me to be able to create them because i participated in both of those activities i was able to take photos during races for the swim team and of the cast of the play and because i knew the people i was able to make sure that everyone was pictured all in all i really enjoyed making pages for the experiences that i loved these girls did such a great job and our entire staff worked hard and we just wanted to show also our staff and then we

007had done a virtual spirit week since so many of our events got canceled like we obviously didn't go to dc we didn't have our pep rally or our spirit week so at the beginning of distance learning we had some um spirit days for people to participate in from home so i think that was fun for people who participated but it also helped us get some pages ready to go that's all we have oh miss reese and miss ryan and abby and and pauline is just so nice to see you and thank you for sharing mr renda was we're just so happy that you're here tonight with us mr renda did you have anything else to add before we ask the board members if they have any questions no i mean again i know it takes

008a lot of work and a lot of effort and you know being in the situation we were in and this and still being able to put that together and uh make it so great for the for you know for all the kids um you know it's a great accomplishment for them so thank you girls thank you miss reese miss ryan oh thank you so much uh mr renda is if board members do have any questions for for our teachers or for the students i will just say that i think you guys did a great job and it's such a nice way to to still have a connection to to your school and to your peers so great job thank you yeah thank you it was wonderful we look at it often thank you so much

009everybody and and uh miss fernandez i think it's time at this point i can move on to mr bellanda for the vhs sure principal belanda the floor is your sir thank you thank you um particularly abby and paulina i expect that you're going to be part of the yearbook staff when you come to the high school that's an expectation now um this is a much different presentation than we normally would give um i didn't create slides to go through what we have but uh just so you can see what the cover of the uh the yearbook looks like and i show the cover because it's kind of important um this this is a heat sensitive section so when you put your hand over um the two bobcats on either side uh be very hard to

010see but we'll see we can do you can get there's pictures that show up underneath it's the class picture so it's heat sensitive you rub it and then it shows up so it's really it was kind of a cool feature they added this year you know our staff our yearbook staff worked really hard as every yearbook staff does but as um you know we heard from the wiscons staff it's been it was a challenge towards end of the year to get things all together and ready um and prepped and delays um from printing and and pickup has been more than more than interesting um but we're so proud of the seniors that were really a part of that um program with mr webb who is the advisor for the yearbook he's one of our art

011teachers he's been doing it this is his second year now um you know our editor-in-chief was uh juliana lapori she was a senior who graduated um you know they're not on here with me right now but there are some some really great sections uh of this particular yearbook that i know they're very proud of um as i flip through looking at them um you know some great things to remember one's one of the i think one of my favorite sections is me in 20 years it's so funny when you read through the me in 20 years what some of the seniors expect is going to happen it's almost 20 years seems like such a long time to them that half the kids put they're going to be they're going to have three to four children

012in 20 years which is impressive and i and more power to them if they do um you know but it was the number of the number of entries where students said seniors said they're going to have three kids like okay good luck with that um you know so uh there was it was i'm so proud of it the title is the roaring 20s uh the time of our lives and you know with 2020 being the year that it was um i couldn't be proud of our seniors and the yearbook staff that put this together um you know this will continue to be a challenge moving forward the next couple of next fall as we start to plan what's going to happen next but uh i'm pretty confident in mr webb and the students that worked

013on it the undergrads that worked on it we'll be able to help step it up and move forward from there um so that's our yearbook um i do have copies obviously once we eventually see each other again which i look forward to meetings again in person will be nice um i do have copies uh that you can take a look at and get a chance to see what their their final product was i was also proud to say that the lit mag the literary magazine was taken over by mr demarcus this year uh it used to be previously done by mrs nichols mr demarches one of our english teachers took over this year and did a fantastic job instead of creating a final a hard copy it's a pdf which i'm not sure if the

014board has or has seen i can certainly share it if they haven't gotten a chance to see it um it is uh again it's it's they tried to bring in a few different things this year than they had before we have not just pictures we also have photographs uh we have poems we have the typical writings uh that we usually have there's even a link to a recording of something as well so this is a the masquerade for 1920 was quite the um the interesting and really eclectic document um that i'm so glad we were able to actually produce uh one of my favorite ones was this section called six word stories um you know that kids you know we had two different girls kylie moody and carolina vicali are the ones who put uh

015these particular sections in um books are unlearned written life lessons was one of their entries um it was just i you know i know we've got the library staff on here so i thought you'd appreciate that but books are unlearned written life lessons i thought it was kind of cool um so it ended up being a 39 page um masquerade which i can certainly share i believe it is posted on our website i will be sure to do that again uh if it's not i'll double check that tomorrow and make sure it's up um but it's a great collection of creative works from our students across the student body and so special thanks to mr demarches who was the advisor and for our uh senior editor kylie moody who's also the class president of the

016club president and senior editor so that's it that's what i've got for you thank you mr belanda mark i'm so excited to learn that that cover is heat sensitive i can't wait to try it out you're going to go try it now see them i am i didn't know that any other questions for mr belanda or thomas to the board all right thank you mark really appreciate that the um i i just uh heard from mr conklin our tech director who's uh making sure everything goes as smoothly as possible that mrs fernandez uh her computer cocked out for a moment so he he reached out to me too so very good so mr belden i'll turn over the rest of the agenda until mrs fernandez gets back there you go so um so thank you

017uh to both the middle school and the high school those are great presentations i can't wait to see this heat sensitive uh uh yearbook that'll be a lot of fun to uh to fiddle with it'll be a first for me i actually want to see how heat sensitive it is in 50 years when they have when they have five kids so [Music] next up on our agenda is the uh is the report of the brookfield public library um and i we have our town librarian yvonne uh chuck here with us so yvonne are you there yes hi bob thank you how are you tonight good thanks nice to see everyone um so um as bob just said my name is yvonne check and i am the director of the brookfield library and um i know

018mark bolando was just talking about the literary magazine um since brookfield has a new town uh poet laureate i'm sure he would be interested in uh helping get involved with that at some point in the future um in fact um the high school one of the high school english teachers mary kozan was on the poet laureate selection committee but we are actually here tonight because we wanted to talk about um the really constructive collaboration between the public librarians and the school library media specialists we wanted to give you a little bit of an overview about how well they worked together they work very well together every year but of course this year was especially challenging and um what i what i will do is introduce our two librarians here today and they're going to tell

019you a little bit about how they worked to reinvent and then successfully launch the very important summer reading program which as you all know keeps students on track through reading to keep up their reading skills throughout the summer so it is a very important program so with us tonight are our children's librarian meg gill and youth services librarian abby lynch and they have a brief presentation for you okay good evening everybody um i'm meg gill and i'm the children's librarian who um with debbie brooks at the brookfield public library thank you so much for having us this evening um i just have a couple things i want to touch upon and then i think um abby and i have a video we're going to share with you but we can all agree that the objective

020for us as well as the school media specialists is to keep the kids involved in reading year round um we believe that a large part of last year's tremendous resounding success with our summer reading program we had over 400 children participate um was due to the fact we were able to go into the schools we were able to interact with the students on a more personal level and that could not have happened without dee and joyce and the scheduling that they um basically enabled us to put together um so when it came to this year's situation it was kind of like oh boy how how is this going how's this going to work um so it's it's like i said last year's interaction paved the way for great programming that we continued to see throughout

0212019 and it's provided us with this base of consistent participation that we've seen even in this strange new world that we find ourselves um some recent highlights include um the collaboration over our one town one read book um it was really through a brainstorming session with joyce andy and sue that the idea was um presented to us of pushing our start date out further to coincide with the end of the school year so that it could be something that the students and the families would actually look forward to doing together um since they're really let's face it there hasn't been a lot to look forward to in this current environment and it's provided us with an opportunity for non-vigi non-digital family-friendly content um you know pushing the kickoff date back more closely to coincide with

022the end of the school year paved the way for more involvement and it gave everybody something to look forward to and i have a quote from joy salda that i think was just really kind of summed it up she indicated that having our principals share the information about the one town one read in creative ways in their daily school-wide announcements added a new level of excitement and encouraged families to participate in the event and again that all came about through a brainstorming session by a zoom that just wouldn't have been possible had we not been working together because we had a start date that was i think initially set for the beginning of may and we ended up pushing that back till um closer to um beginning of june debbie also collaborated with the world

023languages department for our summer reading program bingo calendar which is actually a calendar um that takes the children through the summer and it's events um things they can participate in for each day of the summer of our of our seven week program whether it be reading or an activity or craft or writing a letter some sort of literacy um type of engagement and once they've completed it they can submit it to us to be entered into a raffle for a prize this year is the first year we were able to offer a multilingual component and i think the bingo calendar ended up being distributed or offered between seven and nine languages which is amazing to me um and i i think it's it's the first time we've been able to offer something like that and

024i think in our increasingly shrinking world that's not only exciting but uh very timely and necessary um we were also able to work with joyce and dee to get our promo video for this year's summer reading program out to as wide an audience as possible given that we weren't able to go into the school schools um i believe it was distributed during a school-wide virtual event i think it was a virtual campout they had during the last week of school and so that ensured that we were able to reach the maximum number of students and families with our promo video talking about all of the things we were going to offer which include um our live zoom crafts that i've been doing the live zoom science sessions that debbie's been offering the fractured fairy tales

025story times that i've been doing on tuesday mornings um so we were able to really reach people to let them know this is what we'll be doing this year and this is how it's going to be different which i think is key to give people a little bit of let them know what would be new and also let them know what would still be the same and what would be consistent we have a lot of families that really love our search and find it's a giant search and find poster that um we have a staff member that she creates hand draws and colors in for us every year and it's part of a summer tradition for a lot of these families to come in and do the challenges every day find the hidden pictures so

026not only are we offering that in a digital format we're also offering it where you can actually come to the library it's in a window you can still be outside not have to interact with anybody but you can come down and you can see the challenges posted and actually find the hidden pictures um and we've already gotten some really um positive feedback thanking us for making that happen this year when they thought it wasn't going to which is very gratifying um we've also offered i think i mentioned book bundles and that was debbie's brainchild and it's been going off with a roaring success we've been hand curating um basically uh between um seven to ten books um a request will come in we will look at the child's interest whether it be a specific author

027a specific genre or subject or title and we will put together a book bundle for them and then we're able to check it out to that person or that child's account and set it outside with their name on it for them to come pick up and it's been able to keep them reading this summer and we've already gotten a lot of positive feedback on that as well um and it's been kind of fun considering we're not able to have that in-person interaction but we are able to call an email and say hi you know i put together your book bundle i picked out some really great titles i think you're gonna like and then we've been getting emails back saying yeah that was great this is a whole new series for us or oh i've

028never seen that eric carl book before and it's been you know it's the closest we're getting to that in-person interaction and you know it's been great um and i just i think that the collaboration um really made it possible for us to let people know that we would be doing these things this summer and um because joyce and dee have that that in you know um prior to the end of the school year that we didn't have this year so i think that's that's kind of any you know all of what i have to say if anybody has any questions or if i can turn it over to abby sure i can share that video too if um oh it just muted abby oh sorry i was i'm reversed um anyway i can share the

029video if um i can share my screen or i think i sent it in i don't know what's the best way um eric eric has the video ready to go and he's also got your slide ready to go awesome perfect so yeah again like like we did with whiskenier abby um your choice if you'd like to share if not i have everything up and ready to go if you have it ready to go that would be wonderful not a problem now video first yes thank you hi friends it's miss debbie and miss meg from the brookfield library we miss seeing you in the library and hope you're doing well even though the library is closed we have lots of fun activities planned for you to do at home this summer it all starts on june

03022nd we're going to be hosting weekly story times we're going to do grab and go craft kits that you can complete with me and miss debbie on a live zoom and we'll also be doing some fun science activities that you can watch from home we're also going to keep going with our popular search and find poster and it's going to be posted in one of the library's windows so you can come down and actually take a look at it but it will also be on our website and on facebook with daily clues and hints and jokes and riddles for you to find all the fun hidden pictures and this year's theme is imagine your story so there's going to be lots of pirates and princesses and dragons and mermaids and so much more fun stuff

031we want you to keep reading so we're offering book bundles that you can pick up outside the library we'll pick whatever books you like picture books mysteries graphic novels or non-fiction just go to our website to sign up here's a quick preview of everything we have planned [Music] have a great summer bye guys thank you for thank you for watching and i'm sure um i speak for all the elementary schoolers who must have been so excited to see you guys when they when they saw that because i'm sure everyone was really missing their usual school visits um our usual preparation for on the teen side of things for the middle school and the high school usually also involves a lot of in-person school visits at the end of the year i usually see all of

032the middle schoolers and i would say a big chunk of the high schoolers um so we were obviously sad that that couldn't take place this year but the the best part of having a strong relationship with the school media specialists is that we were able to stay in touch getting ready to go into summer reading most of our collaboration this year was just keeping the other informed about what school what's going on at school what's going on at the library and trying to make sure we all had all the best resources and information to share with the students um and also um mrs crean mrs rocca and mrs malintesta are so great about sharing the stuff that we have going on with the students to make sure that they know that the library's there to

033support them in their summer learning and to really spread the word about um the program via their websites or direct communication with the students and parents or fellow staff members and we're always so grateful to them for getting the word out and also mrs crean's a big big help to us on social media as well we love that um and so a little bit about the teen program this year oh sorry can i have you put this light up as well thank you so our program also was a complete overhaul this year we had just started a new program from scratch last year for a little bit of context um we had redesigned it completely to be about scratch-off raffle tickets but the whole thing revolved around coming to the library in person so for

034the second year in a row we started a program from scratch and um the teen program for rising sixth graders through graduating seniors is very um similar i would say to the kids uh bingo calendar only aged up to be um for the activities to be more appropriate for the middle school and high school they have a checklist of 20 reading challenges and 20 activities challenges and students who complete five from each list by the end of the summer will get a prize the reading challenges encourage various forms of literacy i would say most of our young readers are fiction readers but we're really encouraging people to try non-fiction audiobooks graphic novels all sorts of different reading poetry or news um and also different ways to engage with their reading life um like seeking out

035book recommendations from people or writing a book review or memorizing a poem to recite and sort of getting a new way to get involved with their reading lives and the activity challenges include some things that are maybe normal summer activities maybe you have a weekly movie night with your family but you're trying to do it a little bit more mindfully or intentionally so you choose a genre that's different than what you would normally watch um we also know that there has been a lot of screen fatigue in the last couple of months with everything going on so i tried to include as many screen free activities as i could so a lot of the more popular um challenges that i'm seeing coming in in the responses have been something like going for a walk outside

036or making a new recipe stuff that takes you kind of off this computer out from the screen and gets a little bit more hands-on um the most my favorite part of summer reading this year and my favorite part of summer reading usually is very similar to the book bundles for the kids is getting kids the right book for them the schools offer a great amount of choice in their summer reading expectations which is wonderful we wouldn't have it any other way but that amount of choice can also be overwhelming for people so we want to make sure we're there to support them and we have a form on the website where teens can fill out a little questionnaire and i'll put together a personalized reading list of three to five books based on their tastes

037and interest and we've been getting more and more of those filled out as the longer it's been up so we're thrilled all year round to support learning and to support literacy but especially in the summer um to to get the to make sure we're there for folks while school school's out and keep get them ready for fall um so we're always so grateful um to work with the media specialist to make that happen and that's all for me thanks thank you abby i think i'm back everyone so yeah yvonne did you have anything else that you wanted to add so that was um that's our uh our overview of our program and i um i really am so pleased that everyone was really making every possible effort to not drop the ball to keep things

038going and to be able to launch the programs on time and to be here for the students during the summer which we are all year round anyway but i know this year had its special challenges so thank you all for giving us some time this evening and do you have any questions for us i don't have any questions um but it's it's very clear that you guys are working very hard and it's it's nice and i know that our students appreciate the support so thank you for all your hard work i just wanted to add that we did invite the school library media specialists to join us tonight but they are relaxing and um on vacation and unable to join us so we would have loved to have them um join us and and tell

039you all how um how well the students received all the information that they put out there but it really was a group effort and we appreciate everything they do for us thank you all you guys do a great job thank you okay any other questions all right so up next we have a year-end report from the brookfield education foundation hi everybody um my name is kristen joshie and i'm the president of the brookfield education foundation our mission is to marshal and provide resources for lifelong learning by brookfield residents of all ages a large number of the grants that we fund are for brookfield public schools however i'd like to note that the bef does not solely fund grants in our schools in fact this past year most of what we have funded are community grants

040that includes programs for town entities such as our senior center the library parks and recreation scouting troops and other non-profits such as the green nolt ymca each year the bef briefly reviews the programs we've funded both to celebrate the innovators of these projects and to thank our generous donors who make them a reality it's been a diverse year with the bef funding some grants that we've been very excited about i'm pleased to report that this year we have funded five grants to various community resources more importantly these grants helped empower innovative indie education in our schools and the community uh the first one we had were standing desks at brookfield high school this was an eagle scout project that was championed by ben boves from boy scout troop five the standing desks help engage students

041with certain accommodations or disabilities related to trouble focusing in class by incorporating the desks throughout many parts of the class lectures group activities assessments class work etc they can also help positively enhance the education of students the teacher that used them in their classroom did give us a testimonial obviously they didn't get to use them for the full extent of the year but they did find them very useful the teacher said that the standing desks were really helpful for some of my students that need to get out of their seat sitting for 83 minutes is a real struggle for some students and it was a really helpful way to keep them up and focused they were they were also very effective in helping create a unique classroom environment that i strive to achieve i like

042to have several different options for students to work in my flipped classroom as i aim to take the focus off of the teacher and lecture and shift it to the students and their collaboration the next grant that we funded was for the senior center and it was education on medicare part d the goal of the grant was to assist the brookfield seniors and disabled community in the appropriate selection of their annual medicare part d prescription drug plan by educating the community through careful guidance and selection seniors and disabled will understand their insurance options and potentially save thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket expenses and premiums the result of this were that 162 brookfield residents were counseled through this program they met with a handful of individuals due to the complexity of their particular situations and though

043the money saved by switching to new medicare part d plans is difficult to quantify they did have two particular individuals in this program that stood out through education and advice with this program these individuals were able to save a combined seven thousand dollars in their insurance uh the next uh grant that we funded was actually initiated through a girl scout silver award but it benefited the brookfield public schools with hand sanitizers the purpose of the grant was in knowing that when hand sanitizer is used properly it can eliminate 99.9 percent of germs on your hands especially during flu season minimizing your exposure to other people's germs is crucial for good health the goal was to provide hand sanitizer dispensers within each of the four public schools and develop a hand sanitizer pilot program for the

044district the sanitizers were placed in areas of high traffic for optimal usage in addition to the placement in the hallways they put two in the cafeterias two in the gymnasiums one in the main office one in the library one in the main entrance of each school the goal is to educate the students staff and faculty to be germ free and encourage them to use magnetizers they qr codes removed from the stations that could be used by students and faculty to learn healthy hygiene practices they wanted to encourage the students and staff to make healthier choices not only in school but hopefully to change the mindset and utilize hand sanitizers wherever they can the hope was to see a decrease in absences of in the school year obviously this grant was funded prior to covid it

045was in the fall of 2019 late fall it obviously was ahead of its time kind of a home run and i i'd imagine now that um we're in the situation we're in that the district might be putting in many more hand sanitizers than what this hand this program initially provided um the the next two that i would grant that i'm going to talk about that we funded um have actually been funded since um distance learning and and the start of covid the first um is a 3d ppe for frontline workers the champion is brookfield high school teacher heather bancheri the bef provided a 3d printer and associated equipment to make ppe for healthcare workers and first responders during the covid crisis video tutorials for the equipment are then to be produced and kept in an

046online resource as a remote teaching tool for students at bhs finally the products created using the printer will be a jumping off point for a new club at bhs which will encourage relevant volunteerism and empathy in students we did get a quick follow-up from um miss biancary and the student that's working for logan white since may they have created over 2 200 ear protectors for medical staff in the state of connecticut and then the final one that we have for this year is the library story walks funded to the brookfield library the bef funded a request for an ongoing story walk programming championed by debbie brooks head of children's services the reusable story walk will be available to the entire community for years to come the project takes literacy outdoors using sturdy outdoor refillable frames

047picture books or poetry can be posted on each frame and families can walk along as they read each page or part of the story combining nature with literacy the frames are portable and can be used in various places throughout brookfield such as the library any of the school grounds and the still river greenway the municipal campus etc residents of all ages will benefit from this literacy-focused grant and we look forward to the library unveiling the story walk this summer um in addition there's two other previous grants that i'd like to mention because um on the bef we like to look at the longevity and success um of our grants as we do continuous follow-up one of them was with the mobile makerspace that was funded at the library in 2016. um again with um the

048times that we're in right now with covid the equipment and programs created were um well the equipment and programs created by this this grant were previously used a lot anyway but with the onset of covid they shifted focus and some users sprang in the action creating and supplying ppe for health care workers and then the other thing i wanted to mention was a tower gardens grant that we originally funded in 2017 at wisconier middle school the use of the tower gardens there was no longer appropriate it no longer fit the curriculum um but with the help of uh mr render and miss lebraciano we re-homed the tower gardens one of them is still being used at wisconier by one of the clubs there and two were re-homed to to teachers at huckleberry so we look

049forward to seeing what our little scientists produce in the future in addition to funding these grants we did celebrate our honor and educator program again this year we made it free to um nominate educators given the circumstances that we're in right now and and people are struggling and we really wanted to give everybody the opportunity um to say thank you to our educators we recognized over 350 unfortunately obviously we couldn't have the event that we usually do but we were still happy to be able to recognize our educators and celebrate what they do in our community as a board we recognize the stress and strain that covert 19 has created for our teachers our staff administrators and our town officials i want to take a minute to thank all of you for your tireless efforts

050to guide our residents through this unprecedented time we recognize that how we educate looks really different right now distance learning may be here to stay for a longer than any of us would like and we also realize that the need for social and emotional programs um are we need them um so the bef would love to be a part of helping with these obstacles um we ask any teachers curriculum specialists administrators please reach out to any of us on the bef board we'd be happy to help guide you along with any assistance that we can in applying for a grant and how um we might be able to take your idea and and build it into a program that we would be able to fund um and then finally um we just want to send

051our sincere thanks and gratitude to everyone who's made the programs that we fund a reality um from our generous donors to our grant champions that envisioned and brought these funded programs to life on that note i'd like to add that the only way the bef will be doing fun fundraising this year is through donations on our website we will not be hosting our annual gala this year we've made that decision there's just too many factors that make it unwise obviously at this time no large gatherings but we've also had a hit to our local businesses that support us as sponsors and silent auction donors to that end we do intend to host a community event the weekend that we would normally have our gala um we intend to turn our traditional thanks for giving gala

052back to our business community that has been so very generous to us in the past so stay tuned and look forward look for an announcement on our website and facebook page for our give back event november 20th to the 22nd that's all i have great thank you so much kristen you're welcome thanks kristin thank you so much any questions from the board members okay uh we will move on to public comment is anyone here from the public that would like to speak don't don't see anyone okay um so we will move on to written correspondence uh ed butt wrote regarding spring sports and coaches ron jaffe elijah hewling and haley goodrich wrote regarding the board's open letter to the community howard lasser susan iverson and laura orban wrote about addressing racism in the school community

053marie williams wrote with a question about curriculum ron jaffe shared information about a documentary on racism and voting rights ron jaffe and kiana shabazz williams wrote regarding diversifying curriculum and ron jaffe shared information from the national education association regarding their summer justice series camp and that's it thank you up next is approval of board minutes i'll move that the board approve the minutes from the regular meeting on june 17th 2020 second thanks joy all in favor aye hi okay up next we have our superintendent's report thank you rosa uh so i have a few items to share with you uh the first is that many of you may have noticed that driving by wisconsin part of the teacher lot a lot of curbing and sidewalks have been replaced and we also finally after many years

054of requesting and wondering why we don't have one we have a right-hand home lane out of this so i think i see debbie smiling so very excited about that i'm sure a lot of people will be appreciative of that right internally i see some applause for mr renda thank you um we have to we have to thank our our uh facility team and our facility committee uh and and the town for supporting these these paving projects and uh the brookfield high school paving project is underway uh in front of the auditorium in front of the gymnasium area and and uh new curbing sidewalks et cetera so that's underway we look forward to the completion of that project um bhs graduation occurred on june 20th and while very different um it received a tremendous positive feedback

055it was a wonderful time i have to thank mr belanda and his team and all the grad parents and everyone who made it come together absolutely a major bravo it was incredible um and um in in brief conversations with mr velande again from the feedback he and the team have received um graduation may look very different going forward and embracing some of the things we had to move to uh but we'll leave that for mr vollander to share as time moves forward so we're just really proud of the team and the kids and the parents and our entire community for making that work and and thank mr bolenda for his leadership on that um i'd also like to share that between the board of selectmen last week and the board of finance we were able

056to uh purchase uh part of our um moving forward in preparing for the new school year 91 laptops for our teachers to replace the aging laptops at wisconsin middle school those are our oldest laptops the old the old laptops will be repurposed to other staff in preparation for um work they normally do as well as being prepared for any kind of remote learning or hybrid learning also for the students 300 chromebooks were purchased as part of that order as well and just approved last week for our students so we're really excited because we're adding to the fleet of our personal devices for the students and we're getting very close uh over time to almost one to one provided by the district a moment's notice we will share more of that next week with your presentation

057of the reopening plan but that was a big part of it in terms of technology also just a quick mention uh we'll talk about this later the state provided a the state of connecticut board provided a 180 day waiver for next year with the maximum allowable opportunity to reduce the school year by three days down to 177 and allow us to use three of those days at the beginning of the school year as additional preparation days training days uh in terms of coveted work to get ready for reopening the schools we'll talk about that a little bit later because we do need to talk about the calendar going forward um let's see was oh and then uh i was on a governor's conference call with municipal leaders and superintendents this afternoon and just one big

058piece that bears mentioning uh for all of us including our town officials is that a reminder for everyone that the state of emergency from the emergency order excuse me from the governor uh in terms of the opportunity that he has to uh provide all those executive orders that runs out on september 9th and so the state is looking at mechanisms and opportunities to perhaps let it run out or extend it or extend specific executive orders uh even the fact that we could have these remote meetings all of that runs out effectively um september 9th unless there's a specific date different than september 9th later or earlier so they're working on that and we need to pay close attention to that because things change based on that and uh if they extend it i'll certainly let

059you know if uh as soon as i know and then uh finally i wanted to share with uh everybody here that you'll be we have four guests that are able to join us tonight for our later opportunities uh martha rakine harris and bob rader from cave will be here when we talk about uh establishing our diversity uh committee and also dr sullivan um our public health director and dr ferreira our medical consultant are joining us as well uh to help answer any questions after i share a little bit about the reopening of school process and what we've been doing and going through as we ready ready our plan for uh reopening um so i wanted to acknowledge their presence here in the meeting if you see some names you're not familiar with that is all

060i have mrs fernandez thank you does anyone have any questions for dr brill hey yeah we will move on to subcommittee reports and we only have one from policy and communications so the policy and communications subcommittee met on june 17th and the focus of our meeting really had to do with reviewing a few outdated policies with regard to distance learning and electronic resources so you will see later in the agenda we have um some policies to bring to you for a first read so that our policy is as current as it can be and encompasses everything involved in distance learning uh we also had a discussion regarding communications and the fact that because there was no uh referendum for this year's budget we did not have an opportunity to do a budget flyer and we

061talked about the possibility of doing some kind of communication once maybe perhaps when school gets started again to really try to illustrate to the community what did happen with the budget what was approved and how we will be using the funds that we have this year where we will um you know any changes that they will see what programs we were able to keep from our budget proposal um things like that so we are working on some kind of communication that should come out sometime close to the beginning of the year we felt that to send it in june people were just overwhelmed and sort of you know burnt out with all the the distance learning and everything that was um you know so many different communications at the end of the year that we

062decided to hold off and maybe do something uh late summer or early fall so we're working on that and that's about it okay thank you anyone have any questions rosa can i just mention something that's a little unrelated i just got a message from someone they said that the zoom link um for to access the meeting needed a password and i think uh some people were trying to enter our meeting to give public comment and they couldn't because they didn't have a password so i just said i would share it i don't know if that's anything we can do about that eric um thanks jen i'm gonna put it in the chat for everybody um the link is supposed to be um embedded the the password to the link is supposed to be embedded that's

063how everybody was able to join tonight so let me just pull the one i'm going to put it right in the chat if you could share that with with members of the public that are going in and i'll check the link on the website that would be great yes yeah this they said was the what uh the link on the website yes thank you jen um rosa in the meantime i i forgot to mention um in my report we have it right on their kindergarten enrollment update and mrs diamond is prepared to share that is it okay if we take a moment for that yeah yeah okay it's real quick so we right now um we have 163 students who've started vegetation um and we have anticipated an additional 12 students that we know are

064eligible so we are uh right now anticipating 175 students enrolling in kindergarten of course that's contingent upon a lot of things and people are still in the process but we're still we're pretty comparable to where we were last year at this time that's all are you getting any uh any situations where parents are making decisions not to send their kids to kindergarten um not really confirmed yet i think a lot of people are waiting to see what it's going to be like um before they they make that decision so we've had some questions but people are still starting the process and and you know engaged in that so we're just we're just kind of answering them as we go okay cool thank you yeah great thanks everybody thank you mary rose okay um move on

065to the consent agenda i will make a motion that the board approved the items on the consent consent agenda which are new hires resignations and retirements second thanks joy any discussion on these i'd like to share uh rosa just a a couple of remarks um first of all thanking uh mrs o'connor and mrs pacilic who are retiring with a total of uh 50 years of service to brookfield high school in wisconner middle school um we cannot thank them enough for their service and just appreciate everything they've done to impact children over the last um what is it 26 and 25 years respectively so 51 years of service so yeah a little one of these for our folks i mean they're just uh just some great teachers there and it's a big loss that kind of

066an institutional wisdom and experience and we'll miss them very much and hopefully they'll stay in touch with us but and also enjoy uh time with their families and time to do the things they really want to do um in addition to that uh one of our resignations is a longtime employee mr mike smith he is moving on to a curriculum leadership position out of state and we're just we're sad to see him go he's an incredible uh educator and uh wonderful wonderful person and we're very excited for him and and his career and his family's new adventure uh out of state so we're really excited for that and um the the last thing i say is as you can see it's a large consent agenda and it's while it seems like with all the talking

067we're doing school school is so quickly approaching which it is at the same time we're really only about three weeks into the into the summer um it just it's such an odd time for us we think we have all this time in the summer when we don't but our hr department and our our principals and their teams at the schools i have to give a kudos they've made a number of hires already and as we've explained to you before it's a very lengthy time-consuming deliberate process and i just have to thank them all for all their hard work and we have some some really strong educators joining the team um so those are my comments for consent agenda thank you that's great yeah okay any other questions or comments all right so we'll move on

068to new business and uh bob i understand you have a motion to amend the agenda yes i'd like to make a motion to amend the agenda to item to add an item number f under the uh under new business uh to discuss and have a potential motion on uh changing the school calendar a second okay thanks amy um all in favor aye okay um but first under new business uh is some actually we have two policies but the first is on the deletion of current brookfield policy uh 6141.3 and policy 6141.321 and replacing you with k policy 6141.321 so amy you can go ahead and read the full motion and make that motion that the board approve the deletion of current brookfield policy 6141.3 and current brookfield policy 6141.321 and replace them with new proposed

069k policy 6141.321 with revisions as recommended by the policy and communications subcommittee second thanks joy okay um debbie did you wanna yeah about this yep i mean they're pretty straightforward and eric you can jump in please if i leave anything out or misrepresent anything but really basically these are two old policies um that just needed updating some of the language is old it has to do with really um electronic resources and devices and they they were two separate policies one that had to do with the use of the district's information network and the other one has to do with personal electronic communication devices so um we decided that cabe's policy which is 6141.321 really puts the two together in sort of a comprehensive policy that addresses what it what it is to be a responsible

070digital citizen uh with all the most current information about the children's internet protection act and use of information and communication technologies so um you know i think it's pretty straightforward we made changes to caves policy only in places where we you know put in brookfield public schools or that kind of terminology that was required but um should be pretty straightforward eric did you have anything else yeah the only the only other thing to input is to deb's point is we had um you know in in in the spirit of aligning with cabe um that this is their new policy and um you know the current that the new proposed 6141-32 uh 3-2-1 is is their new policy um and and therefore it makes the uh the two different versions previously that we had um redundant

071um and also updates a policy that that is over five years old and um in in it um five years is a very very long time um especially in regards to uh students and their expected use of technology in the district um it is important to note that that although debbie did touch on the fact um and thank you debbie that the policy is largely um kept in terms of cabe um but changed to some language for brookfield there is a specific paragraph um that led the charge on this that is related and and and dr beryl simon if you have anything you want to add um was related to the recording um especially related to zoom and google meet meetings um we did not have a a paragraph in any of our policies that

072stated that recording without all party consent is illegal and not only is it illegal in state law but it also needs to be against our policies um so there is a paragraph in this policy stating that you must receive consent from all people on a call before um you um record or um that the meeting or the or the call is knowingly recorded um so for example this board of education meeting they're held publicly we know that they're always um held publicly and this this policy covers that um this policy does cover that specifically on the student side um i will let you know that on the staff side um that's in the 4000 series which which um you know mrs cavanaugh takes care of um and on our hr team but but um language

073for that was put into a policy that was actually approved earlier this year so this does cover our staff and our students now eric that was wonderful uh i just had one one piece to that uh while it was not a major problem for us during remote learning uh there was an incident or two and we had to deal with it and we want to make sure we're protecting students and we're protecting staff and so this was a major that was a major driver knowing that remote learning was not ending uh on june 19th and knowing that there would be some form of it uh going forward and or advancement in the use of these kinds of meetings um for the future to the future that we continue to uh to look toward will involve

074these kinds of meetings uh with educators and parents and students and remote learning and blended learning and flipped classroom and all the things you hear about they've become a significant reality for us and we're excited about it and it's a great opportunity at the same time we need to protect our staff and students thank you eric and debbie go ahead bob all right i have a question and it's just a point of order question is this a motion for a first read this is a new policy right yeah so yeah so i think we actually need to amend the motion to say it's for a first reading um because that's how our bylaws are set up so can you do you mind if i make a motion to make a minor amendment yep please i'd

075like to make a motion to amend the motion that's on the table to insert the words uh for a first reading after the word approve and the emotion so it would be that the board approved for a first reading the deletion of etc etc was that amy who seconded yep okay thanks amy do we need to do that on the next one too yeah we will so i'll just go ahead and include that in the next one when you okay thank you okay so uh all in favor of the amended motion all right bye okay thank you um debbie when do you want um feedback for this policy when does the committee meet again uh i think we don't meet again until let me check hang on sometime in august i should have looked at

076that earlier the board meeting yeah august 19. so um so maybe like a week before that yeah why don't we say like to like by august 7th just so that we don't forget about it um and debbie if i may um oh and rosa too if i made for one second i forgot to include the policy that you're getting um in proposal is inclusive of the agreement that we would have the staff sign um although the board just approves policies and doesn't include regulations um i you know administration john myself uh um and uh and the team that reviewed this um felt it important to um have that go up have the form itself that we expect students and parents to sign um that go before the board as well for approval so um this

077policy not only has a policy but also has the the actual agreement that that parents and families and students will sign okay thank you okay um so everybody just get your comments to debbie uh by the seventh and uh we have another policy um this is just an update to a current policy so i will move that the board approve for a first read updating current brookfield policy 6141.328 as recommended by the policy and communications subcommittee thanks bob okay debbie this one is directly related to the other ones that we just discussed this is really specifying when students bring their own electronic devices that those devices will not be permitted to use outside internet resources but as eric pointed out more importantly we've added that paragraph about taking or making audio or video recordings so

078this policy was already revised more currently in 2013 so we're just aligning it with the other two that we just talked about so that they're all consistent um and then the only other thing i will add is um although this policy is a little bit older same as the other one on the language in kiev's um newest policy uh that that handles byod or bring your own device the language did not change um enough really much at all um but um it is important you know that the the paragraph added record regarding recording meetings um that this policy was to be amended to add that paragraph um as per recommendation from council um that that if we change if we add that into 61 61.41321 that we also added into 6141 328 which is why

079we bring this policy to you okay okay thank you eric okay so any other discussion on this one okay so all in favor all right hi okay uh let's see up next is the dissolution of the board subcommittee security task force and possible motion um i actually think it's probably more efficient for me to go ahead and make a motion and then we can have any discussion and to go through with that so as an ad hoc committee having met their objective to formally review the physical security of our schools as well as security protocols and procedures and recommend improvements to the board of education i move to dissolve the security task force second amy got that one so any discussion on this john did you want to add anything very quick just just would

080like like to first of all thank the the members of the public uh we had we had several um parents uh who actually joined us with board members and administration and police chief uh and the like and um again we achieved our objectives we also um there's a requirement state requirement that the administration has a district security team and so while we have that um and it doesn't involve board members we need to meet regularly and then we develop our security plans submit them to the state and that kind of thing um that would involve the police chief as well fire marshall and so we'll continue that but in terms of having yet another subcommittee for the board of education who has met his executives uh in the consideration this evening of establishing a new

081subcommittee there's just only so much time in the day and if we don't actually have an active subcommittee the thought was this is the the time to move forward continue the work we've done and continue implementing the enhancements and move forward okay i will uh i'll just make a comment that it was a very effective subcommittee in terms of reviewing uh all the things that we can we're doing in our schools and finding breakthrough areas but it was losing momentum right it's because we covered just about everything we needed to cover so i think it's right the right time to move it into more operational mode as john says um and uh and use our time for yet another ad hoc committee which we'll talk about soon thank you and thank you bob and other

082gold members who were part of that it really was important to have your input thank you we put some good things into the budgets and uh into our procedures and processes that i think were excellent discussions so all right any other questions on that okay so all in favor aye thanks everyone okay uh up next um is establishment of a new subcommittee regarding equity diversity and race and uh amy rather than um read the motion that's here which is really just to have a discussion um we have here tonight some guests from cabe that dr burrell and i have been having some very meaningful and thought-provoking conversations with um and so i think there there might be a better place for emotion later on um after they speak um but being the incredible valuable uh

083resource that cabe is we thought it would be helpful if they share shared their experiences with us and how they might help us work to develop this potential ad hoc committee so um first i would like to introduce uh robert rader he's the executive director of the connecticut association of the boards of education he has a media in industrial and labor relations from cornell university and a jd from albany law school of union university uh bob joined the new york state school boards association in 1981 as assistant counsel and has worked there in a variety of positions including legislative representative direct director of risk management services and director of and counsel for policy and employee relations services he has too many memberships and chairmanships and awards in his bio to list and he has also

084presented numerous workshops on issues of importance to boards of education both nationally and statewide and has authored hundreds of articles in nationally recognized journals bob has a passion for helping school boards provide all kind of children with a high quality education he has written extensively on issues of equity diversity and inclusion and he staffs the k board of directors equity diverse diversity and inclusion committee and was a key driver for the search that cabe offers in this area including the equity toolkit bob is also a member of the board of directors for the connecticut regional branch of the anti-defamation league which fights for justice and tolerance for all so without further ado i would like to welcome robert rader to tonight's meeting welcome bob and thank you so much and i would take the time

085rose if i could just now introduce uh martha raquin harris who um i think you'll find is so lovely i feel like i have a new friend and i've only met her through zoom um uh and i'd also like to add in that that we were fortunate enough last week to have dr ruby join our conversations um and we really got into some thought-provoking uh uh conversations as rosa said it was really really really great um uh martha bracken-harris is a retired educator with over 40 years of extensive experience working with students and adults in a variety of public schools independent schools and college settings as a classroom teacher administrator and diversity trainer for sphere of influence includes educators children and families from cities towns suburban and rural she has been the director of the

086summer institute for beginning teachers in the independent schools she's trained new teachers and she's she's been all over martha's passion has been her work in diversity equity inclusion and social justice she is a founding member and served 34 years as a trustee of the sphere consortium of independent schools an organization that seeks to make the hartford area independent schools welcoming and safe for employees and students martha's also worked with the avon public schools hartford public schools suffield simsbury and manchester public schools as well as west hartford and bloomfield so she has been in all kinds of communities and again like i said all over the state this past february 2020 so we're actually very lucky here in brookfield uh martha was hired as a diversity consultant 4k and so the the nelly may foundation has

087provided a grant for diversity work for cave we are working under that grant mr raider has been incredible with his generosity of resources for us at this point and again we've had great conversations some initial discussions about what things could look like and what both martha and bob could bring to supporting brookfield and uh i'd like to just maybe start with after introducing martha maybe start with bob and bob maybe reference we shared our value statement from the district and from the board with both martha and bob and i i think you'll be happy to hear kind of their perspective uh when they saw that um unity frankly uh so bob i'll turn it over to you and let you share a little bit about yourself a little bit about thank you so much john

088and thank you rosa thank you maureen it's a pleasure to work with you um and and thank you for all the board to all the board members for being good supporters of cave um we we appreciate what you do the voluntary nature of of so much of your work and and at this point uh as i as i always say um nobody really signed up to be on a board in the middle of an epidemic like this a pandemic so i appreciate the hard work you're doing we we are very well aware of uh what a difficult time this is and it's not only difficult because of the pandemic obviously there have been social justice issues in the country in the state and i very much appreciate and admire brookfield which is you could just

089tell by how your meeting was running uh one of the best uh school districts i know of and your willingness to embrace or at least look consider embracing uh this whole different area of work uh is really to be commended and i i thank john and rosa uh for asking us to come in this uh this type of work has been very important to me for years uh i've mentioned and i've written about i have a son who is transgender in and he has really opened up my eyes to this whole world of hurt in some cases of pain of oppression uh that not only has he in some small ways luckily uh worked his way through uh to become a teacher a public school teacher but he's also opened my eyes to what is

090happening with others in our communities and certainly we're very well aware at cave of how the demographics in our state are changing uh probably 50 percent of our kindergarten students entering this year are of color and uh certainly there are things to learn no matter how much you might think you understand racism implicit bias and so on it's eye-opening it's interesting i'm i've just started reading white fragility which is actually written by a white person white professor out in washington and i think we don't as white people realize the privileges we have um it's as easy as you know we'll never you know i don't worry if i'm ever pulled over by a cop that because of the color of my skin i would not be treated right i don't have to worry about that

091but every person of color to some extent does so what we've tried to do over the last year we put out the toolkit i know john has seen it and and it is available on our website uh for downloading we thought it was so important we opened it up for everybody who wanted to see it in the state not only our members which you are of course and therefore would have the opportunity to see it uh but we started working with martha and martha is it's a real privilege for me to work with martha because she knows this type of work has been doing it for quite a while understands school boards her her husband is uh president of cabe um and also president uh chair of the bloomfield board um and just so you

092don't think there's conflict of interest i made the decision to hire martha uh don had no no part in it at all at all uh but martha's the best person for this and we really look forward to working with you in any way you think is right and we'll talk about that after martha talks about her background a little bit martha okay thank you bob for those kind words and um thank you all who are on this call it to me it was just such a pleasure to be able to sit with educators and listen to all the great work that you're doing i'm very very impressed i loved our meeting last week when we were getting our heads together and how the energy just flowed from all of us and the enthusiasm and i'm

093just um i'm just always loved being in educational settings so this is this is a great you know it's just a great job for me to have and i am so excited to be able to continue the work that i've actually been doing all my life my um dad was a baptist minister martin luther dr martin luther king's good friend and he worked with him and so i grew up during the 60s and was very involved in everything and i i think that um having those experiences and being able to watch work happen from nothing and how people made it grow kept their commitment and changed the world but not enough many disappointments i before i um came before i got on the call i was reading why we can't wait a letter from a

094birmingham jail from dr martin luther king and um when john and i talked and he says it's now and he's committed not just because of you know all the things that have happened but because the time is now um it's been too long and so we know that i'm excited about being on the ground floor again with um seeing something develop and seeing you nurture and mold it because ultimately i'm interested in each and every child in every system across this nation and abroad and if one child is being denied the right to be able to develop and change his life his or her life and go out into the world to change the world then that's that's just an opportunity that we missed and the great thing about diversity work is that we may

095think it's just focused on race but it's not the things we learn by working um to have justice for uh people people of color all of those skills are transferable and when we're thinking about policy we start to include all and then we we just end up having a better system not just for people of color not just for people um you know who are not in dominant positions but for everybody because diversity this uh this you know i'm a researcher and i just love reading um studies and it shows that a diverse environment is just better for everybody so um thank you for thank you bob for giving me a chance at a after career career um but but it's great because i've um worked with many many different kinds of communities and i've

096worked you know in cities and i've worked all around but most of my work has been with um in educational institutions where which are majority white so it's very interesting that um you know that that i follow this path always going back to my community and bringing what i've learned but knowing that um there are so there are so many good people in every in every race and for me to see the transformation that the work does for some of my white colleagues and friends and it moves them to tears and they are just ever so grateful so you're on a great journey we're here for you with whatever you need and thank you for giving this this time to just tell you something about our passion thank you so much and thanks for being

097here does anybody have any questions or comments um for either martha or bob while they're while they're here so bob you're leaning towards the camera i'm not sure if you wanted to say something and now you're on you oh there you go working to get this darn thing off mute excuse me so thank you both for coming i appreciate it and i'm looking forward to working with you both on this journey that we've agreed to go embark on i guess the question i have for you is you watch and you work with other districts who are in a similar situation to brookfield um what has been the biggest secret of success of really getting organized to go after this topic i mean who's been what what have people done that have been extraordinarily successful in

098terms of building momentum because this is about building momentum uh to doing the right thing and i'm just kind of curious from both of your experiences you know what are the one of the little tricks of the trade that would help us as a board get it off on the right foot well i if it's okay with you martha i'll start and i'll just say um for me um and for the districts i've seen its commitment a lot of this work starts with yourself you have to understand your biases and how you feel about other people and what you've gone through in your life and this is not an attempt in any way to say that the uh the experiences of of people are not valued they're all valued but this is just a different

099perspective so i would say commitment to to at least be open to learning about this area um and and having a core of people who are willing to spend the time do the reading think about it and then talk about it and spread the word to me that is the the way to do it martha right and you know i agree with you and you know because we've talked about this and i think about momentum and what does it take for momentum it takes food fuel and the more you read the more you educate yourself the more you educate everyone around you then that can keep the momentum going because just maybe one book or one article will just spark something in you but i'm also going to add to that there will be challenges

100and i just invite you to lean into the challenges because they are not there to stop you they are there to help you grow and once once you figure out how you're going to handle the challenges and you'll be amazed at what you learn by it and rather than um making you tired conquering those challenges will energize you and so um just just keep the right perspective about the process and i guess one more thing i unite i always have one more thing is you're not in it alone and don't be alone you have people around you i'm sure bob and i will get to know about what other districts are doing things don't duplicate you need to find some partners to share to talk about if if some people are half a year a

101year ahead of you then you can really benefit and they can benefit by teaching you because they will be reviewing um what they've done so please don't don't stay in a cocoon and say this is going to be our little thing and we're not going to um you know nobody will know you know but but do but do that don't don't sap your energy on things that you don't have to thank you anyone else okay um so i have a motion drafted um it's quite long-winded so lisa i'll probably just send you the wording to it but i'd like to go ahead and read that and then if there's any further discussion on the motion we can do that then so i will move that the brookfield board of education establish a diversity equity and

102inclusion committee which is charged with strong consideration of the following actions as part of their comprehensive planning process to develop a process for students and staff to recognize existing racial biases understand how curricular approaches may inadvertently promote such bias and develop an intentional and intellectual approach to addressing racial issues with the aim of all members of the community being valued and a and feeling a sense of belonging supporting the development of instructional activities extracurricular opportunities and field experiences that promote a richer awareness of cultural and racial diversity reviewing and monitoring policies on diversity inclusion and equity reviewing curriculum in grades k-12 through the lens of multicultural and diverse perspectives reviewing and employing mechanisms for example anonymous tips or trusted adults to allow students and staff to share sensitive and confidential information that will help in

103the investigation of acts of bullying harassment and racism continuing to research and implement best practices and emotional programs and resources to ensure that every student feels safe in a supportive environment determining where our schools could enhance understanding respect caring problem solving conflict resolution anti-bullying etc providing training for all staff aimed at maintaining a safe inclusive and equitable learning environment for all students including students of color and while the board recognizes that it is difficult to develop quantifiable metrics for the results of all the work of this committee these will be the indicators of progress made one further lessening or elimination of the student achievement gap between students of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds two cultural competency through throughout the school system especially in communications between students staff and members of the community and third survey

104responses so that is very long but very comprehensive motion do i have a second second second thanks bob does anybody have any questions can i just can i just make a point about that um a lot of that was taken as as uh martha was just talking about was taken actually from not a charge but a some kind of emotion in newtown just so you know other districts are starting to to wake up to the need to do this i also looked at glastonbury which is the town i lived in i live in but for the metrics at the end the discussion between dr ruby and and john and and rosa was really what i used to sort of say this is what uh will be helpful to to brookfield and certainly if you want

105to change any of it as you go forward that's fine i just wanted to make sure i gave you something comprehensive so you can think about this this is this is very important stuff and it will take some work absolutely yeah go ahead john thanks rosa and if i may bob it was extremely helpful and what was really important to to rosa and i and just crack crafting that for the board to consider is we wanted to give some you know when you think about bob's question you know where do you start with all of this and what what are the strategies and tactics going forward to get things going obviously we have to do what we're doing right now we have to have a chair for the committee we have to establish the committee

106membership there's a lot to do but going at this in a unified way with board direction to the committee to give the committee uh some tangible starting points and then let the committee make that you know make this happen is is really the i think the best process way to go about this absolutely and that's basically what i was um about to say i think it's you know important to to have some sort of structure generally in place for what we want this committee to accomplish but really it should be because it's such a intellectual process um the committee is going to be the one obviously to to figure out the best way to to make those approaches so so rosa have you given any thought or discussion about the size of the committee and

107the makeup of the committee um i wa i wanted to leave that to most well mostly to the committee in terms of who they feel they should pull in whether they should have um you know some standing members um or some that they just bring in an advisory capacity but um i do think that at least two board members um should be a part of this and um anyone from the administrative team john feels um you know is is important to have um be a member and there are already because we have talked about this sort of in the past um there are already community members that are saying they want to be a part of this so obviously the community um uh members that are parents as well as um other interested parties are

108certainly going to be part of this well i think it needs to have a little more structure than we'll let the committee decide um i think i think the core membership of the committee needs to be defined by this body and uh you know they there and then and then once the core membership is done they can set up a broader community of ad hoc subgroups if necessary but i did much like this uh the standing security committee we were on we made that decision up front there was so many board members so many members of the public so many members of the administration and uh i think we need to decide that we can always modify it later but as a starting point so that that we can start going out and recruiting the

109proper standing members of the community i think we need to we need to establish a starting point we don't have to do it tonight but we ought to do it from this board establishing what the committee makeup is well i i would i would say that you know at least two up to three board members john is there um any members from from your team that you think should be sort of permanent members of of the committee yes and i've had uh expression of interest so i won't mention names or anything tonight but yes there's definitely teachers and admin team members that are interested in energy and i'm gonna i'm gonna interject just here from the high school perspective i think you know just when you start as you start to talk about membership i

110think it's gonna be critically important to have um students on this as well so i just i put that in there as just a consideration as we move forward there's already several students that have come forward to me um that are looking to to step in and take some make some real change so i just want to put that plug in there as well thanks mark what do other board members feel is important to have in terms of committee makeup i mean teachers and students seem to be sort of obvious choices um both parents yep how about uh i'm sorry that's how about business owners certainly if we're looking at this sort of as a if there's any component of it that can be community education things like you know field experiences and things like

111that so you know to the point bob is making a very strategic selection could be very helpful in terms of that thank you mike so so just a thought i i think you need to establish a core committee that is sets the leadership and agenda right that is small enough to be um manageable right because you can't do that with a 30 person committee right and large enough to have representation right so i'm thinking this is going to be bigger than your normal committees would be but that um you know i'm thinking that you would want to shoot for 10-ish right with a couple of board members some members of the public students teachers administrators um and probably some minimum requirement and minimum diversity requirement in that committee right because we want to make sure

112it's properly represented um then i think that committee can establish subgroups right which go off on missions to deal with things like and they could bring in additional people on that so you know they you know like i could see a a community outreach committee or a curriculum group or whatnot that might be more like curriculum may have more educators in it and less you know community members but in terms of awareness we might have more community members involved so i i'm thinking the committee can set the table but you need to establish a core group that's a reasonable size so you can start setting that table right and it's about building a momentum if you start with 30 people or 25 people what will happen is they'll get into a morass all right and

113i think you just need to start with a group that allows you to to grab it set the agenda and then expand right as the committee sees fit so i would i would charge the committee you know i would actually recommend that we establish maybe at our next meeting here's the number of members from each you know grouping um let john start advertising for those you know if it's administrators he goes to his administrative team if it's educators we go through his leadership team to seek out uh proper and appropriate people and if it's members of the public we advertise it right and see what volunteers would get much like we did john at the security thing um and then we have two members of our board on that committee right i think two would

114be a good starting point and then first charge of that um committee ought to be what are the first five things we want to go work on and do we have the right committee makeup gonna recommend a change to the committee or an expansion of the committee that's when we do that after we have that first group because that's just how you just in terms of building momentum you can't do it with too many to start with okay that's my two cents worth rosa i'm thinking it might be helpful and whether it's in the core committee or as bob talked about the subcommittee to involve um one of our school resource officers or someone else from the police department that's a great idea and then also maybe similarly a school social worker or psychologist or

115someone from you know in those roles within the community okay uh for the other bob that's here since you're here um what are what's your input on this in terms of committee makeup and well how big it should be i would defer to martha but it would seem to me that starting with a few people like bob suggested is strategic and will help you in the long run you want the gut yeah i agree with that too you need to be very deliberate about how you set your structure and be very very clear and too many people will you know will be just hard to manage you'll you'll have so many opinions it's it's great you have to have as many voices as you can that represent um you know your population um however you

116need to you know there are other ways you can get people involved and you can think about that um once you get settled in the in the small thing plus it takes time everybody is not going to have a lot of time and be willing to put in that time so you really have to get com a commitment with people and say you know can will you are you willing to make this a priority knowing that we don't know what's happening in the future but um so really it's much better to get really people who are going to be able to get give that commitment to begin but make sure that you're doing things maybe right away uh a workshop a general workshop so everybody can start to feel that they're they're going to that

117they were in people love to be in on on the beginning of something you know and um but so that can happen you can make strategize how you can make you know the education part will will really help people feel that they're in getting involved and can think about the work okay um so i mean i have i've jotted down what everyone has said um two board members the school resource officer administrators teachers students parents business owners is there any other group that anyone feels we may have overlooked i mean that's already even just one representative from those groups is we're already at a fairly large committee that said i mean knowing how other committees have gone schedules lining up you know sometimes it's nicer to have a bigger committee because then there's always sort

118of representation there um so but other than you know those general groups have is there anything else that we may have overlooked in terms of committee makeup just make sure you put capital letters diverse on the bottom of that list right or the top of that list yeah that's true it's got to be diverse if it's all if it's all one race or one uh one mix of people and one point of view it will not work absolutely okay um so there there is a motion on the table is there any other further discussion on this okay so all those in favor hi thank you and thanks bob and martha for being here that was great invitation i'm sure he'll be in touch yeah i hope so i hope so anything we can do to

119help you know you got it yeah bob and martha thank you it's been great to work with you in just a very short time we look forward to a to a very fruitful and uh rich relationship thank you thank you so much thank you hey good night everybody good night take care okay uh up next we have an overview presentation regarding reopening school for the 2020 2021 school year thanks rosa so while i i always uh like to be brief um this is something that we can't just rush through although um it won't be overly lengthy i just promise you that uh at this time in the evening um as eric's getting the powerpoint up i would like to just start this off by sharing with you that tonight is not a presentation of the

120reopening plan again i want to repeat that for the public who might be watching this back or watching this right now tonight is not a presentation of the reopening plan the reopening plan i will be mentioning several times obviously throughout this presentation tonight is more about context requirements perspective planning process and next steps the uh i'll get into the rest of it as the powerpoint goes on so eric if you could just move on for us so just uh very quickly and people could read this i don't have to to read the whole thing the district's school reopening team was made up of various stakeholders from the forefoot's affordable ed and finance we had student representatives with representatives from all of our bargaining units including you know one representative with the exception of the teachers

121we had five different teachers on the group uh we also had parents the administrative team of course was represented um and then uh the uh we have here trying to look i don't know what happened there oh um i have a little mix up in that slide i don't know what happened but anyway the membership that was the membership of the stakeholders we also um have had many conversations and we have been consulting as you look at the bottom part with all of our caps representatives and colleagues the connecticut state department of education western connecticut regional group which i do a great deal of work with um our regional reopening team health department um our consulting physician dr ferreira and um of course um the issue coming up that we're looking at with adjusting our

122school calendar already and we're looking at the waiver that we talked about earlier so there's a lot going on there's things we're consulting with there's things we're considering and we have a variety of people really helping us out the the june meetings were held in 5th 11th and 18th for that entire school reopening team which was speaking of committees and organizations was quite a large group joy and rosa were on the team from the board of education okay next slide so what did the reopening team do in june specifically they provided critical input to our educators specifically provided broad guidance regarding the model for returning to school in the fall our models we communicate they communicated with stakeholders so they have meetings the meetings were virtual they were recorded many stakeholders would share those with

123uh their friends their colleagues and talk about what was discussed at the meeting and try to make sense of things for them to build perspective in the community the administrators from the school reopening team have developed the details of the plan based on both the broad guidance from the team and also from survey data the plan was shared today with this with the full school reopening team to solicit feedback and consider adjustments i'm looking for that feedback uh and turn around by this friday as many of you know we have a very tight turnaround having to submit the plans by next friday the principals are actually with their teachers with a focus on instructional models this coming friday uh it's a volunteer for any other teachers that have questions ideas thoughts and the principles have

124been um intimate in working with the district team to develop the plan the number one priority is health and safety we said this at the start of june and we continue to say that and that has to be the number one priority considering the circumstances we are in next so the adapt advance achieve state department of education and governor plan for reopening the schools was released it doesn't seem like this but it was just a short two weeks ago the state plan was released and we have three major directives plan to reopen school this fall for all of our student days per week develop a high hybrid model where 50 of the students attend at one time or another depending on health cert health data and circumstances and also prepare for full distance learning or

125what will be referred to going followed by the state and by uh in our plan as remote learning or remote instruction next all right so there are key mitigating strategies in the plan and they are non-negotiable most people are familiar with about putting them on one slide we'll make it very clear and start to paint a picture for what school will look like uh in in-person learning for all students in the school or if they're even in a hybrid model things will look very and and i don't i want to be very transparent um and we're not going to pretend that things are going to look exactly like they were because they are not under the current circumstances so face coverings are mandatory um with very few exceptions and people heard about what those exceptions

126might be medical et cetera mass breaks will be built cleaning and hygiene there's a lot of protocols that have to be developed uh training that goes along with that and staffing implications to ensure we have a clean cohorting this is a newer a newer concept in terms of a requirement of the plan uh where we try to keep groups together uh as much as we can for lessons to spread as well as contact tracing of course social distancing uh the phraseology in the district plan is six feet uh while wearing a mask to the greatest extent possible and the american academy of pediatrics talks about three to six feet with a mask and so we're using those requirements also advised by dr ferreira our medical advisor and also working with sullivan our public health director

127who are at the meeting tonight and can answer questions at the end of this powerpoint and then transportation we're um we have the uh ability per the state plan to um uh fill the buses uh with students and encourage parents to drive their children because of that um we've talked a little bit about the limitations of transportation and um asking parents to bring their kids to school this is an area where we're paying close attention to and mr post is working with the bus company uh in terms of uh sanitation on the buses as well and so the big takeaway here is that they're non-negotiable of course but these are the the very strategies we're talking about the the four the first four ones there that protect us are also the most challenging to implement

128we built an efficiency model with our traditional school system and so we're looking now to increase space uh increase in increase area and it's it's very difficult and challenging and i know lots of you watch the news you have friends some of you are in education um in some way or another we're all touched by education beyond the board of education with our families our friends and uh it's a significant challenge at this moment though i do need to to share that the our our parents have been incredible um our special education program for the summer is in a remote learning model um i'm getting really excellent feedback things are going well synchronous and live in many cases and um the administrative team uh our directors our administrators uh are willing teachers who have been

129working uh in in other groups that have been working uh with our administrators our nurses have been incredible in working together to develop the plan so anyway we can move on all right so i just wanted to list out all the things we've done to ascertain information from the community it's been a very inclusive process and so i wanted to review that so the schools during the spring um conducted surveys some uh conducted surveys of both parents and students others of parents um and they have we've been working on that with that information and especially on distance learning and the experiences the kids had and what we could do to improve uh we've listened to parents uh student anecdotal concerns of mr baldwin deal with the athletic advisory group but also through the spring summer

130we receive emails we have phone calls we have conversations and we we really process all of that into a little perspective um we conducted a staff thought exchange on june 18 asking about the staff how can we improve uh our distance learning we improve connections student to student and teacher to student uh the parent survey many of you are aware of we just went out on june 30th right after the examination of the plan from the state the uh input i always get this one wrong eeoc survey we just surveyed our staff regarding coming back to work and that is the employment equal opportunity commission survey there you go i had to get that acronym straight we just conducted that survey to get some information from our teachers the school reopening team um is giving

131feed on the plan as i just mentioned they received the plan the the near final draft of the plan today our principals and faculty are having focused conversations this friday once the plan is published at the end of next week we will the following week conduct a update parent survey specifically trying to find out the information as to whether they plan to send their children or not and that's a big choice that parents have to make and also faculty and staff survey we need to find out more information regarding our faculty and staff and their needs as well okay eric you can go thank you sir we have some key lessons learned about organizational and staff capacity we have this training that was needed during the spring and conducted and will need to continue the

132social and emotional wellness of our students and staff is after physical uh safety is first and foremost uh there's a desire for live interaction there's a desire for consistency uh reliability and scheduling equity making sure that our most vulnerable students are served technology access is a major piece and our tech department has been working very hard on that instruction there's challenging challenges in meeting individual student needs and we need to figure out how we could even do better engaging students again talking about synchronous and asynchronous instruction we need to make a lot of progress on that going forward engaging our families in partnership assessing student learning and other technology needs that are um uh for instruction uh as well as the software and support that goes with that so there's a lot of conversation that

133continues to to emerge from the next slide guiding our reopening plans it's always important to remind everybody that we do not operate in isolation as a school district uh or as a town here in brookfield we work under the guidance of the cdc the connecticut department of health the connecticut reopening team there was a regional reopening team the june 29th document produced by with the guidelines and requirements from the state coordination with the health department our medical advisor emergency operations and then we all do our own on schools that are opening have opened earlier than us different states what's going on in other countries um i can't thank uh dr ruby and some of our other uh colleagues enough for the webinars they're attending and the reading they're doing and the sharing of articles so

134we're continuing to develop our greater profit uh with what else is going on in reopening and how we can learn from that next our priorities in brookfield facilities and operations as i said physical health and safety emotional health and safety and of course teaching and learning and instruction there's integrated themes throughout like equity organizational capacity and hr and obviously budget implications that come with us next so we have six folk there's six focus areas and then compliance and communication is kind of the seventh big area the health and wellness uh focus area facilities and operation which includes transportation as well instruction and teaching and learning as i just said social emotional integration technology our pandemic response and then compliance and communication all of this is detailed um uh in in in great great detail in

135the plan going forward um and again it's being reviewed tonight by the reopening team and i've also if the board did not see that email i forwarded it to you to start reviewing as we were bringing it forward next week at the special meeting so under health and wellness things like social distancing space demarcation health screenings of students and staff ppe cleaning and disinfecting training ventilation hr and of everything i'll say budget implications on it these are things that we're looking at under the category of health and wellness next year facilities and operation looking at school models space utilization schedule considerations food service ordering ordering supplies equipment et cetera hiring facilities transportation so many things under facilities and operations next technology in a big focus area if you're going to have hybrid remote or even

136in-person learning with the opportunity to learn from anywhere ready at a moment's notice we have to plan for three scenarios and we have to be ready uh at a moment's notice with our technology as i mentioned in my superintendent report we had a purchase of 300 chromebooks uh recently approved by the board of finance and in next year's announce this year built into the existing operating budget was a purchase of 450 chromebooks so we are updating our fleet with 750 chromebooks to ensure our students are outfitted faculty laptops i talked about the uh update for our oldest laptops at wisconsin course building our infrastructure programs applications and software and training that needs to go with that we're gonna ask teachers and staff to work remotely they need to have the best training possible next our

137next focus area is under the title of instruction teaching and learning we have to look at our curriculum and our instruction our technology that goes with that resources for student the change out and revision of our assessment practices as the year starts human resources what are the staffing implications we're still working on that engaging students we talked about synchronous learning with remote learning formal scheduling live teaching and interaction blended models and learning from everywhere you'll hear that phrase a little bit more because you learn also in school from your device we have pd that needs to go with that and obviously our goal is to strive to have all students on grade level by the end of the school year a tall order considering how much time has been missed next the social and emotional

138focus area making sure we are looking at the social emotional needs of our students and our employees we want to identify our most vulnerable and help them as best we can and support them we need to partner with families and community like i talked about a little bit earlier um our staff making sure they're connecting along with our counselors and planning for support pandemic response you'll see this color code many of us superintendents are just using a simple green yellow red to designate in-person uh learning when health indicators are positive uh positive in a good in a good way meaning negative i guess nowadays uh where we're able to have uh in-person instruction in our schools um when things might get a little worse moving to a hybrid model which we've talked about quite a

139bit where we go into school 50 capacity where students would rotate particular days and then if we have to move if there's particular substantial community transmission if we have to move to full remote learning um one thing i need i want everybody to know is that we are still awaiting the actual health indicators public health indicators they have not been communicated to the school districts yet as to when you would make decisions to either shut down or reopen school we've been asking that for a couple of weeks we still don't have that next slide final slide is compliance and communication we are required from the state plan to have what's called a compliance liaison i have decided that i will serve as the compliance liaison in working hand in glove with our nurse coordinator mrs

140laforgia who's also joined us this evening and been a tremendous contributor to the planning document we will collaborate with our administration our nurses and our health officials to ensure timely and accurate excuse me that should say communication i apologize for the spelling mistake there again we're waiting for that specific criteria i just talked about and that request for information was sent uh yesterday we have a response which is they're working on what that will be we do not have that yet next slide i wanted to share a little a quick uh quick bit of information we had almost 1700 responses on our survey which is a tremendous turnout for our small district and on the parent survey which was given on june 30th at this time 81 81.6 percent of the parents surveyed who responded

141to the survey said they plan to send their children back to school um and uh 18 and a half percent say they plan to keep their children home of the student the parents who are planning to send their children to school 59 percent of them say they plan to unilate utilize bus transportation in the comment section it was uh quite obvious uh people were all over the place but one of the themes was that uh regardless parents were concerned about uh children having to wear face coverings all day and we understand that um when the plan is published that's okay eric you can go when the plan is published next week and we put out another survey those those uh uh response data may change uh drastically or remain the same we're not sure so

142what are the budget implications everybody's been waiting for this and we're still working it out be very honest with you it takes a lot of time and there's a lot of physical plant work that we need to do which impacts um staffing possibilities etc so um we are working looking at will we have increased transportation needs will be issues with the school lunch program supplies uh whether that's instructional supplies remember we talk about children not being able to use the same set of supplies in the same day really discouraging sharing materials so that means you have to purchase more materials so there's a lot of that thinking that needs to go on our principals are working like heck with their teams to work on this uh ppe which we made a major purchase already um

143and obviously cleaning supplies and things like that those are just some examples equipment technology we made a big technology purchase already so we're kind of set there but there may be software and program things that we need to uh to buy and then of course staffing looking at custodian um and tutors monitors things like that depending on the situations that we find again physical plant is being worked on on this week by our principals and facility team so we anticipate having enough information to provide uh an estimate for next week and we'll do the best to be as accurate as possible again things change all the time just like yesterday we were totally surprised by the 180 day waiver we didn't think that would come down from the state and and there it was on

144the news so things are constantly changing in this world we're in now next all right so i have two slides on next steps because i want to walk through the process for everybody so of course we want to incorporate stakeholder feedback from the district district reopening team and the faculty conversations coming up this friday into the reopening plan as feasible and appropriate we want to make revisions to complete the reopening plan next week i will bring the plan before the board for possible approval and that is july 22nd if there is feedback from the board we will make any final revisions in edits and then i have to submit the plan to the state by july 24th which is next friday at that point we'll disseminate disseminate the reopening plan to faculty staff parents in

145the community and post it and then as like i just said health data changes uh edicts from the state come down or from the cdc we will have to adjust the plan accordingly next slide continuing on the next steps the district continues to continue collaboration and support of each school team to implement the plan and develop local practices and the areas obviously of facilities protocols training in communication uh we will be holding once the plan is disseminated public q a sessions where i've already talked with dr ferrara and i'm sure dr sullivan will make himself available as well where we could have our health experts medical experts available to help with parent questions and things like that and next and that was it so thank you so i really want to open the floor to

146the board if there's any questions um and we also have dr ferrara and dr sullivan with us and so we're ready to go it's a lot to process yeah and i was involved in the reopening team and it's still a lot so and rosa that's this is just kind of some of the process right things to think about in context it's not the actual plan which is 46 pages well i i was going to ask a question about a basic structural question john is um do parents have the flexibility to say i want my child to be at home and being taught at remotely or because that sounds like that's an underlying assumption but at the same time you have this red yellow green where it's 100 of the kids in the school so what

147is the basic guidance of parents rights in terms of what they can and what they're allowed to declare or not declare at this point the state requirement is that we prepare to open for all students this week but parents can choose to not have their child attend our school in that model in person and we would have to provide a remote opportunity for the child and that is not typically a an opportunity if a parent is not in a typical situation a parent does not want their child to be educated in our school system they choose to homeschool their child and we are not responsible so it's a very different edict from the state and it puts an incredible strain extreme strain on the system and we're working on how we can work that out

148so so if we're if parents have the right to make that this high level decision i want my child to be at home and i'm okay with my child in the school what information are we providing to parents sort of just a survey right so they can make an informed decision about that decision um and it's a public health question so maybe i had to direct this to uh the public health folks on the phone but i'm just i'm worried about parents making a decision in either a vacuum or in an environment where they're hearing all these stories on the tv every day um which may have more to do with texas than have to do with brookfield connecticut so how are we orchestrating communicating to parents so they understand what it means to be

149in school health-wise so the first thing bob is we we have a uh the plan is extremely detailed and it will be disseminated next week so i gotta god i'm not trying to i'm not trying to circumvent that but that's important parents need to read that and and we will have uh after that um and we will have conversations where where the picture can't be painted well what does school look like my child be at a desk they really have to wear a mask all day those pieces but in terms of the health data i appreciate where you went with that question at the beginning i'd like to turn it over dr ferreira could talk a little bit about that on how that information what parents could process and so forth so cornelius will turn

150it over to you yeah so you know so i think i think it's very important that we do that's a really good point an informed decision about coming back to school the reason the american academy of pediatrics was so outspoken in their guidelines on returning and having kids come back to school is because of all the social interactions and the pieces that children can get in the classroom that they can't get at home so from a developmental standpoint it's it's critical that that parents make an informed decision so agree 100 that there should be um information provided to them at the same time parents need to they it's they have free will and they need to ascertain the information ask the questions we will provide information that but they ultimately it's their child and they

151can make their decision and um we can't advise we can share information no i understand that but my i i come from like my point of view from the question is it's a very different decision if you live in a community that's not having a lot of uh communities spread right then if you live in a community where it's ranked and the problem we have in the united states right now is we have both right we have some places in the country that are relatively low community spread we want to eat fit that way but at the same time the news is filled with stories of situations that are happening and stories of huge and brookfield happens to be on the low community red point of point and uh and i'm i'm absolutely convinced that

152people will react out of context if we don't talk about what brookfield situation really is right and uh and i know mr dunn is doing a good job of communicating but i think it has to dovetail right into what we're talking to parents about in a very a very powerful way that we're in a different place than a lot of communities we want to keep it that way here's where our plan is right read exhibit a um but um understand we have i mean how many new cases have we had in brookfield in the last uh month uh i have to i have to go to doctor supplement on that one i know i know ray is on i can clarify that as of uh yesterday we have had 170 positive tests that doesn't mean

153they're all they've all been sick but we had 170 positive tests of a total of 1831 tests now that puts us well ahead of the state average but we have to recognize that most of those cases came within a a good month or more ago we've only had two cases since uh july first in a one and a half year old and in a 12 year old prior to that the vast majority of cases were in older individuals we have had eight deaths the youngest 54 the oldest 90 and most of them have been octogenarians so we have to realize that this is a dynamic situation and what we say to parents today may be entirely different from what we have to say to parents five weeks from now right so that's that's really the

154key um we are doing well our numbers are uh considerably falling off um we only are ahead of the state average of one percent because of the fact that we had a goodly number of positive cases early on and as i say the good news is that we've only had two cases in the month of july and those have been in younger individuals we have not demonstrated community spread our vast majority has been intra-family spread which means basically that the the index case within that family has not been self-quarantining and hence preventing spread to their family members but we have not demonstrated that there's been communities spread that is to say a number of individuals within the same street within the same neighborhood who have been affected it's quite widely scattered at this point in

155time that's great input thank you um and you know what we need parents to hear that um you know so they make the informed decisions um and uh or what you're gonna get john is you know 20 of your students not coming to school and i feel sad for that right if uh because those children want this out of an opportunity um and maybe the right answer is ten percent maybe the right answer is five percent maybe it's 25 percent i'd like it just so everyone's informed right so as we're looking at that communications plan just keep feeding together let's take a video of dr sullivan and i put that right in there so that people hear that because i don't think that'd be all people here i can't tell you how many times i

156walk down the street and people have no idea what's going on in brookfield and i say go look on the town website but you know i'm getting communications multiple times a week and there's just too many people who just don't go use the resources so i think in our school district we have to we have to force ourselves to not assume that parents are not getting all that information therefore give it to them again or give them the links or give them themselves we provide the links and so forth we're going to provide the facts and and and make sure our parents are informed to give opportunities like a session like this where they can ask those direct questions i mean given that the major concern was wearing face masks all day i mean that's

157something that we don't really have any control over and correct you know that poses a health concern for parents in a different way maybe dr ferrari if you share a little oh i'm sorry did you ask me a question i was just going to say and some you know children are health you don't have compromised health so that's their reason too dr ferrara can you just weigh in on face masks and you know the length of time and you know the natural concerns that folks have you hear the same same concerns yeah so you know so so mask use is really one of the critical pieces and you know as you as you look at the rate of infections in children the good news is once they get to the um school age that that

158transmission rate and dr sullivan can weigh in on this too is much much lower right so the majority of cases to what he pointed out happens in in adults and older individuals so the american academy of pediatrics was pretty clear that you know three to six feet of of distancing and then the mask really goes a long way to help out you know limit the risk for an infection spread so we're gonna have some challenges i think with our younger kids right but again the good news is those are the kids that are likely not to um transfer this virus the older kids i think that's an easier thing to go about but your challenge will still be you're going to get those outliers right that joke around or touch their masks or do things

159that they're not supposed to so i think with anna and her team really doing some education right not only with the kids but also with the parents is going to be a vital piece to help them understand the importance of mask use and that's an excellent point the fact is that if a covid carrier is wearing a mask uh and you are not the lyco transmission is about 30 if both of you are wearing a mask the likely transmission uh drops down to 1.5 wow both of you are not wearing masks it's about 70 possibility of transmission so we all have a stake in this um in point of fact um we all have to buy into the fact that uh we have a role to play in preventing the spread of this uh disease

160called covid19 uh and by doing so we just might save somebody else's life so it's important to stress the fact that uh masks will protect you from an individual who might be a carrier and right now we don't have any idea whether or not there are asymptomatic carriers in the population we suspect that they are just as with the common cold but some of us are old enough to remember typhoid mary in new york city a carrier who spread her disease of typhoid to a large population of individuals and yet she herself never produced any symptoms of the disease itself so um masks are have been promulgated by the cdc as a substitute for social distancing but we're realizing that that six foot social distancing may not be true it may be that respiratory droplets

161may remain in the atmosphere for a little longer than we suspect so in point of fact if there's a respiratory droplet cloud and you walk through it you may in point of fact contact the disease or contract the disease without actually knowing it a mask will prevent that so that's the key a mask is a substitute for social distancing but remember that being without a mask you can be in contact with a a coveted positive person for up to 15 minutes and very likely not contract the disease the mask is a substitute for social distancing thank you doctor there are other questions from the board yeah i have a question on the uh in person learning where it says uh is there a defined uh what minimal to no spread of the virus are we

162doing that like in one per million one per thousand like is it what is there a set number there or we just is it more of a subjective term at this point well i'll i'll start mike and then i'll turn it over to to the to either one of our consultants the the green as you have it and again yeah it doesn't matter which one it's a moderate high like what's an idea of what that looks like i i assume the situation we are in here in connecticut um those that that that data is where governor lamont and the state department of education and the department of public health have worked together to say we at this point with the data we have we can move forward with in-person learning 100 i don't i can't

163speak directly to right now what would change to make us say we have to go to hybrid but we have we have a general idea so maybe i can lean on either doctor to weigh in on that um where that will change and how we base that to answer uh dr murphy's question dr sullivan do you want to start uh sure um one thing that is going to change is the fact that we've opened up sports clinics uh we've opened up the beach uh we've opened up a number of activities for children we've opened up playgrounds um and in point of fact this will give us some good idea within the next few weeks as to whether or not we can move forward safely on this issue our total numbers as i said are 170

164cases so far out of 1831 tested as of yesterday but that's out of a population of seventeen thousand so it's significantly sample size right lower right with regard to the total population also they print out numbers with regard to uh rates per hundred thousand and our rate per hundred thousand uh is quite good compared to a goodly number of other communities in our area so i think we're holding our own we may see a shift towards younger people testing positive as time goes on some some researchers such as the scripps institute are reporting uh some mutations in the virus making it more prone to binding to younger people's lung cells and as i say it's a very dynamic process and uh what will take place within the next few weeks as far as children's activities

165in town might have some influence so our message today to parents will be significantly different than it might be four or five weeks from now right as if is there uh i mean there's a doctor but i said before that we don't operate in the bubble so you know is this a minimal spread through the state and minimal spread through uh you know just the town minimal spread through the region like i just kind of feel there's a lot of subjectivity here it's like it's not even like there's not even we're just throwing words on there so you know so there's there are there are specific formulas that they utilize right so and you know and i think that's part of what we're waiting for so there's something called a two-week cumulative incidence rate so

166that's going to be looking at the number of new cases right over a two-week period out of say for example 100 000 people and then based on that equation right number of cases per 100 000 people there's a definition that comes in as low rate medium rate or high rate rate or high risk and that low in some of the states i know south carolina for example that was defined as zero to 50 cases per 100 000 people medium was 51 to 200 and then anything over 200 would put you into a high category state so i think we'll wait for some guidance from from connecticut to see how they would like to define that incidence rate and that's going to be your trigger that's going to say open hybrid model or you've got to

167close down so we're not we're not doing it by state or region or like like when new york count like let's say putnam county goes over two percent i do not have the data or information on that at this time but okay it just kind of seems like like i said i will say any direction or minimum moderate or high yeah um i will say this i think brookfield is doing very very well um oh i agree we have only had two cases this month so far um early on with our contact tracing we determined that a large number of individuals contracted the disease by if through uh westchester county uh and new rochelle or traveling on the train that's kind of quiet back and you could literally watch the wave of progression out of

168new york and right up route seven uh it's it was almost pathetic mnemonic that you could appreciate how it spread right up through route seven now the concentrations are of course in the are in the larger cities hartford and new haven in particular but brookfield is doing very well at this point in time i hope it continues to do well but we will have more information within another few weeks with regard to transmission by uh children because of their interactivity uh that's going on now yeah but now you know and i think i think the key thing here is you know we're learning as we go so you know there's a lot of data there's a lot of information we've learned over the last three four months but you know we still don't have all

169the answers so i think we'll we'll track this very closely we need to look at some of this epidemiological study that dr sullivan is saying and then i think we'll look at the governor and also the governor of new york because we'll have to track both sides of the aisle are we testing at higher rates at this point i know a lot of other states are testing at a much higher rate i mean they're testing two more thousand people a day is connecticut on that route there so you know so i can tell you for for new vans health so as a hospital system we are we are doing up to 900 tests a day but much of that is actually not symptomatic patients because the numbers to what dr sullivan was saying have declined

170substantially and people are actually symptomatic with it the vast majority of folks that are now getting tested are people who have to go back to work or who have a surgical procedure scheduled that they've put off their specific guidelines and criteria on how how far out from the surgery you need to be tested and certified as negative and the good news is we are not seeing positives in these these patients which i think speaks again to the area and then brookfield specifically that we've kind of gotten ahead of the game we keep our fingers crossed it stays that way and and i will add the fact that we have an excellent contact racing team headed up by maureen farrell and as a matter of fact some of your nurses some of your school nurses are

171part of that team um and they are basically uh sitting by uh waiting for cases to come in to to do contact tracing so um we have the team in place but there's a little work for them right now thank you thank you thank the lord but um if there is a sudden spike um they'll be ready to to to do that contact tracing for us does anyone have any other questions about this um can i ask if i didn't want to change the subject if anybody had more health and safety questions i want to let them go first but i just wanted to ask like a curriculum and instruction question if but i don't want to maybe stay on the same topic does anybody else want to have more health and safety questions so

172i was just wondering and if it's if we need to wait for the plan for next week that's that's a fine answer too but i was curious to hear um what are some of your thinking about curriculum instruction in terms of what did we learn from the spring and what are some um ways that we're thinking about planning for an environment that you know could sort of change on a dime i'm curious to hear a little bit more about that i i want to turn it over to dr ruby and um and really thank her and mrs farias and our principals for their leadership in this area we've done a ton of collaborating and so dr ruby please so thanks for that question we learned a lot because we spoke directly to students and i

173think that students because they're living it every day are the uh one of the greatest sources of information that we have and some of the stuff that we heard from them was really surprising like we tend to think or many of us tend to think that you know kids just want to do their own thing and be on their own and one of the things that we heard loudly and clearly was that they wanted more structure they wanted more um regimentation they wanted more uniformity and if you think you know if you look at this through a social emotional lens that really does make a lot of sense because they want security they want um they want uh something that they can they can depend on and high school students um really did not for

174the majority of the students did not like the asynchronous um system that we had and the reason that we had the asynchronicity was because we needed to respect the fact that you know families might not have enough devices that everybody was just thrown into this you know you know kind of head first into the deep end of the pool um teachers not you know having students their own students at home and whatnot and we wanted to remain flexible but what we heard loudly and clearly from students was that while they didn't want to start at 30 they wanted to have a system they wanted to have contact this is the other thing contact and relationships with their teachers and with their with their fellow students and i i know i saw dean on here earlier

175we heard the same thing from the um middle school students and so we um we've talked to a lot of districts that have more experience with synchronous learning um than we did and you know if we had to go to um a hybrid model or a fully online model we would be um thinking more in terms of uh more structure to meet the needs of the students and more you know synchronous type of not not like sitting in front of a computer from eight in the morning until three that would be like ridiculous but more synchronous learning and we we would have time um at this point you know because we're working on it now to um to really do something that was thoughtful and as we're planning it to get input from um students

176and from some of their parents whereas before it was like you know here it's you know gone today and you know here tomorrow like what we knew before was gone and suddenly we were just doing it so that's one thing that i can tell you um in terms of um the 100 back all in model um things that we net that we know that we will be changing that i can speak to is typically when children come back to school in a a more normalized year where you know getting to know each other form communities and then we're quite quickly towards the third week of september moving into our um first um uh benchmark assessment well we're not going to be doing that we're not going to be testing kids um i think that there's

177a little bit of um uh kind of standing standing back on the part of the state we don't know what they're going to ask for but we're certainly not going to be starting to test kids we're really going to be looking to develop initial units of study that aren't even part of our curriculum right now that we'll be working on in the next couple weeks that really um take the perspective of the social emotional lens and really looking at how kids are feeling you know kind of trauma informed instruction not not set you know testing kids do you have trauma do you have trauma you know give them to but just trauma informed um instruction so that we can provide um kind of a wraparound um service approach to bringing kids back into school and

178so that's work that we that we will be embarking on as as people are coming back from vacation and um we're really fortunate because the curriculum work that we've been doing is in our online platform that we're still we've been building it for three years and we're still working on it and because of the way it's structured i spoke about this and some of you will remember um it's very easy to go in and adapt the curriculum without rewriting everything because it's you know it's in this online platform and so our our principals and um the teacher teams that can work with them over the summer we'll be looking at mrs farias and the curriculum specialist will be looking at the priority standards and being reasonable about what is it that we that we absolutely

179have to ensure that we teach and what are the things that we have in our curriculum that are extras that we can either compact or put aside so that we're not killing kids that's not you know we're not gonna try to like fit everything in we're gonna try to be very thoughtful and judicious um and intentional about what what we keep what we cut and what we have to create in our curriculum so that's all i can tell you right now jen i don't know if that helps no i think that's great i think it's really important for our community to hear that you know we've really considered their feedback students feedback and that we've learned from it and there's ways that we're adjusting our curriculum to address it so i think that's really great

180thank you yeah and the other thing i'll add is we were really lucky that we had you know the principals and i you know that they that the principals and and steve baldwin actually did a lot of work with this at the high school bringing in the athletic advisory group because they were always willing to really help us out and they invited me in and we actually i can tell you this um with all sincerity we listen to those students on a weekly basis and our faculty was also being pulled by one of our faculty um members of the high school ernesto de villa and he was giving doing weekly staff and student surveys and mr bollanda and his team were changing things in the curriculum on a week by week basis in response to

181what the students and the faculty were telling them so it wasn't like what we did the best we could to launch what we had to do but we knew that we wanted to continually iteratively review it and make it better and student voice was like hugely helpful to us and mr belanda and his team changed things as they went along week by week so you know it was it was a really very interesting and empowering journey to um these kids are amazing they're so articulate and they if you give them the opportunity to tell you what they're feeling they're just so forthcoming and honest thank you maureen does anyone else have any questions so john you need um our feedback or questions by friday right uh that's the folks from the school reopening team uh

182we like that by friday um that was that that was a pretty speaking of the organization of a committee that was a pretty healthy team in terms of the number of people so we'll get that feedback and try you know a lot of it may just be questions you know we'll see what people are thinking um and we'll take it from there but it's a quick turnaround because i'll be providing the final draft uh for the for the uh for the board on wednesday night next week and we'll actually go through we'll go through the plan we won't read every line in the plan because obviously i want to get it the reason i gave it to you today if you have a week to to read it it won't have major significant changes um

183uh in the next week but there will be areas where we can highlight and say hey we've emphasized this a little bit more we had so we feedback and we thought about this a little bit differently and so i'll highlight those areas and again we can walk through and have a very similar discussion to this next week and and there may be several other areas where we receive new direction um that we have to make adjustments okay thank you all right so um just double checking there's no other comments or questions on this right so uh let's move on to the discussion of calendar school year calendar revisions so so rosa therein lies you know that conversation clearly i think for anybody provided a rationale for why we could use more time for training and

184why the state made the the state board of ed made the decision it made um commissioner cardona so eric i'd like for you eric if you could please put up the current calendar that the board has approved so we have a visual reference point and then we have the proposed um option with moving to 177 days and three additional days of training but let's show the first one so everybody can just see this and one thing i will tell you is some of the just briefly some of the items at the bottom of the calendar you know the decision just came from the state yesterday um i think there's some brookfield high school open house dates that in the proposal will not work and we'll have to you know adjust those uh but that is

185not a uh uh have to be under board auspices that is administrative so in our current calendar uh for net for the coming year you can see if you look at august our new teacher orientation begins with three days of training on the ninth are onboarding on the 19th 20th of august and then all of our teachers are in the week of the 24th for five days of training now you may recall that about a month and a half ago we made an adjustment to this calendar where we shortened the 182 days that we have typically built into our annual calendar to 180 and moved those two days to training days at the beginning of the school year uh in addition to moving a professional development day as well and that's how we're able to

186get the five days because we have known we are going to need not only training and technology and ppe but training in uh instruction remote learning etc there's just so much that has to happen and so this is the existing calendar where the first day of school is monday august 31st and so what we've done um in our so in the proposal about the era show is a change in that very beginning of the school year um walt is in alignment with the new state um opportunity that we have with the 180-day waiver and it provides us the gift of time and so it's no place and we want to take advantage of this as best we can for all the training to ensure our students end in a robust and safe environment and our

187staff enters in that way and is prepared so eric if you could put up the option that we'd like to propose give me a second i just have to change it i am doing it hold on what i'm thinking here and what the team appreciated uh today uh and and in the conversation based on on the ruling that just was announced yesterday is getting those three days taking advantage of that for the training as i just said and taking advantage of the very late labor day holiday this year which is september 7th and moving the start of school for students after labor day which is september 8th and so if we do that and we add three days of training using the total student days from 180 to and add three days of training for

188our faculty and staff and if we back that up as you can see on the calendar new teacher orientation excuse me would start on friday august 21st a few days later than the original 19th and then all teachers and many of our staff will be coming in around the 26th or a few days later depending on contracts and they will have as you can see one two three four through august 31st and through that first week in september eight full days where we have the opportunity to plan provide training provide professional learning provide organizational opportunities um to really get prepared for the start of the school year and then there'd be the long labor day weekend and then the students come in for a four day week beginning on september 8th so that's the difference

189what's really nice about this is in the current calendar that the board approved about a month and a half ago june 9th was the end of the school year for students was the last day of school now the last day of school with the adjustment that was that is being proposed tonight the last day of school still happens to be a friday um june 11. happens to be a friday excuse me june 11th only two days later so you can see how reducing the number of student days changes things so that is the proposal for this evening i hope i explained that clearly for everybody any questions on that makes sense thank you and we have uh so is the time that the teacher training or is it also set up and prepping and all

190the stuff in their classrooms so specifically the um the ruling i'm calling it a ruling the decision that came down about um the the three days that are being provided are specifically for covid related preparation and training um so i think they're giving us some latitude there but really the the spirit of it is training making sure folks are ready for the adjustments we have to make based on covet whether that is direct uh personal protective equipment training or that is uh specifically new new technology training because you have to uh do learn from everywhere and help with students at home and work on some other things so there's a lot there i think we're going to have some flexibility i just got a figure these teachers haven't been in their classroom since since when

191march yeah and uh and it has to fundamentally change in their classroom they're going to need the time if the if it's not training it's going to just be set up exactly and so that that is a part of our discussions um but i wanted to speak specifically to your questions through the three days regarding the most you know what's going to be on the lower ear but yes there has to be opportunity to prepare the classroom no doubt about it john could you just clarify that the yellow dates starting with august 21st 24th and 25th when we hired oh i'm sorry debbie finish please go ahead when we hire teachers new to brookfield so they don't necessarily have to be brand new teachers just out of college they could be veteran teachers who are

192joining our team we on board them into the brookfield way with lots of professional development training um in sessions regarding uh the basic things like learning power school in in our district and other fundamentals in hr and so forth and so that that whole onboarding process is a three-day process we've developed over the years okay okay so those new to the district start three days earlier then the rest of the faculty comes in and based on our our needs and retirements and people leaving how big a hiring class do we think we have this year um i could look at what we did hire and then i'd have to look at maureen's raising her hand i can't tell you the number exactly this is my life we're we're really fortunate um we we've um we've

193gotten some great candidates i think john alluded to this before but our new hires are um not high in number we have one new teacher at um center school we have we hired one new teacher at huckleberry school and we are going to be hiring two new special ed teachers there we um hired one new teacher at uh wisconier we're about to hire another teacher at wiscon we got two great new uh school psychologists and we hired um the team at the high school sent us a really great math candidate that we hired so um right now without any other um you know retirements will will just be looking to fill um the two special ed uh situations that just became available uh a high school english retirement and um and then i i think

194one or two paris it's been we've been remarkably fortunate and and i'm just really grateful to the fact that the principals and their teams really got as soon as the budget was um finalized they got right on to apple track which is our candidate um resource and got people in right away i mean actually we we had a hard time trying to keep up with how quickly they were working to get the finalists in to um to work with john and myself and and terry and beth so so ruben knows going back to debbie's question the group that's in the yellow there in those 21st 24 yeah right now and we work intensively with them we um provide them with pd on like john said the basics on our instructional framework of gradual release of

195responsibility making sure they understand um our our approach to formative assessment and and our screenings and our diagnostics and we actually still use the powerpoint that cabe gave us the award for that we developed a couple years ago because it is what it is it works and then we um we give everybody because literacy is so important in our district it doesn't make any difference what you teach we give them the basics of literacy so that they you know can recognize even if they're they're a math teacher or whatever they can recognize science and kids and and get help we go over all the um special ed um required um training we do a lot of state mandated training they learn about the teacher evaluation process which will be changing but we still need to

196do what we need to do they learn about the team process if they're new teachers and as john already stated they meet with our our crackerjack technology people under eric's direction and they um get training on um powerschool they get all their logins and all that stuff and they also have training on building their their website and they also meet with the with the teachers union one of the afternoons after either before we start on one day or in the afternoon when we're done depending upon the schedule so let me tell you these people are really tired because i'm tired um when it's over it's all it's a lot of stuff oh and the other thing that we do that's really nice i don't know if we'll be able to do it this year but

197in the past we have a day where there's um you know because they we that we have a a coffee end in the morning they have lunch and we on one of the days all of the administrators from all the buildings come and have lunch with with the new teachers and so they meet in affinity groups and get you know get to form some relationships so it's it's a lot of work but it's it's i think it's a really nice program and we've had teachers who have come from other districts say that they didn't have this in their previous district so it's kind of uh the people that work on it you know in hr and all the building principles and technology have really they've just done a really they're like like the educational welcome

198wagon of the world they do a great job okay you can come if you want we'll send you a zoom invitation if it's on if it's online but you can come okay does anybody else have any questions or comments all right um i will move to approve the school calendar the revised school calendar as presented tonight by dr burrell i'll second thanks amy okay all in favor oh oh no go ahead rose i'm sorry no go ahead all in favor aye aye aye aye okay thank you i just couldn't get it out fast enough to say thank you to everybody for being flexible and open and supporting us um like i said i'm i'm in touch uh quite a bit these days every thursday morning my western connecticut superintendent organization and on some email exchanges

199today when i shared that i was uh making uh we were taking action on these this decision at tonight's board meeting and i shared the number of days our neighbors are salivating at this opportunity it really is a gift i really thank you and i know our our faculty and staff will thank you as well the administrative team was thinking about the plans right now um as a matter of fact this morning we were really working on this what it could look like um we're all thank you very much and really appreciate the board of support tonight thank you all right um yeah we can move on to old business the first item is subcommittee composition um there is a motion um amy you can read it yup i'll make a motion that the board

200continue its discussion on the july to december subcommittee composition thanks bob all right um so personally i don't see unless and this is an opportunity if anyone um you know is uh typically we don't i don't think there's any been there's been sort of historical changes you know at this point in terms of subcommittee makeup but um how are the subcommittees working for everyone in terms of composition or schedule too but that's been much more flexible lately yeah i think it's been great okay i thought we did have scheduling issues though and that's why we're revisiting this or was it right at the last meeting there was a big discussion about scheduling on the finance committee and uh because of conflicts but that seems to have gone by the wayside and i surveyed the committee

201and we're going to stay with our 5 30 on the second monday which is what's in the format i have the conflict for the um cape committee for tuesdays in the fall that was one of the issues is that and that's still uh still an issue with within the committee as well um like you guys weren't able to i don't know if we we landed on an alternate date or not i think it was hard for joy because you've got some work obligations i remember right you said on mondays can't do it monday either because i'm on the finance committee yeah i can't do mondays it's faculty meetings and yeah so uh training for school would have to be i guess a thursday maybe and i couldn't do thursday okay okay um i mean i

202could do monday if it was it would be one of the two mondays each you know each month jen can't do it because she's on a meeting she's on the committee yeah i'm on the finance committee yet i know unless we worked it out from monday that we could do it you know what i mean oh right we could do it first third or four yeah yeah when i go back to school i get my schedule for the year for mondays so why don't we just leave it at this oh you muted yourself maureen mike do you have issues with monday i i could do it monday but it'll have to be later like around you know 6 6 30. [Music] well why don't we do why don't we figure this out offline because everybody

203doesn't need to you know be involved in this if we can defer just this meeting is that okay with you rosa yeah figure it we figure it out amongst us and then let you know next time we meet because yeah thank you maureen because rosa um i know we can approve the the september to december because that's that was at the last meeting the the dates for the rest of the committee so we could do that with the exception and then revisit okay you can get that established through december the the rest of the subcommittees um okay and then we can connect the the um the four of us can connect and figure out something that works is that good that's good we can zoom okay um well we do have a motion actually on

204the table now um does that need to be amended at all all the motion is is that we're continuing our discussion the motion that was tabled was to approve the schedule as uh as published and i think we taped so i think now that we're continuing it we're either tabling it again or we're approving or disapproving i mean i think we can i think we can approve it sounds like you know the cape committee can come up with some kind of resolution right so i mean the makeup shouldn't change you think no okay okay well then uh the challenge is the challenge is once you approve the standing committee meetings they become your regular meetings and and that becomes you know you know all the whole uh foia rules about the difference between special meetings

205and standing meetings um you want to establish your standing meetings on the day that they're going to have right so if there's still an open question on the day of the week we're going to do the the meeting i think we ought to table it again okay yeah i don't think we should approve until all committees are set dates for the meetings right we can still do that on august 18th because july um the summer ones are approved the dates right we can move through and we still have time in august to approve september through july so that can happen okay but the way this motion right now reads is not a problem we can vote on that then right because it's just a continuance of the discussion yeah right okay oh yeah it's a

206continuance of the discussion just reopened the table the table thing so what's really on the table is the prior motion so i think we should vote to table it again i would i would move that we table the discussion for until our next meeting okay i'll second that all right all in favor aye aye all right okay um so cape will just get back to me and let me know what you guys decide um okay before we go on can i just ask my screen is still seeing the error eric you don't have to share your screen anymore okay i didn't know if that was i didn't notice that it was frozen sorry about that thank you i have it sorry that's okay thank you all right um so up next we have the new

207school building project update um right now the inland wetlands commission has decided to they had a a public hearing that they have they continued at their at one meeting they continue it again um regarding the building site one small issue that was raised that you might hear there was concerns about certain animal and plant species last fall just that you guys are aware tecton coordinated with melanoma mcbroom to identify and record all the areas and species that could potentially be affected by the project they went even further by hiring a botanist to confirm those findings and deep had confirmed the that the proper safeguards for those that the protection of those were in place so the inland wetlands commission is right now just in the process of reviewing those documents and the public hearing is

208still technically open and the next time that they will meet to discuss this is monday july 7 27 sorry so um and that's pretty much it that's what's going on with the new building project at the moment john did you have an email sure rosa just just two items this friday is uh you know the uh the monthly advisory team meeting with techdon the nbc et cetera and they continue to do their progress progress updates and planning uh in addition to that next week we have scheduled i think it's on tuesday late morning we have a site an actual site walkthrough again with uh omg and tacton uh about you know getting ready for the initial uh digging into the ground in the back of the school um in april of april march or april

209of uh 2021 which is uh that'll be fast smoking as well and then the project will really be underway so those are the two immediate items that are coming up any questions on the new school okay we're at three main points finally there's a lot to talk about tonight so i'm not even sure two obvious ones are establishing the committee uh for uh that we did and then the second has got to be reviewed this the the precepts of the reopening plan with the detail plan being next week right so i think you gotta really play those out happy i i think the discussion of the school calendar should be part of the school reopening point i don't think it needs to be together so i was wondering if you want to mention the board

210of finance approval of all the new laptops that's a good one you don't look excited no no i'm actually just going through our agenda and i'm like just reading just this double check that we've covered everything but yeah that sounds good i think we have to make sure the school calendar stands out though because that's like a big deal for people to realize the kids aren't going back till after labor day we just go but however we communicate yeah that's a huge deal well do you feel like that should be its own point i do so i'm fine you can leave with the school calendar going to reopening and then into the established subcommittee yeah okay you might be able to even if you wanted to add you know something about the laptops you could

211probably work it in somehow to the reopening plan thing it's part of reopening so we could put it right yeah and debbie the the powerpoint speaks for itself so it doesn't have to be a long narrative we can just put the link right in there and let people look at that and we have this okay good okay thanks great amy we don't have any upcoming events do we i do not have any upcoming events now summer yeah i will mention that the consent and review period is open so parents can get onto the point power school and update all that stuff that's got to be done before you can see those kids schedules yep good point all right uh anything else that anybody wanted to talk about tonight all right so we have a an

212executive session right after this um i sent you all a google meets invitation for that so unless there's anything else this will conclude our publicly broadcasted portion of the meeting do i'm gonna make that motion yes please okay i will move that the board enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing strategy and negotiations as it relates to collective bargaining and unaffiliated salaries second thanks bob all in favor all right bye all right thanks everyone everybody thank you