Board of Education Meeting

001[Music] want to wait until we're good okay I'm good evening we will call the regular meeting of the Brookfield Board of Education to order please stand for the pledge the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we are setting our full board so first up we have public comment there is no one signed up anyone here from the public wanting to speak I don't think so okay so we can move on to our student representative report so it's about five school days into the new year and there's already so much going on because we have so many clubs in our school so one of the biggest things that's going on right now is midterm prep since that's two

002weeks from today those are when the first midterm start and especially freshmen there's a lot of anxiety and stress because it's their first time taking these tests they're nervous they don't know how it goes so peer counseling is holding a freshman midterm review night so that's this Monday January 13th from 6 to 8 p.m. and there's gonna be like lots of different stations so one is like scheduling so we're gonna help them like schedule out their time for studying like the way their exams are gonna go we're gonna have them like take kind of personality tests in order to figure out what type of learners they are and that'll help them kind of like arrange their study materials like are they more visual or acoustic or hands-on and then our last section is obviously tutoring

003so we're partnering up with NHS with National Honor Society and having them as tutors come in and if the freshmen have any questions or are asking the tutors since they're usually seniors you know how is this class for you like what did you do to study for it so our goal is to just like alleviate some of that stress and like help them study so that's something that's going on students of Brookfield that's like a Newark Club in our school they're holding an all grades review and that's on January 15th so that's a good nice opportunity for all the grades to comment and just study in groups together so I think that's just like that's just a great way for us like you know a couple weeks before midterms to just prepare also student council

004just finalized prom dates so that is March 27th for a junior prom and May 1st for senior prom so that's really exciting we also are like finishing up our senior applications it's like still a very nervous time most of our applications went in January 1st to January 6th but there's still some you know that are just finishing up so it's a really exciting time but also a nerve-wracking time and also today we had our elementary level Student Leadership Conference so for BHS seniors went to this conference in Naugatuck Valley Community College and they basically gave presentation to like gave presentations to middle school students on like academics sports extracurriculars and like how to balance that and just be well-rounded so I think that was like another thing that's going on like we're having a lot

005of athletic involvement and just trying to share whatever we're doing in Brookfield with other you know younger kids so that we can inspire them in that way so while it is still the beginning of the year there's still all these things that are going on so I think that's cool that's it any questions for Monty where will those be it's out of curiosity okay I'm not sure where yes mr. bland is fun enough for both fun thank you we'll see all the promposals is that still a do people still do problem they do it's still a thing okay well thank you next we have our written correspondence Ron Jaffe shared an article regarding Connecticut students results on a new science test Liam and Nia regarding the infrastructure of the bathrooms at Brookfield High School a

006b-lynch inviting members of the board to the community conversations at the Brookfield library Yvonne check sent a survey from the center school ad hoc committee and Andy Korea regarding budget questions okay next up we have our approval of Board minutes recommended motion that the board approved the minutes listed below is recommended from the regular meeting December 18 to 20 19 second [Music] next item is the superintendent's update all right Thank You mr. it is so happy New Year to everyone Monsey Happy New Year so nice to see you so energetic I love it thank you it's appreciated so a few things to share with everybody exciting news at the high school with all the facility work we've been doing at all of our schools the BHS generator was completely connected over the vacation and over

007the winter recess and will actually be commissioned tomorrow there'll be a I think a ten-second power outage for testing at 2:30 after school tomorrow and then everything should be back up and running and commissioned actually means that now if we have a storm the generators should actually kick in it's fully fully and completely commissioned at that point and I'd like to thank mr. Caldwell and the high school staff and certainly mr. posts and the Facilities Committee for all their work on that I sent in the weekend update to the board on Friday that as of February 19th we will begin using education staffing solutions this is going to be a substitute management vendor for us and we're really looking forward to that the principals have had an overview about how this is going to work

008user end secretarial zhh folks have had some training already in that and we're communicating with all of our substitutes about how this is going to work and actually what's going to happen is ESS or education staffing solutions will be the new employer of our substitutes not only our current substitutes who will automatically be hired by them but also any new substitutes they will do the hiring and the vetting and so forth and it's a real win-win not only does the district save on the management of substitutes which really takes a lot of time away from our HR director and we're looking for our HR director to be a lot more strategic in her leadership and the opportunities we can use with her expertise but also its budget neutral and the substitutes most people understand that

009substitutes so typically a job that isn't a long term job and in Brookfield were very careful about not having our substitutes work more than four days a week in many cases because then we obligated to pay health benefits in terms of the hours work so we have to watch our costs so one of the great things with them being employed by ESS is they can work five days a week we can have subs from other districts our subs if they're not hired here for any particular reason they could work in another district this is more opportunity for them to work and they qualify where they can instead of they can take from their pay their compensation they could get health benefits dental benefits they could also have opportunity which I didn't mention in the Weekend

010Update which I learned in the training on Monday our Tuesday morning was opportunity for retirement benefits a 401 K and that kind of a thing so it really is a nice opportunity not only substitute teaching for the the good folks that we need to help us in the professional development work and obviously when teachers are out but also for certified folks who are trying to get a foot in the door in education we get to know these people and we really it's an opportunity for us to to really work with some really high quality people over time so we're excited about ESS and that's that's starting mid February and again all the communications about that have been ongoing just a brief mention on healthy school start times that board committee meets again on January 14th

011and I did want to let everybody know that a number of actions came out of last month's meeting and one of those I wanted to share is that I will actually be I've reached out and at least have scheduled an appointment for me with the CLA and the st. Joe's principals so we can talk about some of the things that Brookfield's working on specifically school start times because that could mean transportation issues for them a couple years down the road just having those conversations and getting their input as to what some concerns might be because they do share transportation with us then I just wanted to share an overview not only for the public but as a reminder for the board going forward with key dates that are coming up so tonight we really we

012we know we're gonna spend a majority of our meeting time on the 2021 budget but going forward it's a very busy month in January for us so next week January 15th at 7 o'clock we have a special meeting with the Board of Finance and Board of Selectmen and so all three boards will be called we'll call to order and we'll have a joint meeting and that's to discuss the special education overage and the implications of that and have that conversation on the the following week on Tuesday January 21st and the NBC has a meeting where Tecton will be presenting the design development of the new school and so the thought was and I know roses communicated with you as well that the board as best they can we can get the full membership there to

013see that presentation because because of the the timeline that we have with the building project we'd really like to use January 22nd our regular meeting to approve that plan of course everybody has to be comfortable with that so that would be the 22nd at the regular board meeting and also possible budget adoption on January 22nd so the tight timeline gets tighter and tighter as the days go by and then of course on the 31st I just wanted to put that out there is that that is when the by that time I need to submit by town charter the adopted board budget to mr. Dunn so those were the some key things I wanted to share with the board in terms of dates and then one last thing I wanted to add in Deb and and

014rose and I will be going to the local legislative breakfast tomorrow the topic is regionalism we meeting with our local representatives at Sandy Hook elementary school 7:30 tomorrow morning and it is an open meeting so if anybody's interested that's all I have okay thank you thank you any questions John's quick question about the ESS is that do you anticipate that helping our sub shortage or yes so one of the things that that they anticipate in taking a look at I can certainly let Ken talk to this because he worked on this quite a bit with Terry is Hillary we're hoping to get a better fill rate on that so it's not only the current subs that we have employed with us that will become employed by ESS it opens up the opportunity to other substitute

015teachers that are out there in their employ they work in Connecticut last year they started in New Milford they're you working in New Milford and they have an office there now and they're in Manchester in Portland and then they're working starting to make inroads with other towns as well what other surrounding town says that's what Manchester Portland and New Milford are definites now Brookfield and then there's other local towns that are starting to work with you there's other firms out there but this particular one ESS is starting to they're in negotiations I guess you can say with other so when a sub wants to sub in our district there's almost like information or link on our web page they're there yes and they're going to imp the interviewing and everything will be done with ESS

016the hiring the fingerprinting all of that is with the SS on the user end nothing changes with our Aesop platform and all of that the same thing for our users at the school and our substitute teachers and that's by contract is that negotiable at the contract for per year like how long does all that can talk to that they'd say yeah they actually won a competitive bid with a consortium that we belong to so the rates are set with that sure one thing that has follow-up to your question joy is that there the there are other services that provide subs but they're the only temp service that only works with education subs so like I've worked in other districts where they had Kelly and whatever and they're not just focused on education so that was

017one of the things that was very attractive because all of their PD that they provide and training is all geared towards educators so that just thanks may be interested in knowing that thank you any other questions okay so we will move on to committee reports first up is Finance which I I'll be happy to report on huh yeah well the first thing on our agenda that night was the election of a subcommittee chair which mr. Belden will be chairing I think permanently so after going over the November financial report the majority of the discussion that we had was focused on the communication and presentation of the 2021 budget and we'll talk more about this later on when we get to that portion of tonight's agenda but the term status quo that we that we really

018were kind of talking about at our last December meeting we really broken it out into really what the drivers of this budget are so contractual and inflationary expenses outliers enrollment increases and then finally new investments so rather than just have the one column of status quo we now have broken out the status quo and investments into much more well defined and more specific columns we also talked about the special education costs which we might get a little bit of that tonight but we will be having our special meeting as you all know but for the public we'll be having a special Joint Board of Finance Board of Selectmen Board of Education meeting next Wednesday the 15th at 7 p.m. here in the Brookfield High School Media Center and we are going to be talking about

019the significant overrun in this current year's budget and how that will affect next year's budget right now we're we're still waiting on some of those costs to be finalized but as much information as we can provide updated next week that we will do that and how we will communicate that was was the majority of the conversation at the at the Finance Committee meeting I believe that was that was pretty much it right ok any questions alright so next up is policy okay at our last policy meeting we welcomed Amy and Mike to the policy committee and I was elected chair so I'll be relations thank you we started out really by going over sort of a review of what the policy committee does and what we've been working on over the past year or so

020we're currently still going through the 3000 series which are really finance policies board policies so we we went over three policies that we'll review more in detail later on tonight but basically they were old policies that just needed some tweaking and updating some of them go back to 1992 so those are petty cash food service and free and reduced lunch which like I said are on our agenda to review later tonight and then we just had a small a short conversation about communications we talked about videos newsletters the website and budget Flyers again just to get our new committee members up to speed on what the communications portion of the committee does so that was it thank you mm-hmm okay so next up is the consent agenda recommended motion that the board approve the items

021listed below and the consent agenda is recommended retirements and resignations second any discussion on any of these all in favor okay awesome I just wanted to just congratulate mrs. cindy de Magli she has been for 17 years our payroll secretary and as we look back in the history of things I understand there were times where people before electronic banking went to the bank and the check had it wasn't there and then mrs. de Magali came in and worked on things and that's never been a problem in 17 years and including mrs. Reynolds and all our good friends and Eric and Kathy and all our tech people we made sure even on the macro burst that we found a waiting crank the power literally here at the high school and make sure people got paid during

022the macro burst so we're really proud of her and we're happy for her only wish her well in her retirement thank you thank you okay now we have new business first up is policies okay recommended motion that the board approved policy 3450 one petty cash for a first reading as recommended by the policy and communications subcommittee okay so this is probably the easiest thing that you do oh sorry a second this is probably the easiest thing that you'll do tonight this policy has to do with pay cash funds the original policy as I said before goes back to 1992 so we just took a look at it and we discovered that basically the entire first paragraph about use of petty cash funds was unnecessary because we don't allow petty cash funds so the policy was

023rewritten to just say the board of Brookfield Board of Education does not permit the establishment or operation of petty cash funds so we're ready for that yeah so we're bringing it forward tonight for a first read any questions on that one all right thank you so we'll know we can vote on that person so all in favor aye all right now we can recommend a motion that the board approve policy 35:42 for food service for a first reading as recommended by the policy and communications subcommittee Oh second [Music] okay so this one also is not quite as old this one goes back to 2002 it really just outlines the fact that we will operate a school lunch program under the supervision of the Director of Business and Finance that we shall include hot lunches as

024determined by the National School Lunch Program we didn't make any I don't think we made any changes to it you just check it out nope nope so basically we are we had a discussion over whether or not we had to get anything put anything specific in here about price because it just says the Brookfield Board of Education shall approve annually the price is set for school lunches and I found out from Ken that we actually haven't done any changes to our pricing for school lunches in four years so we're good on that aspect not the way it's written right now you read it as we should be voting on everything we should vote on no change also it would say you vote on every year whether there's a change right Dave had said that shall

025approve annually any changes to prices and I think I would say yes we're probably I think the question we had was whether the price of the lunch was covering the cost of rice ken we were talking about that so there was no need to change the price was my understanding right we have not changed the prices but I think Bob's point is that the policy says even if we don't change it we should be approving it than we save up yeah that's what I'm saying what it sells so we just said we can pick that up at the entity that's part of the second read I think it's a simple change you just say any changes to the price yeah so we again this one is coming forward as a first read is this a

026cave policy or just a revision to this it's our current policy okay any other questions [Music] okay the next policy is recommended motion the board-approved policy 3540 2.31 free and reduced lunch for a first reading as recommended by the policy and communications subcommittee second okay now this one this one we the our policy is behind the cave one [Music] we recommend that we adopt cabe's version which is what you see here [Music] yep we got it so the paragraph down towards the middle this is on free or reduced price lunches the paragraph towards the bottom part of the page that is completely blacked out does not apply to us so we can eliminate that and again we just thought that cabe's version was pretty clean and straightforward so we would like to adopt Gabe's version

027with the change that's indicated okay any questions all right all in favor all right and for all these policies when would you like any comments so I was thinking to would like to looking at by February 14th because our next policy meeting is the 19th so if I get comments by the 14th I can bring them to our next policy meeting the week after that okay everyone's good on that that's just before the board meeting that day so would this be on the agenda for that board meeting for the second read to it it could be yeah if we don't have extensive changes all right so we can move on to old business and first up is the review of these superintendent's proposed 2020 2021 budget and this is just an action so doctor Burrell

028would you like to intro oh yes sure sure just kind of dovetailing on what you said from the finance report Roseau to get things started is we took the feedback Ken and I and team took the feedback from the board on December 18th and over the break we incorporated those categorized items that I considered investments and categorize those into either enrollment increases via contract or inflation and the old status quo and rolled them into that and they became contract inflation so as Rosa describes is pretty straight forward I sent the slides on Friday afternoon and the weekend update that were adjusted and I've included that at least had just passed that out hardcopy to you and your your binders section - and those slides I think seven eight and nine color them yellow so they're

029very easy to identify number seven eight and nine put page numbers on notice that was a little tricky for all of us last time and you can see the drivers are very clean and clear based on those four categories again contractual inflationary increases enrollment driven increases outlier increases which is really only the focus on special education health placements and transportation tuition out placements and then the investments totaling around two hundred and seventy thousand dollars it's broken out very cleanly so I will start by saying sort of in another follow-up to the email that I sent out we really need to get into it tonight any big changes that you know you sort of had in mind or you want to exercise we sort of need to do that tonight so that we can try to

030stay on track to adopt this budget at our next meeting and we can have everything sort of you know Anna Rosa I think may be a good place to start after this introduction is just a reminder for the public and a reminder for the board so after the December 4th meeting there was several comebacks and so we sent answers to a good number of questions and we talked and we exercise those questions at the December 18th meeting since the at the December 18th meeting besides this comeback which was breaking out the budget differently while it still is a six point eight percent proposed increase at this time in the preliminary superintendent's proposal there were a number of come back so we roses should we go start to go through those maybe to get the ball

031rolling yeah that's my first release to start and those were sent out so I don't know if you have your copies in front of you on Friday Rose do you want to walk through those who walk through the the email sent through email yeah take our time so everybody can make sure they have everything in front of them I knows a lot of paper it was part of the Weekend Update young [Music] okay so we talked about the revised slides yes that was number one yep okay so now I know yep so health benefits and the FICA is now in the salary figure which I think makes sense because that's how we had historically estimated salaries right right you know [Music] okay so providing reconciliation of special education outplacement budget to actual current year expenditures

032we'll have that later on and I think that that particular question regarding special education over general obviously we've talked about it we talked about it earlier at the forum that's something we're really going to talk about great detail and hopefully we have even more information we made an incredible amount of progress we certainly could have conversation about that this evening but I know there's so many other things and we're giving a lot of time to that already so maybe kind of put that on the back burner for now and then continue through and my intent is to get that to the board yeah least a couple days before Wednesday's meeting in case anybody has any questions yeah that would be great thank you so the next was we asked dr. Brill to provide the cost

033savings and class size implications if one teacher was reduced from each grade so reducing 13 teachers would reduce the 2020 2021 budget by 1 million one hundred fifty eight thousand nine hundred and eleven dollars this assumes the average teacher on the master SEP 7 salary grade including health benefits like a total of per teacher expenditure of eighty nine thousand one forty seven so that brings class sizes in the elementary grades brings kindergarten to 21 first grade to almost 21 second grade 23 third grade twenty three fourth grade to 22 fifth grade 24 sixth grade 22 almost 23 some of those are still with within our guide someone one of the other rates all with they're not all within our guidelines or it was kindergarten in first grade no no but they just get out of

034the guidelines okay yep when we clean our staffing each year I apply a mathematical formula to our projected enrollments to come up with how many sections keep us just under the max one section less I'm not gonna read through the implications for the middle school in high school because that's that just gets lengthy and I think you guys all have it in front of you and you can all saw it so if you want we can start our discussion there sort of see how you guys feel about you know some of these implications I think these are too scary of numbers for elementary school I don't especially considering the fact that let's just be honest they've been our enrollment projections have been off every single year and underestimated so I don't feel comfortable with numbers

035any bigger than that and I certainly don't want to have to ask for a special appropriation the beginning of a year again so I don't know where you guys I think the reality is though those numbers are probably gonna be I mean - the teacher just covered this in the last meeting that this is still attractive town families are still moving here mm-hmm I mean this is down one teacher per grade kind of sharing your in your concern that those numbers could be higher making without the teacher okay great and that's a lot in elementary school we have to realize that our elementary school teachers don't have Parra's and help in the classroom and and some districts have you know more pairs that float around or even regular pairs that are in the classroom more

036regularly I volunteer in my daughter's classroom and it's a lot of work oh I can't imagine another two or three kids you know in some of these classes so um and I assume if we were to make any reductions to staff it wouldn't necessarily be a clean sweep one teacher per grade probably right so when you look at a reduction in force typically obviously you look by district need you have to you first you have to look at the teacher contract and a lot of time you're looking at district need you're looking at certification you're looking at the grade level you're looking at teacher seniority so there's a lot of factors that go into that so it's not a linear mrs. Jones is you know new to this particular grade level so hope mrs. Jones

037won't have a job it could mean mrs. Jones has to teach a different grade or something like that so it's all in it or it might not be mrs. Jones and people make assumptions so we talked about positions we never talked about people the to me the seventh and eighth grade numbers look equally as troubling I mean 2730 yeah a lots are - it's really really high in terms of the high school I see the the percentage of sections that are are these the numbers that if they are currently I didn't actually go back to take a look but okay so what they would be is on some of these over half of the classes would be over and depending on enrollments - inna or subtracting one teacher from those for subject areas would cause

038the average class sizes to go up by approximately three students for class and would undoubtedly increase the number of sections above guidelines okay so now it's specific because it says science it says math there's there's lots of different math classes and they are designed for specific grade levels so I kind of feel like these numbers really aren't like the full story like you know there's chemistry there's biology I would sue most kids are taking biology at a certain grade and other kids are thinking so I'm kind of one is is that taken in I mean he says the largest class size is 27 so like what can happen there and again exactly what you're describing cuz things vary at the high school depending on levels depending on course depending on grade level I mean all

039kinds of factors go in so that's average so you could have classes quite a bit higher than that and then you because of the way the schedule works out and all of the other constraints to get kids as many courses for their schedule in their pathway as we can another class might only have 10 or 15 depending on the situation so it's going to fluctuate into at this point in the year before the program of studies is even distributed for next year to the students and those discussions have even started it's it's an exercise we did for the math but it really isn't for the finances of the math but it's really not a fair exercise to at a high school to try to figure out right now and to that level of detail we

040just can't do it but I understand it's it's premature how's this guys my guess my point was its you just off just based off these numbers to make a decision positions would be would be murky at best yeah agreed thank you for understanding so does anybody have any other sort of input in terms of staff reductions I'll just say I approach it from a different point of view maybe not completely different but I'm fighting to know what the amount of money and the impacts are thank you for doing that but it's this portrait it's this board's responsibility to advocate for the best education for our kids and I don't think even if we as much as we have a big problem we have to advocate for proper class sizes at all levels and so that's

041our job and so we need to advocate right so let's advocate I would not cut a single teaching position out based on this I would agree I would agree and the point that you made about ability that REM Romans going up scary to think that that's the case it's a kind of position at each level or what not knowing that okay so what is the total cost of the K through six World Language Program this is for our Spanish our exploratory Spanish program the total cost of that is four hundred thousand our four hundred and thirteen thousand five hundred seventy eight that is the cost of four teachers including their benefits books and supplies this is a tough one I think for me personally but I know when this was contemplated a couple of years

042ago that is when you really saw parents turning out to board meetings and really speaking out in favor of keeping this program but it does need to be stated that I think I didn't even really have an understanding that this really was more of an exploratory program not designed to be a language acquisition program and I think that's what we need to sort of figure out as a board is what where our values and what do we think you know is best for students in terms of how they're utilizing their day so there's any thoughts I'd say first and foremost something that needs to be said is that social has mandated its Amanda mandated content area and at this point we're neglecting it and why is it being neglected because of the world language exploratory

043program again it's an exploratory program I don't think we're in the position to be putting this exploratory program over the mandated and neglecting the needs of our students I think that's what we're doing with unfortunately with with this exploratory program and we're spending a lot of money to give our students a program that that they're not being put in a place where they're any better if they didn't have any Spanish yes Monty please um like I guess cuz I'm not familiar with it like what exactly do they learn in the program like do they like begin like learning like Spanish or is it more like the culture like what does it mean my exploratory maybe one of our administrators but yeah please well for fifth and sixth graders for us the 20-minute push in that

044they do have into the social aid class every other day is students are learning basic Spanish skills then the specials that we have for fifth and sixth grade they have a rotation special is built in to learn more about the culture of spanish-speaking countries so that's where that part is doesn't necessarily mean that they're speaking they do speak a little Spanish but it's more the learning of Spanish and the basics is in the social studies class that's a continuation obviously of what they are learning down at the lower levels so mr. Rendon tell question for you so I want to say it was two years ago when we had or two or maybe three years ago when we had this big long set of discussions around more time for social studies and cut back and

045restructure the middle school the Spanish program that's where we put some of it into the special rotation and so forth I thought it was very creative when you came up with that by the way that was a highlight that year how's it working are we getting better results ins in social studies or is it not making an impact well I think when you say there's no I guess direct data based on you know tests or anything to that nature per se we would definitely be able to get to more curriculum we're definitely able to the ability to have the amount of time to for students to do more writing in there that was one of the reasons I know couple years ago we talked about our upper levels we're seeing a big difference in the

046students ability to write because at the lower levels at that time before we made that change because it was every other day there wasn't really a chance to that the teachers had the whole entire grade of students so there was as much writing involved in it and I think that's one of the biggest things I know our lower level fifth and sixth grade teachers have talked about is they have more time for discussions and follow through with the curriculum that we've had in the past because obviously it more time so when we had that discussion the part of the reason we actually were compelled to add time in for social studies because I agree at the time we were we all had the reaction we were neglecting social studies but it was based on test

047scores we were looking at test scores in in the more more critical writing more critical interpretation type scores those same test scores are we looking at them to see if this is having an impact so we're what we were talking about was and the way you can address is the the spec scores for literacy yeah because our students weren't we had discussions about there were some folks I said oh you can teach social studies through ela and the point that I would make is that we needed that social studies tying back was there's a difference between literacy a big umbrella term and disciplinary literacy and disciplinary literacy is teaching students they this skills and providing them the opportunity to learn how to read like a historian which is very different than learning how to read

048like a mathematician or a scientist because people in different disciplines reading the content of those disciplines who read it in a very different way so you can't teach one subject necessarily through another subject so we wanted to increase the social studies time to have it be what it should be the full complement of social studies so that students as as Dean was explaining would have the opportunity to be reading primary source documents but not just being provided with those documents to read but engaging in conversation doing argumentation and doing argumentative writing and that that's where we excuse me weren't seeing our students performing well on s back we're seeing the scores slowly creeping up are we that was my question it was that we took like a half step that when we went through that

049whole process we reduced the amount of sawdust Spanish and increase the amount of social studies my question is are we seeing results from that or do we have to go further we that's what you're asking me my professional opinion I I think that other people what a great we we're still not where we need to be with the opportunities that we need to get these are you know they're middle schoolers but they're still little kids and they need a lot of support and writing I think almost everybody could agree is probably the most difficult thing that we asked children to do and it needs to be consistent continual every single day and one of the hardest things and there are other educators on the board who can speak to this as well one of the

050hardest things to help students even college students graduate students understand is that you know the rating is never done it's a it's an iterative process you have to keep going back to it and that's one of the reasons why we need more time to provide that type of experience for our students I understand the concept my question is are we seeing anything in our measurements less he actually formally look at in order to tell us that the degree of impact or not what I said was we've seen small increases in ela but I can't tell you that that's attributed to social studies I mean I'd be making that up so I would or the question being what data do we have to prove that it's been productive and solid exploratory program what if our students

051gain from that your hope and of the Spanish Sun yeah the Spanish side the data on the Spanish side I last me I said there was thank you what area there is nothing social so I think we just you're saying is there has been spoiling pieces but I think also you have to understand depending on the types of questions and things that are asked on the smarter balanced testing to has effect I mean social studies if you're asking more content driven social studies you know nonfiction type questions we don't actually know that because obviously it's just the smarter balanced testing but in though in that that ability to write nonfiction use sources use other sources to back up their claims and things of that nature is are invitations a big that's a big skill that

052stood is a great skill as students need to be successful on these tests and so well we don't have you know standardized test course to talk to the house what we're I think what our teachers are seeing in the in the classroom is that the student skills are increasing and I think that over time that's gonna really hit big at the high school and we will have data from SAT because SAT does give us content area disciplinary scores in you know social studies and science and we are will talk a little bit later about the what we're doing with curriculum and the next phase of new curriculum revision and recreating is going to be in social studies and so the amount of time that we have for social studies is going to be critical to

053be able to provide the students with the type of social studies instruction that we really should be providing for them knowing what it is they need to know and be able to do in in school in the times that we're in and the art we talked about the argumentation and that is key and you really social studies is the one of the the one domain where that really comes through I mean just look at the world it's all argumentation it turn on that news this is like taking facts and being able to make your case and social studies just lends itself to that orally and then writing I have another question if that's okay um so when I was when I was in fifth and sixth grade that was like six or seven years ago

054we had like on her 80s and BJ's like one day would be Spanish and one day would be social studies so like is was that not sufficient enough at that time so we try to increase it well we actually did increase it right so social studies is more consistent and moved some of what was in the Spanish content into the end of the specialist rotation what do we like try to allocate like more time for Spanish then like separately like if we gave social studies to full core like what do we still have Spanish being taught in fifth and sixth grade cuz I still feel like that's a really valuable skill that like we started learning my brother started learning Spanish I think in like third grade it was like I think they started earlier

055than when my grades started but I I feel like that's still like a really important aspect of us like just being exposed to other cultures especially like in the world we live in today I'm not sure why I feel like tonight is the first time I've heard this program being referred to as exploratory I mean that's that's yeah that's what I mean remember the last meeting at the last meeting we did but that was the first time I had really heard it described that way as well so no I think it was a couple of years ago when Kevin was presenting on it she shared that it was an exploratory exposure kind of a program that it wasn't a full flesh his foreign language Elementary School which would when you say flesh you assume language

056acquisition it just it never was there was never time dedicated to it being a plus program and I don't know what the messaging was prior to this administration's arrival in terms of bringing it on as elementary program but there was just never going to be enough time talking to me at least three days a week so um so there's a lot Lane we just don't have that time considering all the needs and science social studies math and ela that's part of the issue okay big part of the issue so so didn't mrs. Holly also say at the last meeting that I think we asked her how our students fare in Spanish language skills compared to say magnet students magnet school students when they both enter the middle school and I am pretty sure she said

057that magnet school students were no better than there was no difference in proficiency right they off perform at the low novice level okay so that seems to indicate to me that we're doing a pretty good job with an exploratory program that that for compared to a school that sounds like there's spending more time or perhaps getting more instruction but that's just here so we don't know that for sure we don't have the data on that we can't really make a valid conclusion on their experience in there I'm not sure that we can say they're getting nothing out of it yeah go both ways really Kevin did say there wasn't a difference between students so I think and if I could just interrupt I think what she was being very nice about is saying that there's

058no difference between the two populations of students ampuls of students because neither of them are achieving okay perhaps thought that's the point so there's not language acquisition through either through either programs and we and we can't I agree with you joy we can't sit and pass judgment on that other program cuz we don't know anything about it we don't know what they do or don't do so just on a budget mechanics point of view is there a proposal on the table to eliminate this program is that what's being bandied about here that's so there is a proposal to remove the elementary Spanish language but who's making that proposed me who's making that broke we're making the proposal you're making that I don't mean to make it a swift like you know acts here you know

059I think it needs to be massaged out a little bit but I mean for I mean these students aren't tested ultimately on a state level in Spanish and they are tested on writing an argumentative and I totally agree with all that I think that is extremely crucial I think if you look at other if Spanish is that important to waste there could be a club there could be I mean rosetta stone puts out lots of things I think I think learning another language can also be handled in other appropriate ways that doesn't involve class time during the day so I'd like to explore maybe some options that maybe we you know that doesn't involve budget money that are as much or as much as much budget oh yeah and we're not discounting the value before

060a language not at all I mean I absolutely would love for my children to be involved and receive a program to the fullest but unfortunately that's not what we're offering and to sort of facilitate that and sort of to your point if you know we as a board are valuing this as an exploratory program to Monty's point to just as an exposure to different cultures and and things like that more to our global awareness and if that's you know truly what we value and we're willing to you know put that amount of money there then fine but as long as we understand that this truly isn't again a language acquisition program that we think is going to make them better Spanish students when they enter seventh grade because the fact of the matter is they're

061probably not so it's not small my money correct I mean Jen if anyone values so social is probably the most I'm sort of thinking on a couple of levels because I hear mozzies point to about the idea of sort of global competency and cultural awareness are there other things that the Spanish exploratory program gives us that may not be language acquisition and is there value in that so I think that's one thing I'm thinking about and then I'm of course something about the social studies - in the argumentative writing so I'm wondering is there a middle ground somewhere if we value the exploratory nature of the program is there is is there value and still having it but not as often or would that kill it and its entirety okay so I'm les I'm focusing

062on what you're talking about what you're talking about with global awareness they don't need to do that through an exploratory Spanish program I mean global awareness should be a component of everything that we do it that and it is it's part of its how we select the literature that we that we use in instruction it's the type of books that we select for classroom libraries and for our library collections I know that our library media specialists when they and and the school-based folks can speak to this if you know need be when the library media specialists select books they are very aware of cultures I use grant money to purchase books through a company called language lizard and we have selections of those in the elementary schools where I work with Kevin Holly and look

063at the languages of the students that are in the schools and purchased books from them every language that it's available in from language lizard in the school so I'll give you an example like in the Mary Rosa school brown bear brown bear I mean like anybody who doesn't know that book raise your hand okay so brown bear brown bear we have a collection of brown bear brown bear in about eight different languages and the books that are produced by this published by this company has the language of focus whether it's Mandarin or or do or I mean we've got Portugal you name it we've got it if we can get our hands on it using grant money and it's English on one side and the native the first language of the student on the other

064side because we want to support children and we want to support families in maintaining their home language through having these resources and being able to if the parents read English that's great they can read both if the students can read them both that's great but if they if the home language is language other than English and that's the only language that the parents have we want to honor that by providing them with opportunities to have books in their home that they can reach to their children and then the kids can read in English when they learn to read in English so I'm using that as one very very small example of how we're honoring different cultures and trying to honor and respect an awareness of the different people that make up our community and global

065awareness is going to be built into social studies naturally and even in science when we talk about because um who are who are the scientists that discovered whatever it is the kids are studying what how is that happening throughout the world Eric is working with the Technology Committee because we are trying to decide which standards because there are no required standards in the state of Connecticut which standards we want to bring to Cape to look at it that having the board adopt so that we can look at all of those global technology competencies and not create new separate courses but include that we want to enrich the courses that we have for our students so I see that the the point and and appreciate what you're sharing but I don't think that that that's the

066only way to do that and the only if it's if we're only focusing on Spanish culture we're leaving a lot of people out of the picture so I think that we have to be mindful of that and figure out how do we want to really approach in a very systematic way what the board values about global awareness and how that should be part of curriculum [Music] Femi you haven't said anything what are your thoughts I think having the the language program is it's beneficial I know personally my children home and they haven't gotten a ton out of that I don't know there were some staffing issues at the middle school last year that affected my current eighth grader I think you remember Deb I think it's a worthwhile program I wouldn't be opposed to possibly

067making so much just months to up could I ask so at the elementary level Spanish is a special so mr. Rendon explained how it was at the middle school but at the elementary school it's still a special so I know this is sort of like this is gonna be a very vague sort of question but is there any way that either of you could maybe describe how potentially that specials time might be utilized if Spanish were no longer in the picture and while the principal's are getting ready I appreciate that question Rosa one thing that I do want to caution in in terms of this discussion is that if a decision was made to you know eliminate for teachers and you'll hear from from Mary Rosa and Melissa that it doesn't necessarily mean or a

068decision was me to eliminate K through six or K through four Spanish it doesn't necessarily equate in a linear fashion to that direct amount of savings because there is some backfill issues and there's a there could be some other opportunities for more focus on our human tation we've been talking about that tonight or stem work or more time for the arts so there's some things we have to think about but those costs so there'd be a backfill so it isn't just a clean this is we can say four hundred thousand dollars I you know and you would have to get it put something and they'll be able to talk specifically to that because they obviously have their master schedules and can talk about the students experience and how that works so I just wanted to

069plant that seed and not be again I might use the word premature a couple of times because you know this is evolving and if ultimately they're you know I've been around five years now in Brookfield so there could be a comeback and so there would be work to do on what might be a backfill and what would be something really in line with our priorities and what the costs might be and then we could you know differentiate that so ladies [Music] okay thank you at centre school this is only the second year that Spanish has been a special so prior to that though our special teachers were full-time and what would happen is students would receive an additional the math or excuse me music period art period PE over the course of the year so

070there would be they do six weeks of having you know PE twice a week and then they'd have six weeks and I think music twice oh but you know I mean so that that's the way it really had worked in the past so there was more opportunity I think for as John was saying more and more using looking at the Arts in a way that could support other skills or being developed for students we talked a little bit about a esteem approach and what that might look like on those extra days you know so what how could we incorporate some of the other again other standards were working on and take them into a more depth with students but that's all again very broad possibilities but as John was saying there's the reality now that

071because Spanish is especial it does function as a specific purpose in the schedule other than just providing students with that exploratory program it's also part of our structure of our schedule so it would look a little different [Music] so on huckleberry it's pretty much the same it would be eliminating a period for our teachers and currently the six special that we have which is Spanish constitutes the the weekly PLC time that the teachers gather together further collaboration and right now it's wonderful because every grade level gets that once a week of that time together that's not that's in addition to their planning time so if we eliminated that special it would cause us to start having PLC's or planning time where we're eliminating a prep time and then trying to Constance you that those extra

072minutes and they're contractually somehow so you know either replacing that it's a balance if we take one away and we've talked about you know adding an art or music but for Huckleberry the class sizes that we have we would need double it's just like we have two PE teachers now if we wanted to add more art we would need to art teachers so eliminating a Spanish teacher might not necessarily mean a savings in salary with that answers your question it does just the one of the things we have to think long and hard about is just the reality is when you do eliminate a program it's never coming back so you just we have to think about that is that anything we would be comfortable with how long have we had the program like four

073or five years probably six so that's we just have to pause it we just have to keep talking into the microphone just purely / - and I understand that it's not a 402 your point that's that was my original kind of tiptoe around that was like hey is there other ways mm-hmm but if you just divide it by two that's two hundred six thousand dollars your new investments are two seventy I mean we're like they're almost so I mean 0.6 of that seven percent that you know rich brought up in the last meeting you know I think that's that's the type of this this is the type of discussion that I'm sure he's a representative of very large population wants to see a sure and to that point Mike one of the things we do

074we did have some again very preliminary conversations because we knew this meeting was coming and we wanted to obviously converse with the board the so you know in talking with Mary Rose and Melissa you know the the structure and the way things work at the elementary school is very different than the middle school and in talking with mr. Brenda some of you know if 5th and 6th grade Spanish were to be eliminated and he was exercising that it wouldn't increase time in the unified arts schedule for the other specials and then it would that push in time of 20 minutes a couple times a week I guess that his name would go back to social studies and then it wouldn't that wouldn't necessarily nesset eight necessitate a backfill of anything so it that might be

075a non cost at the middle school so those are things to consider how that how that again that's the complication that it happens to be a benefit in this particular case from a monetary perspective but those complications when you get into middle school and then certainly high schools the complexities of high school scheduling so could I make a comment I have five children all of them were exposed maybe not have language acquisition but they were exposed to language at rather early ages three of them are fluent in multiple languages as adults I talked to my oldest son about his language experience and he attributes his ability to pick up language as an adult to the fact that his ear was more tuned to languages as a child that he had exposure to it that he

076met and met people who spoke different languages it wasn't afraid of different languages the words come out of your mouth differently he attributes a lot of that to his exposure at an early age there's a lot of studies that say simple exposure is a good thing right because it trains the trains the body and the mind to be more tuned the language so just stick that in the back of your head secondly when we when there was a formal proposal to eliminate elementary school language Spanish how many years ago was that three four three three or four yeah three or four not everybody here was on the board at the time maybe the only one who was on the board at the time lucky me we had a lineup of parents and educators come in

077here we spent I would say we spent four hours one night talking about this program and with with comebacks but the thing that struck me the most was the very impassioned input from parents who said education you can work on the specifics of skill acquisition in education you can teach them to read you can teach them to write you can teach them to do math but the fullness of their children was enhanced by what Brookfield has done right which is we have good arts programs we've got good language programs we have good physique programs and it makes at the elementary level a more whole child they were passionate about this and I put those two comments together right at the child of mine who experienced the the lifetime growth and he's 37 now right so

078he's and he's an educator he's a middle school middle school gifted right now he looks back and said that was one of the formative points in his life and I marry that with what I heard from the parents and Antos tell you I would not give up this program rapidly I think it helps our children I really do it helps them be better better people not just necessarily the best writer or reader but better citizens and better learners broadly for their life and that's one of our goals right if you think about what we've talked about as the strategies to make better at better citizens out of our out of our students not just better proficient academically and I am passionate about the need to retain this kind of program I really want to agree

079with both of those points because I feel like like I I went to Mexico over a winter break and I was able to converse with so many people like genuinely like learn about them and their culture like at restaurants just at the beach and I feel like if I didn't have that exposure in fifth grade my brother had it even earlier he had an even more interesting time because like he was exposed to that culture earlier I feel like in some way shape or form it needs to be there for young children because like you were talking about the book and how like there's English and the students like native language or the parents native language and that's fine for students that are bilingual or like are not from you know don't speak English as

080their first language but there's so many students here that only speak English so I feel like there needs to be something for them so that they also learn and like whether that's just the language of 21 countries or the language of 35 countries I can get at least one is still something that like opens their mind like from a young age from second grade third grade fifth grade whatever that is to say like there's more out there for me to learn in terms of people like socially I just think that's important too we're in Mexico did you go so my son who's a as a administrator is actually an administrator at the American School of Monterrey Mexico he speaks fluent Spanish now he has four other languages he's relatively fluent in and and it's to

081him it became a lifetime passion as a language and international culture and I think language in international culture I would observe that Americans are the most country centric population in the globe you walk into you walk into France or you walk into Mexico they're speaking English right from a everyone of them they come in they know how to speak English you go into the u.s. and you say how many of you know how to speak my language right I have employees who come in and say they don't know any French they don't know any Spanish and they don't even try well guess what I'd like our our our youth in a global economy to be willing and interested to try right do you need a language acquisition program to do that no you need something

082that makes them comfortable that that like other languages are okay and I'm sorry I'll go on forever and I will I won't take our whole board meeting up but I feel very strongly that this is valuable to our kids valuable to our kids what what proves the value of it in a sense I'm not gonna understand your personal experience but your children that's great but I would empower you to really speak to the children at Brookfield which I've spoken to a lot in addition to my own children and I've I've written the emails year after year I've looked at the newsletters what has been taught what we covered and year after year it was the same thing we learned how to count we learned of the days of the week the seasons things like that

083and that's great exposure but again where was the validity and the effectiveness it just wasn't there and just to say that we had we're giving them exposure what seems that small or any present still she studies in so many other content areas that you that they can have this global exposure but I think the expense of so many other things I agree with you and so one of the experiences Bobby and I were talking about when we were talking about is he they had a pseudo curriculum when he was coming coming through his schools where he they learned the numbers and the color is one year but then they would learn different things the next day of different things in next year it didn't it was still just exposure it wasn't hard you know I'm

084gonna teach you grammar I'm gonna teach you how to write and all of that but but it did what certainly was not repetitive but I I hear Joyce point and I do think that there's value in the program but I wish it was a better program yeah absolutely I mean could it be a better program do we have the capability like I'd love I guess I would want to know if we were to keep it what what are the improvements that are gonna be made to the program that would make us feel more confident that the $400,000 is a worthy expenditure yeah I agree with that like that would that kind of we could bring miss Holly to talk about the the improvements that have been made and will continue to be made lots of

085things have been done to improve the program when the question was asked by the board we certainly put the cost of the program on there for everybody for this discussion and then we wanted to make clear when Miss Holly came here explicitly clear compared to a couple of years before if it wasn't to some that it is an exploratory program we didn't want people to make any decisions on any false pretense that kids were going to with the with the amount of time that we have available for the program that they were going to acquire language so you know again that's that's the point and is to to Rosa and Bob's point they were talking about was talking about this the value of the exploratory versus are we actually acquiring language what do we want

086as a school district I mean that's really what has to come down as a conversation into what Mike was talking about earlier in in a non mandated area when we have so many mandated have two areas and all of this is so very expensive I mean you know in but I put at times so but the the thing I react against is that we're sitting here deliberating on a budget and it feels to me like you got budget pressures let's just throw this thing out right and and so let's talk about it it's an elimination proposal and that that's why I asked the question earlier is there a proposal on the table because I don't think this is the right vehicle to to throw this out I would rather have many more heart heartfelt and

087thorough discussions about what is our program you know should we go down this path of making it better or should we go back down this path of pulling it back but I don't think the budget is the right place to have that discussion I mean that should be in our curriculum committee that ought to be something that we're actively talking about as a board I just feel like we're reacting and therefore let's just just pull it and that's what happened three years ago and guess what we heard about it in spades and about how valuable it was to our families so my opinion is 400,000 for a K to six or a language program isn't that much I mean I don't know I don't have any other districts to compare it to but that doesn't

088see the cost is really the teachers I mean that's that your staff of just as a reminder for everybody that when we're talking about programs around eighty percent of the budget is the staff that's always how it is so in any program that's what you're looking at and you know you're looking in next year the average teacher with benefits and all that comes with that eighty nine thousand dollars so just in your head as you add these things up and you think about it well you know Bob you bring up a good point because I think we do feel under pressure when we see a big budget increase we want to be responsible for the taxpayers so is it a better conversation to talk holistically about what is the board comfortable spending and starting with

089that big idea because otherwise what we're gonna do is we're gonna look at each of these questions and we're gonna like we said well we can't cut any teachers we don't feel good about that maybe we do the world language maybe not we don't feel good about that but what what does the board feel comfortable about in terms of or do they feel comfortable that the budget presented is appropriate it's a percentage increase that we feel we could stand behind or do we have to have like a bigger conversation about that just throwing that as another way potentially to look at the issue so we can like what do we think about that well I mean as our the very first part of the PowerPoint I think you know it says that this budget is

090a financial statement of this boards values this districts values so you know whether we were sort of debating between qualitative value which is something you might not be able to measure in the ways that you know some members here have described enjoy you might need more qualitative value to sort of you know support this clause so yes so you know I think it looks now that we're sort of not we're not really there in a conversation I think I mean I don't know if it doesn't look like there's anything that we can do tonight on this particular subject I don't think unless someone wants to sort of make that formal proposal I'm up to further discussion that needs to happen like in 3d or in another meeting what is your point qualitative and quantitative you

091know we got to see you know I know there's you know values meet a lot of different things so what is the value of this from a qualitative standpoint and you know obviously we're talking about the budget and Jensen playwright we're I'm looking at this and like okay well you know even if half this half this half of it is is a surplus or you know we can throw that at investments it's it's something it's not it's not a small number I think it is debatable so I I think I'd be open to that when Bob asked me am i proposing it I was more like I want to talk more about it that's the suggestion I think it puts it as a suggestion it just felt to me like it snuck up on us

092something we're actively talking about taking out of the budget and I just felt like it snuck up on us and I and I wasn't I didn't want to be passive-aggressive about it either were probably we were thinking about it or we're not thinking about it and at the last week I was yeah thinking about it after hearing what yeah I mean in reality if we feel that you have to eliminate the budget we could look at each of these things so in that eliminate athletics we can eliminate club you eliminate yards I would do the list if I could suggest so that was one question number six and we had 11 questions for comeback so perhaps we just go through the rest of them at least yes get that out there so it's out discussion

093and then kind of get to the rest of this okay so so the cost of athletics well actually Rosa I think you were leading that part do you want to yeah yeah yeah so the cost of athletics um and actually didn't have a question about this the cost for athletics is eight hundred fifty nine thousand four hundred forty eight that there's a lot that goes into that number right it's not just through that yeah its coaches and transportation it is transportation - oh sure officials and when we had pay to play was transportation something that parents paid for was that - that participate raised raised as I recall we eliminated it immediately when I got here is super ten and I was really proud of the board for being able to make that work I

094think it went holistically it we raised maybe sixty to eighty thousand dollars total don't quote me on that I'd have to go back and this is going about five years now they're in a very tumultuous time and then that that would offset the total athletic it didn't necessarily go to one particular account as far as I recall but then again the history was inaccurate at the time I became a superintendent of the budget history just wasn't accurate and Ken is there any way and in no way am i proposing this but is there some sort of differential that we if we were to like really strip it down to just mandated costs what this sort of what the differential is between what we're spending now and and what is strictly mandated for physical and health

095education no no this is not this is not says that in health this is actually this is not phys ed in health okay so athletics is not mandated no lettuce is actually not mandated all right so I'll just continue going down the list then so clubs and activities that is for huckleberry with skinnier NBA chess is 117,000 168 almost entirely stipends pay to Club Advisors the arts is 1 million five hundred thirty thousand four hundred seventy four there are fourteen teachers here coral and band stipend supplies equipment and travel to competitions [Music] so those are pretty much the non-mandated items that we can sort of so the arts the arts as a whole is just not mandated so how much is just the piece that is not mandated know this is the old hire program

096that is the total program salaries of teachers equipment I think that's why I was asking the question so it's a mix of mandated not mandated yes unlike much of which is mandated okay thank you Bob did you just want to know how much we spent on the REI I was interested in what we're spending in the arts but I was also interested in kind of a kind of a recap of what are the programs that we're doing and what are we doing on curriculum because it's not even mentioned when we go through our budgets or our curriculum reviews and I'd like to hear more about that that mate doesn't have to be for today sure meeting but I think we need to spend much like I feel pretty passionate about language I feel pretty passionate

097like arts us and as a value-add mrs. mrs. Fitzgerald is busy working with her faculty on developing their units k-8 they're in a really good place she actually we had some conversations over the last couple of weeks and she's developing some kind of summary materials to update dr. Ruby and I on exactly where her teams are in their curriculum development and then we would obviously go to cape committee and share that and then we certainly will be more than mrs. Fitzgerald be more than happy to come bring that forward and come share that with the Cape committee in the board yeah I just I mean that's really the arts are really interesting because I'm a believer you don't necessarily have to spend a lot more to have a vibrant arts program you just have to

098have focus on what is that you want to deliver with staff yeah yeah I really want to enhance things by saying I want to have this extra thing this extra program but is the questions I would have is what is our program for music through the grades how does it grow you know our strings part of it or they're not part of that sure you know there's a lot of stuff around that choral programs how do we enhance skills and get kids excited about that arts and Fine Arts sure know what are we doing there art appreciation drama doing their drama weren't the Giants with middle schools and I actually having had kids who've gone through this I think I actually think we have a pretty good program and it's underappreciated and we don't talk

099about it I don't know what other other people feel about it but my actually my my kids all look back with great joy and the arts programs they had so can I ask a question about from going too far stop me but on question 11 we asked about curriculum writing is that something we could talk about tonight or actually we prepared that was something Reds that's lengthy enough that I actually asked dr. Ruby and mrs. fairies to put together a brief overview presentation as a district and where we're at and then each principal to come up and specifically talk about where they're at where they anticipate working with their teachers in developing their curriculum this the remainder of this year and then for next year you know that which was the specific question what is

100the curriculum writing the extended duty actually going toward are they share that so when we're ready we're certainly ready conversation as well when the board is ready so are there anything is there anything in any of these items and these are non mandated items for the most part that you guys want to go through may comment on anything that you see doesn't align with our values okay there was another question which was what was the reason for the fluctuation in electric costs do you have an update the electrical costs were lower than they were in 1617 and lower than they were in 1819 two factors in June of 2017 there was an overpayment of about eighty seven hundred dollars with the credit taken in the next year so that kind of artificially inflated 1617 and

101reduced 1718 and then during 1718 there was less electric usage at both the high school and uncle Barry I don't know specifics and I do it every year totaling about 20,000 dollars that's a lot less yeah but it wasn't just one I thought maybe it was you know I would see it in one block but it was we thought it through though here burst we were trying to isolate that yeah that was one factor but it was multiple months mm-hmm yeah it was just those two schools on the other two schools were relatively consistent all three years more snow days what's up those years more snow days and the last question was regarding curriculum writing so don't you ready for that weekend yeah sure yes so dr. dr. Rudy did you do the honors please

102thank you mrs. Ferris as well thank you that's my favorite thank you so the missile it so what we want to do is give an overview which I don't think it's working hello okay so we want to give an overview this is a very high level because it would take days to go into what goes into the creek in writing but a very high-level overview of what we've done over the past three plus years to set up the principles delivery of what they're currently doing this year and then what the extended duty money that they've put into their individual school budgets for curriculum writing is what what is proposed for so the first thing you know and this might seem very simplistic but we really need to be on the same page for what curriculum

103is because you use the word curriculum I see Joyce head and it means different things to different people so what do we mean by curriculum and curriculum typically refers to the knowledge and skills that our students are expected to learn and that includes the learning standards or the learning objectives or you could call it learning targets that they are expected to meet and then the units and the lessons that the teachers actually teach and the assignments or the projects that students are engaged in asked to do also the books materials videos presentations and readings that are used in a course and the tests and the assessments that measure how students do all of that is part of curriculum so sometimes and that definition is lifted right from that that address sometimes people use the term

104curriculum when they're referring to a program that they purchase from a vendor so you might hear some people say we use the teacher's college units of studies curriculum that is not a curriculum that's a curricular tool so if you look on your PowerPoint where you see books materials etc etc that's a part of curriculum some districts actually buy curricular tools and use that as their curriculum but that's not what we mean when we say curriculum so this is really important as a foundational understanding because it's the it is the foundation upon which we are building our curriculum PD for our teachers and the process that we're using for curriculum development so just to talk about the curriculum development process here in Brookfield whether or not you know this or not most teacher preparation programs do

105not have a course in curriculum development there is a course on curriculum but it doesn't teach you how to develop curriculum so when we were embarking on the process of looking at you know redesigning our curriculum so that to make sure that it was aligned with standards we embarked on with your support and with our community's support consultancy with Marie Alcock dr. Marie Alcock in 2017 so that teachers could actually own the curriculum so that we're actually teaching teachers and empowering teachers to develop the curriculum as well as be being the end users of that curriculum along with their student learners and that's pretty important because it really provides for a much more meaningful experience for the learners both the adult learners and the student learners and it's actually what we're in business for right

106as a board of education as a school community curriculum is our business curriculum instruction and assessment is what we do so we really starting in 2017 with dr. Marie Alan Cox consultancy she's an international expert on curriculum development some of her books that she is authored or co-authored are on this slide and Maureen found this little clip art that says got Alcock on this mug and in fact we have so we got her already and it's interesting because a lot of our you know sister towns in Connecticut are looking to get out so she has started from what I understand to work with the Wilton School District so I guess they've jumped on the bandwagon of trying to make sure that their schools also have a standards aligned curriculum and that empowering teachers as developers

107as well as end users so we've got dr. Alcock and we've got this program going to develop a core team of curriculum developers in the school because we want to build capacity in our district and as I shared with the board when we put this into the budget it's not like it's it's not going to be forever and ever and ever because we are going to be building capacity and weaning ourselves off of dr. Alcock support at the level that we've had and in the budget this year there is a decrease in the amount of funds that we're looking for to to spend in working with dr. Alcock because we're building capacity and expertise with our teachers so we'll have we'll get a new cup or we'll just let her go to Wilton or Weston

108or Westport or any other W that might want her you are oh yeah we are so so so now Deb is going to talk about what learning has occurred so that you know what the teachers got for them Fiat money and the support that we gave them yeah so it was really hard to fit all of what we've learned into this one slide and as Maureen said at the onset this is really a very high level you know presentation on really the curriculum development process but core curriculum design teams consisting of both teachers as well as administrators from all of our schools again we're empowered to become both the developers and the end users of curriculum and I can't stress the importance and the appreciation and this and the appreciation for the support by the

109board and our community to really allow teachers that that yeah yeah that privilege to really own the curriculum so that it's not just this you know store-bought kind of curriculum that's given to you in a binder and you go and you implement it because going through this process of curriculum development is really giving us so much more than just a standards aligned curriculum it's giving teachers the professional learning to really be better teachers and really understand the standards which are out there minimum grade level expectations but really beyond just understanding the standards but really becoming and developing a better expertise in assessment literacy and best practice instruction evidence based instruction so it's really in the three years or so we've really seen and teachers really feel much more empowered in an intimate with the curriculum

110so it's really done a lot not just given us this end product that we're going to use in the classrooms okay so we started off with collaborating to bundle or gap put together the standards in a way that made sense developmentally neurologically for students and we pasted them out basically within the context of the nine and a half month school year was at the nine and a half year school year I know and again the standards are the bare minimum end of year grade level expectation so we were able to bundle those paste them out according to you know again the context of the school year we then deconstructed did a close read of the standards just deconstructed them so that we could look at what within what's the knowledge what is it that students

111needed to be able to know and what was it that they needed to be able to do so the knowledge the knowing and the skills the doing then we were able to develop assessment item or events that were aligned very precisely aligned as you can see this is a very precise systematic process the assessment items were aligned with the standards and it says their bucket one and I'll talk a little bit about the buckets if you will up in the next slide we also prioritize standards and that was for the reporting purposes only even though all standards are explicitly taught and overtly assessed throughout the school year we prioritize standards for the purpose of reporting only we also identified instructional materials basically the activities and the resources that are aligned to the standards which is

112really the knowledge of the skills and as Maureen referenced the curricular tools and the programs the district approved programs such as the Teachers College units of studies those are certainly part of and integrated into our curriculum but those are not out curriculum and all teachers so even if the teacher wasn't a core curriculum design team member because obviously we can't pull every single teacher out of the schools for professional development that would really give what's es the SS run for their money as well as our budget we the building principals have really been very thoughtful in the capacity building rollout at the school level so in terms of exploring the next steps we're looking now to get into bucket two and that's really developing the context for the curriculum so as I was sitting here

113listening to some of the conversation around you know global themes certainly that would be part of our bucket to in terms of developing context for curriculum and certainly looking to you know make some of those themes or the case studies that would be involved you know culturally and globally relevant and then bucket three it talks about the student engagement for self navigated learning I'll talk a little bit about that in the next slide or two so this is a graphic that really shows the relationship because this is sometimes confusing to folks the relationship between standards curriculum instruction and assessment because we throw all these words out and they may not mean anything to folks so here's a quick example the standards so the common core standards the next generation science standards the social study standards

114arts standards music snail whatever standards were talking about those if you want to think about architecture if we had Paul chuckle here he could deliver this this so those are building codes okay so building code is the bare minimum I don't know anything about building well let's pretend you know you have to have the foundation has to be this thick and it has to be made out of stuff that's got these things in it and you have to have at least X number of windows and you have to have at least X amount of outlets and they have to be this high off the floor those are building codes so the standards are building codes most people if they're going to build a very high level house they're not going to just be at the

115at that level of building code but they have to meet that or they're not going to get a certificate of occupancy when the building is done so if you meet the building codes then you want to build the structure the architectural design of whatever it is you're envisioning you want to have for your own building whether it's a home or a school or a hospital and I think all of us have a little bit of experience with that having been through the new school building so once you have that building code then you need to have a blueprint the curriculum is the blueprint okay so the blueprint is much more sophisticated than just the basic building codes so we are building that curriculum it embodies the standards which we must assess to make sure that

116everybody is reaching the minimum but that's not where we stop and that's what why we had have to do professional development for the building of the curriculum and we gave you a little bit of an overview about bundling the standards and all the things that Deb talked about on the previous slide if you have a curriculum that doesn't really do anything for children unless you can engage them with the curriculum and so that's the instruction and that's where we are also providing professional development and have been doing so for the past five years since we got here on the gradual release of responsibility model and you've seen that in our strategic coherence plan how are we engaging students with the curriculum so that they are actually learning from it and we are we talk about

117learning targets and the activities all of that is in the curriculum so that it's not a lottery of who your student gets for a teacher there are insured experiences that are embedded in the curriculum so that we have equity and then and we've asked this question here tonight how do we know that it's happening how do we know that it's working and that's the assessment piece and what we really like Mr Belinda would know better about this than anybody because his teachers really gave me one of my greatest moments of work here in in Brookfield because we have as teachers we really haven't had in pre-service in the becoming teachers a great deal of learning in designing assessment assessment literacy among teachers cut is is not high and so we make up tests that we

118think measure something but how do you really know and so this great moment was when we did a lot of assessment work how do we design the assessments which takes a long time and you have to know everything else before you can get there that really measure what we think we're teaching we had and I'll just say it was the English teachers it was a great day so they have these tests that they give and they've been coveting them and they give them back to the kids after the corrector but then they take them back because they're gonna use them again and when they really unwrap the standards and went through this process with one of their units they started looking at the test that they give and they realized that the tests that they

119were giving don't really measure anything that they're trying to figure out if they taught and to see teachers really sitting there in these work sessions and having that aha moment and saying oh my goodness we have to redesign this because we're doing all this teaching but this test doesn't really assess what we're teaching was really showed us that what what we are trying to do we were getting at so this process is something that takes a long time to do and I would invite any of you to invite us back some other day or a Saturday or a weekend and we can give you a deeper a deeper dive but we can't go into it we love to talk about ok as promised we're back to the buckets so the buckets are there to really

120illustrate the evidence the assessment evidence of standards assessment evidence of curriculum and assessment evidence of instruction so that's what really these buckets represent and they also correlate or align to the three big reasons for why we would embark on standards aligned systems so the number whatever necessarily in order but number one on this slide reason for the why of going to standards aligned you know systems is that it provides transparent and honest feedback to the learners and it's the feedback is relative to that those building codes of the bare minimum end of year grade level expectations that really allows us as teachers to be diagnostic and prescriptive to make sure that there are no gaps in the foundational skills those bare minimum expectations and as Maureen was saying when we were going through this professional

121learning and really reviewing some of the assessments that we were in fact you know giving we recognized that they were really more of a mix of standards so he really couldn't be very precise and diagnose and isolate a particular standard the systems that were doing now we actually use alphanumeric coding from the skills which is derived from an exact precise language from the standards we then use that same alphanumeric coding to create an assessment item to be able to measure the skill that we just aligned it to and we also have the same alphanumeric coding to the activities learning targets and resources so you can really see that it's very very precise and it's really a very systematic system that really works so that we can really be sure that we are measuring and observing

122relative to the standards as I said bucket one evidence of standards that brings me to bucket two which is the assessment evidence of the curriculum and as Maureen was talking about that's the bit of the blueprint that's really going taking those building codes right they're still part of it the standards are there but we're going above curriculum should always go above and beyond standards right we certainly don't want to have you know a system that just just you know teaches bare minimum right so we want to go above and beyond standards and we also want to make sure that we have because we're being so efficient in this process that we no longer have to give assessments or embark on any kind of other activities that are fun but are not really giving us information

123relative to the standards we can be that efficiency affords us more time to be able to spend on relevant and authentic meaningful learning experiences that allow students to engage in real world you know experiences to be able to take those building codes those bare minimum grade-level expectations and connect them and transfer them into context so that's what you know bucket number two is and then bucket number three which is assessment evidence of instruction as Maureen was talking about that's really the engagement piece you know what am i is a learner what am i learning why am i learning this how will I know if I did learn it and you know what do I do if I didn't learn it and how do I feel about this learning experience so really instruction to use dr.

124al Cox terms isn't it is what she referred to as an invitational art teaching teaching is an invitational art so the extent to which that learner accepts the invitation is engagement so bucket number three is really the assessment evidence of instruction or engagement and really you're getting that information from bucket number one and bucket number two so the assessment evidence from the standards the assessment evidence of curriculum the descriptive feedback that the learner gets in consultancy with the teacher helps that learner to set goals and be an active participant in their own learning and the product of that is a learning plan or a self navigation tool so now the learner well again along with the teacher at the very young age I mean it starts with kindergarten can really be thinking about okay this

125is how I did with this standard I've got this I don't have this yet this I need to practice this and I still need to learn that and these are some learning activities that I can engage in in order to help me practice but I don't have yet so that's the learning plan so from the previous slide that's still the learning that we're embarking on in terms of the professional development so I'm going to give you an example of what would be a bucket to type activity and when I illustrate this I think it's going to if you're wondering as we've been asked sometimes by teachers because it's exhausting work can't we just get this on curriculum from some other district that already did this right that sounds like a good idea especially if they

126already paid for it so and I love that question so let me give you this example so when we start we're going to be moving in and the principles are going to talk very briefly about we're going to be moving into bucket two for the curriculum work that we've done where we have bucket won't we have all the standards aligned assessments etcetera are all done now we need to go to the curriculum level and look at how do we make the standards that everybody has to to learn in you know in the state or in the country that use the same standards as we do how do we make it relevant and engaging and have students have the opportunity to apply what they've learned that's the that's the context so there are several districts in

127the state who have been working with Murray Alcock and Heidi Hayes Jacobs for a number of years New Haven is one of them so on your slide you see an iteration of a unit from grade 2 which is this is a math math unit and that unit is titled me my world and measurement and it's and the subtitle is all aboard miles of measurement at Union Station so they took they and and we started to do this you'll hear a couple snippets about how we're following this type of a protocol they looked at what so we learned these math skills we learned about measurement we learned about time etc etc that aligned to standards in second grade how do we contextualize this to Newhaven how do we integrate this with other learning that the students

128are doing in second grade so Jen I'm not going to ask you but you know that in second grade they're studying about their community right and there something about transportation and there studying all these things so these teachers wrote this curriculum because you couldn't buy it anyplace just look what it's about and they looked at they were looking at some of the things they were studying history the historical part of their social studies program and they have the beautiful Union Station train station in New Haven so they developed this so that there was a field trip to Union Station there were interviews with some of the folks that work at Union Station there was work with the train schedules and weather and they used the the second grade math skills of time and measurement to

129solve real world problems about what happens when mr. Jones needs to get to New York City by 8:30 and his train leaves at this time and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah something's on the tracks here what is the impact of the climate if it snows and trains don't get to leave until this time all real world problems if you look closely I don't know if you can see it it's very light it says hold off this component for revision next year globalization ok clear because their plan is after they they teach this particular stage of development of this unit there it's not going to stay like that it's going to be iteratively revised and improved and what they want to do is have a global connection and they they were injured the teachers knew about the Japanese train system

130which is very much different than ours and that their trains go much faster so they were going to do a comparison of the train system in and the timing just what a second grader who do with their math in New Haven and compare it to euro South America and they were going to do skyping with partners that they were going to find in those other countries this is second graders in New Haven so the money that we have in the budget in the individual school budgets that's for extended duty is for teachers to work after school on Saturdays we have teachers that work on Saturdays we have teachers that are so enthused about some of this that they work on during vacation and we are able to keep track of what they're doing because it's

131every all of our curriculum is entered into an online platform Rubicon Atlas which makes it available to everyone makes us able to embed links very comprehensive yeah we so we can we can we can run reports to see which standards are being addressed what the frequency of the of how many how many times they're being addressed in a unit which standards aren't being addressed that we have to go back and and look at further and so they are working on in ela and math k4 this level this example that I'm giving you here about New Haven early I'll tell you one other quick story Berlin has berlin school district has been working with the same consultants that we've been working with for years and they've done they've actually won some awards for some of the

132content that they put together for their curriculum and I remember one of the elementary teachers asked me two years ago well if they did such a great job couldn't we just borrow it and see what we can do and I said yeah that's a great idea so let me tell you about one of the things I want an award for it's their kindergarten social studies curriculum and it's all built around the Berlin Fair it's amazing that's not gonna help us so our our curriculum is going to have this level of context at the next stage and that's just part of the work that the teachers will be doing so we're gonna the principals aren't going to talk for long they're just going to tell you quickly what they're doing so that you have a better

133understanding but I hope this wasn't too confusing but that it you know there's so much to talk about but it's very complex and where we're doing it because it's what's right for kids any questions we can I just ask before you move on so do we have any units that are Brookfield relevant like this that's what we're working on now that's our next step yeah and we have and there's some ideation that's already taken place and I think Mary Rose is shaking her head she'll tell us all about that maybe we start with mark questions we could start with mark I start with whoever you want yeah we can start with mr. Blandon from the high school thank you dr. Ruby and mrs. Ferris thank you I don't have a presentation so thank you and

134I just I want to make a quick comment before we you know one of the conversations we talked about Spanish and I was you know sitting back there it's k-6 it affects we talked about global things I just want to thank the board in Cape because our social DS curriculum you know our two courses for our freshman course is global themes now and our sophomore courses Human Geography so on talk about human connections and it's just it's something that's connected directly to the work that we're doing so want to bring that up but I appreciate Deb and Maureen you know introducing this for us because it really kind of gives context for what we're doing here you know certainly the high school is at a different place than the other schools we are the kind

135of last in the line of succession you know as we start to roll out report cards and changes and standards aligned work but we have been part of the training right and so just to provide you a little bit of context in the program of studies which I'll present to Cape and then in 28th there's a hundred and sixty three courses on the books right I'm requesting curriculum work for 23 right that's a start it's a dent so I just want to be you know we talk about the big picture of things just want to make you aware that this is this is gonna be a long process at the high school and it takes a lot of time and effort and all the requests that I have really are level funded from the same

136kind of from what we've asked for the previous years so there's no increases in curriculum expectations in terms of work so we were lucky enough we had a couple individuals I believe Mike Smith was one as well as mark Jewett at one point in time went even prior to the Maury coming to the district and they were in orange and got to spend some time shadowing the orange school district and seeing what this process was like we're also then fortunate once Murray came to district initially we started training core groups of teachers the core team of teachers that were going to be involved in the curriculum work that would eventually help to train the rest of the department and when worked together initially it was really math and social studies teachers were the first ones

137that were really there English and science eventually came on board but that first core group was really math and social studies and then as we move through the years phys ed was there as well phys ed in health was there as well and as we move throughout the year over the last three years really English and science attended more frequently and now we're at the point where our other core courses are other courses like our extension courses our family consumer science you know they haven't been trained officially yet they've had a very little bit of Murray and they're just in the beginning stages of their work there you know so really to establish a baseline this is some really good professional development for our teachers to really truly dive into standards and really make sure

138we understand them and see what we were doing currently what we needed to change and then really establish a baseline is it aligned and you know we have vetted the courses took a look and said okay as Maureen talked about which is great you know we talked about bundling standards that's step one that's a step one because the curriculum is what we do without it there's nothing there's no purpose for us being here without curriculum we might as well go home because there's nothing for us to teach we just be making it up on our own so it's really important to do that piece we walk through that established bundles and then we looked at you know over the last three years and now last year was a unique year because of me ask and

139most of our professional development time and everything was focused entirely on that so we did not do a ton of curriculum work from that perspective so what I come to now is that you know the requests that we have and for example I have I'm looking at about you know the average if you're looking at I'm gonna pick one out here as I'm looking at it if like we had two teachers that worked four to five hour days on exam at $40 an hour you're looking at $1,600 $1,600 for two teachers working five out to five hour days you know there you go there's $1,600 like that and the amount of work that can get done if you sauce if you see some of these products it may look simple but once you bundled standards

140and then you start getting into essential questions right and skills and ideas and then you start moving on to assessments it takes an ordinate I'm and we're constantly revising you know we have a structure here at the high school with collaborative learning teams where as they teach you know during the course of the week they meet every four days and they're talking about the curriculum they're reviewing and what's coming up next and they're making notes like this the globalization go back so it's a living document so even though we may have developed curriculum for let's say English 1 which is gonna be further along something like US history which Mike Smith is involved in from the ground up or they're a little further along in terms of the buckets right so they've bundled standards in

141history they're done essential questions and skills they've looked to develop P scales and aligned assessments and now they're moving to the next step we have some that are there but they're still going back and revising to make sure it's aligned whereas when I look at like marketing 1 and intro to business we're gonna be bundling standards that's where we are at the very beginning of that process and so I'm looking across this you know I'm looking at courses in business world language you know we have French and Spanish pre-ap three or four classes in English four classes in math for classes in science and I have a fifth class we're looking to really tweak US history again because that's one of the ones that you know is probably the farthest along and all our courses

142but the interesting pieces they need to continue to do more it really shows how this evolves is a living document that we need to continue to work to make sure this stuff happens one of the other things too that's important to know is that when we do curriculum work it's not just that's great you three going to work on curriculum and usually it's teams of two to three here at the high school there's an action plan that has to be submitted an action plan has to go to Maureen and Deb and they give feedback and they give they give feedback right sometimes they're done over again so it's it's something that you know is vetted it's not something we're doing on our own I just want to let you know that when we do these

143things and I could go through the list of the 23 courses that I'm looking to but you have a general idea and my request is somewhere around $27,000 is what I'm requesting for across these five departments business world language English math science and social studies which equates to a work on 23 courses it's not 23 full courses there's no big polished model at the end and I've got 140 something others I got to figure out how I'm going to do that next so there it's a vetted process we're working together and it's constantly evolving and it's this the staff is invigorated right and to take those next steps because they see it we're far off the rollout really starts down on K and is working its way up and we're gonna have a lot of

144conversations moving forward but that kind of explains where we are now I think that if that makes sense questions you want to be here later than usual okay all right going down the line it's a little different as you know from the elementary to the middle school to the high school but I'm gonna try to focus on what I put in for the extent of Duty for for Wisc and here are the if you want to say core content areas we are further ahead than the high school we've been I've been hitting the button on this thing we we have been able to work a little bit more with our teams and we have our math team say we do by grade levels I have two people two teachers say for each grade level so

145they're working together on these things so for instance we were when we're talking about I'll start with our English Language Arts those were in the lower grades we have four teachers but when they work together like Mark said we submit plans to administration to let them know exactly what we're going to be working on at that time one of our big shifts this past year for fifth grade as you know is we have been able to get an open court is one of the foundational skills instructional tools that were working about working with that they had spoken about before as a curricular tool not the curriculum but a tool and that's been something I know that is really our 5th grade teachers have embraced and feel that it's been it's been a great asset to

146us but again when you have something like that with that tool we're trained in it and then once you do you need to learn how to use it and then also figure out with how we are going to incorporate that within our within our curriculum how we're gonna put it into our year-long context of the curriculum another area even for ela for all for grades but we've been doing some PD with Amanda Aaron's and also with that learning the changes some of the instructional changes that we've made or decisions that were made in we've made and also assessing students and when you do those things all of those things go back to changes in the curriculum along the way science and again I'm trying to make the connections here but as you know because we've

147talked many times about the Smithsonian science could that again that's a tool that we're using the PD that has come along with that and things has changed our curriculum in different areas in how we assess our students and we still need to make changes in our curriculum based on some of those areas we had just our last grade 5 has now has all of the science kits and there's going to be a lot of change for our and the curriculum part of that that still needs to be done social studies something that Maureen brought up before something we're very excited about we have made changes in the past to schedule a context of the sequence of the curriculum based on those decisions we had spoken before but really the newest one is we've developed a

148relationship thankful thanks to dr. ruby through a grant with the connecticut arts for learning and what we're trying to do we met with two of their staff members and some of our arts teachers we had our art teacher one of our music teachers theater arts teachers and two of our social sites teachers happens to be mike smith was one of them in seventh grade and mr. Schadt and we're starting to fight we're gonna start there finding a way as we start to infuse the art into our everyday curriculum and social studies so we've started that process we would want to continue that process you know if you think of it as an intern more of like interdisciplinary type learning and units that we have and also as a part of that I think about this

149ties in great to the social-emotional learning that we've been talking about trauma sensitive training as you talk about arts and music and in theater arts and stuff like that so that's part of the extended duty for there and then in math and in most of these other areas we are still working on we have excuse me some PD with Murray coming up is work starting tools a little bit more with the item banks and the assessments using those to create assessments that are better aligned to the standards that we have so that's the money that I have put out for extended duty is really based on those four areas at this time we do have other times where I know mark spoke about some of the other courses that he has our peon health has

150have done a good chunk of this work some of our other areas have not had the chance to do as much so they'll be doing more but it may be not as much that as needed as needed in these four areas for Wisc and ear at least well again and for my extended duty part it's the the main courses that we have for ela science social studies in math and I should actually say we also have extended duty for world language I know that there's work that you know if Kevin had spoken about and they're further behind in us mine I think was 12,000 altogether yeah I think I was 12 thank you so since we've been working so much kata for we thought we'd share what we've been doing together that okay any questions

151let us know and we'll kind of just kind of throw everything yeah so we've really been at the forefront is Maria and ever saying of the work that's been happening has been happening really Kate for so our teams have been there from the start having all the training and really the last two and a half years been working closely with Marie intimately intimately with Marie to make sure that we are following the process and you're getting everything done that needs to happen but I would say over the course of the last year we've really been working on three things continuing to build the professional learning and understanding of these special practices that are relative to curriculum design for the core team so you know all that the slides that Deb went through today that didn't

152happen overnight that's taken a you know many years at this point to kind of get everyone's understanding because the first time as you know with learner's we're all learners the first time you hear something you know that you hear it and then you need to hear it again you hear to get you know I mean so now I would say our core teams are I mean you I would challenge you to talk to any of them about this process and they would be able to explain it very explicitly so the next step that we're actually next week or two weeks Maria's coming now to talk about the learning plans which is that self navigation that that Deb and Morgan we're talking about earlier so that will be the next step of the learning for our

153core team the other thing that they're really doing is designing the curricula which were you know kind of the bulk of the work and then I was at the last piece at both schools are really building the capacity of colleagues to be able to have the same conversation about the work that the core team is able to have so it's been incoming embedded within our s RBI teams within our data teams as you know many of you who experienced the report card this trimester or last trimester that's all you know every teacher has had to be brought up to speed whether or not they work with Marie from the beginning we needed to make sure that they had a common understanding of all of these documents and terms and what that would mean for instruction

154and all of that kind of stuff so that's really been a lot of work for the core team so all of that has really kind of been in really reading math and writing we haven't done a lot but this our specials areas have done some work but it's been primarily in again reading writing a map Deb described in depth those documents we've been putting together but it's been the year-long context so deciding when each stammer standard will be explicitly taught and evaluated or assessed over the course of the year the proficiency scale for each standard what does it look like what does it mean that a child is able has met this standard or not met the standard and what does that look like I'm the kind of that graded scale the banks of assessment

155items with examples for each level of that on the proficiency scale so all of this is taking time and you'd be surprised the level of debate you can get to in kindergarten when you're discussing like the very basic counting and cardinality and it really brings up so many things that you knew on set that you don't realize that you know when you when you just think about it on the surface and then it also includes all our unit plans which would be the bulk of our work this year essential questions big ideas the daily teaching points outlining how the curricular tools are implemented within the curriculum so that's kind of what Maureen was describing earlier but we don't we didn't just take open court as our curriculum it's our tool and now we've dried that

156you were making everything fit in a line and that's where a lot of these instructional activities and resources come into play and also again obviously the assessments and all the scoring guides around the assessment so when you when I say that it's it's a weeb weeb stops really printing things out for teachers because there's there's a volume of documents that they need to be able to manage and understand and put together just for their own knowledge so that they can then instruct instruction students so that a lot we have Google Docs set up and you know we're using rubicon and there's a lot of this very intricate in that way but I think that the two overarching themes are alignment with the standards and making sure that we're efficiently using our curricular tools with fidelity

157to make sure everything is really I mean done clearly is there anything you'd say up else about like the work we're doing now no I mean as everyone now has discussed in great detail there's just been so so much work as you can imagine to just prepare for the standards aligned report card this this past year this current school year and I think for the k4 teams and you know merit rose you can add to this as well really for next year like when we're looking at extent of duty it's going through the current units that have been created and kind of tweaking and revising them building upon the assessments that are geared towards the self-navigate learner and then also the contextual piece right making it our own you know what makes our curriculum stand

158out as Brookfield's curriculum versus you know another district as Maureen and Deb kind of described and you know we were having a conversation about this yesterday because our teams meet huckleberries team meets every Tuesdays and Thursday and we started talking about this work and we're kind of lucky because we have a news building being built in our back yard so we talked about how you know when we start developing this work but you know from a math standpoint you know oh my gosh there's so much we can do in math in regards to area perimeter building even how much does supplies cost will you have enough develop the building we talked a lot about writing how do we incorporate that into persuasive writing you know writing letters to dr. Burrell and the architects of where

159they think certain spaces should be and then even which I feel like sometimes gets neglected like civic engagement right you know building a playground that's all inclusive for everyone like what does that look like so it's really exciting you know and really that's where our moving forward for us kay for our extended to do money will really delve into that next year yeah so you would ask I think more you'd mention also it's just some other examples of seeds of ideas that teachers will come up with so in addition to like there's the building project we're referring back to an first grade Bridgewater chocolate so there's a little bit of a session obsession with chocolate and the fact that Bridgewater is there so you know we've looked at we started talking about math units and

160just addition and subtraction is what that we know what does what that kind of we're asking kids to do and solving word problems in someone you know when we talked about like what is unique and special term to Brookfield you know we talked about again we have this this Chocolate Factory in this company that is you know like things known throughout the country and so how can we now you know use the skill that kids need in terms of you not only being fluent with addition and subtraction and you know all of the the nuances of taking apart putting together all the comparing of numbers and that kind of thing but also where did we talk about our persuasive writing you know I mean how could we could students write and if there are certain

161design or chocolate or something that they would like to persuade the bridgewater people to actually start you know developing or how would they market to their their friends who you know like when there's this new product what would that look like so there's a lot of speaking and listening involved that a lot of literacy involved it's just so it if it offers opportunities for any learner to engage with the standards in a way that is not just sitting and receiving instruction so it's just another way to look at in kindergarten and one of the things we've been talking about is creating a book store so you know kindergarten there as you know if they love their they're learning to read like these symbols actually means something you know it's not just this nonsense on a

162page so they're really starting to write their own books and and and your books and and publish them so you know we talked about you know like what is a book could a kindergarten bookstore look like and we have books say on your way Book Fairs twice a year so how could we have a section of kindergarten writing and what would that look like in terms of you know just the you know not just the writing itself but also you know how much would you charge for your for your book and are you going to include an illustration do you want to do a book talk and how do you know so there's lots of you know components that really will be our kind of next step moving forward and that's this is where now

163we are only limited limited by our creativity and and how we want to move forward so it's really this this is where a lot of the time comes in though because it requires research and we need to make sure that there's there's continuation from grade to grade and classical you know me so there's there's just a lot of work that goes into it but we're very excited so and how much is each of the building spending or do you have a combined total no so currently I have asked for about seventeen thousand for next year around twenty four thousand twenty four thousand for Center and eighteen thousand eight hundred fur ok included also money for science and social studies so all of the work that we've done for especially starting I think we've talked about

164how it starts in kindergarten moved this way out yeah so we have the curricular tools again in place especially for science now we need to make them ours so we're not just teaching the curriculum we're making them Brookfield and what that's going to look like so that's worth a lot of that extra money came into is also looking at the seed three standards and how are we aligning everything we have a cohesive approach the schools are very well positioned came from eight I'm sorry the schools are really well positioned K through 8 to move into that the science work and that's not going to be it's gonna be a lot of work but it's not gonna be as heavy a lift as the ela and the math and then next year we're hoping to really

165focus on the further development of real standards aligned social studies curriculum and bringing in from the pilot that Dean is doing with the the Arts Council seeing how we can really just have the social studies to really come to light not only through the Khan the contextual piece but also through the arts and when we say that the arts we're talking about like in the units that they're gonna be working on at the Middle School with American history and seventh grade thinking about and believe me I I don't know anything about this I'm not pretending to be an expert I'll give you my simple little example so if they're studying the Revolutionary War like what what was what was the music and the art in the Revolutionary War so how can we use the text

166from music as a primary source document to give us to have kids be thinking about why would somebody write this ballad like what does it have to do with whatever they studied in in their their content and then what about paintings we can access on the internet we don't have to be able to go to a museum to see the painting with paintings of that period or paintings that were done about that period and what do they tell and then bringing in through the grant money through the grant that I wrote bringing in visiting artists and seeing if we can get them like in residence for a week to be co-teaching with that teacher the other thing that Dean was exploring we'll be exploring is how do we make it work when kids are rotating

167through those specials because there we can't say we're going to teach so this part of social studies and in February we're teach this unit and we're going to be working on this type of music because everybody doesn't have music or art at that time well do we do we do that in eighth grade if it's as if they're using those sources as primary sources text music painting in seventh grade and then when they go to eighth grade the eighth the teachers can say when they go through their rotations whenever it is last year's in social studies you studied X Y see now we're going to take that piece of music or we're going to look at that that style of art and we're gonna do whatever it is they do that aligns with the standards

168we're hoping we're very hopeful confident almost that this is going to really work out big time and then we're gonna want to do similar things and the other grade levels in social studies to really make that connection for kids so that this the they call them specials they really their content areas that they're not viewed through that lens of something extra they're really part of the curriculum and I think that speaks to what some of you were speaking about before so any questions thank you so much I like what mr. bland has said and I really you know I'm passionate about the fact that the curriculum work that we do is really the heartbeat of the school district I mean everything else everything's important it's hard to when you look at that list of questions

169you like how can you get rid of anything and that's a hard job that the board has to do but the curriculum is really what what we're here for and to have our teachers be so engaged and to own the curriculum and to be so enthusiastic about what's really tedious work is a credit to the people that we have working in the district and I just like to pay you back off that you know Rosa Jenna and I have really had great opportunities of past two years to really witness that firsthand even though it's usually the Blanda show [Music] we've seen that come to fruition for the past two years and I'm the opportunity of being on Cape so you hear teachers coming here come to talk thank you and I think one of the

170things just to remember if you look at so the amount of money we're spending it's realtively little this is really and I think you did a great job of reminding us how sophisticated this work is and it this is what makes us a system versus just separate schools or separate teachers sort of working in isolation in order for us to be to go from good to great we have to work as a system and without a fully aligned curriculum we'll never operate as a system and it's like a moving target though so you have to keep on visiting and visiting it and you're never done which is exhausting but that's the work and if we want to be great that's where we have to put our energy Africa and as a final statement to build

171on that the that's the reason why we're using Rubick on Atlas platform because in days of old when you had we probably still have it's a place on our website the little chart where it says you know every three years you're going to revise you know certain curriculum because that's how it's been done forever that's that's history if if if you're if teachers are teaching something a unit and it's not working there's the bare minimum that those standards the the code the building code that has to be covered but they have the freedom to make something that isn't working work right there in the moment because we don't want we have a class of third graders and the mentor text which is the book that the teacher uses not that the students use in the

172curriculum map is XYZ book and it's about baseball and she's got a bunch of kids that are like crazy about dinosaurs and you can teach what you need to teach using the dinosaur book don't use the baseball book you know you can switch it right up everybody the bare minimum the the insured curriculum is very different from the operational the curriculum that's operating in the classroom that can change but everybody is going to get what they need and what they're supposed to get nobody's gonna get shortchanged this it because we value our teachers they shouldn't be slaves to a binder of printouts that somebody who they don't know put together and just one other thing I think is really exciting is to hear all the talk about the authenticity of the tasks and students have

173authentic audience and things like that and you can tell that the work is going to be a lot more meaningful and I think it would be great for us maybe in a future meeting to eat when those units get developed and kids are doing those authentic tasks those would be great to share oh absolutely thank you so just just a question on running the curriculum program all right so I've watched this now over four years I had the joy of it by the way and I agree with you what you see in the Cape committee is just it's just inspiring how do you measure progress on completion of I mean we have it's never done well that was I would expect that answer but there's a kind of an initial whole rollout we're going through

174and we want to address our curriculum across the board how far along are we and how do you measure that so we have this document it's very long in fact it's a pain in the neck when you're waiting for it to load because it's so long oh let me backtrack two years ago all the administrators sat with Murray I was on the computer because that was when I had my surgery and they made a timeline of what we could expect what we needed to have done and how we'd have done and so then our what we call the Brookfield learning plan was developed based on that timeline now the timeline needs to be altered from some time to time when you find out well we didn't we really didn't expect it to take that long

175and so we adjust things we monitor if you want to use that term or measure how far we're going by looking at we're checking in they can tell you how much we check in checking in with where they I saw that with where they are on on the timeline and what products are in Rubicon Alice so we can go in well many of us have act the principle set back we can go in and we can look at any course that's being worked on and see exactly what's in there so you should therefore be able to say to me I'm thirty percent done or I'm twenty three percent done or I'm and on but this plan the way it's going I'll get from 23 to 35 percent done wouldn't you be percentages I would say

176that the expectation was that we would have everything all the standard standards bundled all of the standards alphanumeric coded for blah blah blah you know whatever course it is and tell you which stages of work should be done by one yeah I know I just I'm hearing a lot of descriptive and I'm kind of trying to get my head around how far along does this path are we and and what does this budget take us to as we're thinking about telling the town that this is a good investment and we're proceeding along the path and I just don't know how to articulate that I am short short short of a long too long a discussion yes I got a math curriculum question yeah I'm sure I would get a numerical answer but I know miracle

177but I'd love 20 even if it's a qualitative well we have it's by phases and you know what I'll send you the I'll send you the document because there's phases of curriculum development and there's four phases and we can tell you where the courses are in terms of whether they're in phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 or phase 4 I mean but it's not it's all one I know I'm just trying to figure out how to communicate this to the public a little bit I mean like very simple terms what would you agree to say that the misconception is often well how do we need all this PD why is all this neat money needs to be spent on PD I think that's the MIS exception outside I think they're gonna say that that's the

178question that comes out that I hear year after year but I'd love to be able to say look how well we're progressing right that's what I'm that's what I'm feeling is we're making progress but we're not talking about it other than you know to our term can't do that in the elevator pitch like what are terms that a layman would understand yeah yeah well I mean like if you think about it you might argue that when you started maybe we were at zero or maybe we're a point I'll give you an example like kind of continuum of ten even like I think that would be not on too unkind to say that for and I'm looking at you joy or ela and math it was a resuscitation okay not what not revising okay they had

179a start from the beginning for science okay and we had a lot of gaps that we had that we had to deal with so it wasn't a lot of really heavy lifting messy messy work it was also the PD was necessary because we need to get all that get an understanding that like teaching reading isn't philosophical it's actually scientific and having everybody understand the scientific principles of teaching reading so you have to have that basic understanding first let's move over to science science was we knew that we were behind in terms of where the state had developed an outline in 2012 of the five-year rollout to get everybody to NGSS we weren't there so we only start we had to giddyup and get science going and you know we had a lot of back and

180forth over the expenditure for the curricular tools for science and we we so we were starting what we weren't we weren't undoing a lot of stuff because it wasn't a lot of stuff there to undo we were starting anew with this new curricular tool and the new standards we did PD with the standards and if and without even having a full implementation we have test scores that we can be really proud of on NGSS we just got the state the state's I think I announced it last time that the state percentage of students who are at 3 or above for fifth grade and eighth grade was about 54% and our our fifth grade in eighth grade we're at 75 and 76 and we haven't even fully implemented the curriculum and it's great progress given we

181haven't gotten notes of the so so we're not so but but we we didn't have a lot of like undoing to do we were kind of starting new because it wasn't much there so so so if you're looking at you know if you were gonna ask me when would you predict that we're gonna have these amazing s backs course I'm gonna be really honest I can't tell you that's not what I'm asking I'm just asking if you were walking up to Joe or Mary in the supermarket say we've been progressing let me tell you in two minutes how we've been progressing and they don't have time for the all the knowledge that you have how would you boil it into some simple metrics we've got to find a way to stable to talk about that

182right it's and it doesn't have to be too numerical you know there's four phases we're about 30th you were about 80% of a phase I'm fine twenty percent through the second phase we're not even started on the third phase right that's it that's simple message yeah I mean you could look we can look at rue Cana we could come up with something like that just think there's we're not we're not talking our story well and and there's progress to be made right every time we go to a budget it's about progressing it to the next step right and and we're doing it without spending a lot more year-to-year right which is good but progress is important and to be able to look though for example the Board of Finance and the Board of Selectmen that

183we're only 30 percent of the way down this path and we've got more to do right don't don't slow us down is a very important simple message to have and we're not telling that message it's too it's too complex to digest so we just think about that don't have to answer tonight but people on how would you tell that story and I use percentages because I'm a math guy she she pegged me oh but but it doesn't have to be that it could be phases and were halfway through this phase and yes I mean that's the only way we can talk about the phases of development and where each it's about simplify subjects like really the complexity is that like each subject is not you know might be it wouldn't have to be it's by

184grade by course is it everything is different I like how you said the elevator pitch though I think about who our audience would be someone who doesn't understand curriculum at all it doesn't want to and it doesn't care - yeah and how can we tell them that we've made significant progress but we have still a lot of work to do and it's important and we have the foundation in and the first floors framed so something to think about I think like those are good things for us Bob to think about for lots of different things because that we are the voice of the budget and the more opportunities that we feel comfortable explaining things in a simple way the more successful a little bit yeah I think we we we are the voice of translating

185a very interesting and challenging and exciting environment that all of us in this room are working on - a group of people who are thinking about this as how much am i spending on education and my kids getting a good education right and that's it there there's more science and art in the in what we're talking about then the average everyday Joe's ready to absorb act right and we just need to work on that that's a that's a that's a I had a boss at one point in in IBM when I as I've worked there for many years we used to say Bob ducky ducky horsey horsey right and his message to me was keep it simple tell the simple story and you'll get 90% of the way where you need to get with the

186people who aren't in you in where you are ducky ducky or see yours my voice my boys remember to your point pub just living in this town looking at this number of 6.8% I just don't see that flying with the taxpayers and so are we in a position where we just have to look at I mean I stand behind the budget I don't see anything fat to trim personally I mean I like to keep everything in here but living in this town and being a taxpayer knowing what the taxpayers I just don't see this number anywhere near this number being approved look at it as I liked it and however historically do you look at it I was like will we push this forward anyway and then when it comes back the Board of Finance

187and they say well I thought I think our primary responsibility is to the education of the students in the district so if we I think we believe that this is you know this is where we stand and this is what we need assuming everything else lines up to our values we we need to be comfortable with standing behind it thank you so and just as sort of an aside to that you know I think we need we definitely need to do a better job of communicating the curriculum work because I mean it is it is everything that we're doing and nobody talks about it none of the parents ask about it and it is the most important thing and clearly I know we could talk about it for a really long time but you know

188it's when you you think about not just the professional development some some people will go there but it's also administrators too and I would like to thank all the administrators both that are here and they're not here for doing this incredible amount of work because it is and it's your leadership that makes it work so thanks for noticing that Rosa and I want to take a moment to share my pride in the instructional division which is all of these folks and the effort that's gone into this the vision that's gone in into all of this work and I don't think three or four years ago and Bob you were on the board at that time that you would be able to hear presentations from our principals at the level of instructional leadership that you heard

189this evening and that you've heard over the last few months the development and the capacity build that's happening with not only our administration but our teachers has been incredible and you know I'm just very proud of that work and I do agree we do need to figure out a more cogent way to express what's going on in much simpler terms perhaps horsey horsey ducky ducky Bob I've learned that pictures work well in newsletters I understand not a lot of we like pictures and newsletters less words John and more podcast I'll make sure there's Bob Cassie you know it's funny our parents don't come in and talk to you about what are you doing on curriculum every now and then you see our one who does it but I had an experience that I was in

190a social event and the parent the pipe never met before says oh you're on the Board of Education what have you guys done and I'm like oh boy oh my god am i 1200 because that's how those usually start she said my oldest child is a good student and in kindergarten and first grade he could that he learned to read me learn to read well my second child who's three years behind him can decode the newspaper he can pick up words he can sound them out my older child can't do that what did you do and I'm like oh let me tell you about curriculum foundations and all of the investment that we made to fix basic literacy and reading and writing at the elementary levels to that moment they weren't talking about curriculum but

191they were talking about it right and that was just visible to me and and I just love to love to see that night that's I thought that is a credit to everything that was in Bob I've been here now through it through this is the third board yeah you know that I've been and it doesn't happen without the support from the board this doesn't happen so and you're the liaison to the community in that so this is this has been a team effort with everybody here it's incredible work this was really useful thank you and thanks to Devin Maureen for presenting that it was really glad they put that together for us yes we do so does anybody have any anything else that they want to have you know anything major that they need sort

192of administration to have another round of comebacks on before our next meeting we don't have I mean if there's something that comes up I would still like tomorrow or something like that's okay but you know is there anything that you don't want board feedback on anything we want to discuss openly [Music] we will the one item we need to have lots of more discussion on is the meeting where I'm a special meeting on next week so yes I think we have that well underway but the whole discussion especially with the Florida Finance and the Board of Selectmen on our special ed both both known and unknown risks is really important and it really it's um really getting close a lot of evaluations have occurred meetings that happen and like I was saying earlier missus why

193God expend a lot of progress with that so we'll be very close next week well we have a chance of the Finance Committee meeting to review that wasn't Asia our intention is to go through all of that with the Finance Committee on Monday night prior to the meeting on the 15th and just for the board just as a reminder of those dates so typically and I think people newer to the board kind of understand that we try to keep our Wednesdays free so if I need a special meeting or something like that so next Wednesday's taken with the Board of Finance Board of Selectmen meeting that's the 15th the 22nd is the following Wednesday that's a regular meeting so we could certainly have budget discussions there but the the timing again the following Wednesday is

194the 29th and perhaps we might need a special meeting on the 29th to finally approve the budget depending on the discussion on the 22nd but if we are if we don't have comebacks tonight for the 22nd and then we arrive at the 22nd we have some conversation there's not we have to have a special meeting if we don't make a final decision on the 22nd and so and in the time it gets shorter and shorter to delve in and make adjustments or you know if anything like that's going to a car so just it's important to go over the next three weeks and everybody's head so you can kind of see that what we need to do thank you thank you thanks for the support yeah I'm just thinking about our next meeting we've had

195a lot of learning and comebacks I think we all need to come to the next meeting with proposals that we are ready to put on the table that we all consider ok we can't keep just talking around it right I think that the next meeting is each board member has to come in within a point of view with either I'm ready to support the budget as is which is a point of view or I think the following three things should be considered by the board and we ought to start with just let's get the list of things to talk about on the table and then we can deliberate right because the more specific instead of talking around it we can be the better we will more effective will be as a board so just it's

196hard right you know and and but we're at a point where it's gonna be okay are we ready to make proposals right and so that's I ask the question kind of rhetorically early are you making a proposal but it but it's we have to reach that point soon right so we can bring it forward and a week I don't know if you want to do anything further on this tonight but I think we could start our next meeting with that it would be probably gives us a chance to let the what we digest what we got tonight Bob do you feel like in order to do that it would be helpful to have a number in mind you know what what percentage increase are we okay with you know I think you're I think if

197there is any sort of reduction it needs to be a specific item or items that you're proposing are being reduced because we can't just give administration nope just give us the five because it's our purview to say what goes in or out of the budget so and frankly if we don't know tonight if you were to go in sometimes we've done that can you find X amount of dollars in the budget and we go back and scrub the budget and come back with a list of suggestions frankly we've done that so many years in a row there's not many places to go be very candid in fact we've had to bring back some positions that we eliminated because we couldn't function without them properly that takes time to do so if we wait til the

19822nd right now we've only really got it probably a week to do that yeah I mean do we should we be looking if we have to come with a list next meeting of programs or whatever am I looking for you know $500,000 in programs am i looking for a million dollars in programs and staff you know what I think and this is just me personally I think you should right now in this budget process I think we are only at the point where we need to make sure that this is a whatever we put forth to the town that this is a reflection of our values so if something is not if you believe something is not in line with that then that's what I would imagine you would propose to reduce but you know

199aside from that good good could I make a thought yeah that might work cuz I there to kind of gather what you did I actually don't think it's the board's job to walk into the next meeting trying to fit a number right I don't think that's what we oughta do we ought to go in saying I'd like you just said it's about our values right so we ought to think about programs that are in there that we think might be you know something that we're we think is an opportunity or areas of spending that we not I do think it might be valuable to get to give the administration a bogey to say what would you do if you had to do this right and and I and it's not it's not always easier fair

200but it helps us understand where priorities would be in John and his team's point of view right and he may come back and say oh my god I just can't get there right and that's that's short of you know cutting programs but I do think there's always value in doing it I'll call it a pounding case right on the downside and the what sticks in my mind you know if I'm looking yeah here we have three point seven seven percent in the base case short of the enrollment and special ed and the investments right so if the answer was tell me how you get 377 down to three right or you know that's that's a not an unreasonable bounding type of case I don't what's 0.77 worth yeah so three to four hundred thousand dollars

201tell us what that would what that would look like right that's not the end of the world right it's not millions but boy way to give us some insights into more than just the seven of us right and how we might think about it we could make it do it you know we did a case of one one of those exercises where we started at 100 and we increment it by hundreds right and went up we could go up to five hundred six last year the year before but you kind of got to the point where we were able to gauge our level of pain right relatively quickly out of that right because it was that that was the case when the governor was gonna yes take all the money away from right the town

202and we went to the Board of Finance saying we did an evaluation at fifty thousand here's what you have to take out at six a hundred thousand here's what you have to take out a two hundred thousand here's what you have to take out and we drew our line here right we're not with a board we can't advocate any more than that that was really powerful because the Board of Finance could buy into that right and the Board of Selectmen could buy into that because they could say oh I don't want a double plot you know I don't want to add the class sizes I don't want to do this and it was powerful as well I would suggest we do something and that one of those two range either give you a bogey or

203give you know do a gradiation at $100,000 a shot you tell us what how painful each of those is and then we have information in not well I think Bob I think we may have just answered the question because I think the gradiation if we want to call that every 50,000 or $100,000 up to a particular number it gives us a framework to work that exit to exercise that problem and then we can come back to you with that it was effective last time is my point so better because I'm afraid of this thing where are we gonna come back next week and all advocate for like or not but programs being eliminated like yeah I don't like that I like where that's going so I like Bob's suggestion because the administration can look at

204perhaps a variety of different things and say well if we cut this a little we cut that a little and we could get to a hundred thousand two hundred thousand and I think it would be harder for us to say cut this and that a little because we don't know it as intimately as they do we could say things like get rid of this program and I don't you know that's pretty tough I think you guys know the budget in more granular sense if you give us some advice to think about and-and-and we ought to be reacting to that input as opposed to us all showing up with I got Milo hoppin I got little my little now we might have hot buttons I mean we've known that at our board before but we've we've

205you know we've had people who come to the thing saying I really don't like that program let's get rid of it right and we've had lots of feedback on that over time right man I walked in here and said I just want to get rid of Interscholastic sports I mean mr. ball would jump out of his chair and come beat me yeah but because I will never do that because I'm a believer in sports like I am with all the other things that make a full program for our kids so please don't take that wrong but the I do think having us react to ooh well thought out here's what would happen if you had to reduce I will just tell you the thing I'm sitting from my experience on the Board of Finance they

206will understand enrollment driven they will understand special ad they won't understand 3.77 right that'll that's and they'll want us to go manage that this is a street but this is a straightforward number right no I understand what it is see the three seven seven has a lot of drivers in it we had some surprises on insurance and we had some things on there there was a lot of things in there but I mean to reduce that number the only way to do is to reduce stuff I don't know let's like let's see what the administration tells us well little extra says it yeah we can exercise it mm-hm that's that's a you might be right and the answer might be we're stuck with it we don't we don't advocate that mm-hmm right but I think

207that's up vote that's the decision we can make happy with a more structured presentation on here's how you might deal with the first 50 years I need to deal with a hundred you guys choose where the clips are not logical to you but it's to to frame our work because we can we can work all the way to forty four million dollars if you tell us to so um should we stop at four hundred thousand dollars three hundred thousand umber four hundred four hundred and forty thousand dollars as one is odd but here's here's the way I would judge it John when you get to the point where they got that they're silly right they're just not even things that we would have to consider it'll be obvious okay that's very good right you but

208you might find I'll just give you a for example for the board instead of having a big question about class sizes you might have a little question about a class size right so maybe if we did one fifth grade teacher we could live with that but we can't deal we don't want to do it for everybody I mean maybe I made that up yeah but that's more thoughtful but that's a hundred thousand dollars right you know that discussion they need eighty nine thousand if I reserve and so that that's a different discussion and we could understand the implications of that discussion I remember when we did the thing on the governor's exercise we got up to about $300,000 and it was we're just shaking our heads right there wasn't a single one of our board

209members because it really became personnel at that point it became key to cut this big program and that's too important but I I'm sorry I'm talking and talking no so we're happy to do it twenty seconds would you guys everybody okay with this as an approach yeah you're cautiously I'm cautious because I don't I don't like prior to being forced to make any reductions to our budget I don't like publicizing possible reductions that might be communicated or it might sound as if well we might be okay with a 1% reduction to this and having another entity saying oh then we're just gonna shave off one percent in essence giving them sort of a menu of items to pick and choose from and really that is entirely our discretion it's not anybody else's so that's that's

210my only fear I to allay the fear they're making the decisions on much bigger dynamics than that they're looking at they're not taking where most in their budget to I understand yes so they're starting from the taxpayer right that's that's what the board of finances job is right our jobs advocate for inching the best education for our kids in a reasonable way their advocate their their jobs to advocate for the taxpayers and against the services and have the best services for the lowest taxes it's a very they're different jobs and you we just ought to recognize they have a job and but they're our partners they're the other side of the same coin that's why I think I think if it if it gets that point they should be the ones to ask for okay

211then after we've already presented adopted and presented our budget to them there should be the ones to say okay you give us the scenarios of 1% 2% 3% reduction muscle get ahead of it I also but however though perhaps this exercise can help us better understand and advocate for the budget because we could see with two hundred thousand dollars less like a scary number what scary scary effect what so we better understand why if we feel that what we've asked for is appropriate by taking some away it might give us a better understanding of what might happen if we don't happen yeah and I would want to focus on the implications of such cuts more than almost as much as the budget impact about cotton right it's not you know here's what will happen it's

212just take that anyway some things are obvious but I think back to when we cut the some of the staff right and then we had just had to put some of that back you know understanding that implications is very powerful so I think for John and Ken maybe what would make me more comfortable and you guys tell me if you guys sort of understand but so investments those are clear maybe you could come back with sort of what would be the implications of if we had no new investments this year I know it's scary but rather than say like a specific number and things that we might cut like sort of across the board the things that are controllable our investments I don't know if there's anything in that inflationary contractual number that's controllable but

213I mean I don't know is there anything I mean it's inflation and contracts and so now you look at anything is controllable if your think your salaries right well you can cut positions right but we've are there are consequences to doing that yeah and we've already exercised those so I feel like we know the implications of that I don't think that means that we'll come back by contract by law we have to adhere to those increases in salaries we don't have can we really as much as everybody wants to pretend that we have control of that that's collective bargaining in Connecticut that's the law so we have to do this so the only way to control salaries is to limit right so I don't think that needs to be a comeback because that's that's already

214been exercised and we have that in writing shows what it would be includes class sizes of yep the enrollment driven increase those are our extra teachers in first grade right yeah one less at huckleberry and then three more or Center so you could tell it maybe tell us what the classes would be if we just didn't get those teachers the outliers special education tuition and transportation again not controllable right note one our best to minimize it of course so I mean other than saying like what happens if we don't get these new investments I mean what other comebacks did you want to see what about something like benefits you know I know we we can't change salaries but as can we look into different benefit providers or see things that's all contractual but the provider

215itself is like Blue Cross versus Oxford versus well we're in the Connecticut partnership plan right now along with the town and we have to we have to maintain the same benefit level so right I don't think there are better pricing around for that level of benefit that we have I mean I just think the fact that matter is that we can't control most of these expenses it's like a very some less than I mean 1% that we can actually control so to exercise a what-if is sort of automatically going to those scary places and we're most likely gonna have to do that anyways yeah but I don't think I I don't know if yeah I don't know I don't know uncomfortable sort of giving scenarios as to what might be cut at a 1% reduction

216or a 2% reduction because we don't know that yet and exercising it ahead of time you sort of handing off a little bit of control because we're now sort of giving that the Board of Finance sort of a comfortability level and giving them the cut what are they comfortable with I don't know it also shows that we're looking at things carefully - it also says we if we feel that 6.8% is appropriate we feel it is because if we cut on two thousand two hundred thousand right that's not gonna that's not gonna be and I just feel like the administration can look at that number in a different way than we can I to be on the Board of Finance if the Board of Ed had come in with a six percent increase and not

217exercise - I would have I was cut them more because you weren't crying you weren't thinking about it you weren't doing your duty right and and that's an easy thing to get into is because we heard it tonight at the the public forum is what are you all working on right and that's gonna be when anyone sees 6% increase that's what they're thinking is well what do you what what have you thought about right and if we don't even haven't fully exercise that and walk in with us well it's not controllable we can't do anything about us yet guess what they'll find a way to force us to do it and it actually gets worse by DNA so can we circle back then then that then that supports them why is it off the dome

218I'm not saying is off the table but going back to the world language program if we're advocating for the education of children then we need to sometimes look at programming or go line by line like we said at the round table to find opportunities for savings that are not hurting education because are we really is it a program that's benefiting the education of our children it is I don't know how I will vote on that but that's kind of on that spectrum we've analyzed it it should be on the table right and that's a perfect example why we brought it up we just want to propose that's a perfect example of it because it doesn't align with what you believe should be in the board value so that's something that should be on the table

219yeah I would like to propose that is yeah we ought to talk about that and we ought to actually consider voting on that and because I think that I think so I'm not afraid of that that's that's so that's exactly the discussion that the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance would want us to be having and I think you know Rosie you said that how can we take anything from the inflation contract in increases and really that's where that would come from ideally but the problem is that it might net out to not be not much of a reduction if we have to fill that with we'll go to answer that for you I mean yeah if there's a backfill like I talked about in that example we would actually have a you

220know a very high-level initial proposal idea of how some of that back felt would have to happen sections new programming you know that kind of thing and then what's what the real savings would be in the actual savings I think the discussion too could help us sort of solidify what our values are too because we can look at some of those things and John and his team are gonna share some of their priorities through the decisions that they make and that's something that we can look at and think about how how well does it align with what we think we should value so it could move us in maybe a consensus building type activity well I mean certainly if the majority of the board is comfortable with that and wants the administration to exercise that

221then we maybe we should also flush it out a little bit when what our Finance Committee means yeah right so if we have we have three of us there with the administration give you guys a couple of days to think about how you might go approach it and then we can flush out kind of a structure to a little bit and you and I are both there so that's that that would be a good good point counterpoint on how we might attack the question I have I have a question actually on the the contract increase as opposed to class size I think class size we'd all be on the same pages we want to keep those as low as possible but do these numbers reflect this especially in kindergarten first second third grade Paris as

222well like how many how many kids per educator not necessarily kids per teacher students that is it's two per teacher so I mean what the what do the numbers I mean I'm kind of curious on what the numbers look like student to educator per room I mean what does that what does that look like because I would imagine that joint I would had the pentose I border that's up you know what para or uh an aid is cheaper than a full-fledged teacher oh yeah so so but I'm not sure what the either the question anymore supports in place interesting question yeah because I worked in a district when I was a kindergarten teacher we had 26 kids in class and we had we didn't have our own pair of but the pair of you know

223floated between two classrooms depending but you we just had different schedules of when we were doing certain things because it was one pair for two rooms okay it was different you know in my district we our numbers are much much higher but we have pairs of TAS we have floating early intervention Paris that support the kindergarten first grade teachers as a way to exactly I think the first and foremost the you know we want to keep the numbers low but is there is there an opportunity to carve a little bit into that you know that what 350,000 is at point seven percent of the to get closer to three is it something let the class lives blown up a new more do more Paris however many Paris you might come to me and just say

224you know with a paraeducator contract the average para with the benefits and everything else total costs about close to fifty thousand dollars I think two years ago we used 48 thousand dollars so I mean it just continues to go on so just fifty with benefits forty that 48 to 50 verses 89 90 right so it's forty thousand has no and we have to keep in mind that the budget increase is six point eight not six so it's almost set can I ask a question about special ed transportation how does it work like does are there opportunities to put multiple students yes buses and go to different we do that our own students who might be going to the same facility and we also share with the local towns that's one of the big initiatives over

225the last two years we've been working on with the western Connecticut superintendent's group and the special educators from those groups is that kind of regionalizing the services and sharing services with the special education transportation we've to say we've saved money would probably not be the right way to say it we've avoided a lot of costs and you'll actually in our discussion next week you'll really see where jean has been able to do a lot of ride sharing with the students and when you see the increase in tuition there's not a commensurate increase in transportation which usually we used to kind of band the about and say well it might cost fifty thousand dollars for tuition but don't forget transportation is gonna be about fifty thousand that was always kind of a loose estimate that we

226would use so people would understand that an outplacement is about a hundred thousand dollars she's really doubled up on transportation and tried to make that really work as best we can and be as efficient as possible and I have to thank the folks from Ed advance for helping us coordinate that as well so that work is significant cost avoidance I could tell you we also do that with the AAAS magnet school and with nonno again with ship hog okay and with the special it with more students being out placed does that or could that possibly free up more Paris we've asked that question and we've had several students just in the last two weeks move in with ie peas that demand paraprofessionals okay so when you say when you do that and you find oh

227maybe we'll have a para and I I hate to keep saying it that way as if we've exhausted every day as we say we asked the same questions you know we really we really keep exhausting this and trying to save everything we can it is an attractive town - it is it really is and you got you got it you know we talked about it in the in the public forum that a lot of the changes the turnover of the houses I mentioned that you know you in our street we had you know four houses turnover it was about nine kids right now I kept thinking about amongst nine kids with the ratios that we're going you're likely to have at least one maybe two you know just given the percentages special everything's some could

228be severe some could be locked but if there's that kind of turnover and I got one Street with nine kids rolling in we got it go on and around Brookfield and a stream of new kids showing up needing one-on-one para may be needing outsource out placement may be needing pairs in the classroom I think it's gonna be a theme for the next two or three years I hate to say I just cuz I think it's what's happening to the demographics we're facing and it's not that kids are more healthy or less healthy or and more needy or less needy it's just we're having a shifting demographics going on with a lot of young families rolling into town so we just got a deal with them and I've by the way I think the Board of

229Ed and the Board of Selectmen oughta know that that it's something that's not gonna go away well one last thing and that you don't have to say the answer now but sorry mark the math intervention interventionist of high school is there data to support that there's an either okay I know we probably went over FS yeah I talked about it being just briefly that we wouldn't ask for if we didn't think we need yes I got every single position that we that we asked for in the budget when the principal's brought and we discussed it we didn't put it in there unless it was something just hire Bob to do that Joey as I know you've asked about you know what one of the principals submit in their budgets this and that they will assure

230you that unfortunately they don't get everything yeah but everything you see they've asked for more and so that's we really prioritize in trying to time what we're asking for and this happens to be a year where we've got this almost 2% extra with the overage in special education which will carry forward to next year right is there anything else on the budget discussions all right so anything else that's really major that you need administration to sort of work through ask me email to them like this week okay so let's just move on then to the new school building project that's just an action and really there hasn't been much of an update since our last meeting you know Christmas and the holidays and really nothing nothing took place nothing new the only new big thing

231to sort of talk about is the end of the schematic design phase of that project is has to be completed by this month and the Board of EDS approval is needed to close out that phase and move into design development so in order to do that we have to aim to not only adopt our budget at our next meeting but also approve of those plans now I know you guys need to see those plans and be comfortable with it so the NBC has invited us to come to their meeting on the 21st that's a Tuesday and that at seven o'clock at in room 133 at townhall it's at the Town Hall I'm not sure which room um yeah I have it as room 133 in Town Hall but I'll send another confirmation of that before

232we before we get there I believe at this point we're just sort of attending to receive the presentation it won't be sort of dialoguing I have to just double check on that if if there's a quorum if if there's any sort of issues with the next hour meaning is the very next day so yeah as long as as long as it's okay that we that we discuss board matters if we're if there's four of us I think that the only issue is if we discuss amongst ourselves if all of our discussions of with the NBC just asking them questions that's for a clarification it's probably fine and we can have that and if we're deliberating about banding things as a board on our decision I think that becomes a problem we can have those discussions

233the next day but it's just sort of there to receive the presentation and so if you could be there that would be good I just looked at my calendar all three that night Rose if I can add on the new school project we're having now two more user group meetings so our elementary teachers some of our specialists mrs. Fitzgerald mr. Baldwin media specialist regular ed teachers the principal's dr. Ruby mrs. Ferris over the course of two different days one is the 14th next week the other is the afternoon of the 21st when techn on will be in town and they'll be in town for the 14th and the 21st to go over the design give any further input let people ask questions you know all those pieces you know show what has been incorporated from

234all of their ideas so we're pretty excited about that to make sure we get that final input in just thinking about the sign-off um I think we need to ask the administration for their agreement with a and that's input docile support yeah right that's something John you could yeah in a more formal way say we've reviewed and we're signed off on on it after you've had a chance to do the detail review because there's only so much we can do at that meeting but your input because you got so deep into it is really critical to us as a board I think anything else on that thank you okay we can move on to three main points Oh the budget I don't know maybe there's too much there I don't know you're wrong what do

235you think I liked how Monty was telling us all about the midterm Support Program yeah that would be great they seem like very extensive sure I don't be cool from you know on the main website or on I will say since we do such a bad job of talking about our curriculum work we should talk about the curriculum that's a good idea so maybe dr. Rubin is Debbie's presentation yeah what was the third and oh we all right right I mean yeah that's pretty updated so just you know deliberated on the budget the administration is going to exercise some of the little status for continuing to exercise by the way here's the two hour segments that you can here's the meeting there's a link to the meeting start off on the high note about the

236midterm buy review program yeah yes darling monitor star Monsey huh all right so um okay upcoming events over the next two weeks we have Center elementary school students are participating in benchmark assessments over the next few weeks on Tuesday January 14th there's a PTO meeting at 9:30 in the cafeteria Friday January 17th is a PLC day students will dismiss at 12:20 and Monday January 20th school is closed in observance of Martin Luther King died at huckleberry Hill Friday January 17th PLC students dismiss at 12:20 Monday January 20th school is closed for Martin Luther King Day Tuesday January 21st and Wednesday January 22nd our auditions for the fourth grade play after school at 3:25 in the gym at whiskey near Thursday January 9th is the winter chorus concert at BHS on Monday January 14th of math

237team Broadview middle school Thursday January 16th the winter band concert at BHS Friday January 17th PLC day students dismissed at 11:40 and Monday January 20th school is closed in observance of Martin Luther King Day and Brookfield High School Monday January 13th is the midterm prep for freshmen which is sponsored by the peer counselors from six to eight in the library Wednesday January 15th midterm study night for all grades from 5 to 8 in the library Wednesday January 15th the all sports Booster Club will meet at 6:30 in the staff lunchroom Thursday January 16th coffee with principal Belinda at 7:30 a.m. in the staff lunchroom Friday January 17th PLC day students dismissed at 11:00 Monday January 20th school is closed in observance of Martin Luther King Day and midterm exams begin on Wednesday January 22nd and

238end on Monday January 27th Mr bland oh what time is the winter band concert on the 16th that's W on us that's yeah yeah that's at seven right seven hours s7 yep Oh tomorrow's course at seven you know in the sixteenth is band at seven you should be done okay anything else okay thank you for a productive evening without objection meeting adjourned thank you yes these are always the hardest meetings for us [Music]