Board of Education Meeting 1-2-19

001[Music] [Applause] [Music] good evening this is Wednesday January 2nd Happy New Year everybody I would like to call the regular meeting of the Brookfield Board of Education to order if we could all rise for the Pledge of Allegiance pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we have our full board in attendance this evening and so the first thing on the agenda is public comment we do have two people signed up first is a chris d'elia excuse me one minute Chris now can you hear me now okay my name is Chris D'Elia I live at 16 Val Road and the reason I'm here today is because we have a we have a

002problem in the school system and that is with once again we have money going missing from the schools you know I'm here speaking probably by myself today but be rest assured that within the community there is there is a growing distrust of the school with management of our money and if any of you have been talking to your neighbors you'll know that that's true I don't know what we're going to do I don't know what we're gonna do about it would its hidden from the community time and time again another thirteen thousand dollars almost missing this is there's other issues going on like that within the school you could talk to any parent and they'll tell you stories of donated money missing and there's no oversight and there's nothing there's nothing from the Board of

003Education everybody on this board knows that your job is to represent the people and represent this town and to let us know what's going on and I can't believe that the board would know about this going on and not send out something to the parents after the investigation was over after search warrants were done and and keep us informed you know we're tired of being bled to death in this town we have to pay for our kids to park their cars have to pay for our kids to watch our kids play sports we have to send our kids out to raise hundreds of dollars just to play a sport in this town only to find out that the money had gone missing this is worse than what happened with art all right this woman stole

004money from from the kids in the school from the parents in the school and I know you guys are not going to respond I know you thought not to respond to the public but I'm just telling you if if you want more money to be raised for these schools and you want your your school increases with with taxes and all I sincerely hope that you guys get a handle on what's going on because this is this is pitiful so I have to say thank you Chris we generally don't respond and I don't want to get into a back-and-forth but I just will say this was not money disappearing from the Board of Education this was purely a PTO issue which is a separate 501 C 3 independent of the Board of Education with its own

005treasures its own accounting this was not money missing from the Board of Ed we are not losing money so we just need to state that right here perhaps you should also address these concerns with the PTO that they have done very well trying to address that with a few people I'm just saying there's there's other areas that you think you could address I appreciate that you know it wasn't taken out of my left hand pocket was taken out of my right hand thank you yes so Chris just let me just add and you can go said if you'd like the it's important to remember that the administration and the Board of Education don't provide oversight to that organization had we we haven't we've actually been instituting a lot of accounting controls and a lot of

006oversight reviews we do not involve ourselves in any way in the financial management of that organization so that said you mentioned there are other items if you're aware of other items come talk to me afterwards I'd like to understand more specifically you're here but I'd be HAP more than happy to discuss with you my issue is that we need more oversight we need an open checkbook system we need to know where the money is going this is but I've lived in this town for 15 years and for 15 years we've been asking where the money's going for 15 years we've had different people come in to the border bed or in the town and we're asking where is the money going and all we keep finding out is that the money is going into somebody

007else's pocket whether it's from the PTO this time what school the last time I'm just saying we need I understand your point but you cannot go combing hole to different organizations that actually are not operationally connected and saved because they happen to have something that were related to the school and in assuming that the one organization is going to be providing oversight to the other organization it just doesn't happen that way well I mean I understand the I don't that does make me feel any better that like I said that there's someone else I would suggest you go talk to the PTO yeah thank you and Chris just to to clarify because you have you referred to the entire Board of Ed I found out when the public found out I had no idea this

008was going on I did not know it was going on it's not a board matter and there's difference of opinions but personally I found out when the public found out I was aware of the concern that the PTO had raised but I was turned over to the police and the police were handling it I knew nothing other than that and I'm not alone in that there the the PTO had spoken as I understand to various people thank you next we have rich Saluda rich so Lucca 32 great hair and lean um I guess I just want to say to Chris you're not the only one who's upset and coming here to talk about this I was disappointed to see that it wasn't even part of the agenda perhaps it might be part of the superintendent's

009update since he was quoted in a newspaper and I fully understand the difference between the PTO and the Board of Ed but like the previous Speaker I was involved four years ago with asking questions of the Board of Ed regarding questionable expenses and not only were we dismissed myself and several other residents who are raising those questions one of the board members actually mocked a group of the residents who were raising those questions refer to them as Rooney's gang Rooney being Glenn Mooney who's now on the board of Finance the board of education did nothing about it and yet when mr. Collier was finally arrested everybody was shocked how could this happen and this is what I'm reading now about the PTO everybody's shocked how could this happen and the reason I'm raising the issue

010is the question is why aren't people asking questions how does somebody do this for two years just like the finance finance director of the Board of Ed who got arrested did it for several years it's because nobody asks questions everybody just accepts what somebody tells you and nobody looks at anything there will be checks a check the Finance Manager was the only one writing checks could write his own he could write a check to himself nobody would over you know as the previous speaker mentioned who's overseeing this so the question I would have I mean yes you guys are separate from the PTO but the PTO meets in the schools and you're responsible for the schools so this is an organization and again I'm not saying that you have to check everything they do but

011to just hide your put your head in the sand and say well it's not us you know let's make that clear yeah but the PTO is part of the Brookfield school and where is that where is the rest of the Brookfield PTL how come they didn't know about it just a treasurer is is that person the only person who deals with money and expenditures nobody oversees that you know and I agree with the previous speaker this is outrageous and as a taxpayer you start thinking eh what's going on here in Brookfield you know I would have thought people would have learned after the previous situation I thought people would have had a little more of a conscience and maybe a little bit more perspective on looking at things but apparently that hasn't happened because here

012we are four years later and we have a similar situation with PTO so thank you rich I will once again underline and emphasize that the PTO is not part of the school finances they're completely separate and different it's its own 501 C 3 non-profit group okay that is all we have that are signed up is there anyone else here that would like to speak okay moving on we have student representative hi everyone hope you all had a great holiday in new year all the students at BHS are adjusting after the long break and still trying to get back into the swing of things at school most of our clubs are focusing on coming up with new ideas for fundraisers and ways to get the students involved with the town also our winter sports teams are

013in full swing and performing extremely well and students are also beginning to prepare for their midterm exams which will be happening in the next two weeks thank you thank you very okay written correspondence okay there's one written correspondence from Marie Williams regarding the new school project thank you approval of forty minutes recommend a motion that the board approve the minutes listed below as recommended the regular meeting on December 19 2000 18 second any questions or discussion soon okay all in favor all right all right brings us to the superintendent's update dr. Bruce thanks mrs. Thurm I'll be very brief I know we have a robust agenda this evening and the holidays took up most of the break we sent out a school message communications today regarding the new text message feature that probably in about

014a month can kick in that there's a lot of families a couple years ago we did a survey and families would prefer many would prefer to receive text messages rather than the emails that we send and so working through our technology department with Eric and with Denise works on our power school we're able to get that in place over the next month so we sent out an informational communication through email today and walk people through how they can sign up for it and get make sure they have the right cell phone number and that kind of thing and there's an opt-in there's federal legislation behind this you can't just send people taxes you have to have permission so they'll opt in for that so we're pretty excited about that opportunity we'll get that going for

015at the end of the month and then the other piece that I wanted to share is dr. Ruby and I met with a couple of folks the director from advance and also the consultant Jonathan Casas who helped facilitate our strategic plan three years ago we really we talked about planning kind of a reboot of the strategic plan kind of framing all of the work that's been ongoing and going forward how that might look some of the process and some of the big pieces we have going on curriculum design taking what look at the overall everything and how we bring that and take a call and what will be taught on you in the number and easy to measure so that's really so that's thank you thank you thank you moving on committee report was um

016Cape okay so we had a jam-packed meeting and I know we're gonna hear from a few folks later with details so I'll give you sort of a big overview on what we accomplished our big task was to discuss the program of studies for the high school and mark Poland is shared with us sort of the big picture focus of how the high school is really transforming itself sort of in in a few different areas one really strengthening their work in STEM science technology engineering and math and then also increasing our focus in global competency and so a lot of the program changes are aligned with those goals and additionally making changes to meet our updated state requirements as they change we have to make some changes ahead of time so just a few of the

017highlights we heard about a proposal for Human Geography which would be a grade 10 course which we were excited about we heard about some new course proposals in the stem department creating a technology a versus B course which would give students access to different types of technology and we felt like that would really draw a lot of students interests and there are some changes to the math program integrated algebra we learned that really for students to be college ready algebra is key integrated alger and there's a change to the to make one course a two-year course to make sure more students have access to that higher-level algebra to make them successful in college in addition we talked about some change some new courses including AP capstone international business American Sign Language also some changes to

018the music program and a science research course so a lot of new exciting courses which we think will update the high school and and really prepare those students with those 21st century skills and additionally a change to our PE requirement to allow for the increase in our health requirement which is state mandated and the committee voted unanimously to support those recommendations also Maureen updated us on a program called s team math and we're going to we recommend it using this as a pilot program for the spring semester but what it really does is it individualizes instruction for students in math so it allows students to sort of work on areas of need but also allow students to sort of push themselves and work in ways that they can challenge themselves so we had a demonstration

019of that and we were really excited and we know when joy thinks it's a good idea it's good for elementary school so we press that and then Maureen also gave us an update on the pre-school ruler project unfortunately she didn't receive funding from the BEF for a request to train local preschools but she's going to continue to look at opportunities to spread that work high school program of studies anything else okay we'll move on to the policy communications update okay so the policy and communications committee met on Wednesday December 19th we continued our discussion on the restraint and seclusion policy that we had moved forward at that same regular board meeting on 12:19 so you guys saw that one we also discussed a lunch charging policy that deals with how the district handles negative lunch

020balances we opted not to have the board see that at that meeting so that's what that's one of the ones that was taken off the agenda last time we want to have two we want a full month sort of as a committee to kind of go through that one we do the same thing for a possible non lapsing fun policy we're gonna have dr. Breck with other area districts to see if they have an on lapsing fun policy and what that looks like in the language and stuff like that so that'll be coming forward probably soon but we had a fairly lengthy service animals policy that we had to take a look at that was discussed in committee and it's still sort of in the review process we're getting all of our questions to doctors

021at Pala this week we reviewed both cave and Brookfield's version of a transfer of funds policy which is part of our work with a 3000 series so you'll see that coming through in the next meeting or so continuing with the 3000's we reviewed Brookfield's version of the credit card usage policy and because of its level of detail and thoroughness over the K versions we opted to we liked Brookfield's version better and so we'll just be updating formatting and things like that so you'll see that next meeting most likely communications we discussed the budget communications and dr. Brill updated us that the superintendent's spending plan was tweeted out it was added to Facebook and the entire budget binder is available on the website so that looks good there we also talked about the new school projects

022communication which we'll be discussing more later there's not much more to add on that but Debbie and I did work on sort of tidying up the FAQ section right now it's just those PDFs that everybody's been used to but we're trying to sort of because those documents are getting kind of long we're trying to categorize them and make like a table of contents and things that people can click on to sort of just like find sort of a topic that they can then search under so so Eric is helping us work on that and that should be up and running soon so did I miss anything yep any questions just one I'm with the in we haven't seen it yet so they'll probably the answer will see it but with the service animals policy yeah

023is that just something that all of the schools now are putting into it or do we actually have instances that are going to be requiring a policy um we do require we do require a policy are the one that um that we're there's a cave version that were there are several K persons that we could potentially adopt so we're just looking through the different versions to see which one is that we like the best so we just have to familiarize ourself with to answer your question is potentially a situation sure I got that right okay moving on oh we have a consent agenda recommend a motion that the board approved the items listed below on the consent agenda is recommended new hires two resignations retirements second any questions discussions I just want to keep her

024vested Deidre for thirty-three years of service with Brookfield and I congratulate her on her retirement on the 31st officially that's amazing yes very appreciative of her service okay moving on to new business we have the adolescent sleep presentation okay so um I want to welcome dr. Craig ken Aparri up to the podium he is a pediatrician at yale-new Haven Children's Hospital specializing in sleep problems also he's the director of the pediatric sleep center there where he's built a comprehensive sleep program for children which is the first of its kind in Connecticut he's boarded in Pediatrics pediatric pulmonology and sleep medicine and the goal in his practice is to provide simple evidence-based information to families and physicians and about how to achieve more specifically in terms of school start times healthy and appropriate adequate sleep for

025kids Thank You Rosa and thank you guys for hosting me tonight never been never appealed before so it's great to be here and I actually I feel kind of bad that you guys can't really see over there yeah no no um because uh there's such pretty pretty slides for you tonight um so this is an issue that I've been interested in for a long time is someone who takes care of teenagers and I have some future teenagers in my house and when I moved to Connecticut from Massachusetts we moved to Guildford about five years ago and I I went for a run at around 6:30 in the morning an event that is not having before or since and I saw some kid just standing out on the street and I'm like ah that's weird why

026is there a kid out here and then I saw another kid come down then I saw the school bus go by and I'm like oh that's really early so I started working with the Board of Ed in our town some of the start times later and after about five years we moved the start time effectively about twenty five minutes later it's not where it needs to be but I'm going to show you why I think this is an issue that's important for our teenagers and sort of some of the myths that come up when this is being discussed I didn't really talk about the practical aspects of changing start times which I'm happy to discuss if you have questions but they really vary from district to district so let's talk about start times in the

027in teens so look at this guy right here this is a teenager is natural habitat and see is passed out on the couch there's a phone to his side and the laptop right there so here's our roadmap for what we're going to talk about tonight we're going to talk about teenage sleep biology and the reason why teenagers runs trouble when they start high school we're going to talk about the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation specifically for teenagers but they are relevant to all of us and finally myths about later school start times because I've been to a lot of Board of Ed meetings and there's certain themes that people are concerned about that give that I think are worth discussing so I want to start just talking about well how does pop culture you teenagers

028right we've watched John Hughes movies movies about teenagers well we know teenagers are lazy right they just sort of sleep all the time and they're argumentative they just want to go off to the Academy instead of staying at home on the more there are uncle moisture farm and they make bad decisions and they're also hungry all the time so hungry they ordered a pizza and mr. hands class they spent a lot of time in their bedrooms with their devices not listening to their parents or surrogate parents and they go through a lot of changes the thing is so much of this view of teenagers is actually shaped by the fact that teenagers really are sleep-deprived all the time this is from a study from 2014 which surveyed 12,000 teenagers in the US and it showed

029that 8% of girls and 9% of boys were getting adequate sleep we imagine if your community you said well about 10% of kids are getting enough nutrition or 10% of kids have clean water to drink and you get a feeling for the magnitude of this in this study the blue pie wedge there is for kids getting nine hours of sleep we think that teenagers need eight and a half to nine hours of nine and a half hours of sleep let's say the kids getting eight hours of sleep that's still just a third of kids and it's just it's crazy to me to think that this is just sort of the law of the land here in the United States and as students proceeded through high school this is just showing the percent of girls and

030boys getting adequate sleep in different grades so you notice that in the in the ninth grade boys tend to fare a little bit better than girls it may be because boys are tend to be a little bit behind girls in terms of purity it may be that boys are perhaps a little bit more careless about getting ready in the morning I have two boys I know of what I speak but by the time you get to eleventh and twelfth grade they're equally sleep-deprived and they're more sleep-deprived probably due to progression through adolescence and the fact that score extracurriculars become more demanding so why are so many teenagers so sleepy so sleep-deprived we have to talk a little bit about the biology of sleep so this is is I want to explain there's two reasons that

031determine when we fall asleep and when we wake up and the first is easy to understand it's what's called a sleep drive so when you wake up in the morning the sleep drug gets higher and higher right it makes sense a little longer you're awake the sleepy or you are we all understand this and then when you sleep during the night the sea tribe just kind of drop off drops off until if you didn't have an alarm clock eventually you just wake up because you'd had enough sleep as a side bar it's important though that generally if you need an alarm clock to get up in the morning there's a good chance that you're somewhat sleep-deprived but the other part of this is the wakefulness Drive and this is what people talk about when they

032talk about the body clock think of a signal that comes from your body to keep you awake as you go into the late afternoon into the early evening your seat drive is pretty high but you tend not to fall asleep and the reason is you have this wakefulness Drive that is counter balancing that sleepiness drugs what happens and by the way when you hopefully it's synced up to drop off around the time you go to bed when kids hit puberty the sleep drive shifts two to three hours later right so that period when that wakefulness surge happens happens later so you take kids that were falling asleep you know around 8:00 8:30 9:00 falling asleep at 11 o'clock at night but what happens to our start times in my district in many districts elementary school

033starts latest middle school starts in the middle and high school starts the earliest so the practical effect of this is we are compressing teenagers sleep opportunities because naturally you could put a teenager to bed at 8 o'clock they're not going to fall asleep and this has been validated well before we had xbox snapchat Facebook etc it's just natural biology so we're just squeezing that sleep opportunity for them so when we're talking about addressing this that there's the first myth that comes about is that kids can just go to bed earlier right we know and unfortunately because of a natural shift that's just not how it works I take care of a kids with very severe sleep problems and I have kids come in that are they do everything right they give their parents their cell

034phone a clock they're done with their homework on time they go to bed at 9:00 or 9:30 and they still can't fall asleep till 11 or 12 o'clock at night it's just the way that kids are wired so when we have this class here we have a natural teen sleep schedule from 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. or 12:00 p.m. to 9:00 we have an average high school start time in the US which is a 804 a.m. we're going to talk a little bit up where we fall in the Northeast and in Brookfield specifically this is a recipe for just chronic sleep preparation and kids they just can't catch up and I'll show you why in a second but what are the consequences of chronic sleep deprivation as you can imagine sleeping like eating drinking breathing

035clean air is a critical bodily function so when you don't get enough of it where the quality isn't good there's severe consequences and I do I would divide these up into three domains the first is the academic domain the second is the Health domain and the third is the psychological domain so in the academic domain kids that are chronically deprived get worse grades they have increased tardiness they have higher dropout rates and they have decreased complex problem-solving this is literally while residing for schools to solve complex problems right in terms of their health one of the underappreciated effects of sleep deprivation is actually increased weight and obesity we know the sleep curtailment is associated with increased appetite and decreased Society when you eat increased hypertension increased risk of diabetes and prediabetes and most critically an

036increased risk of car accidents this is a really important study that was looking at two adjacent counties in Maryland Chesterfield and Henrico County so Chesterfield County and these are very similar same mixture of economics demographics but Chesterfield starts at 7:20 and Henrico starts at 8:45 in this along the bottom you do see the time of day and this is a graph showing the rate of car accidents teenage drivers in the community and you can see first of all the Chesterfield kids have accidents earlier that makes sense because the they're driving most commonly rushing to school rushing to after-school activities but also see how much higher the peak is and the kids that have to get up earlier the fact is the biggest risk to teenagers in terms of getting injured or dying is in a

037car accident and this doesn't just affect your kids it also affects other people in your community because we are all on the roads with teenagers and let's be real here no offense to the students here teenagers aren't great drivers to begin with right and then we added the distractions that we have and it's nothing personal it's just that you're new at driving we all get better at driving the more that we do it there are more distractions they were before and they're tired this is a really significant risk to our kids I think one of the most important things that you need to think about as a community and as a Board of Education when you look at this issue early school start times are associated with a thirty to seventy percent increased risk in

038car accidents in the community following the psychological effects kids that are sleep-deprived have decreased impulse control again a domain in which no teenager excels increased drug use that goes again to lack of impulse control earlier sexual activity that's sort of hedonic or pleasure-seeking drive this increased I mean we all know we're tired right we're more likely to have that Snickers bar than if we've gotten a good night of sleep and increased vulnerability is stress and also suicidality and this is also really important because suicide is a major killer of our young people and now it's it's the relationship between sleep and suicide is a really complicated one it's not a straight line but we know that sleep of deprivation affects mood adversely and it also increases impulsivity and it is not always obvious who the

039kids are who are at risk for suicide I had a colleague from Stanford give a presentation where he talked about a kid in Palo Alto who killed himself himself in front of a train and this kid smart popular kid everybody liked and nobody thought he was depressed but he was always the kid that other kids could call up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning to help them with his homework you know clearly a kid that was suffering so let's talk about what percentage of school districts in the u.s. start before 7:30 that morning okay so who thinks 10% well raise your hands anyone 25% 50% 75% 90% okay so actually and this is I grew up in the Northeast we assumed school starts really early because it gets dark early and this is partly

040why this school starts so early we're here in Brookfield we're in the 10% of schools that start before 7:30 in the morning so you may look at your adjacent districts and say is it by the by the way this is based on the 2015-2016 national teacher and principal survey this was US public schools principals who are surveyed you look at the districts directly adjacent to you they probably have start times that are similar to yours but if you look at where you are not where we are nationally we are much earlier again the national average is 804 so really we're on the earlier side in Guilford two we were until we made a change we were we were at 7:20 so we are right here with you so in 2014 the American Academy of Pediatrics

041recommended that no school start before 8:30 in the morning in 2015 the Centers for Disease Control follow the same recommendation and on the left is a is a short list of organizations that have recommended that school start at a 30 or later including the American Medical Association the National Association of school nurses the National Institute of Health the National parent-teacher Association associations that have recommended middle and high schools starting before 8:30 is none just to give you some perspective and the weight of the evidence for this is very strong so here's another myth that comes up a lot of the time so I keep getting a reminder to take out the trash that's not showing up on the screen right one that reminds me a tie my shoes in the morning - this is from

042we had a very contentious discussion on social media and elsewhere in Guilford about this issue not as nasty as it wasn't Greenwich where it practically came to fistfight at some board's event meetings but this was a common one yeah now we will stay up later since they can sleep in it'll be the school's fault or doesn't work anymore cuz parents take no responsibility for raising their kids anymore right maybe we've all heard these sorts of arguments the reality is later sar time equals more sleep this is from a study that was showing a direct relationship and this was Puli what's called a meta-analysis pulling multiple study of about 10,000 kids this was showing the percent of kids getting eight hours of sleep in a relationship between a high school start time 7:30 through eight fifty

043five note that the later the school started the higher the percentage of kids getting adequate sleep it's a straight line more recently this is well the top health stories of 2018 some of my colleagues moved the high school start time from 750 to 845 in Seattle Washington which is one of the largest school districts to ever do this the other one was Minneapolis which was the first to do this in 1996 and they just published the results of this and what they found is this this is look at the bottom graph here this is the sleep duration when kids are falling asleep here is 2060 and here's 2017 you can see that the kids are not going to bed any later but there is a significant extension of sleep in the morning here's another myth

044that's really important you can catch up sleep on the weekends there are very few sees are students from Korea and this is three is one of the few countries in the US where teenager this sleeper product korea-china-japan the kids are really sleep deprived I can tell you in Australia for example high schools always start at 9:00 in the morning and there's a fair amount of research showing that sleep deprivation is cumulative and you can't undo it by sleeping in all the weekends even though a lot of teenagers try to do this what's interesting is during the week if you if you look at kids performance on measures of vigilance in academic performance there's actually a guy named Dean BB who has a fake school that he runs in the summer and he pays kids money

045to come in and sit through classes that are designed to be boring right he does pay the kids to do this and sleep surprised them and what he shows that performance falls off during the week when the kids sleep in on the weekend the performance improves but it doesn't get back to where it was when they started in school so each week they're getting a little bit worse as they go through this torture summer school that he's devised so they just can't catch up and the other thing is is interesting is a lot of the kids who get this really strong sleep extension on on weekends a vacation they actually seemed at a higher risk of mood disorders and suicidality again I don't know that it's a clear cause and effect but that may show

046that there's something just regulated these kids that are sleeping all day on the weekends and vacation it certainly doesn't seem to provide a benefit or make them happier or healthier during the week and finally this is this is this is a big one in my town it's probably a big one in your town as well and the idea that effecting changing start times is going to affect student athletes right this is a big battle that we fought in our town in Greenwich this is why got so nasty there because the idea is that well practices are going to be shorter right and kids are going to have to either come out of class or have difficulty making it to their away games so if a couple of things to say that first of all I

047have to speak against the idea that early start times are good for student athletes so this was actually a study that was in CCMC and this was showing the risk of injury to high school student athletes here in Connecticut base the number of hours of sleep per night so you see the kids are getting less than eight hours of sleep a night had a much higher risk of sports injuries and it's probably doable combination of decreased vigilance right we're tired when I was vigilant if say a fastball is coming at our face or something like that and some of it is just deep performance that degrades when we're sleeping so the other the flip side of this is sleep is an issue that the major league sports teams are actually looking at to optimize the

048performance of their athletes right so I know someone here was saying their kid moved to Massachusetts they are worried they're gonna become Red Sox fans you know III I'm a Yankees fan and I was in Boston for a several Red Sox championships it was no picnic so lots of sports teams now are optimizing their players sleep to improve performance if you're a high school coach don't you want this advantage for your student athletes they're less likely to get injured they're more likely to perform better college teams are looking at this and some you know high school athletes so this is from an article talking about football coaches in in Texas let me tell you they take football pretty serious down in Texas so this coach said when his high school football players struggle to build

049strength and gain weight with little improvement Jeff Jordan asked some of their diets and training routines he also asks how many hours of sleep are you getting every night in everybody he said kids who aren't getting results aren't getting enough sleep I think that's one of the most overlooked areas when dealing with kids is athletes how much rest they're getting and by the way Dallas Texas starts at 9:00 in the morning and it's not because Dallas is a hotbed of progressivism right they just never changed the start times when people are going to consolidate school districts they just kept them at nine so they just kept their and this is I haven't looked at the most recent on Connecticut interests classic about a conference but this is showing just that they actually research showing that

050switching to later school start times create a more optimal learning environment improve student achievement for high school athletes so the Connecticut sports conference is actually supportive of this change and I think you could talk to the people in Greenwich ooh they haven't had a lot of difficulties with scheduling meets or games or anything like that much less than people thought it was going to be so I'll not close with two quotes the first is from one of my mentors talking about early school start times Julie Owens if you knew that your child's school there's a toxic substance that reduced that capacity I learned increased chances of a car crash in May likely that twenty years from now he would be obese and suffer from hypotension you do everything possible to get rid of that substance

051and not worry about cost early start times are toxic and finally I want to close with a quote from Kenneth drag Seth he was the superintendent actually was Edina Minnesota which is a suburb of Minneapolis Minneapolis changed their start times in 97 and dined at 96 and he spoke at the national Star Times conference last year and he talked about the difference in his high school when they move the start times forty-five minutes later he's like the kids were calmer going from class to class there was less trash everywhere because kids weren't drinking cokes and eating candy to stay awake during the day and he said parents were against it came up to them and talked about the difference in their life and he said if you're talking about changing start times how are your

052kids in the morning if your kids get up later you will get your kids back because that's what parents said to him they're like I thought my kid was going to be just miserable because he's a teenager but he's miserable because he was sleep-deprived all the time so I think more than anything this is a really important thing to think about as parents and community members is that kids don't have to be unhappy and stressed all the time and one of the ways that we can help them with this is by ensuring that they get enough sleep so right there I've got some information there you can hit me on twitter and ready to take questions from you guys all right so one of the one of the things that when I went to the

053adolescent sleep health conference one of the things that really stuck with me was it's not just about and you kind of touched on it was it's not just about teens getting enough sleep but getting quality sleep and where that quality sleep comes from is sort of the early hours of the morning just before you wake up because that's where REM sleep is more consolidated so should you just touch on that a little bit so I don't know anyone here well shift worker ever a shift worker I used to be one when I was a resident and the fact is it's not just when you sleep it's also the timing of when you sleep you know I simplified a little bit to say the circadian drive as a wakefulness Drive but there's our bodies have a

054natural predisposition for when we sleep and when we move through the night of sleep we actually go through different types of sleep so the beginning of the night is when you get that really deep sleep so someone wakes you up to an hour - after you fell asleep you feel terrible you can't wake up and then if you get enough sleep in the morning often you'll wake up out of a dream and you don't feel groggy that's REM sleep and REM sleep is actually when a lot of learning happens where memories are consolidated so during the day we learn stuff but they shown in animals and people that if you short-circuit that REM sleep the neck during the night after you learn something your ability to recall it to make connections in your brain that

055generate the manner the memories is impaired so when we're getting kids at their desks like 7:20 in the morning they're in a time when their body biologically wants them to sleep so we are essentially cheating them of that opportunity to learn both because they're asleep in the first period class and honestly many of them are and because they're not getting that period of sleep that is so critical to help learn the question your presentation is on middle school in high school what is the recommended start time for elementary students so this is something where it's there's a lot less clarity on it if you have an elementary schooler and I do generally they are pretty early in the morning compared to high schoolers we struggle with this in our town as well because they even

056get the modest changes the we did we have to move our elementary school start time from 850 to 900 four hours by 9:00 I think there's a couple of issues to think about younger kids before puberty are more likely to just fall asleep when you at the times we put them to bed I mean with that within reason but they don't have that strong wakefulness drive during the night so you could put your 8 year old bed and 8 year old Abedin I'm speaking from experience here earlier or later depending on what your schedule is they have a little bit more flexibility not to Maine where it gets troublesome or art or to issues first of all the safety of having any kid out in the dark but especially little kids if you want if

057you wanted to say like some districts will move football high school in the elementary schools start time for the sake of argument but then you can't really have elementary schools waiting scores waiting out of the dark at 6:30 in the morning it's a safety issue I would say that the best evidence which is very limited here would suggest that you know I think that you sort of look at the recommendations is that like the best practice would probably be around 8:00 for an elementary schooler 8:30 or 9:00 for a high schooler the thing is practically speaking and this is the decision we made in our town sure it's great to say what we want but it's not always possible to get there so we're kind of trying to inch towards better for me I think

058that in our town the the the best way to do it would be like a 7:45 start for elementary schoolers 8:15 for middle school and maybe 45 for high schoolers I don't think we're gonna get there because the logistics that we struggle with in our town but I'd say generally elementary schoolers have more flexibility but I still don't think I think it's too early for them to be starting in 7:00 or 7:30 and the flipside as many educators have said to me after when you're looking at the end of the day there's really starting to fade after 3 o'clock in the afternoon so if you're extending their their day they just don't have a lot of focus in the late afternoon so that that's not their peak time for many high schoolers what afternoon is

059a great time but for elementary schoolers they're they're kind of done with their learning at that point so I'd say dialing in inches so they're done with their coursework by 3:00 we're probably best so a question for you as you've gone to these conferences and yet obviously have built a lot of expertise here how does homework play in that equation I mean I and I speak from experience with my daughters who were athletes and would come home from their meets or their practices and then be faced with a pile homework about a deep and the Apple 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning trying to finish their homework or the papers or whatever so I think it's a really important issue and this this is something for all of you guys to think about as well

060sometimes are part of the problem but let's be real here I I feel like teenagers are under more pressure than when I was in high school I'm not gonna say how long ago that was but I think it's become harder to be a teenager I think there's more pressure I think that what's expected again just to to college is is more difficult now I looked at this issue a couple of years ago and in terms of homework volume I'm not an educator you guys are experts and I'm not in this domain my understanding was is that for your average high school students the burden of homework is not necessarily increased a huge amount over the years though some did varies from district to district it varies if say AP classes tend to be totally off

061the chain in terms of homework volume compared to non AP classes I think it is important as a district to look at you know III there's a this guy who spoken when the conference's name truck-sized are in his he's like the father of circadian sleep medicine he talked about the fact that there were really no his kid had to be into school at 7:30 in the morning and there was essentially no limit on how late she was expected to stay up to get her work done right like if we look at airline pilots or truck drivers there are actually rules about how long they have to rest before they take a shift we don't have rules like that for our high school students right like it's kind of crazy when you think about I mean

062like Jenny must look back and be like now I really wish I I'm glad I stayed up late and worked on my paper when I was a junior in high school like I think I think there has to be some sort of limit I mean in Guilford we've actually looked at trying to limit homework somewhat it's a it's a thorny issue when you have actually a lot of parents and I'm sort of pushing for more work for their kids but I think that one interesting part of this experience is when they move start times later that means moving n times later right nobody has a problem with later start times people have a problem later end times for what they found is that kids don't stay up later which is interesting right you think that

063well you're just pushing everything back it seems like kids are a little bit more efficient at getting their homework done when they're not so tired like if you've been up since 6:00 in the morning you went to school you are too swimmy you're probably not getting your homework done as quickly as you would if you weren't quite so tired right so I think that is a definite factor but I I'm sure I don't know what conversations you guys have about this I think it is very mindful to think about the stressors on your kids and homework is a major stressor for kids absolutely I was wondering if I could just ask Maddie since you're a student representative I wondered just from your perspective like what that the professor said like what resonated with you and

064can you sort of share your perspective from experience I get like six to seven hours of sleep per night and I've about three hours of homework but I also have two and a half hours of some practice after school so I don't have a lot of time to do any of my work and getting up at 6:00 in the morning and sometimes 4:30 in the morning for practice is not easy and that early start time at school 7:15 it's really hard to get everything done and try and get a good amount of sleep so I often like I find myself going to bed like midnight a little after in order to get all of my hours of homework done things the experience of many young people who are just trying to do the best right

065like get all the things that we expect of them and it's really hard I mean I mean I get tired just hearing about that right like we even work and then go into swimming for two hours and then like doing a bunch of homework like is gross we don't do that right like honestly I don't you know your your life is like when I was a resident and I'd pull like 18-hour shifts 36-hour shifts like probably not that bad but like you know that was that was like pretty nuts right you had mentioned the increase in the incidence of accidents and on your website had gone through some of the material and you actually equated it at some point to driving under the influence sleep deprivation absolutely the amount of impairment to drowsy driving is

066is very similar to driving under the influence and we all we all know we've all gotten the message that driving drunk is bad right it's not that people don't do it but I think that generally it's understood that it's not a good it's a really bad idea but in our culture where we sort of accept a baseline degree of sleep deprivation we don't always recognize for example it for an adult and we are if our sleepers curtail by two hours for two nights in a row the degree of impairment is not that far off from if you skip a whole night of sleep like it's very significant so I'd say anyone in the audience but especially if you know young people there's only a few things that work if you're tired if you're sleepy if

067you can don't get behind the wheel if you have to take a nap in your car or have some caffeine or have some caffeine then take a short nap and drive home but the most important message is people aren't good judges of their degree of sleepiness especially teenagers who are inexperienced drivers so like if in doubt really your parents may be a little bit man if you call them but they really want you to be safe and I just encourage people to make to tell their kids to make good decisions about this and to recognize that if you sleepy to drive you know there has to be they need to know they can safely recharge the people in their lives and for a way to get home it jumped out on their graph comparing the

068two counties in Maryland the second peak of for the county that started earlier was right at they were getting out of school on where the accidents were and you need to talk about that when you were going through the data but that's one that are going to be sleepy coming out of school sure in our town there's a road there where the students are tearing out of there to get they all work at Bizness orchards if you urban of Guilford like they are tearing out of high school people know we live on that Street just get it get your kids and your pets and doors right because like they are blazing out of there and you know it's just I think it goes back to to the fact that again we teenagers are kind of

069stressed I had a lot of free time when I was a when I was 17 or 18 it's not really how it works anymore are there any questions from anyone in the public here just one other thing I'd say so in our town we got a modest change the star jobs we moved the high school later by 15 minutes plus 10 minutes of improved efficiency in the busing our mandate was to do that at no cost right there are lots of different ways to skin the cat here it really depends on your community our community like many communities was cost sensitive on this issue the economics of this are pretty clear that this is if you spend more money on busing that you get back a benefit that benefits all the students like if you

070get a new teacher that's going to benefit a certain number of students right not every student but it is clear that you get bang for your buck is spending money in this but there are ways to do this with no costs I think I think it was Richfield it's actually saving some money their high school or there wasn't work they recently decided to was it done okay they tabled oh yeah there was one town that saved yeah there's superintendent like me this is even that laughs yeah um there's one town that actually saved money doing this you're bussing maybe really well optimized ours was too so it was hard to squeeze any more optimization out of the bus routes so it's hard we've got a good feedback from the students already I want to get

071more sleep for the kids in our town I want it for your kids near town to you so thank you for inviting me to speak oh yeah so what does the research say on the minimum amount of change that you have to make for the start time for it to have a worthwhile impact in terms of a return on the investment so it's a dose-response meeting the more that you get the more benefit you will the minimum doses look a lot where we are there's a couple of studies a look at a 15 minute change that did show some benefit in terms of test scores in students mood but it's modest right you know and I before I sign it because I was part of a committee looking at this issue in our town I

072was ambivalent about it because I sort of like I'd rather get more but we worked on the issue for five years we wanted to get something going there for the center for many of our parents would be better to make one change its instead of two you I would encourage you to do more honestly when I moved to Guildford on my workhorse of science I'm like we're gonna get this done in a year and then I started going to support vet meetings and seeing how things worked which is not it's just it's it's not a slam on boards that it's just the complexity of things it's not just the scientific thing it's also how do you get things done in the community which is much more complicated right how do you sell ideas that are

073gonna amuse people because changing start times in communities people right by definition everybody's life in town revolves around the start times you mess with it some people are gonna be upset have any other questions should probably have like 20 more thank you thank you for even considering this I think it is an important thing to think about for what it's worth there's some talk about maybe looking at this as a statewide issue which would take a lot of heat off of you guys so that'll take more than a year though take matters in that way yeah that's right that was that was very interesting appreciate you of yeah okay well that actually segues perfectly into our next agenda item a new business which is the establishment of an ad hoc subcommittee recommended motion that the

074board establish an ad hoc subcommittee to study healthy school start times second we've talked about this for a bit now and the fact that if we even to start embarked on this journey we need to start with an ad hoc committee that would start studying healthy start times if we were to do this I would recommend that Rosa cherish she's done the heavy lifting at this point going to the workshops and bringing this forward we can discuss the makeup of how we would want that that committee to look as well suggestions have you guys already started the discussion or no no no no we brought it forth here Rosa what would you envision to be honest I would envision a pretty large committee similar to the new school project only because is of a similar

075size in terms of disturbance in the community so I would envision you know three board members at least one administrator can as well a member from a representative from the bus company one from each of the private schools in town definitely at least two or three parents a student definitely a student representative high school and maybe administration from probably each school because if school times are going to be affected on all schools then yeah so fairly large but I think that kind of representation is is necessary maybe include a couple of teachers too yes yep yeah and coaches upon managing a big group like that is yeah you might consider taking pieces of it and make by my visor II groups breathing is he really know that you know where you like for example you

076want I want I want to get input from the coaches we're gonna run something like I won't get input from teachers you go run that is a kind of a one-off and we can keep your group to the little miners you tend to ten to twelve maybe you start getting to 20-plus people in a regular standing committee yes you need a core group is actually driving and setting an agenda so I think you could structure there's some ways you can structure some of the ones where you want input but they don't have to be in the day-to-day how might I do it you know like for example busing company might be someone you eat at a right time but they don't have to be a standing member of the committee you just bring them in

077yeah I'm guessing we have an item in the agenda for consultants for this was actually part of my discussion with the folks from an advanced day we actually talked about healthy school start times and really I have to applaud the board for moving in this direction because anything that's going to improve the physical and mental health of our students is what we need to be studying very seriously in thinking about their overall quality of life I mean I can't think of anything more important so it's really very important to be thinking about this and I thank you for your leadership in this area and I look forward to learning more about it together as a community and seeing what we might be able to accomplish yeah the reason I brought up the consultant is because

078that whoever we hire yeah presuming it gets a approve go push on that and just so everybody knows the mr. Costa I asked him to pencil in the next board meeting just in case you wanted him to come and talk a little bit about some of the features of the service and some of the experiences he's had it was part of the welcome change and start times back about ten years ago now ken was there at the time and he's actually work with Richfield a little bit and they've gone back and forth similar to the to the experience in Guildford their recent experience and we all know where Ridge Hills table that for now and Guilford has moved forward on it but I've had some very deep conversations with superintendent there and some of the

079experiences is you know some of the highs and lows what I've heard there as well so there's a lot to this a lot of pragmatics a lot of change so but if the science is there it's hard to argue with that unless he forgets like so it's not their well being against their performance their successes that seemed very strong and with the consult about this and this may actually be a better discussion to put into our budget discussion but I know Rosa had said well earlier that it almost takes a year with the ad hoc getting community responsiveness accept and and buy-in before he would even start a consultant to do the heavy work to so that maybe it's something and well you know maybe follow your lead on this whether we would even need

080the consultant in the budget your going forward or ready we delay that the ad hoc and get started to get off the ground yep because the consultants more of the technical work right they do they sort of hired out like the logistics for you they will sort of work with you on bail times and school bus routes and stuff but but not as much a community right right and just input which is what we would need to behavior to that yes yes exactly so this year would really about like learning about it learning from all different stakeholders and sort of building a consent yes exactly helping with the process service to the community even talked about they already had up what do we call it thought exchange there's there's a product called thought exchange where

081everybody could see the input from everyone else and certain ideas rise to the tops through technology so that's all process no and we're always happy from that but they really had some great ideas to help us out through their their local experience just here in Connecticut so what I would recommend at this point is if we recommend and approve the subcommittee then those board members that would be interested approach Rosa and then once in the upcoming you know we can even put you as a standing report on a monthly basis if you have that and then we would just your report as to what the content and the makeup of the rest of the committee is yep does everyone good with that good okay so all in favor aye host now that's your ever-growing Rosa

082thank you for taking this on very much thank you so if there are any board members interested if you can just let those know directly that would be great okay moving on we have the program of studies recommend a motion that the board approved the 2019 2020 brookfield high school program of studies which includes the addition of AP seminar AP Research International Business SEM technology a 3d modeling and printing stem technology base materials processing tools and techniques orchestra percussion workshop algebra to be scientific research Human Geography and American Sign Language second that was a mouthful thank you no sup Jen got up and walked away everybody oh sure sure she had her mouth full already now it's my turn to talk you know I appreciate a cape subcommittee for spending the time that they did

083you know that Wednesday or Tuesday before break it was a long time and I can see they bear with me as we went through and I was lucky enough to have our humanities coordinator dr. Spencer there as well as our stem coordinator mr. Hill to kind of talk to some of the social studies English associate is really and science and math changes and things that we're proposing you'll see it's a pretty robust change there's some real I think it makes sense just for me to kind of talk through them quickly or if anybody has any questions I'm not sure how you want me to go about it I could do either of those sure I'll do a break yeah absolutely I go I'll go really some some there's some basic changes that just were kind

084of revisions that we need to make just on line with what we've already decided you know conversations about PE and health credits that was a big one you know we talked about this at one of our last meetings the two meetings ago we talked about how the requirement at the Kate meeting was that the state requirement for health is one credit than the state requirement for PE is also one credit starting with a class of 2023 so that's a big change right now we offer two credits is our expectation for graduation for students taking PE and it's really a half credit for health right now for most students we would shift that to align with state expectations to be one credit of health and one credit of PE which requires a reduction in PE but

085an increase in health as to how that would work so I presented those things they came subcommittee and we agreed that those things to align with what the expectation is for the state needs to happen but what it does is it provides a kind of continuum of wellness and the way we've kind of structured in the way we envision it would work here so you know that ninth graders would take a semester of health starting next year they would take a semester of PE right so then that first year they have a credit of wellness for lack of a better term their sophomore year they would take a half year of PE either semester which actually gives us some options which is nice so through their sophomore year they've taken a credit and a half

086of wellness and then by their junior year they take that last half credit of health the health teachers are very excited health teacher sorry it is one teacher that we currently employ a teach health we do have some cross certified teachers that are certified in both PE and health that'll give us the opportunity so we're not necessarily looking we're not looking to hire any new staff which was my original proposal we've tweaked that and taking a look at what we offer and say we can get it done with what we have now but there are a health teacher and the other teachers in the PE and health department are very excited at the opportunity to go in from a quarter of credit health in which is essentially 22 classes is all you're gonna get in

087ninth grade and twenty two classes in eleventh grade so now we're doubling that which is really important given the state of everything that we've talked about and even the presentation from the doctor previously so that's one of the things we want to do to align with state expectations there's a few of the things we changed recently the board talked about we're gonna now work with ship hog agriscience as opposed to not walk so that's been changed in the program studies it's a pretty simple change yearbook used to be a year long class we've shifted it to just a fall semester class which was a great thing for us it made a lot of sense for us to do that because that now gives us opens up some second semester art electives and we can get

088the work done that way in a second semester for other courses marching band is something that we needed to tweak which we have Ward approved in August I believe and want to make sure that's reflected certainly in the program studies and so those are kind of the tweaks we've added some there's been some straight-up additions that I want to kind of go through really quickly that really aren't changes a program just really enhancements so what we already offer one of the big ones that you know is the Board approved several years ago the senior demonstration project that is a one credit requirement now for students and that are currently sophomores have to complete before they graduate we've explored a couple different options in the senior demonstration project committee and one of the things that's come

089out of that committee is the possibility of offering an AP capstone sequence of courses so and that would be a way the students could actually earn their credit of senior demonstration project at an AP level it's offered it probably about 10 to 15 schools in Connecticut right now not very many are offering it we've done a I've done a preliminary application just to show interest and College Board has responded and said they're excited and would be willing to you know allow us to teach this course moving forward if you're interested in doing it but it's actually a two-year course this is for a really advanced student first year being would be a junior year seminar course it's a full year course we're looking at to be taught most likely by one of our teacher librarians

090or live library media specialists and students will explore topics related to you know as we talked about seminar and research the seminar is a really exploration of research and how you're going to do it and the finer points of that there's a pretty well-established AP curriculum for that and then students would then take the AP research class their senior year and actually complete a full research project you know and we talked about AP we're talking about college-level research is the expectation so this would better prepare a lot of our students that choose to take this course for that next level in college if students were to complete those two courses just to those the only two they completed let's say for example they could actually earn a certificate from college more that says they've completed

091the sequence if they complete this sequence get threes on the actual test because there are tests for seminar and test for research and then they get threes in several others I believe it's for other subjects of AP tests as well they get a capstone diploma so College Board recognizes their efforts and gives them actually a capstone diploma so it's something a little bit different than looking to incentivize kids to take this so that's one way that we've got the senior demonstration project committee identified as a possible way so we want to make sure we included it in our offerings for next year a couple other things the work that we'd like to add as well international business this is something that as we look to explore with dr. spensser and our global engagement certificate certification

092competencies the global certificate global engagement certificate is a certificate certificate of global engagement I transpose those a little bit as a new state initiative that actually has a multi-pronged approach that talks about mobile coursework and one of the way one of the requirements is to meet I believe it's a seven credit requirement of courses that have a global theme we currently have things like road language right we have stuff in global themes in our sole Studies department we really want to expand our offerings that not limit students just to one particular discipline so talking about an international business course would be a really great way for kids to get that opportunity and really expand that way and possibly earn credits towards getting the certificate of global engagement so that's something we're interested in doing right

093now if you choose to do anything beyond intro to business it's you may do marketing you do sports entertainment marketing and that's kind of where it stops this gives us another way to look at things from that different perspective which is nice because not all students want to take sports entertainment marketing we out we can now possibly offer something a little different for them in our musical program looking at adding Orchestra percussion workshop you heard from some of our strings players who were here they really kind of work independently they do a lot of their own work because the band's program as great as the teachers mr. st. George's and differentiates for those students they end up doing a lot of their work on their own because the music isn't necessarily arranged the same way

094for a band versus Orchestra offering this for those kids we're hoping might expand some of those programs and give them an opportunity to actually play in an orchestra setting versus just a pen saying the same thing with percussion when I go in to do observations mr. st. George and I watch them teach there are a bevy of kids who sit in the back because they all want to play percussion that's the real that's the driver that's the thing they really like and he has to rotate kids through whereas the student that's playing trumpet or saxophone or clarinet or flute has the opportunity to play every piece that doesn't happen with percussion and so because there's so many kids they're interested in it and our beginning guitar program is great we have a lot of kids

095are interested in doing that this is also give has another option we could some of those students that may not want to participate in band but want to learn more about percussion this would be a way for them to learn some more about that you know mr. Hill is also proposing a scientific research course not surprising if you've anybody's talked to mr. Hill you know his level of dialogue is higher than most when it comes to the love science and math and he proposed this after working in Westport for a couple years and they have a similar course and really we have some some staff members that are willing to certainly do that but being a science major myself when I went to college I really had no idea until I took my first science

096class what scientific research really was high school did not prepare me for that I can say that certainly and having a course like this has designed a student-driven an interest driven where students that have the opportunity to really practice and research it kind of ties in a little bit with the AP seminar course we're gonna look to see what our enrollment numbers are I would say no matter what I talk about here it's that I talk about adding to the program of studies doesn't necessarily mean it's going to run it really is all dependent on student interest and the students want to take it if we had four or five kids let's take scientific research we wouldn't do it we certainly wouldn't run it because we want to be sure we don't compete with other

097courses as well but it's an interesting thing is going to align to NGSS the science and engineering practices are things that we've talked about you've heard about them from the elementary level and NGSS and things that we continue to focus on and we see overlaps between the science and engineering practices and the mathematical practices in the Common Core State Standards so we're really excited about the opportunity to possibly offer that and then another pure addition would be the American sign language which we've talked about here at the board mrs. Holley's gotten up front and talked about the the American Sign Language Program I've done a site visit I was unable to go the Thursday before break down to Greenwich but we also had sponsor actual dr. spensser went with mrs. Holly and saw a fantastic

098ASL program that has offers ASL from one to four which is different than the current program that we saw in Connard so we're excited to offer that there is one thing that we would have to delete from the program that would be digital student that currently is a quarter credit class that backs up against health and which isn't currently a quarter as soon as we expand health to a half a semester course there's really no place of that digital student to fit at the same time we know there's some important skills the students learn in that course but they're also getting Chromebooks in eighth grade and we're starting this conversation earlier so when digital student was first and introduced and I believe it was called skills 21 think of it first started really was connected

099to the iPad initiative and having students now have this new one-to-one device technology in their hands and how are they going to use it effectively and appropriately we're going to look to take some of those same skills and things that are taught in the digital student course and see how we can intersperse them into other courses to make sure the students still have those well we feel about it they'll have a relatively solid foundation maybe not as solid is that they took this one quarter credit course but we still think that we can meet the needs of kids by eliminating that course and kind of absorbing it into other courses that we teach and we also do something since we change health from half to a from a quarter to a half so we needed

100to find some other way to so do that so and the last big three really are the areas of human geography which dr. spensser has talked about a little bit of the Cape committee meeting Human Geography is a course that we would look to actually replace our modern world history course that we've now talked to sophomores we've had some great experience and some positive results with our global themes course which is new for our ninth graders so our 10th graders would take this human geography course it's certainly modeled after you know looking at the AP geography course that we currently offer AP Human Geography and in talking with Stephen Armstrong who was the state consultant on social studies and all the work that dr. spensser has done and she can certainly come up after and

101answer some questions if you have specifics about Human Geography and what that course might look like but we're excited to offer a different thing for kids and we think it's gonna work out really well stem in stem gen to talk about stem technology a and B we would like to add a little bit to those course descriptions to make it a little more descriptive for people so stem technology a would be 3d modeling and printing and stem technology B would be materials processing tools and techniques so we kind of tweaked those names that the request of Kate when we talked two weeks ago so that when someone looked at a program of studies they saw stem technology and stem technology what's the difference what are you doing you can actually look at the course descriptions

102and so we add that to those so the students would know and really stem technology B is an existing course we're just kind of renaming it essentially it's an intro to technology class that we current off currently offer but with all the opportunities we have with our laser engraver and with our plasma cutter and all the cat and 3d stuff that we can do we really look to ourselves to offer kids an opportunity for that it's something down the road that we may see as a required class for kids as we talk about project-based learning and the tools and things they might need to be successful in a project-based learning environment of a stem environment they might need to take this course in order to be successful so this is something really piloting and seeing

103how that goes in the area of algebra - currently though we have some we have students I think we have 19 students in one class and I think 20 in another of an integrated algebra 2 class that exists currently that's generally taken by juniors who take geometry their sophomore year they're not necessarily ready to go into a full algebra 2 class they take any greater mm or two and then after that the path gets a little trickier as to where kids are integrated algebra 2 prepares them but they're not getting a full algebra 2 curriculum and we're finding us where it kind of falls down we take kids and sometimes we put them in algebra 2 if they're ready for that not every student is ready for a full algebra 2 so oftentimes what happens

104they might go to stats from Michael or a math modeling course they could go a couple different directions but then they're not getting the full experience of really mastering algebra 2 standards this what we're looking proposed is take the integrated algebra 2 class and make that algebra 2 a so this actually becomes a two-year sequence to make sure students by the time they graduate that all our kids are getting a solid algebra 2 foundation right now I can't say that they necessarily are getting an all solid algebra 2 foundation because some kids are getting it when they take algebra 2 that next year after integrated and some kids are going to other courses so they may not get that full algebra 2 experience and we know we talked about success in college and career is

105really needing a firm grasp on all those standards and really mastering them and this provides an opportunity we're talking we're not talking about you know 197 kids need to take this course but for those kids that do need to take it you know the 40 kids that may need to be in of course this is really important for them to make sure they master those standards across the board because integrated house was really only taking getting about half the standards that they eat an out resume at this point so we need to expand it and then I talked a little bit about health already so that is a lot of stuff and one little one concise as I could be and I'm sure there's gonna be questions but I think this these changes as this

106continues to happen I'm as daunting as it is and like I said I appreciate that they came so quickly taking time to go through it this just shows the progression that we have we're continually moving forward we're looking to create opportunities for students to offer them the best that's for them to prepare them for life after high school so and they'll be more year after year you'll see me up here again going through the same sort of thing but we're always looking to reinvent ourselves so so we're happy to be here thank you very much there's any specific questions I can answer about a particular course about a sequence about a plan or I'm how to do that and Liz is also here willing to come up and talk about human geography because that is

107the one that's gonna be required really of all sophomores we'll take human geography next year if approved so all these additions are proposed without any increase in staff except for the stipend the offering time the old that that's a bit already exist so the the only increase that is the American Sign Language teacher that's the only all these all these are based on that the algebra 2a and 2b so then the sequence for these students would be algebra geometry 2a and 2b they could also they could take other day want to take a statistics course they could still take that at the same time it'd be independent I mean we have to have some kids that really say they want to take stats that's fine they could do that but this just allows us to

108make sure we ever all those kids are graduates are getting that solid algebra 2 curriculum across the board physical education sure classes on the next page yep I thought they were some interesting topics yeah these new classes like adventure education and what you soon well there's it's outdoor education technically and they wanted to change the event for education it's the same thing they're trying to find a spicy way to make it more but these are all existing classes that the kids can take now they just kind of read morph them so it makes you to make it more appealing and I think the best part about this whole thing for me is that you know using our existing staff and the great thing about our PE and health staff is we looked about ok how

109can we do this and we laid out the numbers to make sure it works evenly that we with the staff that we have now how we can make this happen and it was ok we can do one credit health one credit of PE and that's just what's gonna happen after the kids take their sophomore year repeaters really gonna be an opportunity and the PE teachers didn't really love that idea they wanted to is there any way that we could find a way to make maybe one of these classes a little bit bigger right so that I can we can now offer and their junior year and senior opportunities for electives repeat for those kids that really want to take it that was their decision that's often times that comes to the principal say I'm gonna

110make these class sizes larger they said they want to do that because they want to be able to offer some of these opportunities as electives so not everybody would be able to take a P elective but some kids if they were interested in it would have the opportunity to take it so it was really impressive that that department worked that hard to see there's some other things they can do that's great so general quick I'm gonna stay on PE for a little short essay this word duck so today we're at 2 and we're gonna go down to one as a requirement for graduation correct have options to do more than the one for an elective yeah so it's exactly so if a student you know once they get there they're 1 credit by the end

111of sophomore year if they were interested in taking elective they could certainly sign up for the you know they can request it it doesn't necessarily mean they're gonna get it because we have limited staff we probably able to offer a section each each semester we'd likely be able to offer and health goes from Africa correct okay so that means overall the PE health is going from two and a half today down to two correct is there a way we can keep it at two and a half foot more pee in there because I'm a believer in physical education for kids and I get it I worry that we're going too far and and it feels to me like we're reducing the overall space and why why why do we need to do that yeah it

112would um you know and we looked at that quite a bit because certainly my original thought was that I would in my blue sky world I would add another 1.0 and have another health teacher and we could offer the same thing we have three and half credits of of health and PE and wellness because it'd be its it is important but you know from a fiscal perspective which I'm thinking of and also a feasibility we know that having that one credit of health is it is important and you know that and I think I think everybody agrees that one credit health as if is important right now I think we can get the job done with what we have and so our current you know right now our kids that are I can look at

113this full of my exact numbers here so our students that are so the class of 2021 so our current sophomores right they actually have a level one point five credit requirements so because they've taken already a half semester a semester already they'll take by the end of this school year they'll take in a full year so they've got their one and a half credits we may be able to and I may come to the board next year and say listen you know we have this discussion we talked about if this if this continues to grow there's opportunities one of the things we're looking to do is rate clappers the YMCA and see we need to offer life saving and CPR and other kinds of courses that could really support kids who are going into you

114know careers in Parks and Rec or physical education or any sort of you know sports or activity based fields I may come to you and say I really think we need to add something else back to this I just don't know that without requesting more staffing that I could do that right now within the existing structure of you know being budget neutral okay so my question was not about increasing mm-hmm it was about holding the number of hours the same and when I asked that question it was routed and my thought that if you're gonna have two and a half hour two and a half credits required and you're gonna have two and a half credits required in the future that you could do it with the same staffing so I wasn't actually proposing more

115staff rates I was proposing hold at the same and which would just mean you know cut out as much but frankly my reaction would be if we're gonna lower the number of hours we ought to be shot in PE teacher Sun right and I don't want to go there I think that seems I think you shared with us and correct me if I'm wrong that right now the PE classes are very very large yeah and so what the change that change would do would be to reduce the amount of students within PE classes right that is exactly so right now you have the average PE class size you know I would say you know going into PE we have classes sometimes with 32 33 34 kids in a PE class which nobody complains about my

116PE teachers are fantastic they do the work it'd be more productive if they had you know 25 to 30 kids you know in those classes across the board of what we're doing at managing the trying to manage the class size they get a little bit closer with that same caveat that we want to try to still offer like to get it to the right class size optimal class size would be to keep staffing exactly what it is and offer no electives but my staff said you know could we push it maybe to that 30 32 level in a couple sections so we can sell offer some electives because they really did a tough time thinking about giving that up they didn't really want to do that they they're torn between the managing you know could

117we get it back to a 25 26 class size versus a 34 kids in a class but they would choose to have less required and have a more manageable yeah yeah so it's another related item and this is actually me you may tell me now that's long gone okay but when my kids were going through the high school there was a junior requirement it's not a junior requirement anymore so there's the physical fitness test a physical fitness test they have to do sit and reach they have to do mile they have to do I think it's chin up there there's a bunch of different flexibility it's now can be administered in any grade so you can do it at ninth you can do it in tenth and there's a still require it's still required yet

118we have to report those statistics every year to the state yep so what we what we do now instead of doing a junior which is when we currently do it we do it with our sophomores and if they can't meet there's really no doubt if you can't meet the test there is no remediation for that I mean it's it's it's a data point that we send to the state and certainly when it comes to the school accountability index that we get every year they do rank us according to while our kids do and if you I think if our our population got to a point where they saw a significant gap in an issue whether it be in gender or ethnicity or you know special ed population anything then we'd be cited for that and

119then we have to work and look at our PE curriculum to see where we are but there's no specific remediation plan for a kid who a student who doesn't necessarily reach it but that being said when the teachers do record it and submit that data our teachers are pretty progressive like they talk about lifelong fitness and they want to work to those you're not write a paper on hope now thank you but one of the things that is interesting I will say is that we found this one - the middle school we did walk throughs and I found the same thing we did walk throughs in high school PE classes when they were doing the mile at the middle school and then again in the fall here at the high school kids remembered their times

120from previous years it was amazing the way kids remembered it and they looked at to better themselves so it's pretty impressive they're not going to classify this and mr. Taylor please if you if you just want my opinion you actually need to practice the art of running in order to run faster yeah you can't just show up this year and show up next year and expect you're going to improve here yeah yes that's definitely own opinion that's fine a little bit good question about the senior demonstration sure so I assume the AP capstone yeah if if this were to be completed in time for the new state requirement so it should be air current southwards to be current juniors they would have to start that next year yep what we would do is we'd send

121one of the teachers to AP training over the summer that's aft it's actually included in my budget as a possible item to send a teacher for ap training over the summer I tend to include those because we like to rotate people in any way I think it's always good to get ap trained so that is thin to our budget and we offer the AP seminar course next year for those anybody interested so the current sophomores will be able to register for the AP seminar and then you wouldn't have the AP research the year after the year after we have ap research yes so does that mean this capstone pair of classes becomes a requirement it's not a wouldn't be a requirement it's a way to meet a requirement so you can meet a senior demonstration

122project doing that way and it might explode I I don't know it's it's one of those things you can't really I don't know until II get into it but we have quite a few as you know in this building quite a few academics and kids who are really into this and so whether it's scientific research where they choose to do seminar and research combined in AP it could be interesting and the student choice piece that I think is probably my favorite part of the whole thing is that it's not dictated by this is what you have to do and here's the topic that you have to research there's also so much students involved in that I think kids are gonna be interested in doing it to seeing what what they can choose to explore because

123they want to they want to do it instead of me telling them we're gonna study World War one today we had spoken about capstone a year ago one of the issues was finding advisors to the kids yep topical experts does this ap research or is it too early to say it's it's really it's not gonna require no it's not gonna require advisors because you know that the courses in the two tier sequence is really intended to provide students with a skillset to do the research on their own part of that requirement may be for them to go seek out an actual expert in the field as part of their own initiative and their own work to make sure that they get the right answers and have the experts in the field to talk to that

124that's my assumption looking very really through the syllabus to see what it looks like you're in the process of forming a program to address those that don't take this Grutter going to d2 I know cable B that came to me be very surprised that I'll be coming before you again at some point in time to talk about the rest the senior demonstration project and what our plans are in the next next two months I'll be coming to talk about that great any other questions thank you very much thank you very much okay so all in favor of approving the program of studies I post thank you again mr. bland uh okay next we have discussion and possible action concerning district data sharing agreements recommend emotion at the Brookfield Board of Education authorized the board's director

125of technology to negotiate data sharing agreements with appropriate third-party vendors and execute set agreement subject to their review of the superintendent or as designee prior to execution sake so just briefly what what this is is frankly this is a belt and suspenders motion we have abided by new state law and have adopted several policies under the data privacy legislation in recent months and this is kind of the final step in moving forward on this on how we execute this and operationalize the policies and how we operationalize how we go about doing our business Eric confident our technology director Eric maybe you can come up to the podium at this point as our technology director works through all of those contracts already and it formally brings those either to can or to me and then I

126execute those contracts we worked with our Board of Education Council and talked about the concept of the technology director directly entering into those obviously with the permission of the superintendent final approval and to give him a little bit more authority over the and that's exactly what this motion is Eric can you summarize for the board kind of exactly a little bit perhaps a little bit more or take me in terms of the actual day-to-day things you do that have to do with a third-party vendor and what that actually means uh short so one of the requirements of the state law that we've talked about in a policy is actually entering into contracts with these vendors several of these are actually taken care of at a state level PowerSchool Google the ones that every school districts

127use but even deeper than that the district itself has to enter into contract with with these vendors in some cases the vendor themselves creates of term of conditions or they create their own amendment of which we sign they countersign it and give to us those are the bigger vendors for example Google we have already entered into a contract with Google they sent an agreement we agreed to it every other school district in the state has done that as well but some of the smaller vendors some of the software that's at individual schools or that is only used by certain districts this is where the contract comes into play and the contract essentially follows the policy that we approved over back over the summer which is the state law stating that vendors cannot sell student data

128to advertisers that the Brookfield school district owns the data that upon termination of a contract the data is returned to Brookfield schools or destroyed and proof is given that the data has been destroyed and then also there are rules in there about how data breaches are handled when the Board of Ed is notified when the Board of Ed is notified how does the Board of Ed notify parents there's got to be a certain timeline X number of days depends on the breach is what sets the number of days and that's all written in the contract as well as the state law and then what the mediation is what steps the vendor has taken to handle the data breach along with what data actually got sold in what didn't get sold and anything like that with

129a lot of experience with talking to the vendors working with other school districts as a technology leader email group that we always every day there's something new about about data privacy and there's a lot of back-and-forth with the vendors so you send your contract are written by our attorney you send their contract they send their amendments and you work back and forth until you come up with an agreement so there's a lot of a lot of back-and-forth between it before it's signed and frankly on top of it to be realistic there are vendors who will say we will not sign this and now we are required by a law to say sorry we can no longer work with you that is going to be true of that could very well be true of some programs

130that we currently work with now and have been working with for years and this also sets a new evaluation going forward for any time something new is proposed in which data is hosted by them on their locations or if data is hosted by us locally in other words it's on our servers here but if you call for support and they access your equipment they've remote in they are now subject to the data privacy law so there's a lot of components and a lot of back-and-forth working with the vendors to handle just exactly how they see the view of data privacy and how we school districts see it and then how the state sees it it's great time 2% support of that unless they propose changes to our standard data privacy agreement do you run all

131those changes through our council yes we will and we absolutely should we recently received the final contract from our attorney that we're now ready to start disseminating the standard boiler the standard boilerplate that will be handed out before it's touched edited nothing else it's you know the vendors name will be written in and and you know the blanks filled in and then it will go back and forth obviously reviewed with Council and then as John mentioned with with himself and Ken will be reviewed and then a final agreement made again really any changes any amendments can be can be are okay as long as they adhere to and that's what partners yeah I don't think it would um especially as they get some of these vendors may get very you know nitty-gritty into some of

132the details I don't think it makes sense to not to not so half there so thou art will prefer Howard boilerplate Kevin that's just a discussion I think usually yep okay thank you very much Eric thank you Eric all in favor aye okay that moves us to full business the first item is the 1920 school calendar recommend a motion that the board approved the 2019 2020 school calendar as modified by the board is recommended by superintendent dr. John Burroughs okay so we went back after the meeting last week and I say last week there's only been four days actually since the last time we met so that's my my superintendent report was so grateful now that I realized enforceable days so I'm gonna walk through this month by month - some of the changes for

133everybody and I also um we we also followed up on early dismissal times we did a little adjustment there we had to make and also some clarity on lunch ways at this punk in the air so question first sure is there any difference between the two copies that we have okay all right so the first is October on October 11th I had scheduled a PD day for the for that day we moved that as per board suggestion to October 15th that was partly the intention was to smooth out the week so they weren't disrupted with a day off then back to school on a day off so we've had it we have a longer weekend that weekend of the 12th 13th and then the 14th and 15th for families and students and then the teachers

134will be in on the 15th for PD also in October Columbus Day is that's the 14th Miranda yes Columbus Day is the 14th we have while we are prepared as an administration to follow the directive of the board and move forward on having school held on the 14th if the board wants to move expeditiously on calendar for next year by getting it approved tonight or frankly in the next couple of months we cannot move Columbus Day to be a non holiday because it's in its five of our six of union contracts and so we have to make up a separate memorandum of agreement that tastes just simply takes time to negotiate and go back and forth and you can imagine depending on the particular agreement how it's written the iterations that go back and forth

135between five different unions and our board attorney and back course we'll take certainly more than in my experience six eight weeks it just will take that kind of a time so in terms of a pragmatic matter it's not something realistically that we can take off the table Columbus Day for next year but we certainly will if that is the definite wish of the board we will work on that going forward so when I proposed the 2021 we don't we can come to school on Columbus Day okay so Columbus Day still in there okay so that's October trying to just go month by month so it's nice and nice and easy to understand in November we had moved to actually for this year we had done it and it didn't work out with snow day but

136for next year I proposed that the 27th of November which is the Wednesday prior to Thanksgiving that that would be the district would be closed and that would be the beginning of the Thanksgiving recess the board in terms of looking doing its compares and benchmarking and taking a look at things asked that we reinstate the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and so that's schedule doesn't early dismissal one more traditional kind of a schedule there so that day is back that's November December the let's see the 20th Friday December 20th I had that scheduled as an early release day just prior to the holiday break which begins on Monday the 23rd but since the 23rd is is typically not a holiday because it's not Christmas Eve what we decided will close the the school rather than spend the

137energy to open the school up for just that one day the thought was to have Friday the 20th be a full day of school so that the calendar indicates that it's a full day of school there so in June with the three built-in snow days the last day of school scheduled for the 18th rather than the 19th now and if there were no snow days at all we don't have any emergency days we would be on track to be out of school last day June 15th so just so you guys know that okay so those are those are the adjustments so every adjustment the board asked to be made has been made with the exception of Columbus Day which I explained if I could direct your eyes to the upper right hand side of the

138calendar under the dismissal times the word dismissal times there we can I put a call into the bus company because one issue we have with the dismissal times for weather-related dismissal times is we try to compress them artificially frankly and the reality is on a weather-related early dismissal you you can't expect to have actually a quicker dismissal time than you do on the regular early dismissal times when weather is not an issue so what we did is we left the high school at 10:30 and we moved the middle school from 11:15 excuse me from it was at 11:00 a.m. we moved it to 11:15 as a weather-related earlier dismissal and that that frankly is to just reflect the reality because the buses get home later anyway you can't compress the in-between time with the bus

139transportation and then the elementary schools rather than sameness 11:30 so this is Munky involved you know okay the launch very clear on whether planned only a few minutes five minutes early dismissals 11:40 is usually now 11:30 know that we didn't change the early just didn't change that planned early dismissals yes we had we had to joy because they were all compressed because the boss were so even on the when the weather is not in climate that was an issue so we want to reflect realistic plus times so that's why that the high school remain the same but then everything else is off of that first bus run so yes we moved that 10 minutes and the same thing for the variant well 15 20s yeah and we worked with Debbie from the bus company she

140thought she can make that work for us John now that November 27th is a school day you need to fix the paragraph at the bottom about when if there's a school closure prior to Wednesday November 27th that day will become an early dismissal instructional day I guess need to figure out how we would add a day yeah that would be just a traditional I think there yeah thank you for catching that dip and then my recollection of the the conversation about early dismissals and lunch was what would it take to provide lunch and early dismissal days maybe not weather-related but just general early dismissal days I know you said we do provide lunch at Center and huckleberry but what would be involved in providing lunch at the other school that's what we're waiting on we

141talked to Alfonzo on the 20th of December and told him to get cracking on that and see what we come up with and then we've had vacation and everything else so we don't have that answer yet but it doesn't mean we can't come up with a solution but for now going forward this is what we have if we're able to figure out lunch and work with our principals on that and how that might work then if we can do it we'll do it would it be possible to designate June 15th maybe even some color I might hate to throw too many colors onto the calendar but something and then underneath just a 15th last day of school without inclement weather days just so someone will look at it then if you're trying to plan and

142so then you've got the to articulate yeah because that could be confusing people last day of school in those snow days right exactly it says it here in red under at the end of the paragraph but that's now granted we're taking out a large portion of that because we're taking out the part about about the Wednesday before Thanksgiving but it's still a lot to read before you maybe we can make this you look at this paragraph movie there's some bullets on it so it's a little easier sure you do that and we maybe highlight it and read on the fifteenth or something like that we can okay any other so do we need an extra sort of give back day though like this year we went to school right before Thanksgiving to save on that

143snow day so if there's a snow day before November 27th what happens do we have my made-up today we just make the day at the end of it okay so we've lost the Friday before so we made it up on Wednesday so we're even with our days right all right so we're saying next year the 27th is already it snowed already the school day what happens if we have you know closing before then we don't have that day we wouldn't know liked it in my mind typically just added and there's not like an easy save like there is this yeah correct because we had that kind of flex day with that Wednesday before Thanksgiving we don't really have that and adding that day before Thanksgiving made our end date from the 19th to the 18th

144edition right so we now have that day kind of goes really okay versus beginning okay so we're happy to make those two adjustments we'll adjust the language and maybe the structure of that paragraph to reflect a bit more accurately and then we can put a color on the June 15 mm-hmm if you're comfortable with everything else it looks like something got cut off yeah I do I just printed but yeah we should check that out baby anybody okay see that way okay okay since the the approval or the changes requested really our format versus substance is everyone okay just approving the school calendar all in favor aye most thank you everyone for your work on this thanks for everybody's thoughts and input and Lisa and I can try to get that out of user tomorrow

145or Friday we're best that off everybody soon as possible okay next we have the capital projects discussion this is just a recommended action that we continue the discussion of the pro-choice capitalist and it looks like this is the updated copy here I can yes can walk you through you should have three handouts in front of you the Facilities Committee members saw it and discussed it tonight before this meeting and our last discussion the board asked that we prioritize the projects in the first year of the plan develop a couple of scenarios for center school based on how much usage the building would have and to get more detailed information about the individual product projects with the holiday break I have email Tecton the next day after our meeting and I just got today the detailed

146information that myself or our committee has not had the opportunity to go through yes so we are actually as a committee building to have a special meeting next Tuesday to go through the projects in more detail that we'll be able to have a more intelligent discussion with you at the next meeting but in the meantime I'll let you know what what I've given you so you should look at it so the first the one I color-coded the headings was one in black says new school and not repurposing center school which would be the scenario where we're going to occupy Center school for the next three or four years what projects on the plan would we do just for us and assuming that the the facility might be mothballed after that suggests what we would have

147to do and then we came up with was security upgrades and just a portion of the paving that Tecton had recommended for for that facility and that would specifically would be the parent drop-off Luke pushes narrow and runs around the building and deteriorating rapidly the next scenario with the orange heading is new school and repurpose this center school which has all of these centers school projects on it as you saw last week Carl asked last month and on all of these that high school and middle school are the same and then the blue heading is the no school scenario so if the school project is not moving forward this has all of the projects for all of the buildings [Music] so the no new school has the huckleberry once in addition between that and the

148[Music] can't see the expense that yes just in the first year 3.7 million more and then the swimming into the school just in the first year I think over time it's another good case yeah another good case you know Facilities Committee really talked about that today you know the building's having outlived their uh their use so are the projects in each of the schools in priority order at this point is that next Tuesday's meeting how do I say well they are that current year ones are in or yes okay so if you're meeting next week is two more review the projects and just go through everything before you officially present direct yes tonight we were short on time and like mr. post said he didn't receive this until the last minute but one thing I

149do want the board to look at very closely is if the new school project is not approved we are looking at spending quite a bit of money just to get center and huckleberry hills school back up and running so the it's it's very scary it's gonna be a very scary situation for us as a board to move forward if that new school is not approved because we're going to have to spend millions and millions and millions of dollars both at center and huckleberry because they are so old and they are deteriorate deteriorating and that's a great issue and in a concern so yes does anybody have any questions at all about the facilities and us talking about them next meeting yes absolutely yes if anybody would like to review the plane before that and if

150you have questions you would like the committee to discuss next week feel free to send them now if you were these are prioritized within the school yes one through five if you were to prioritize these how many is a in the pace plan it's 12 no and that's something that we're also gonna be discussing next week long is that I'm picturing the discussion with agreed and they they're gonna need to know what's the most important that across all this oh absolutely I I want to know what is most important and that is why we scheduled a special meeting for next week to really sit down and have the time to have a good discussion so we can report back to you accurately this is and so I I think since we do need this work

151we're definitely not doing an approval on this right now so since it is just an action we can just keep it if anyone does have any questions before next week they should direct them to Cannon Eve correct yeah please and also our meetings are always open you can feel free to come and set words when you talk to it Tuesday 4:30 so be the 7th 8th it's the 8th and it's gonna be full offices thank you thank you for breaking this out Ken that's really [Music] what what she's playing how she's planning to run her process carefully I think we've generally given the long writer we had laundry lusts but that she's new witness so I'd be interested you know that we can make that connection [Music] okay moving on to the review of the

152superintendent's proposed 2019-20 budget and this is just a continuation of the last two times so we had the budget presentation and we can go through it a little bit more we can start with any questions anyone has further I know we had responses and some other questions that were sent in and received and then you just put those there which probably haven't had time to address I guess I have a question we brought it up before in regards to the consultant for the school starts time if wait that needs to be in this budget or if that is something that can be delayed or next budget cycle once we have a year the ad hoc I think it would be very I think it'd be very quick if we moved to you know think about

153implementing new start times for I mean really even if we did it for the 2021 year I mean that that might be appropriate for the 2021 year if that's the route that we end up wanting to go which would mean that it would need to be in the budget for this next year but yeah I don't know how you how you guys feel about that well another thing I think we if I if I may Jen something we want to think I think I think the board should consider and I just want to put it out there is and again this is preliminary it looks like March 5th will be the referendum for the new school project and our goal there would be to have students into the new Elementary School for fall 2022 so

154something we really I think as a board can be thinking about is using this as an opportunity to frame this true you know reframe the strategic plan and frame you know a big change with going from four to three schools if that's what the plan is going to be with start times and other things if inevitably that's where we're going to go so I think we could use when we talk about the term coherence we could use the ongoings that are the big projects here in the district to bring all these initiatives together and so that's something in terms of timing I just like to put out there for the board to think about I don't yep that makes sense I was just gonna ask when we look at other examples where they've had success

155do we know how many years they studied before they had the consultant yeah five years ago first yeah it's usually a multiple year I mean we could hope for yeah III well and that's something that we have with the the new school plan the other piece is you know dr. canto Perry talked about his personal experience in Guildford obviously he's got professional experience with it but Jonathan casas from in advance the reason that you know when I talked in this morning that said you know if you could share some of your experience I think might be beneficial since we're having the sleep study specifically that information discussed tonight perhaps on the 16th wall this is part of the budget discussion he he talks not only about logistics but just also to face and timeline and

156that kind of a thing so it's not just with you know the superintendent you know in the suit assistants are attended behind closed doors publicly you kind of hear that from somebody who's been around the state doing this for a decade jump in Murray please I think the other thing that's really important is not only the work that is done as a subcommittee and as as a board and an administration working as partners but the Community Partnership is going to be absolutely pivotal and I think that that's something that's going to take that first of all we would never want to a rush job because we want people to really understand this understand the pros and the cons there's you know when you get something there's always a trade-off and people have to have time

157to really process that and be given you know real data that they can understand not just numbers and graphs but anecdotal stories that are have been written telling the story of what's happened in different different districts and I see that as something that will take time and I like the conversation that we had with the gentleman this morning from an advanced we're talking about you know everything coming like a Venn diagram of all of these different things that are going on that are big and important and and have to segue with each other and seeing you know it all coming together as one holistic plan rather than I think good there will have to be changes again if we even though the elementary schools are kind of on the same schedule when it's one elementary

158school that's going to change bus runs and denying and things and so I you know John always tells us you know if you don't do something right the first time he always have you because you don't have time yeah you always have to find time to do it over again so I kind of I'm thinking about all of these things in that vein and how does it make the most sense I know we'd all like everything yesterday well we obviously can't have that but wasn't pragmatically if we're anticipating that with a new school it's presumed for a moment that the community gets behind that and it's approved in March if that's gonna be making other significant changes in the district that that would be a good timing to build around right for this yes because

159oh but you don't want to be changing the bus runs this year and then he'll get another one two years after we would be hiring a consultant to make changers recommendations based on four schools so we have to almost reinvent the wheel looking at four perhaps yeah not but perhaps reinvent the wheel again for three schools so I think it's a little premature at this point you're put in that carton from the horse yep I would like maybe a little more clarity on what the consultant would do for us oh really the kind of the nuts year-olds and the logistics but then it sounded like John was talking about helping having the consultant help us get buy-in from the community to my to my knowledge and there is a there's a company called school bus

160consultants and that was the one that you want name that kept coming up because a lot of districts are actually like well what do they actually do we actually eat one because a lot of districts have done this without a consultant and without issue I mean we'll end it a decade ago without issue but [Music] really what they do is they they will work with the bus company to essentially and they'll work with like bail times they'll help you out with that kind of stuff but to my knowledge that's that's what they work with is logistics of it once you've already decided that you're going to make the change but not necessarily the planning part of it I don't know if well the other parts of this is is John's and John his name is

161Jonathan he's putting a proposal together it's kind of three phases three ideas that are coalescing as I talked about dr. Berube just articulate and I think we're all kind of thinking thinking of this the same way we're starting to conceptualize this is we want to look at reframing the strategic plan with so many great things going on so many accomplishments and so much more to do there's a lot going on says one aspect and Jonathan was part of our initial strategic planning the other parts that is not only a school start time study for the purpose of wellness for our students based on the research that's there is a time study they could also help us with that not only how custodians are spending their time teachers are spending their time administrators are spending their

162time and there's there's tools technique strategies and ways to analyze and you know from the outside and then self analyze time because that's one of the biggest areas that's that's our most precious resources time what do we always talk about we never have enough time and where we could find better ways to be more efficient where we could isolate and have ownership of perhaps waste in our day that we don't realize could be used more productively we all think we're busy and we're all hairy but being busy can't necessarily equate to being productive and so we've got to be open and honest about that that's another area where they can help us and I think these these big ideas start to come together if we could have you know a consultant like an edit help

163us in some phases as well so would they look at bus Proust okay oh yeah they've done all of that in and just one thing Jonathan did work with Wilbur a decade ago or whatever it was and when Ken was there I don't think it was the process it started before it was that was actually started with their Board of Ed it was started with so they did all the heavy lifting that the subcommittee of our portal under pressure so there's a little there's differences but Jonathan cited welcome to your point rose that he said well that's kind of the longest term success story that's honest and they've existed for the most part until recently in a league for athletics where everybody else is on a more traditional schedule so they figured it out the

164one caveat I'm gonna put in there for this is wherever we end up going I am NOT behind I'm behind student mental health and I am behind student physical health and doing the best for our kids I'm not behind students routinely leaving the last period class early for practices games and other things you know a state game or a big time competition that's one thing that's a one-off but that's something we need to be very careful about and I do hear this is just anecdotal that in some of the districts where they've moved quickly with the start times you just let folks out early for away games and it's like you know that's not we're not gonna make that happen so I just wanted me you know draw the red line right there that's something

165that we're gonna have to figure that out and it seems like you know your contacts with the doctor tonight and other folks they can serve as maybe like advisors for us to help us build our knowledgebase connecting with Wilkinson others so maybe that's sort of our quote-unquote consultant for the next year a couple of years and that maybe won't cost that much right no absolutely and it's like we do visits other schools another one of my my sayings is the second Mouse gets the cheese you know it's not always great to be first let's learn for those those remains a mistakes the mouse the traffic goes off first Mouse gets her second Mouse gets the cheese so second Mouse does get the cheese so we can learn from the mistakes of the other dishes this

166is a big deal going in this direction or if you treat that way sound alike learn tonight the dr. Broyles old adages yes but I think it's really exciting to sort of frame it around that idea that we're sort of heading towards this new year new school and well the curriculum work you've been doing an instructional work is sort of you know moving us towards this end and that's such a great initiative part of the overall strategic plan right and articulated as such so that's pretty exciting yeah big time for the change yeah but to go back about the budget budget item do we need it in this year's for next year's I think as long as you guys are you know we're sort of all on the same page in terms of like removing

167that started times if we do with it if we get a new school then yeah we wouldn't need this yeah this budget that's what I think about pictures of greens put the conversation back to make the decision and then we'll go on and I think they'll be the easiest agreement we have in this entire budget who's there - got a good note all right any other questions I mean each time we don't we're doing a little bit of a deeper dive and a deeper dive yeah so if I was i I just been staring at chart 18 in the deck that we reviewed because it's summarize what's in the budget as incremental spammy [Music] the page nine it was chart 18 I know is in the deck I was in the front section yeah cuz

168it don't when I kind of sat down and the staring edit it comes down to there's a three percent status quo we can bang around on that that's the questions basically that you sent us today where could we bang around on the three percent right and then the rest of it is five hundred and ninety two thousand dollars five hundred ninety three thousand dollars of incremental items as a very specific West and I when I was reading through that five hundred and forty thousand on that was basic educational needs you know aligning with curriculum dealing with enrollment from the prior charts so most of it is of that ilk but I would suggest we kind of go down this list it's a very specific list and determine whether we as a board want to carried

169it forward right that that would be how might approach our primary question and maybe at the next meeting if it has had a chance we can go back and look at the status quo stuff and see there's opportunities on that right yep I'd like to have any questions prior to that though okay um with the districting investments on goal for just with the technology and there's some stuff here which I know is level funded but is very um is there priority on this as far as that the technology updates just what will paycheck a look I'm sorry it's page six on slide 12 okay thanks [Music] so do you mind asking the question together okay just just as far as the technology investments I was just wondering if we have a priority - I know

170a lot of this is level funding and there's very little if any that's that's being asked as an ad but I just was curious as to the prioritized prioritization of those sure so I can invite Eric up just so he can follow up on anything that the statements I make with a little bit more articulation if necessary the increasing the speed and reliability of wireless with more access points really that's that's a that's you don't really have a choice we still have issues with the reliabilities if you need to increase that in terms of modernizing the switches at huckleberry again that's a capacity issue with the use of more wireless use wireless mobile chromebook cars we really have to move forward there I will let Eric talk a little bit about the lab at the

171high school and the upgrades to the presentations at the high school that you've been doing talk about kind of that priority short yeah and I I do what John hit the first two nail right on the head um one of the things that I wanted to just mention with the modernizing the switches in huckleberry I know anything in regards to Uncle Vernon right now is you know with with a potential new school project the thing with those is even if you took the two schools closed them and built one bigger school will still need the same number of devices and these devices will last eight to ten years so we do need them and it's not like well you know open a new school and have one sitting around we'll still need the same number

172of devices to account for that so they can transfer take an absolute transfer over to the news yes yep and they're the last school on the list and so that would bring us in full district wide with the same devices same switches same capacity and bring up our reliability John hit them Wireless perfectly agreed there the other ones are the BHS computer lab you know although we're one-to-one and we're looking for more Chromebooks you know lower-cost devices getting more of those around the district around the school there are still need for high functioning um you know it's a lot of a better way full full better computers the examples are art programs digital learning programs you need a good computers to run things like Photoshop and the art program computers are getting older although to

173be honest with you in priority the other --there i thought other items are probably more we could get by another year it would be great to start getting these labs upgraded because the more we delay you know a high school lab i'll have to do other labs and they don't have to do staff devices and then we'll have to so um trying to spread out upgrades and it's part of it about a device life cycle plan i'm working on developing on kind of leveling out instead of buying all new replacement devices at once you know every year we kind of continue an upgrade cycle and spread it out over a couple of years the presentation stations trying to get aggressive on getting as much of this building filled as possible we did half of science

174and half of math this year mark that's correct yeah i want to finish out those departments and then continue on you know and that's based on tracing i have right now pricing of these boards can change and i can certainly look back into those to see what cost adjustments can be made but again it's an aggressive move to get ourselves up to speed the original smart boards mimeo boards this is not doing what what classroom presentations need now it's all about big touch screen tvs with multiple touch and and more interactive and then ways that they interact with the Chromebooks in the one to one program here in the high school but one other question because it is on here I'm not sure if you would answer this or whether it would be riskier but

175with the mobile the mobile world language lab now that this is essentially on a cart and really because we don't have the room for anything besides that and again we're we're basing this like the schools were starting to on contingencies you know with with the thought that the musical proposal will pass but when that happens we will have one-fourth of the risk in your population out so I'm assuming we're gonna have many more classroom spaces at that point would we have a class for the world a world language lab at whisk and ear and if so with the mobile lab integrate well into that or what is likely that what do we want to do is best more like what we have you know bigger to larger investment with a stationary we're like we have

176here at the high school right that's kind of where you're going with that I am yeah and well we're going to right-size the middle school if the project goes through that's what I'm saying and there will be space so there will be space to have something like that and it would be would be triple the investment I mean it probably more as I looked back and I think it was 130,000 yeah but I'm just right at the high school I'm sure I don't know whether it would we would mimic that exact thing at a risking your sight you know it's increased by then but it's just a thought you know we will we'll this investment become not obsolete but but not what we need then we spend a third of the money and maybe we

177hold off when we use an A that's what I was that's what happened kind of um well so I'm gonna be repurposed in a different way in the sense so they'll break down kind of the 51,000 so the majority of that is the actual program the Sony soloist language lab program the curriculum base of it the licenses the teacher station about eight to nine thousand that is Chromebooks in a cart of what's built into that fifty one thousand the hard the hardware yes the hardware and equipment is actually the lowest cost of this solution versus as you were speaking of the the high school language lab that equipment had a much higher cost you know physical big desktop computers high-powered the desks the furniture everything that went with it yeah so could the software and

178this be integrated into a stationary lab should that be a scenario in the future yes it can okay yes it can you know it wouldn't be as much of an investment if we were to do with them because we would already have the software going into it oh yes yes I yes um yeah then the concern with you know that was a topic discussed in the concern what that is is you know the limited number of labs already at whisking here to dedicate an entire lab to just a language lab like we have the ability to do here just would not be feasible but I see what you're saying come when the classroom clears up and can become a computer lab okay thank you Eric what happens to things like mimeo boards when when we

179upgrade to a big screen system do we sell them to other districts can they be repurposed can we trade up all right now they're recycled and they are used elsewhere in the district some are that some are just beyond their usable life and so they're recycled properly we do work with the town on selling some old assets you know older iPads that we again just end-of-life can't be used anymore and stuff like that but we do try to recycle as much as we can to go a little more time out you know for the high school so for example we take a couple menu pens and Mineo equipment out of this school and whisking air as we move forward you know the older equipment huckleberry and center needs need something so um they we don't

180we try to we try to only throw out I shouldn't say throw you try the only recycle equipment that is truly at the end of the life and is no longer usable but we do use recycling programs that that come on-site and take the equipment away and properly dispose of it great thank you very thank you much appreciate it and then I also had a question bring this is probably yours on page six slide 11 just with and I know these aren't all new asks they may ask is really just the St math and I just wanted to ask on that this year it's piloted so I mean if we're doing it this year but it's a pilot it's pilot program it's free yeah so what we brought to Cape was a presentation on what

181MSD math is which is spatial-temporal math a math program that is used to both provide remediation review opportunities and enrichment enhancement opportunities and it's without language so it supports and of students who have learning disabilities where reading and reading comprehension impact the ability to you know access a tool and also children who speak languages other than English as their first language so the pilot and we because we just have the Cape meeting right before the break as John was saying they weren't that many days Deb and I and Eric are going to be contacting the principals to talk about how the pilot is going to be implemented what grades or classes are going to be in the pilot because there are several other districts that in the in Connecticut that use s TMF but you

182need a computer to do it so ever so we have to just determine what the pilot is going to look like in terms of who is going to be involved it will be free this number that we estimated was four including all students in K through 4 it next year okay five through five I'm sorry and that that's another part of the discussion that we have to have with Eric and the principles in terms of the new Chromebooks that are being planned to purchase and the timing for the actual program if after we review the data from the pilot we determined that this is something that we want to move forward to we have a good sense about that given the national data and the local data of how students have responded to being able

183to use this resource so my honest anticipation is that that number is going to be lower because I don't think that we're going to be able to fully implement k5 realistically when we really look at the number of devices but because that that could change when we see what Eric is able to get also what Chromebook C is able to shuffle around into the lower schools you know are we would like every student to be able to do it the plan that we've talked about and we talked with the fella from st math from UCLA about how other schools have done this and we would be looking if we had to scale down to more likely than not trying to scale it down to kindergarten grade 1 grade 2 and workup so that kids over

184time with the success the program would grow into it but we won't know exactly well no well no well no fairly soon because we're gonna set up the the meeting to happen between Jeff myself and Eric looking at the what we have four computers and then going to because it also involves scheduling so even though we don't have one to one in the lower schools we don't need each student to have a computer at the same time but what's the feasibility that we can expect we talked about this before Christmas with with Eric and now we need to know the principles to see how whether the pragmatics of using the number of computers that we have currently in the schools for the pilot and the number of computers that we'll have available next year when

185there's some new ones purchased and shifting you know equipment around how many students can we service and I think that we'll have those numbers within the next couple weeks by well thank you we're just we're looking at a deadline for the budget so would we have it say by the next meeting Kay and decision yeah and then it'll be then that number will be the number that you know will be the number that we need to do the project but I have to say that we would hold off you know at the end of the year when we look at the date from the pilot you know if it's not what we expect it to be we're obviously wouldn't be moving forward right okay thank you just short for me so while we're on the

186S key map how does that connect or not connect with the curriculum we bought last couple years is it is it is it linked with the with the standards and so if there's you know a placement test that'll take that you know places them because they're doing it independently however for the teacher use of it the the teacher can look at his or her curriculum and what it is that he or she is teaching at the time go into st math and see go to the standards you know and do a crosswalk so to speak and so if I am teaching whatever whatever standard I'm addressing today I can use an ST math presentation as my opening you know link because I hope don't worry about anybody in the classroom unless they were visually impaired

187to see the program but I'm gonna be able to engage my English language learners the children who can't read with this very game a fide approach to to dealing with the standard that I'm going to teach so a teacher can use it in the that way because it is it is linked to what we're doing it would be linked to any standards-based core math program that we because one of the things we talked about when we did that math rollout proposal was getting consistency up and down and I wanted to make sure that I would we just weren't either throwing in yet another way of tea now dr. Ruby I don't know if you can answer this but um because it kind of relates do you know how many subscriptions we have to you know

188like Khan Academy and I Excel so would that be something that we would phase out if we're doing st Mathis I know we are absolutely looking and Erica is knee-deep in this yeah before we had this the state law on compute the data privacy and I think you're a teacher you know teachers would either independently get things loaded onto their computers or schools by subscriptions to certain things and so you really wouldn't have a good handle on who was using what in the school network we're narrowing in on that and we as you know as a Cape member we try to funnel everything that we're doing to you know just to get back at what Bob was saying you know do things in line with the curriculum because we don't want we don't want I

189excel here and this program there the and so we're looking very carefully at that as we do we just did this year with paper subscriptions to things like weekly reader and all these scholastic for social studies elastic for science and just pulling all these random good resources but if they don't align and they're not aligned with what our curriculum is and they're not aligned with the standards we we just don't want that type of a helter-skelter approach to keeping kids engaged okay so I guess my question is what are we spending specifically being that I excel that is mighty used k5 if I don't know if we go with this if we just decide to go with st map wouldn't be also using my excel because there's only so many things that a student can

190do in a day I think in your question this question of savings saving okay is there is of some savings we can farm in the budget right so it wouldn't really yes it's very pricey and I think that so there could be savings that could be backed out of the closet yeah so what I'm just what I'm hearing is we might not deploy it to the degree and we might have savings that we can use to partially offset yeah that would be good we've already dug in on that process great question max we were talking about that tank like the day I talked about that today and the science is just to continue the National Geographic Estonian I'm sorry yes once that we're doing now that have been used very effectively have gotten positive feedback

191yes I mean it's it's work obviously and it's a different approach and the you know I we have principles here but speak to that there's the science project the science program is being very well received and the one thing that I'll say is I think that of all the companies that I've had involvement with over the past couple decades in terms of doing professional development I think that the professional development that they came and provided on-site for the teachers in using these modules was really the the best I've ever seen I had good feedback from teachers on that as well so does this what it would where are those science modules rolled out - at this point in time now if it says we're rolling it out grades one through five and we actually rolled

192it out to some other great site so we have we have purchased all of the modules four six seven eight okay so we're six seven eight six seven and eight did a pilot last year we brought in a new module that the teachers were trained there are three modules and each of those grades was brought in a new module in the beginning of this year and we have the third module and training will be planned for that third module this spring so do we need to do all grades one through five at once we're not actually doing it all at once so this is just for that then at the end of this this year Mary Rose will have all the modules for kindergarten and we will have we have one in grade one and

193next year we'll bring in two more in two more in grade one and then there will be a final one and grade one in the subsequent year so we're not we won't be done with the roll it would be too expensive and it would be too much for teachers to implement and for kids to be able to take on any one time and when did we roll out the sixth rate between last year and this year and one of the reasons why we decided to do that is because we're a little late to the party in in transitioning to NGSS and the the NGSS assessment counts this year so might so the question is a budgetary question if we've been rolling it out some this year and we're rolling out some next year and rolling

194outs on the following year why isn't it relatively flat why's there a bubble of a hundred and twelve thousand dollars so it shouldn't have there been some money in the budget from what we rolled out this year and it would be kind of flat year to year no we did it wasn't planned that way because the I can get all that information for you because we have it all laid out [Music] if it was because of the number of of the modules each grade had each of the grades has a different model numbers of modules and the middle school was a priority and you need more and more materials for the lower grades because in the middle school we only have two teachers per grade level so you only need two sets of teaching materials

195for each grade level and then the student materials which are much less expensive and the consumables go for like the five classes that each of the two teachers per grade teach when you get into the elementary grades out of you pattern nine teachers in a grade level or a degree level so you have just you know just the multiple from from two to eight you've you know quadrupled the amount of purchase that you're making so it's much more expensive to buy the materials for two out that the all the classrooms and the elementary grades and we did one for some of the elementary grades this year and now for next year we're going for two modules and then the following year the last module cuz there are four modules it's a number of number of

196kits that you have to buy because of the varying numbers of teachers I'm just so the I struggle with the bubbling phenomena that we're spending money on top of a budget that's already challenging to sell so I'm just wondering if there's an opportunity to smooth that out at all on our selection budgetary questions and I would say that that would not be in the best interest of students when it comes to the science because we're already a little late on on this transition so could you maybe at our next meeting we're gonna talk about SD math maybe just kind of here's what year by year roll out of house and why the costs behave that way I think we just need that information or a snapshot of where we've been yeah we're including where we've

197been and where we're going right you have all those yep No so in kindergarten there are a total of three kits available at the end of this year is Maureen stated dr. B stated we will be we will have all we have all three kits right now in kindergarten there are a total of four kits or modules available in grades one through five we currently is dr. B stated we have one kit right now in grades one through five in grades six through eight there are three total modules available and we have all three so we're really a complete with modules in kindergarten and in grade six through eight so kind of the bookends if you will in the budget request we're requesting two kits for grades one through four in the nineteen twenty and

198three kits in grade five that would complete great five as well so then we would be complete next year in all grades except for one through four where we would then have to put in in twenty twenty one request for the last kit for grades one through four and this also includes the PD which as dr. Ruby stated it was very very widely well received so my question takes those numbers and expands at one layer deep which is okay so when did we roll out the kits what did it cost us to roll out the kits and why is the cost behaving the way it is so it's just kind of a layout historically to the future on the whole roll out yes okay so what kind of links the dollars to the rollout right

199because as you said it's hard it's more expensive to roll out at the elementary level because you have nine sections instead of two right I understand that but it's but it's very it's it's hard to see it and how we have our budget [Music] so so if we're spending a hundred and twelve thousand four hundred incrementally next year that means the total actual spend is a lot more than a hundred and twelve thousand for the rollout next year because we spent something this year yeah you think total yes no Don no just next year spend if incremental and your request is one hundred and twelve thousand four hundred which is what's on the chart that me and you did some spending this year right so that means next year is that plus one hundred and

200twelve thousand no because one once you buy the kits and less people destroy them might replace yeah I was just talking about just budgetary but money so you spent let's uh let's make it for example you spent fifty thousand dollars buying kits this in the current year that would tell me that next year you're spending a hundred and sixty two thousand dollars bingo I mean it's where why don't we go away if we saw we're calling on to 112 is everything we're spending then there's a thirst using my example $50,000 that is being spent we expect this year that's being spent on something else in the status quo budget that's what I'm not fond do you really want to know what the increase is yeah I want to I want to see the whole picture

201because maybe it's less than 112 yes I can i think you follow my numbers if 112 is the total spend there was a deep decrease that should have been in the status quo as a decrease and that's what I would be looking for in such if 112 is not let's see if it's if it's truly the incremental then I want to see what the total picture yeah you see where I'm going this is because you can't just keep it move the current amount in a status quo flat and then say that I want to add to it by this amount okay I'm sorry I banged around this is the biggest number on the chart which is why I'm banging around on itself [Music] any other questions I just have a clarifying question I apologize a

202few assets at the last meeting but the 1.0 high school special ed teacher do do we know what that's what that teacher will be doing sure where that's needed well that relates a lot just harken back to October when we did the the case management reports to each of the special education teachers so it's directly that asked is directly impacted by the number of students and the current caseloads that the high school teachers have but I like to invite Christine up so you could share exactly the rationale for that requested so um based on our October 1 numbers at that point in time for our resource program at the high school so these are teachers who teach co-taught classes academic support types of classes the average caseload was actually twenty two point eight so almost

203twenty three students per teacher at that time we have very large academic support classes with lots of students in them those caseloads are larger at this point because we have had some students qualify for services or move into the district since then so adding another teacher of the high school would be directly for that resource type teacher and would help us to bring the case slows down if we had that teacher this year the cases would be at about 19 which is more manageable and with a co-teach or what they would be on a standalone classroom yeah so those teachers do a combination they co teach and provide academic support services and sometimes may make teach as self-contained English or math that's for students who have really significant learning rights so they all do a

204combination of those types of activities based on the student need the schedule the strengths of that teacher so we have some teachers who focus on English and their co-teaching gave me wish and others that might be doing math for example could we is there the thoughts to introduce co-teaching in social studies or Sciences with the addition of this new one is what we were hearing is that the students are clustered together as they should be for co-taught classes in math and literacy and because of the lack of scheduling availability in the high school they're usually clustered together in science and social studies as well but without the advantage of a cup of a protein so that is always going to be something that we're looking to do if we want to make a commitment to

205co-teaching in science and social studies we would be talking about adding more teachers absolutely absolutely so what I'm saying we're bringing the caseload down a little bit because we need more we need additional active academic support classes and some of our code taught sections have are quite large so we'd be looking to do that and if we can do it based on the scheduling year-to-year we certainly would try to do that but I want to be clear that if we're talking about making that commitment we would be talking about even more teachers this is to provide the same model of services in a feasible reasonable way not really understanding our services and I think it's important for the board and the public to hear to the doctor I'll help me out I believe making these

206these caseloads more manageable with the addition of the special ed teacher and down to about 19 and so let's assume that's the number that it becomes we've talked and I know we've talked as a board with me years ago when we did some analysis when mr. Manos was here that really ideally we look at caseloads and also a neighboring this more around the 15/16 they are they are lower than I guess yeah so 19 while more managable is not necessarily ideal it's not like no and then so the 19 students those are are you referring to students in a class with one teacher so like a resource room or possibly so I'm talking about students that are on one special education teachers case okay maybe just explain what that is for every writer absolutely so

207that means especially as a high school student this happens where frequently you may have multiple special education teachers because you take different courses so you may have a teacher in English you may have a teacher in math you will have one student who is the case manager that is a special education teacher who is primarily responsible for making sure that the child has an IEP that data is collected that meetings are held that information there they're generally the point person for information for the family and so it's really a case manager is the description it's really the person who makes sure that everything is functioning within the within the IEP we often we make sure that the case manager is somebody who sees that student for a substantial amount of time it's not a different

208person from your English teacher or your math teacher it will be one of those teachers or you're acting typically it's the person who students have academic support with because they are seeing that student and they're working with them and talking about how they're doing in all the classes all the time so it's it's one of the special education teachers that has the unique responsibility of managing that students entire program I will say that when you because all of these teachers teach academic support the reality is that some of our academic support classes and a look at mark for confirmation are this large there are 20 25 to 25 students in academic supports because each of these teachers teaches an academic support in addition to the co-taught so their caseload is that number and most of

209the students on their caseload are in their academics of our class their academic support class has that many students that's very large for special education services where students are supposed to be it's not a study hall they are working on their IEP goals and objectives and they may all be different and there's one teacher and they're working with upwards of twenty kids a large number there's not like a state mandated number you're supposed to be in compliance with of courses like that no we need to be in compliance with with a child's IEP so sometimes for students we might say they need smaller group instruction some of our teachers do that when I said before sometimes we have small group math and small group English those are are because students may require smaller group for

210their instruction but the academic support no there's no state there's no state mandate I'd like to go back to a question that Colette asked because we've just been doing some of our board visits at the at the different schools and I happen to go to Center in the high school and interestingly both of them I heard the same thing but in slightly different ways and both of them were regular ed teachers who would observe that over time as the percentage of students that are have special needs is increasing there there are some sections that have clusters of large numbers of special-needs students and some of those teachers are left with no help at all in the classroom and not a parent I was here in Paris down at the elementary level and I was hearing

211co-teaching at the high school level mostly around social studies in science I understand that so have we ever the question I have is if we ever studied class the classroom mixes on where we have just a sole regular education teacher alone with high percentages of special-needs kids in the classroom as when I say the high percentage is 40 percent of this classes special needs type of class we heard that a couple of times so I one thing is we're really careful about we do have clusters I mean that's the thing that has happened and we have them for English learners as well because it actually makes sense and is often good for students and good for our staff to have students with similar needs to be able to provide the best services for them small

212group instruction is often more powerful and more effective than individualized instruction so we do that intentionally 40 percent is high they're actually so I said there aren't guidelines for academic support there are got aren't guidelines for when we have students who are in regular education classrooms if we're going to call on a regular education classroom you can't have you know half the class have special needs so I don't actually think that our percentages are that high we look at them when we do the class placements very carefully I do think that it may feel the needs may feel significant and it is possible I have not been here for obviously a long period of time but the the percentage I know from looking at the data in brookfield historically the percentage of students with special

213needs with IEP s having has increased dramatically I don't know that the staff has increased the staff to support those students has increased to the same degree so it may feel more significant than it did maybe 10 years ago I haven't done that complete analysis but I do know that we've gone from about 7 percent 14 and that is very significant I understand it's significant and I'm always concerned if we have the wrong supports in some of the classrooms right so and and it's unrelated to budget to tell you if I just was a voice I heard that was louder than I expected that we probably ought to take some time and look at you know or how many of those situations do we have yeah and I would just I would just add that

214the principal's monitor those those class schedules often I'll just leave it at that and I would encourage anybody who's feeling that way and maybe it's an actual you know close to a reality to have that conversation with their direct supervisor their administrator and say this is a situation because those are conversations that could then happen with our special ed supervisors with Christine and we can have some really quick all hundred percent would be too high and we would take steps to remedy that I don't know where that classroom is I'm not aware of it okay I do thank you [Music] other questions [Music] um I do want to point out that we have our public hearing slash roundtable discussion on the budget prior to our next meeting in two weeks so the sixteenth so I

215want to dig in here and you know figure out where we're at and what we're doing I'm not sure we need to make any hard fast decisions until we at least allow the public the opportunity to provide input as well I mean at this point though we can go it Bob as you had said you know take a look and see what we think we've talked about most of them already I mean so the one way was we really haven't talked about whether there's a couple down in the pre-k but I think we had talked about that at the prior meeting you know the pre-k teacher the special education sorry the the speech and language and the Paras right those were all down to pre-k if I remember yes or kind of shuffled around on

216the Paras find out what it got us to pre-k talk about the American Sign Language teacher we didn't talk much about the BHS strength and conditioning coach the only $25,000 is that what are we hearing from the coaches about the need for that the the maybe mark you could come up to give a little more detail I know that mr. Baldwin our athletic director and director of phys ed and health for the district is really talks about the positives of having this and in the coaches and the students themselves and the parents talking about the the benefits of having strength and conditioning coach as gifted [Music] yeah from time to time thanks Ken and but not consistently from the booze club so maybe Mark you could jump in on that a little bit yeah so

217that the $25,000 well it's it's a four season so really be a full year most of our seasons run obviously fall winter spring so we're actually looking to have somebody also working over the summer it's something as supervisory certainly I mean to have somebody there who's well trained and well versed in strength and conditioning I mean not all our coaches while you may be a certified coach there's certain expectations you have to meet to get your coaching certification beyond just your first aid and CPR those sorts of things there's closing coaching modules you have to take but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're versed in how to build the strength and conditioning of athletes you know from nutrition on on through and you could just be a successful coach who really knows this more really

218well and understands tactics and things like that and has a general understanding of adolescent behavior and can talk about that when it comes to specific needs for each individual sport we don't have that and with a fantastic fitness facility that we have now and the opportunity the advantage that our athletes can have and parents are interested in certainly having their students have the opportunity to work with somebody who's other than the coach who actually has dedicated their career or their their life to doing this sort of work I think it certainly benefits it helps an injury prevention it helps an offseason training to make sure that athletes are well prepared going into the season so that they're strong and prepared aerobic ly and just physically fit because we do often see injuries we see a

219lot of that stuff that happens preseason our kids get started in the middle of the season they don't make it through the whole season because of injuries or improper training and just just gives us a little more consistency it helps coaches develop a solid plan as well they'd work with coaches not just with athletes they also work with coaches to help develop plans that would be best suited for athletes and what they're looking to do you know what we you know certainly I know we talked a lot about stipend is what coaches get paid but the amount of time that they put in the stipends that they make you know a nutrition plan and a strength plan is a part of that conversation that we plan plan is part of that conversation but it's not

220the primary folk this allows us to address a few other needs that our athletes certainly have but also work in conjunction with the athletic trainer as well to do sir things are done appropriately in the weight room and just in fitness and health in general how many other school districts have this position you know I don't know I could find out I can I can do that research before the next meeting and be able to present that how many districts have starting fish new coaches yeah thank you sure mr. Bhati probably everybody go thank you thank you thank you buck another question Ken and I apologize if I've asked this before there are three the assumption is three retirements built into this budget yeah three to four three to four and and how many did

221we have this year I lost count five five five but that was a large amount and more than has been historical the year prior we also had more than three okay so is three I mean is that it's a conservative number that you have I think it's a more realistic number than the two we put in before prior years okay any other discussions directions do um it's just a clarifying question I just want to make sure ever ever correctly on page 18 I'm trying to remember it's the yeah the are we going ahead with the enrichment tag teacher or was that the one we're saying we're gonna hold off on and hold off on that you really think thinking to our discussion earlier about framing the strategic plan looking and everything and also realistically looking

222at what we have the capacity to accomplish in one year's time and the consideration of summer school is also the thing we're gonna hold off on yes do we have any other requests or directions of the administration before the next meeting because I mean next meeting is really what we're gonna be doing the huge heavy lifting so this would be the time to say could you go back and take a look at this or this so we have that information for them well I'd sent in a bunch of questions today said hey what just so everybody knows what I did was I went through every line item in the budget today I was focusing on the status quo side because I actually thought this the fact that we had this one charger made it actually

223easy to go through the investments so I was focusing more in on the status quo of why did this behave and why did I behave and get some more details on things so I think when we have that it kind of opens the door to you know asking some of those kinds of questions and as I keep looking at it I'll keep feeding and with more questions sure but I'm trying to get to the bottom of are there any opportunities there things simple things like oh did we study you know they'll roll out on we talked about it earlier on the SD math right are there offsets sure I'm looking for those kinds of noises so that might be in the base budget so if we can get more information on the BHS business team

224leader like what's our current model you don't have to answer that now but what does that look like the whisk in ear clubs I know they're small ticket items you know we cut huckleberry clubs but yet we want to add some tomato these are two quotes from last year the Dena or I have two so just curious like what you know that was amazing penny years middle school posed new clubs so you like a deep description on the club yeah I'd be curious to know - if he asked for more than two and we put you put two in here or what did he only asked yes right yes okay these were the two that were requested last year that we did last year well we currently have a business team how many students are

225enrolled in that what what is a leader meet what did what happened in the past well thank you invited markup to talk about that um as we talked about you know with new business classes that we're proposing and all the work we're doing with deca and remember we were down to one business teacher a couple of years ago we added a business teacher so we actually have a business department now um so mark can talk about the need for that yeah and one of the other things that we've we've been working in the business department I've let me talk about the Perkins grant quite a bit it's a federally funded grant that we get every year it's the Bucks can kind of pass them out a little bit the college and career counselor has been

226kind of working with that but we find that there's a lot of gold between back and forth between the college and career counselor who does a great job with it but it's also kind of trying to it's been working with all that literally last year met with every single junior and their families it became a little bit cumbersome and has been working really hard to get that stuff done but all the money goes really to the business and family consumer science department so this team leader position really is somebody who would help to oversee the grant number one that's a huge piece that we would need to make sure expenditures and really that we're spending the money that we get in the right places it's not that we're not doing that now it's just I

227think it's inefficient the way that works and the extra time that's required to do that you know to oversee this Perkins grant isn't really accounted for any other way so that's one piece and then as we move forward curriculum work it's really important for us to really have somebody who's a leader s'en in that area to help lead that that team as we look towards skill-based and we're looking at you know for example as we start to expand our STEM program I'm going to need to expand our business program that's something that I'll consider to say we have to business teachers for this for a school of 868 kids that's pretty low that's something that's an area that I look to expand on eventually as well but to have somebody to help coordinate and do

228that sort of work would be really helpful on our end for the kids is it something that we can do without we we've been we have done without it so far I will say that we used to have a it was a CTE team leader last year we had somebody who are in a statement last year that got oversaw the Perkins grant as well as oversaw the to business teachers technology department and Howe mech button stem became one fact that person who did that from technology became folded into that department they're kind of leaderless I mean from that perspective of they still have mate and we work very closely together as they work with mrs. shady but to have somebody who's very well-versed in that particular area of business and marketing is really important I

229don't know those standards as well as I might know a math or a science standard and so it's really helpful to have somebody who has that leadership and that ability part of leadership team meetings and to help drive really where we go next with a skills-based program which we need to develop because right now I would love to offer at least 10 more electives that we just we can't do at this point so we're looking for leadership in that area as a teacher stipend this teacher said yes so the business teachers don't are not part of a larger department like humanities or stammering no they're off they're kind of an island on their own yep and this is just a stipend it's not someone take on that leader someone take on that leadership role and

230then which includes Burke the perfect grant which is a huge piece we want to make sure that you know like I said there's there's a lot of intermediary steps right now between that goes between one by the time the request gets in and somebody gets to it you know she ended working hard in college and career counseling to make sure that they get the particular request for whether it be a field trip or a rush development there's a lot of intermediary steps and what ends up happening receive it as a meeting with the business teachers and all the work really is on the business and marketing and consumer science teachers and to have somebody from that department lead that work makes more sense to me than having Shannon do it and the Perkins grant was

231like we expect it to be about stable from last year yes about some nice to about 19,000 yeah okay thank you can we just go back to the the enrichment tag teacher I guess I missed the conversation about holding off on that position till next year is there more work that has to be done from a consultants point of view on designing our enrichment tag program or I mean it it's I feel like it was such a big goal for this year and now to be tabeling the addition of the teacher it's sort of I just wonder if there's something else we could be doing so we're not just ya know I understand that putting the whole thing on hold yeah for now yeah I think I think it goes back to our earlier session

232you know conceptually about start times we want to do it right and with the I mean you just look at all the the implementation of the science modules I mean the math program is still considered new to some of our teachers all the curriculum design work that's going on there there is just a capacity issue for you know the models going to be an integrated enrichment model and we'll down the road get into exactly what that looks like so people to kind of visualize that but a major part of that is that the teacher the enrichment teacher would through clustering likely and scheduling of students who qualify under the new criteria that we've talked about we need to develop that piece as well is the teachers are going to have the classroom teachers who have

233these students are gonna have to be trained for proper differentiation or of those students and also the collaborative work they'll be doing in the planning in conjunction with the enrichment teacher as I said in my presentation a couple last month there just is what we have really frankly we're maxing out our teachers on how much they can do and so it really for me became the priority of where does this fit and then when does this fit and knowing kind of the broad vision of what I just described that we want to do I don't think are even on a small scale I think it would be too much I'm trying to bite off too much too much for us to chew and one year and I would want to be a successful rollout before

234everyone including the students I guess I would look for you know even something like after-school enrichment you know that that is covered by a stipend or something that is there to challenge the kids who just want a little more I don't know it seems like if it can't be if I understand why we can't add the teacher and why you know that the staff has a lot on their plates but it seems like maybe there could be something in between yeah I know that we have a lot of effort we have a lot of different after-school activities and clubs and I mean there there hasn't that kind of conversation really didn't come up mom because we're really so focused on what are we gonna do during our on a regular school time and you know

235in it really with the exception of the club somewhere skinnier additional things didn't percolate up through the budget process from teachers the principal's up to say hey could we try this after school I mean it just hadn't been part of our conversation in the development process this year do you think it might be a communication issue though maybe we can look at like what are the opportunities currently for enrichment in after-school and sort of do a better job of explaining that to families and kids so they understand yeah I mean if you're someone who would love a little bit more science this is or if you you really need to be more creative this club like maybe sure there's a way that we do those clubs exist I mean it's very straightforward we have a

236principals meeting tomorrow morning I mean we strategically scheduled it with the timing of the budget process and everything you know the vacation to be be tomorrow so we could follow up on this a conversation we can follow up on how to you know to inventory that and how is that communicated and out in each principle I'm sure does that to some extent they're building already but maybe there's a way to do that a little bit better well at least they give us an opportunity to address your question yeah so are there enrichment opportunities well like I remember we need to make it better but at one point with skinnier funded by the PTO was offering after-school activities that you know there were probably 15 different options and there was robotics and some really you know

237really interesting things that you didn't get to cover in in you know the everyday science class art class whatever and they were you know people who would fight to get into them because they were really interesting subjects and of course it requires the teachers willing to decide in zone right but you know maybe for a little bit of money not not $85,000 but you know a stipend maybe we can bring back some of those things and not rely on the PTO to raise the funds to support them because I think there are a lot of kids especially at with skinnier that are sort of craving something else a little bit more talk with principals talk okay thanks you got it thank you is there any way that kids may be from the middle school can

238I don't know partner do something with the with what's going on at the high school in terms of all the stem stuff going on there I know not during the day but like maybe if there's like I don't know we're only limited by our creativity and we have to you know those are conversations we have when people raise those and you know I'm we are all very open to when those ideas come forward to pursuing them if we can so all kinds of partnerships and ideas that's part of the I wanted to put out there that leadership for tomorrow in the community partnership in the civic engagement and thinking about that and you know that that's a position I see that could be a part of making some of this kind of stuff happen yes

239well again the ideas are great the creativity is wonderful but you know like Marc just explained about business you need someone who's going to take the mantle and run with it because as we you've done your visits to talk with the teachers and you know i I've done those individual visits and we all saw I mean our staff gets maxed out at a certain point so you know that's part of the initial discussion right that we just had you know at what point is it a breaking point you can't get people anymore to do and that's the rollout and science that we talked about how quickly make that happen so crickey wide open the thinking about it seeing how we make things up [Music] said differently we've been doing so much on curriculum it's rolling

240that out we can overwhelm our teachers very very carefully to make sure we don't want them off they have to they have to they have to help it's very important in the pace at which we've gone is we've had to go up because we weren't there so we we had to do a lot of catch-up we're still feeling some of that there's no doubt about any other requests for administration for next time for questions maybe Ken's been jotting these down making a nice list Ken you know we know we have Bob's questions that came through this afternoon maybe you can just go through that list to remind everybody as a closure to the meeting I think we're gonna look at I'm gonna remove the start time study priorities on the technology level funding items can

241we possibly reduce the St math if I know how much we spend on the I Excel see if there's any savings there can we smooth out the purchase of the science modules and we want to hear about your breakdown of our spending on that I determined what was the real incremental increase in the science modules how many districts in the area have strength and conditioning coaches I don't know if you need more data on the BHS business team leader after mark spoke description of the details on the clubs that the musketeer wants to add and then what after-school enrichment opportunities do we have now if I could find out like what the how many students would want to join a club like that like what was the buy-in for students yeah I don't know if

242we can find that out you know sort of like survey yeah the kids yeah yeah I don't we can quickly do that but you know that we might be able to this is thorough this thank you no shortage of things to do questions I mean it's just you can tell by the more questions we ask the better we understand well if I had more time to go through the budget and think this you know and then we can you advocate for it sure absolutely exactly so then we can bring this up next meeting and I do want to announce again and we probably need to really start communicating this to the public that we have the budget round table yeah slash you know discussion for the public at six o'clock two weeks from now Wednesday

243the 16th thinking we pushed out the text message school message today and we'll be pushing out the calendar by the end of this week and then I'm sure by over the weekend the three important things might be coming out right Rosa I'm just saying so there's a you know that but I think next week we have to sure well I think the more its advertised hopefully the more people end up on Facebook in a big discussion absolutely okay then we went to the new school building project that weeks gonna be a very busy week because our meeting and and the budget roundtable are on the 16th or the 15th is the town meeting to set the referendum date for the new school project that is again 7 o'clock at the VHS auditory on the 15th

244they're recommended and again I just try to get these dates out as much as I can I know you all know that but the recommended date for the referendum is March 5th so that's what will be voted on on the 15th there will also again be another presentation from the school similar to what we had in October but maybe a little bit more detailed as far as conceptualized drawings and plans in addition to that there will probably be more detailed financially as far as what this would cost the average homeowner at maximum at minimum going over through through the entire years so that will be there as well we are adding new presentation dates for the next two months as we even speak so the dance card is getting really full they're just kind of

245a gentle reminder if you had said that she would check with a certain mood group or groups if you wouldn't mind checking and getting back as soon as possible with us because we want to make sure we can get everybody that we can or if there are any others I know that you think needs you be perfect even if there are any small group elections for a favor that you think would would benefit from greater detail you know especially if it's a group that is normally not getting school reach messages or anything else whether they have you know young children or whether they don't have any children the house you know if we get a group together we're happy to go in and give a presentation there to the more people we can reach out

246to the better yep I didn't I didn't sign up to do any yet but if there if you need an extra person at any point you know just let me know I love that thank you and I think you had mentioned about the chance of the stats as well yeah baby awesome thanks could we ask the public to send us suggestions to four groups perfect idea yes please think if there's a group that they think we should reach out to should they email you can you do email the board a better you can email the specific new school project email which is www new school project dot news new school project at Brookley thank you it was struggling on the last one okay WWE new school project at Brookfield PS bat board um that's it

247unless anyone else has any input or discussion with new school project all right three main points yes yes the committee with the panel I think we just yeah we put it all into one yep and the capital improvement plan highlighting this school project doesn't pass how many how much as far as finances routing yes scenarios yes and air costs the cost it's a good thought yeah I mean we weighed that we haven't voted on it yet but if they were just presented and then with the scenario that if we do nothing we're occurring millions to keep this is that what you're getting at Georgia yeah we do nothing to kind of full I guess that's part of like the new school plan so it's a new new school but it's also part of capital yeah

248we did maybe the noose could you put it in the new school saying how we're gonna meet other organizations and then if you know of it or tie it in there lose that cation as a theme yeah the third thing I what is and I try to put it a little excitement around the program of studies there's a lot of interesting new stuff on there so you know not the budget things we've removed I'll do that next time next time well yeah we I don't think we've really decided on anything with the budget yet except for these yeah consultants right yeah so I think the heavy work on that's gonna be you know yeah as long as we can get the round table day out there something other than the three main points I think

249the part of the studies is a good one [Music] hey upcoming events Center elementary school there's a preschool open houses Friday January 4th from 10:30 to 11:00 there's a PTO meeting next Tuesday January 8th from 9:30 to 10:30 in the multi-purpose room at huckleberry there's a PTO meeting next Friday January 11th from 9:30 to 10:30 at was skinnier the chorus concert is next Tuesday January 8th from 7 to 8:30 in the high school tour auditorium and the band concert is on Monday January 14th from 7:00 to 8:30 and also in the High School Auditorium and the math league competition is on Wednesday January 16th from three to five thirty at broadville Broadview middle school in Danbury nothing to report from the high school that's great thank you very much okay then without objection meeting is

250adjourned thank you everyone I that was a very late evening [Music]