Board of Education 1-15-26

001budget review. Um, Mr. >> The >> Thank you. If you would all join us in the pledge. I alian to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all. >> At this point if there's anyone in the audience who would like to address um any budget items. Seeing none, we will move on. Um, I'll hand it over to the superintendent. He may want to >> Thank you, uh, Dr. Herrian. Uh, this evening we have a a quick kind of recap slash uh questions from the last meeting. And then we are going to cover the instructional curricular uh piece of the budget as well as special education. Uh we started engaging the PPS director years ago u because it

002is such an important part of our budget and there's some volatility that can occur without placements and other stuff and I think it's just really helpful. Robin does a great job of providing an overview as does Marleene and Emily for their sections as well. So, um, Emily, you want to kick things off? >> Thanks. Good evening, everyone. Um, I'm looking at all of Marleene's manipulatives and thinking I've really got to step up my game for next year, the budget part. Um, but I'm just going to go over some of the questions that we received via email and some of the questions from the presentation, but my part is pretty brief because we got through all of the operational sections on Tuesday and then I'll be able to pass it off to Marlene. So, a few

003questions. I just grouped them by category based on uh all the sections we went through on Tuesday. Uh, so some of these are more simple answers than others, but I'll kind of go through them. I think I have seven slides and then you all can just ask any questions that I was unable to answer. And if I can't get you the answer tonight, then I'll work on getting it to you for uh the next round. So, one question that came up was about grants and revenue and are we anticipating less grant funding next year in comparison to this year? Uh, Robin was able to provide some information about um funding for uh I believe it was IDA. Um, and so I wanted to show you the estimated amount we're getting this year and then the

004estimated next year. And you can see in that right hand column where we're anticipating less money than we would anticipate this uh current budget year. So not really seeing huge differences um in terms of more or less. Um, but you can also find more information about the state and federal grants in that section of the budget book which outlines everything and has more longitudinal data than what is here. And there was another question about what is the seed grant? So, it's the special education expansion and development grant uh which is providing $30 million annually across the state. And as Robin shared, Cheshure seed entitlement is $83,886. and we're going to use that to offset the cost of a van for the community life program, which is about $56,000, which will eat up a big chunk

005of that seed grant. Um, but just wanted to make sure I shared with you what it stood for and then also loop back to that van purchase. Some staffing questions. Um, I have provided you all there were some updates for the budget book. You should see that in like a little packet. Um so what you have on the top there is just the uh capital expenditures plan. So again we talked about the capital budget running along this year but being a little later in the spring and I shared with you yes last year was a little bit funky in terms of how the board of ed approved and then what the town council ultimately approved. So I provided you the first three pages of the capital expenditures plan. It's the yellow piece of paper. I

006didn't include the whole plan. It's like a hundred pages but it's also available on our website. But that just kind of recaps the stages of the capital plan uh more clearly than I think my slides did on Tuesday. So I bring that up to say there were there was some confusion about staffing um partially because there was an error in the budget book about certified staff. So I have corrected that and put that in the paperclip packet that you have. But the request for staff total is 12 positions. nine of which are teachers. Those are five elementary school teachers, one elementary school sped position, 2.5 unified arts, uh a 0.5 multilingual learner teacher. So that makes up nine. Then we have a request for two administrators, which you can see below, which would be the

007uh elementary school assistant principal and the STEM curriculum coordinator, and that's all of our certified staff, which is 11 positions. And then we have the inside maintainer which I'll share a little bit um more about because there were some questions but that's the only uncertified position that's on our maintenance and operation our facilities team um the trades person. So just wanted to make sure I was clear about that with the with the staffing. Um you can also you know you're going to want to switch out what's in your staffing book um with that but wanted to make sure to clarify that point. Uh, and there was another question about PAR educators and also openings on our website. And so I shared on Tuesday, we don't see a ton of openings for certified positions. And if

008we have them open, it's not open for very long. Where we see the most volatility is with the PAR educators. So in your budget book in the non-certified section, you can see where we have our PAR educators, uh, both special education and, uh, general education. We call them IAS, which you have in kindergarten and first grade. It shows up in your budget book exactly as you see here. It's the first part of the table. So, you can just kind of see how that that whole bargaining unit is this is all one bargaining unit. Um, and it's an FTE of 30. That 30 hours a week is what we consider full-time for the PAR educators. And you can see I' I've made this a lot smaller here, but you can actually see it by campus in

009the in your budget book. Um, so the the other thing about this that you should know is that they're budgeted in two different line items in the non-certified. So, they're not going to all show up together. So, uh, one thing about this is I went today and looked at our openings. We have one certified position open. It just opened up at Dodd, a a sped teacher. And then for paras, we have one ABA DTI. That's the highest paid position in the bargaining unit. We have two lunch and playground aids. That's actually 15 hours a week. And we have nine PAR educators. There's other openings on Applet. You can see them, but it's for long-term subs, kitchen workers, and central office. So, just wanted to make sure um I shared that with all of you. Um

010benefits. So, there's a couple slides about benefits. I know this is it's even small on here. Um but wanted to provide some more color to the stop-loss because that's a more volatile budget line item. And we have stop-loss because we are self-insured. So, again, it's for claims over $175,000. we get reimbursed for the claim over the $175,000. So, for instance, $200,000 claim, we get $25,000 back. So, the idea here is that you want you the premium we pay to uh be less or equal to the claims that we are reimbursed for. And you can see here through 2012 uh through 2016 we were with Symmetra um and then we switched over to CT prime in 2016 to 2017 and we have been with them ever since. If you look at the loss ratio um industry

011standard is like 70%. So if we're our loss ratio is over 70% that's pretty good but the best loss ratio is over 100% because that means that we paid less in premiums than we got back in reimbursements. So you can see the green years we have 2013 2014 2016 2017 2019 2020 and 2020 20 uh and 2021 our loss ratio was over 100% meaning we were refunded more than we paid in premiums. I have included the town and the board of ed in that loss ratio. The reason being is we benefit from having stop-loss with the town. So that is um the ratio there is kind of an offset with our loss ratio and then our premium increase. So that's the bottom line. So years that we have uh really good loss ratios, usually our

012premium goes up quite a bit, right? So if we got 108.6% 6% uh loss ratio in 2013 2014 you can see our premium went up by 42.3% because the insurance companies are trying to recoup their money. So it kind of can even out but um obviously you can see in the last few years our our loss ratio has been been a little bit low but it is uh risk risk mitigation by having stop-loss for our self-insured plan. A few other benefits questions that came up is uh how much do we sp spend on wellness initiatives? We spend zero out of the operating budget because we receive $65,000 from Sigma to fund wellness initiatives. We get 48 about $48,000 from the board of ed specifically. Um and the the only thing that we're funding that is

013counting out of the operating budget is our employee assistance program which is about $8,800. Um that is in our operating budget. You can see that in account 2011. But that 48,000 for instance the wellness fair that we held today um that was from the Sigma fund and we plan with the town for that. Um we also what were our administrative fees before we were self-insured. So I did try to find this but I went back to 1991 and we were self-insured in 1991 and I couldn't find anything from before that. So, you know, when we're when you're fully insured though, your total includes the administrative fees, but we've been self-insured for a very, very long time. And then another question about benefits was how much is budgeted for pension and retirement programs. So, the amount

014that we budgeted this year for the pension, the pension being the defined benefit plan that was phased out in 2015 was about a million dollars that we've budgeted. And then the defined contribution plan uh was um 400,36 436. Um so that's the amount that we've budgeted for those plan. Again, the pension is being phased out. So you're going to see less employees that there's no employees that are going to join at this point. Um but the defined contribution plan is growing and we have over 200 members. And then just one more slide on the pension because there were a few questions about this. um which will test my knowledge about pension plans. But here again, it's pretty small, but this is actually available on the town website, this little box that you can see that

015is overlaid on the pension and retirement um account, but is like how is our pension fund doing? And you know, we have about if you look at our total pension liability and our fiduciary net position, um we've got about 71.7% covered. Um this is again including town and board of ed employees. Um but so you know that number should be as close to 100% as possible but that's where we are right now. There's a very comprehensive I can give you the uh the exact web address but there's a very comprehensive report on the town website under the finance page if you wanted to dig into this a little more. I know this is just a very small snapshot. Um, and then did it show here? This might have see if this got cut off. Oh,

016one thing just going back to this one is that there was a question about how many people are actively collecting. So, not active employees. Um, I was able to pull for tonight's meeting, how many uh you can see here the category for town. That includes the town and the board of ed. How many retirees and beneficiaries are currently collecting? That's 266. I can't say how many of those are board of ed employees. Uh that would take a little bit more time, but I did want to at least provide that. That is also included in the report that I showed that's on the town website. So, you can find all of this information there. Um and then a few other things. We talked about maintenance and operations and the addition of an inside maintainer to the

017budget. Again, you know, originally there was a request for a grounds person, a building maintainer, and the inside maintainer. The inside maintainer for $76,000 was left in the budget. This is our current outlay of our inside maintainers. Our maintenance team is far larger than this, but what you can see is we have an inside maintainer at Dittle, Highland, and Dodd, and then two at Cheshire High School. Um, the other thing that I wanted to relate this to is, you know, there was a question about like overtime and is there an opportunity for the current employees to fill some gaps with overtime. Um, one thing that this team also does is they are on call once a week. Um, meaning we have 24 someone is on call 24 hours a day. Um, and so they are

018already working a shift a week um with where they're on call. So this this team is is stretched a little bit. And you can see here that um Highland Doolittle existing buildings there's no swap to go to another building at this point in time. And then another question about uh maintenance and operations was about grounds maintenance and repairs. Uh do our grounds maintenance and repairs budgets include athletic fields at the elementary schools and at DOD and what percent is allocated to keeping the fields playable? So some of this is um you know I I posed this to our director of facilities and shared you know a lot of the grounds resources are allocated toward the towards the high school. Um there's a lot of property there significantly less at DOD and very minimal resources at

019the elementary school. Um and approximately 50% of the grounds labor supports field maintenance and 85,000 annually in services materials and equipment. Um currently we only have the Cheshure High School fields being irrigated. Um, Dodd and the elementary schools do not. And in terms of field use, Cheshure Public Schools is the primary use user at Cheshure High School and Doddfields. Uh, the elementary fields aren't used beyond what the school is using them for very frequently. Uh, and Parks and Wreck is the largest overall user of the play fields. And in terms of how we share with parks and wreck in the town is we don't receive reimbursement from the town outside for outside use of school fields, but we do support each other. So the department of public works and the board of ed support each

020other as needed to make sure that the fields are in shape. Um there are agreements in terms of the elementary schools about field maintenance versus grass maintenance and just try to work collaboratively um between those those two um the the town and the board of ed. All right. And I think this is my last slide. Uh transportation. So a few is there was a question about how many vehicles does Datco have? This is separate than what the board of ed has that I shared on Tuesday. DACO in our bus uh busy yard has 29 type one buses. Those are the really large school buses, seven type two and three vans for general education. They also have spare buses. We don't pay for the spare buses. Um they're just there just in case. We're paying for

021actively running buses. We get um you know we pay per bus um and we get five and a quarter hours of run time. So there was a talk about electrification of the fleet. Uh if we I just want to include this section from the contract. The board may at any time during the initial term which goes through June 30th, 2029, extend our term by 10 years if DACO makes one or more zero mission type 1 bus operations with appropriate infrastructure. So that would extend our DATCO um contract, but that would also get us towards electrification. Um, and you know, that is a conversation that we are coming back to. I think we've prioritized getting the Sandbake uh easement between the busy yard and the new DACO uh office cleared first, which we're planning on doing

022over the summer. And then how does DACO the DACO contract work? It's a pretty comprehensive contract, but very basically, we pay a fixed rate per vehicle per day for 5.25 hours of drive time. We don't invest in their fleet vehicles at all. um we only invest in our own. And then there was a question about Simsberry. If you are going back to Tuesday's presentation, you know, Simsberry's per pupil expenditure on transportation is significantly less than Cheshurers and why. I don't have all the answers here. Um so what I did was I included the contracted services for um Simsberry and Cheshire. We don't have a uniform chart of accounts in Connecticut, so it's hard to say, you know, exactly this line to this line what what it could be. I did go on their website. Um,

023one thing that is a significant difference is Cheshure provides transportation for students attending technical high schools such as Wilcox. Uh, and we budgeted about $169,000 for that in 2324. So that was the year that was compared in that chart. And Simsbury does not provide this service and instead offers mileage reimbursement to families. So, it's potential that they're getting savings there, but again, it's not there's not a way for me to do a line for line comparison. So, I don't know if you >> Yes. >> um to see if, you know, they have any information that could help us better understand it. But, um we received acknowledgement back that, you know, they they're going to evaluate it and get back to us. But, um hopefully we'll have more information for next meeting. >> Yeah. >> Or

024sooner. Thank you, Emily. >> Yeah, that's what I got. >> Will you take a question or two? >> Absolutely. >> Miss Cullinin has a question back on the staffing staffing. Emily, if you could go back to that page one certified staff and I know um the superintendent went through this, but I just thought for anyone else who's watching tonight who may not have seen um the first budget hearing, >> can you talk a little bit about um the five classroom teachers um increase >> and what the reasons are for that. I mean, I I know it's additional students. Yes. >> Um class ratio. >> I'm gonna say one sentence and then I'm going to quickly punt this off to Jeff, but uh essentially it's to maintain our classroom ratios. Our classroom ratios in elementary school

025is 19 this year. And by adding those five teachers, it keeps it at 18.7. So with that, I'll >> Yeah. And I I think that is short but sweet and kind of sums it up. I mean, uh, honestly, I I kept coming back to it saying like, we've added enough students that that many additional teachers only has us at 18.7. And you do the math a number of times, and that's what it keeps coming back to. Now, the enrollment is grounded in a projection for next year, the same way we do every single year. Uh, but the projections have been solid. Um, if anything, the you know the just to go back to last year the class size ratio was 18.9 is budgeted and it the actual is 19 um so it's it's very close

026using th those projections I anticipate it to remain that way um so if any and also as you saw giving given our growth and potential for additional growth Um, I think 18.7 would be great if we we hit that, but it might float to 18.8, you know, or something like that. I think it's a a safe estimate. >> So, do we generally put a priority on keeping K through three classes smaller than four through six? Right. And which I can tell why it makes total sense. the sizes of the four through six classrooms. Have they generally like when I look at them now it's I don't know what 20 anywhere from 21 to 23ish is that generally the same as like would it be different next year than it would be you know >> no

027the the they're tracking on the historical averages. Um and what's interesting if anything we would anticipate given that the fact that the schools uh in the future will be better balanced in terms of the number of students attending them. So like there was a point where we had 850 students at Highland and like 310 students at Chapman. It's so hard when the building is that small um to have a balanced class size because you really only have two sections in the grade level. And when those sections get high, let's say that there are, you know, uh, in fourth grade there are 52 kids. Well, nobody feels good about 26 fourth graders in a class. So now you have to put the third teacher in there. And so now the classes are really small >> and

028and so you can't achieve the same balance you can that let's say in Highland where there are so many sections um where you can balance that out. So now that the schools are closer to an approximate same size the I think the differences between buildings will probably iron out a little bit but that's you know into the future. But the the class size averages that you see as projections next year are in keeping with what I think our targets have been. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> Um you [clears throat] you mentioned field use. It's just sort of a uh in terms of funding related to field use. It's just sort of collaborative. you just work together without any cost transfers or anything like that. It sounded like >> Right. Okay. Right. Like there's certain

029agreed upon things. It's not a free fall, but like you know there's certain agreements about who's going to maintain which part of the fields. Um and part of that is the Department of Public Works has seen some downsizing and so you know that that's impacted our team's share a little bit. Um but in general, no, there's not like a written agreement. There's just some standing. >> You just make it happen. Okay. Without any cost transfer is the point. Um do so what do but we do have cost transfers related not to the field at least for swimming we have to >> yes >> pay is there anything else significant that we have to pay the town not hockey which is rentals out of town as I understand it but anything besides swimming that's significant or

030that's it >> no >> okay >> that's it >> um I don't know if this is anybody Jeff I don't know if you or anybody has an idea about this but I'm just curious do we have a sense of how many cos will be issued like say by August for houses or housing, condos, whatever it might be. >> Um, no, I can get that though from it's a projection obviously for but I can I can get that from um I know Mike when he was doing the enrollment projections had meetings with the town but I I can go back and either ask him or um >> but that's so that's baked into the enrollment projection >> into what? Yeah. into into the MP planning stuff. Yes. >> Okay. Um the [clears throat] grand list at

031some point. So 8%'s a big number. Um the grand list at some point should be growing because people don't pay grand list. We pay taxes. >> Sure. >> Um so I'm just curious. Do you have an idea? I I don't think it should be done yet. Do you have do you know the date by which the tax assessor should be done with the grand list? >> I don't know that. I I do know that our grand list has grown. uh continues to grow. The obviously the biggest driver of our grand list will be the north end development. >> Yeah, >> the north end development uh is already generating significant tax revenue. When the north end development was planned and executed, the agreement between the developer and the town was that any revenue initially generated would

032go to pay back the >> the development of things like sewer lines, power out there, the roads, all of the the site prep that would be necessary. And so, you know, we're a year into that. This year, it's anticipated that, you know, a lot of that tax revenue would go, this would be the final year of of paying off the developer for the site improvement. >> Okay. So, >> but there is other obvious scramble in town growth, >> but okay. Okay. So, with regard to the single biggest development, the single biggest like here's one person who's going to pay these taxes, one organization, >> there is a we still have a one-year mismatch basically. So, we're looking at 8% increase. You're requesting an 8% increase, but we're not expecting the grand list to grow in

033relation to it this year. It' be next year. >> Yeah. Anything that I Yeah. The biggest the biggest chunk we expect a significant jump not in grand list because the grand list has already grown. It's the money available from the grand because all that money is dedicated yet to the development. >> Okay, thank you for that. >> Um, >> oh, wondering just about terminology. I'm not sure if you know this and I see a footnote on here, but it looks like you snipped this from another source. Mhm. >> The benefits tab, the benefits slide. Um, it says terminated employees entitled to benefits but not you're receiving them. I'm guessing terminated is a general term. >> Yes. >> Meaning they're gone, not meaning fired. >> Correct. >> Got it. Okay. Thank you. Um, and the last

034this this is not a question but just a point to make which is you we're talking about transportation. You mentioned the electrification of the fleet and the point about the option to extend for a 10-year term. >> Uh oh, and actually that would only be a five-year extension. Okay. >> Yeah. >> Regardless, just in general, uh I'm I like I like to issue RFPs. I like the free market, but based on my 20 years of experience being involved with the board of ed and the town council, I've come to the conclusion that uh school buses are not part of the free market. It just doesn't I don't think it I don't think it works that way. It's um there's probably a number of reasons for it. Uh the cycle trying to onboard, you know, 30

035or 40 bus drivers at a particular moment in time starting in September, it's just not conducive to the free market in a way that I or I think most people would see it. So anyway, if we do end up going down that path, I would be comfortable seriously considering it. uh because I just don't think RFPs work that well for school buses. >> And and it doesn't tie us to like if they get an electric vehicle, that doesn't mean we've extended the contract 10 years. It's just saying that this is the pathway which we could extend it to from a 5y year to a 10-year contract >> because they have an asset that's got basically a 10-year life that they want to cover it with. >> Yeah. And I don't know if that's I honestly

036don't know if that was written more with the um the electrification mandates that won't be impactful for us till 20. Yeah. And that won't impact us till 2040. I know 2030 is the big um that is what's advertised a lot, but that's for a very select group of um communities that are disproportionately impacted by pollution. >> So that's not us. >> Thank you. >> Uh thank you. on the uh retirement slide. This is just more of a general question because I noticed there's a line item in the budget book account 204 on retirement incentive >> and that line item was increasing 164%. H how does that work? Like how does that program work? >> I just realized I didn't bring my budget book up. So let me look into that one and get back to

037you. Yes. >> And then the other question I had since you brought up transportation was um on that account 627 there's a uh or related to that account I should say there's a proposed increase of $74,000 21.5% and the note in that budget book says uh diesel and gasoline expected to be lower and accounts for the reduction in the budget for this account. So I was can we just for the next meeting could we clarify what that >> Sure. >> uh drivers of that cost increase are and what the discrepancy is between those two. >> Thank you. >> Or I've exhausted you. I don't know. Anyways, thank you. Let's see. I think we have to Marlene's up next. >> Yeah, but this is okay. Well, good evening everyone. Tonight I'm going to take a few

038minutes of your time and try to go through some of the instructional expenses. As you can see by the slide, this comprises about 6% of the total budget. Robin is going to go over the special education aspects of this 6% and I'm going to share with you the general education percent uh particulars which is you know even smaller than that 6%. So, as you can see, this is the overall total budget in purple, and then the instructional expenses are that low line down at the bottom, which has been pretty flatish for quite a while. If you look at this, you could see that what we're requesting this year is a 5.95% increase, which really isn't putting us at an increase. It's really making up for a few years past. We're going to start off with

039staff training and I'm going to share a little bit with you tonight about how we use staff training. So obviously we are as administrators, as our teachers, as our coaches, we've been spending a lot of time going to workshops and things around the state through with a group called Partners for Educational Leadership. Azra is involved in a group. Kevin, myself, and some of the math teachers at the high school are also in a collegial collective to study instruction. And the one we're focused on specifically is looking at math instruction. Myself as an assistant superintendent. I belong to a group that has professional development once a month. Jeff belongs to the superintendent network. These are all different avenues where we're getting staff training to bring back to the district. This year we had 36 teachers from

040across all of the schools who asked us if they could go to this training that was put on called building thinking classrooms and there were all different avenues for that. They have gone and they've taken that training gone back to the classroom and back to their schools and have led some coaching have led some peer-to-peer um networking groups together. And so when we talked a few years ago after the pandemic about bouncing forward, we wanted to build the capacity of the people that we have here. We want to encourage leaders among our teachers and we want everybody to learn and grow. So that's a lot of what this particular line item is about. It's not just about the certified staff. It also includes people from our business office, people from our technology office going out

041and staying a breast of what's latest and greatest, especially when it comes to a lot of the things that we're talking about today. Whether it's Vin and Emily or it's Mike Papa or it's Heather Santi, everyone is actively engaged in staying a breast of things and in many cases people in this room are helping to lead some of that work across the state. The other thing that we have is we have some um coaching that we we uh contract out for for our multilingual learners. We have not had a resident in-house before who necessarily was expert in that and so we were we were working with ACES to bring some of that in. I would like to say that we have a resident expert now with Azra Redzik who has been at the forefront of

042that in a lot of the things that are happening in the state. And so we've been able to decrease that a little bit and you use that money for some other things. But trying to give you an idea of what this money goes for for staff training. When we talk about instructional supplies, you know, a lot of us were talking about paper both today with some of you and then a lot of us have been texting about paper. It's a lot more than that. And this is what I really wanted to bring some props in today to to share with you. So the first one that I want to talk about the first thing I want to share is these phonics. You've heard a lot about a lot. So I wanted to first grade phonics

043books. They're colorful. They're bright. They're shiny. They're new. these books being read every single day in the book, going in and out of the backpacks, sitting on the floor, going home, sometimes coming back, sometimes not, maybe hitting the bus floor, being stepped on, and with little sticky hands. So these are beautiful books but they have a shelf life. So we use them for as long as we can and then it becomes time that we need to order. So that's our uh that's our first. Now let me talk about music because this was the easiest instrument. Why don't you grab one? This was >> their name. These are called spoon whackers. And these are instruments that help teach pitch. So you can bang them a little bit on your table. You can get an idea of

044different These happen to be used at middle school, but they're also there are sets of these at elementary schools as well. For a set and a kit, they could run anywhere from $100 to $150. And you know, they're not see they're a little these are in good shape still, but they're dented and a little banged up. So, we often need to replace those. Our music teachers will often say to us that they need additional musical instruments to have in the classroom and for kids to use. Yes, parents rent those, but we also are are always looking to tune up the instruments that we have and share them. So those are our those are our music. Anybody know what this is? >> So this is great. This is little butterfly pavilion. The great thing about it

045is you can use it multiple times. What you need to continue to buy is the larae that comes with that. So that can be a little tricky. >> I'm going to roll this one over for you. >> Beautiful. >> This is a second grade sand table. You can see it's got some Legos in there. It's got some trees. This is part of a unit called our changing earth. And this is where students are focused on whether or not the environment that they're creating is livable. So their experiments that they do with natural elements where they put in soil and rocks, they study the sand. The teacher puts a frozen block of ice in there as a glacier and As it melts, you're able to see as a kid what happens to the environment. The sand

046and the things that go in it often need to be replaced. So sand, I can't quote you a bag of sand right now. We usually buy try to buy it in bulk, but it's a tricky thing to to keep up with. Some other things that our teachers really really need are lumber. So, if let's see. Mr. Leewok was super helpful in bringing this over today. He even put a nice price tag on it, although we're not playing prices right here. This piece of lumber, $450. And this is from the construction technology class. right now. They are they're really super frugal and useful because they take old projects apart so that they can reuse the wood for the new projects that they do. This is one of those consumables that's really tricky for them to keep

047currently. There's the construction technology course and then there's also the theater course that they use to build. This piece I'm not going to I'm afraid I might drop it. This is a piece of metal and this is used in the manufacturing course. This one bar is $100 and so kids use it to build. I believe this is Adam's son's project that he worked on, but don't hold me to it. And in Tom's class, they learned how to make the drill holes the right size, and they have to learn about the precision of the size that things need to be in order to hold things together. So, I I hope that seeing some of these things gives you an idea of the kinds of consumables that we have because for sure they're not the things that

048come to mind to me first. Now this next thing I wanted to share if you like this are materials and supplies that go with our fifth grade no fourth grade agricultural unit. This is sandpaper. And the kids take the micro little magnifying glass and the sandpaper and they are studying. Where's my note? They are studying particles and they're looking at the size of one of these. And everybody gets one of these. And they go over and they take a little bit of clay, a little bit of sand, a little bit of lum. >> Sorry, Amber, I don't need to move you out. It's okay. >> They get out. >> And they study the particles there. And what they tied this to is that Cheshure is an agricultural spot, right? It's what do we call it?

049The um capital of the state. And so they talk about all the farms that were here or are still here and they talk about what kinds of soil you need to grow different plants. They start out with this phenomena where kids are studying the size of particles and then they put one of each of these in here. They put water in it overnight. They come back, they study it again. So I point out this particular um unit because this board supported the hiring of two incredible science coaches who teach that robotics unit that we got the funding for from CF and they have rewritten the fifth grade curriculum to be all handson with the kinds of experiments that you just saw that start with a question and build students curiosity. We're getting kids off of

050subscription textbooks in science in the elementary school so that we can do hands on things that get them thinking and we connected to real world activities and so they decide what kinds of things they could build. I missed a whole bunch of vocabulary in there somewhere um that this teaches them. But I wanted you to at least see some of the some of the So, the other thing I'm going to hand uh hand out to you is a list and you can just pass it around. These are some of the um materials that are used in our culinary classes because if you think about that, we're talking groceries and you've got a class on Monday, a class on Wednesday, a class on Thursday, Friday. If you have a snow day, you're nonp perishable. It's just

051they might not you know, they might not last. So, here's just a list from Big Y and some other places of things that they are buying. And this one for anyone who's interested is the construction list that they put together in science class. >> The things they need are goggles. If you think about the high school kids all wearing these after year, this is a really actually nice pair. But this is that we that we need. >> You may enjoy this one. This is one of our deceptibles. So, this happens to be starfish that come in here, but they're also dissecting pigs and they're also dissecting eyes. And um let me see. I have I have a note here I wanted to share with Other things worms, >> pigs, sheep eyes, frogs, worms, rats, fish

052hearts, and some of those things are happening obviously in biology class, but also in zoology and anatomy. I can't forget the owl pellets. The owl pellets, I'm told, have close to doubled in price in the last five years. So students are using those in various grade levels. They do get a chance to look at them in elementary school. They take another look at them through a different lens so to speak at the high school. I would be remiss if I didn't share two more. Can you bear with me for two more maybe? >> Okay. So Mr. Dr. Nate OD shared some things. He teaches the engineering and production class at >> D and some of the things that they do really require um work >> and they have laser cutters etc. And I just wanted

053to pass around some of these things. So they've got some posters and some keychains and the children are learning how in Amy Pepper's robotics and design Some of those may have come from Amy's class, the collectors and the digital um using the digital printer. But the other kinds of things that always come up are, you know, all the things in here. We're always looking for mice and chargers and power strips. I also need to share with you one of our books. >> So, the nice thing about textbooks is when you buy a textbook, it lasts usually for a good long time. >> The problem is that very few people are really selling textbooks anymore, as many of you on the curriculum committee know. And what happens is they sell a digital bundle. So, The things

054that are on the digital bundle are fabulous because you can you can look at videos, you can see things explained, you can click on words that you don't know and get definitions and it offers an experience that's wonderful and less and less are our companies doing that. And by the way, when you buy that, you might have a four year or six year subscription, you have to renew it. So that alone has thrown us for a loop in trying to keep up with that. Right now the um folks in the physics department or science department at the high school are looking for a replacement text for that physics book. It'll be a process. Had to show you this also. This lovely model of a house was built by our students >> and this is something

055that they do in that course I was telling you about earlier. But all of this I mean it's wonderful but this is one of those things that you can't reuse. Right? So all of all of these materials all these instructional supplies are what we really need for teachers to to teach the courses that we offer. So, I hope that gave you, you know, a little glimpse into when we talk about instructional supplies, the kinds of things that we're talking about. All right, speaking of textbooks, I did show you our physics textbook. I told you a little bit about the subscription. Here's a list of those other other software and curriculum that come under this. budget line. So many of you are already familiar with Eureka math. I have to tell you though, a number of

056years ago, probably 14, 15 years ago, teachers had a milk crate in their classroom. And in the milk crate, they had a bunch of files and that's what they used to teach math. And they were expressing at the time that like this is getting really tricky to do. We we're trying to manage all of this and it's it's getting really hard and so we had engaged a group of teachers to evaluate multiple math programs and we ended up going with something that at the time was called Engage New York and it was an open resource that was on um online that became obsolete in a way because a company now owns that program and we pay for that program and it cost us about $100,000 a year. Zern is piece of that. I'm not going

057to read through all these, but you can see that we have a lot of software subscriptions and classroom licenses that we really need to keep on top of. Funhub, I'll point out is a foundations resource, I'm sorry, foundations, and that's a part of the right to read. So we are you know infusing those things into our curriculum. School links is um uh mostly used at the high school but it is a helpful tool to the high school teachers and the staff there in the college search process and the college application process. On shape is something used in the manufacturing and CAD classes as well as the Adobe suite. We've spent time and I know you all know about the library books in the classrooms at the elementary level. We need to keep replenishing those. In

058addition, when we add when we get that increased enrollment and Mr. Jeffrey or um or or Miss Burns, Dr. Burns calls and says, "We've got another classroom set. We need a a classroom library." So, we have to put a classroom library together for that teacher whenever we get a new teacher. So, we we when we close a section, we will box all of those materials up. We'll label them and we'll put them into storage. So, we have some swing space, but when it's a new section, we need to start from scratch. I know that um Rob and Carrie will talk about outplace tuition, but I wanted to just speak a little bit to general education tuition because as you know, we send students who live in Cheshire to some other programs, other high schools when

059they have programming that we don't have here. So that includes Lyman Hall, Will Cox Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven, the Sound School in New Haven, and then Kert Techch and Vinyltech. Those are one-offs mostly because they have a unique program that's not offered at the others. So you can see here that number is how many students are attending those schools. Next up is library books, periodicals. That's pretty self-explanatory, so I won't go into any more details on that, but I'll just let you read this slide on library media supplies because everybody kind of scratches their head and goes, "Well, what do they need for media supplies? What is that?" And that's all that binding tape and binding glue and labels and card stock um to keep the books with a dust jacket

060on them and to make sure they're barcoded so that they can be scanned out. So that that takes up a little chunk of this budget as well. This last one I want to focus on and let you know what we don't pay for here. We do not pay for the Smarter Balanced Assessment and we do not pay for the SAT that the students take here at the high school. Those are state required tests and that is not a cost to us. What we do pay for is the pupil attitudes towards self in school survey which as you recall we eliminated for K2 due to budget cuts and not just budget cuts but it also made sense with the um intensity of labor that was needed to administer that to kindergarten students. It really needed to

061be one-on-one and read to them. So we thought that that made sense. But we did eliminate K2. Now we offer this in grades 3 through 12. Pair deck is an assessment that's sort of bundled with our math. It's where we do all our math assessments online. A cadence at Dodd Middle School is also the reading survey that we give to students in the elementary. I have to say at DOD we're doing that digitally which is a huge time savings for teachers. We would love to be able to use the digital version at the younger grades for for the teachers. It just makes it them not have to handcore everything which they could be planning wonderful activities like these that I shared with you. Oh, Azra, I forgot our gumdrop one. I think we might have

062to pull that one out before I before I sit down. The other things are headsets um and the seal of biiteracy. I did want to say that while the seal of biiteracy is not today a requirement, it's required that we report on it to the state and so we have to pay for things like to have the students tested in their language that they want to get this seal. So that um is a it takes up time which is fine. We believe in the seal of biiteracy, but there's also a cost because we have to send them out for a specialized test in any of the languages that that they might speak as natives. Um, we also pay for like pins, certificates, stickers, so that that gets a fixed to their diploma. New and replacement

063equipment honestly is another area that I'm I'm sure makes sense to everyone. It's lab equipment, classroom carpets that get really grungy that we want to replace, especially in the classrooms where we have our littles. Musical instrument storage is something that general music teachers are always asking for. We've um replaced kils, cafeteria tables, etc. Let me tell you what we get for free. We get the Google Workspace for education. That's free. Canva for education also free. Clever which is a platform that allows us to have um single sign on for ish for our students so everything's in one place and they can find it. Those are all free. Other sources of funding are title one where we spend money on intervention and student supports. Title three for multilingual learners. We also do some professional development with

064that. Title four we use for curriculum improvements with Perkins which is focused on the high school. They spend a lot of that money on transportation. They take kids on trips, field trips. Um there's a lot of equipment that we bought in the manufacturing program with that money. We also do curriculum revision over the summer and some of that is paid for by Perkins. And then a lot of the club stipens one uh DECA FBLA are two that come to mind. Peek Jones is that town the grant that the town oversees that what we use that for varies from year to year and based on need. And then just a reminder of the Cheshire Ed Foundation has also been very gracious to us. They had bought the robots, the new robots for the STEM program. to

065circle back to staffing. I know that Emily talked about this just a few minutes ago, but um if we're thinking about curriculum staffing administratively, it's Azra and the as the preK8 curriculum coordinator. We have coaches, one coach for reading, one coach for math. Across our elementary schools, we have six coaches, one at each of the elementaryaries, two at Highland because of the size. At the middle school, we have teachers who serve a dual role. They're teaching and they're also doing some coaching. The majority there it's split a little differently. Math and ELA have more time the way we've scheduled them to be doing coaching in the classroom. So, they teach for maybe 2 and their coaching for 08. Our social studies and science teachers are really mostly in the classroom. So that co coaching is

066much more limited but they do have a free period in which they can do some of that leadership work. At the high school our department chairs are all point4 for department leadership and coaching um and then point 6 teaching. This might look familiar to you this slide. This sort of gives you the leadership distribution. So if you think about course offerings in the core content areas, the green represents the high school in the slide on the left. Elementary is in blue and the middle school is in red. And if you look at the leaders to lead the curriculum work in those places, you can see it's almost inverted. So we have elementary, we have a significant amount of coaching, which is appropriate to what we need. We don't have the same level of coaching and

067support at the middle and high school, which brings me to that budget request for the science math coordinator. And listen, we spent a lot of time on this at curriculum the other night, so I'm not going to be labor this, but I wanted to at least share based on our conversations last year why this was still something that we're talking about. And if we look at this slide, I know a couple of times we've been asked like, can can we see it? And Emily also gave this out. So it's five classroom teachers, that would be the cost. one art teacher, one music teacher, 0.5 health and PE, 0.5 multilingual learner teacher, and then I have the assistant principal at the elementary and the science and math coordinator. Really in italics there for a reason because

068I think we know that the we are really in need of teachers to be on point with our students. And while these other two are really important and would really help us, I think we're going to have to make some big decisions. And I wanted you to know our thinking on that. That's all I have. I'm happy to take any questions. Feel I'm in pretty good shape if you didn't hit me with a boom whacker. I have a question. Is that okay? >> Thank you. No. Awesome. I mean, my my daughters still talk about culinary and are chopping things exactly the way that they learned. So, I mean, it's just the things that carry on is fantastic. Um just a small question like how are there's a line that's much bigger obviously for instructional supplies

069and then there's a smaller line for curriculum materials. I'm just wondering like how they're different. What's in curriculum materials that's not and it's >> tell me the two again Heather. >> Sorry >> just give me those two again. >> Yeah. So, um, curriculum materials is like, I don't know, line or account 643. >> Um, and it's smaller. I mean, it's and then there's the instructional supplies that you really all just went through. It was like all this stuff. >> I was just wondering how what's in what's in curriculum materials. >> Curriculum materials is a lot of curriculum revision. So, I know the board has heard me talk about CWI before. That is um where we've done a lot of rewriting of curriculum. That is where we're paying teachers an hourly rate outside of the school

070day for some of that work where they need to um let's say evaluate a physics textbook. They can't necessar sometimes they can do that during the school day but sometimes that's like an ad hoc committee. Sometimes the materials that we buy there are something that we're checking out for pilot. Um, sometimes it's well like smaller things, not a textbook, not a program, but smaller things that don't really call into the book. I'm trying to think of a good example. I have to >> That's okay. I can barely >> But a lot of that is focused on the curriculum. >> Okay. Thank you. um in your instructional. First of all, thank you for bringing all these in. It's it's very helpful to understand. This is usually what my elementary school kids come home and talk about

071is when they're doing things like this. I don't hear about the we write a book today. I hear about, you know, we we made we use the what are these things called? >> Boom. >> Yeah. It reminds me of what was that that World Cup with the booas. Yeah. This that's what I thought you were g giving us. Um, you have instructional supplies I'm seeing here is just less than $600,000. And I I don't think anybody would argue in this room that we need these things. We can always use more of these things. And so I'm curious, you know, if Jeff Bezos were to say, "Hey, Chesher, you just got this amazing award. I mean, what is the what is the blue sky budget on this?" I mean, is it another hundred? Is it a

072million? Is it like how how high does instructional supply go before you tell us we don't need anything else at all? >> I don't know. [laughter] >> You know, I I think we do with what we have. I think if we had a little more for me and I think for the principles here, I think that we I know I struggled as a school principal. I think the hardest thing is those science supplies. I think it's what you need for manipulives in science because this is part of the thing. >> This is a gumdrop wave >> machine and it's made with gumdrops and sticks and it teaches kids about waves. They put it together, they per set them up for later. So, you know, it's it's pretty primitive, >> but who what kid in in

073fifth grade wouldn't wouldn't want to be a part of putting that together and testing it and writing down all their observations. >> So, that's not a lot of money, but to do more things like that, >> right? >> Well, and and one of the reasons I asked that question is because, you know, we obviously have a responsibility to the community to spend this money, you know, and budget appropriately and responsibly. Um, but being as involved, you know, at Dittle specifically as I am, I know there are many, many, many families that want to give more and more and provide more and more either for a classroom or a grade level. Um, you know, and so I'm wondering if if there's, you know, at some point here in the future a a program to provide an

074avenue like that. um you're sitting next to a Cheshire Education Foundation board member and you also served on that um prior to appointment and so the Cheshire Education Foundation uh just a couple years ago made a $55,000 commitment to enhance our robotics program. I mean that was a gamecher for us to be able to provide those resources. Um, so there is an avenue. Um, and I'll give a shameless plug. On January 27th, we have I just sent out a parent square yesterday, a concert celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Cheshire Education Foundation in which, like I said, they not only provide those sort of resources. the robotics commitment um was a little bit of a deviation from what they typically do, but uh they've certainly are are willing to provide those sort of resources and

075that's who Marlene and I turn to uh when we need that next level support. And so there's a a concert on the 27th. You can also make donations through Venmo on their web page or or PayPal. >> Uh, additionally, we will have at the end of March a trivia contest that's always a riot. Um, I know if Adam is watching at home, he he's a regular participant as is Dr. Herrigan and others. Um, so there is a an avenue for that and you know I would encourage people to to consider that. I appreciate their support. >> That's exactly what what we need to happen. I'll also add that none of these things happen. I think we all get the emails doing this project. If you have toilet paper rolls, if you have this, if you

076have that. So we do from these kinds of things. Do you have skewers at home that you're not using to bring in? So, I feel like our teachers um solicit volunteers. They work. There's only so much we can rely on the community to give us those little, you know, like French fry, you know. So, >> thank you. >> We got more. >> Um the Rams the uh curriculum coaches. You said you had two at Highland. How are you going to distribute the six of them now? >> Yeah, reallocate those and I and Jeff were talking about how reallocating all of our staff. So, we're going to have to do that so that they're equally dispersed among all students and the teachers. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. um the testing and evaluation, the seal

077of biiteracy. I've never heard of that. >> Yeah, it's been around for a while. That's the um it's a it's a recognition that a student can get for being bilingual in both English and another language. So, it could go one of two ways. It could be a student who's fluent in their native language who comes to the United States and learns English and gets recognized for being Or it could be a student who is English speaking who becomes fluent in French or German and takes the test that they can do this language that goes on their diploma. >> Oh, interesting. Is this something people would put on their resume? >> I would. >> Okay, thank you. Um, let me see. Uh, so speaking of that, things that could go on somebody's resume and alternative pathways.

078Um, first of all, I think this whole demonstration of supplies, instructional supplies, this is absolutely fantastic. I appreciate it. And at least a portion of this I and I know I'm confident Matt has been living at home for just in in the here and now like today in the past few years. Um, yes. I I saw you talking about carpenters, machinists, chefs, and I, um, yeah, I I don't I don't want Cheshire High School to get to the point of competing with the other schools that you're the sound school, the technical schools, but I do want kids to explore the alternative, be able to explore um, pathways that are alternatives to college. So this, in my opinion, this is really important, what you're talking about, the instructional supplies, and I get it when you're talking

079about it with the lack of a better phrase, the dollhouse, whatever it is. Um, yeah, this is I feel like this is super important to be able to do this. Again, not in a not to compete with the technical schools. That's unfortunate because kids are making a decision in eighth grade um of a path to take. So, it's it's difficult. Um, but any I just want to say thank you for that. Uh, with regard to with regard to the free stuff that we get, >> I I'm thinking it's not exactly free. Uh, there's data that we're probably giving up. And just very generally speaking, are we looking at data privacy? And >> oh, 100%. >> Okay. So, at least in theory, the the data is is not given up and sold out. That's correct. Um,

080a number of years ago, I think it was seven years ago when um, the state came out with their data privacy laws, every single solitary digital platform or subscription that we have, we do not even pursue it until they sign a data privacy policy with us. >> Okay. >> For more information for you, Tim, or for other parents, on our homepage, the across the top there are many tabs. one labeled for parents. If you hover over that, digital citizenship and student privacy has all of our information about student privacy, the contracts, etc. Uh so people can check that out if they're interested. >> Thank you. And you you mentioned you touched on uh curriculum staffing, so I'm just we're in the middle of budget meeting, so I'm just going to say this. Uh, as I

081mentioned before, the increase that the superintendent request is 8%. And you're talking about positions that I think would have great value, but just generally my preference is going to be for classroom teachers. Um, you mentioned what was I think Emily mentioned before that uh what we're looking at right now is an average of about 19 kids per class. >> Yes. But that is that's all in that's prek through high school, right? No, >> basically. >> No, >> those numbers that she quoted you earlier are for K through six. >> Okay. >> I think um Dr. Solen alluded to the other night. We are concerned about the enrollment numbers at Dodd. >> Dodd ideally we we would it would be nice to put I don't even want to say nice because that downplays it. Um, we

082need need to add a team. Even if we added two teachers next year and two the year after, I think that was something Dr. Solen suggested in passing at his meeting last Thursday. Am am I I can't quite see you through the boom whackers, Jeff. >> Uh, that's a first. I've never heard that phrase uttered, but um [laughter] yeah uh that I I think reflects what you know the the conversation was. >> Okay. you know that there are there's certainly a need for what the request is with respect to an AP or STEM um supervisor that the um the need is also there at the middle school too and as the uh enrollment comes in and I look at projections um I think there's a really strong argument to be made at that >> yeah

083the basic concern I have is based than what I recall you saying last week is the growth we're going to see growth there in the next two years. >> Absolutely. >> And when we're talking about four person teams, if that's the model we continue to use, >> right, >> then based on the number you said for next year and then the following year, it just seems to me that it would make sense to grow that over time, two years, two teachers plus two teachers to get to four two years from now rather than four at once. >> Just speaking generally as we go through the budget. >> Yeah. That's why I said, you know, at the initial kickoff that this is a a conversation. You know, I I don't Everybody's got perspectives and I think

084there's a lot of it's a tough uh budget cycle. There's a a significant increase that we're asking for uh in the face of significant growth and other contextual factors that have put a lot of pressure on our budget. But um I I think you know we have historically and it you know it's reflected in our central office staffing have emphasized the classroom level and I think a decision like that would be keeping with our historical practice. >> Yeah. I just I mean I'm not an educator. I'm I'm a dad >> and so I just am looking at as a parent and >> I I really appreciate during the curriculum meeting the explanation that Marlene gave about the STEM coordinator in particular. >> Yeah. Um, and I do think that it could be really valuable, but

085just looking at it as a parent, classroom teachers generally just are easier for me to understand than >> Sure. Yeah. And, you know, and I know you're not, but I I do uh particularly given our audience want to reinforce the incredible uh impact that administrators and our leadership has on >> Oh, yeah. >> the daily practices and outcomes for kids, too. So, it's how do you strike that balance? Um, and I think we've done a pretty good job of that historically. And this is one of those inflection points where it's it's tough decision, but I fully understand the rationale for the classroom. And, you know, I I support fully support that direction as well. >> Tim, I would just say like I've had kids in the high school and I would I know you're approaching

086there. you're not and I agree with classroom but a STEM coordinator is not a classroom teacher but they support all the courses and I think I can I would say it would be really important to have I think it's a position that would be really beneficial at the high school that would impact all the kids they're not elementary school in a classroom but they are high school kids preparing to go to college it's it's like almost paramount to me that they have that support. >> Yeah. So, I'm just flagging that like I understand, but they are like a classroom teacher, although they're not running one classroom. So, >> yeah. No, thank you. I appreciate that. >> I would just I would just like to add to um what Tim was talking about because we've been

087we've been talking a lot about it um amongst us, but we really do need to consider those uh that half team added to the eighth grade at Dodd so that in another year we can add two more to make the full team. We're not talking about a 19 student class ratio in at Dodd. We're talking about we're up at 24 25 26 and that's a lot. So, um you know, we need to keep this conversation really open to adding those that half team in this budget. But thanks for all of this. And the one question I had was about the culinary classes. Is that at the high school and Dodd? >> No, just at the high school. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Question. >> Yeah. Did you work on the price of groceries? [laughter] >>

088I see what I could do. >> So I suggested to Tim that we could cut back on the chocolate chips and he almost bit my head off. [laughter] >> Chocolate chips are important for the cookies. That was the highest that was the highest budgeted item on the grocery list. Um Marlene, I just have a couple questions actually. One in particular and more or less this might be I'm looking at the classroom libraries um and then the consideration obviously of adding additional teachers we know to for the new schools as well too. Um I'm surprised given the presentation on the new school's budget that it wasn't part of the FF >> FF >> cost. So it can you see clarify that? >> Yeah then that I'm sorry you're talking about the kil we bought furniture we

089bought in the FF costs correct this wasn't incorporated into knowing that we're going to add additional classrooms. I'm sorry. Which element was in the new library budget? >> The library books classroom li is a consumable that's not included. >> It wasn't considered in >> Well, it's things can be considered. They're not reimburseable. So, you know, the the committee um there are a few items that we've discussed with the committee that are not reimbursible but are asking them to include. At this point, the committee has been um steadfast in trying to really prioritize reimburseable items only. Um, so for example, Chromebooks are not reimburseable, Chrome carts, things like that. Um, and so, you know, right now they're tracking the budget. If there's money, I think we could make another pitch at the end if there is

090money available, but right now they're they've, like I said, been pretty steadfast around only reimburseable. >> Okay, that's the clarification I needed. Thank you. Um, I I mean, you know, I I I like Mr. Kau's suggestion. I do caution about, you know, trying to get the public to make donations, contributions. You know, as a parent, my kids already graduated, but I just feel like that puts a financial, you know, imposition on families, too. Um, I'm just thinking like SATs are coming up. I used to have to pay for my kids SAT practice and prep. You know, on the one hand, my philosophy, it's a school system. We should have built-in practice and prep just like you should giving a kid a pencil because it's, you know, part of what they need to learn with. So,

091I'm just really leerary about doing that. But I do like the fact that it's an innovative idea to fund raise, if you will, for those items. Um, and having been a past STEM coordinator myself, I do feel that having that leadership in the district builds the capacity um, just like Miss Fitzgerald had um, said earlier, it just builds the capacity of our staff. So, I I do support that wholeheartedly. Thank you. >> Thank you all very much. I appreciate it. >> I just want to clarify one one [clears throat] point. Um, >> on the on the parent side, right? I don't every everything would be optional in that idea, [clears throat] right? And one example I'll give you is do little when we do teacher appreciation week and we solicit donations, families donate thousands of

092dollars to the PTA out of just like appreciation for the teachers and for the classrooms. So I I don't intend in any way to shift any of the budget burden to the families. Um absolutely not. I I agree with you. provide them everything. But I I'm pretty sure I have a gift card for a butterfly garden from preschool days that had I known that was part of the curriculum, I would absolutely like I might just go buy it now and and provide it to Dittle. >> Okay. >> Someone who apparently needs no introduction. Um [laughter] our PPS director, Miss Kerry. >> Thank you, Matt. I was just about to get up and move. I can see Dr. Solen. Um, well, welcome tonight. Um, um, I got the memo on what to wear tonight, so I

093went with the black suit like Marlene went with the black suit, but I did not get the memo on to bring manipulatives and, uh, you know, objects, but anyway, >> I could have brought all sorts of OT stuff. Um, all right. So, welcome. Um, I'm looking forward to sharing this information with you. um as our talk about special ed and cheshure. So um here I want to share with you that uh currently when I pulled up the number of students that we have in district with IEPs uh in December we were at 725. Um that to me uh I can't believe that we're at 725. When I came in as director we were around five something. Um so it is we've seen a lot of growth. Um the other dates uh the other data points

094on this graph are based on our October submission to the state. Um we've seen an increase of 180 students with IEPs since 2020. Similarly to general education, we are becoming bing bottom heavy with our numbers. Um our secondary level, we have currently 233 IEPs and at our elementary level we're looking at about 348 for K to6. that does not include our Darcy students. One of the things you can see here on the slide two is showing that u at Cheshure we are right now at 16.3% um as of 2425 prevalence for special education. The state average is 184.5% which is we are traditionally below the state average but that number has been creeping up. Um, taking a look at our prek IEPs. Um, last year when we ended we were at around uh 83 IEPs

095for prek students. You know, way back in 2020 we were looking at about um it was just over 50 53 54 around that area. One of the things that's impacted our number of students with IEPs in our preK program is when kindergarten moved to being the age of five, we now have prek students staying in prek for a longer period of time because of their birth dates and how that falls. So some students will be in a prek program for three years. They'll do prek 3, prek4, and then an additional year. um whereas before those students many times did go off to um kindergarten. Students come up to our program through birth to three the birth to three pipeline and once they turn three at which time they are then referred and we then determine

096whether or not they continue to qualify for services in our program. I know this is your favorite slide. We love to talk about out of district placements. Um, students possibly requiring an out of district placement are on our radar as teams and administrators collaborate frequently to monitor their progress and the results of applied strategies. The recent legislation enacted this past July requires districts to conduct a functional behavioral assessment resulting in the development of a behavior intervention plan prior to placing a student out of district. The FBA can take several weeks. You want to implement that behavior plan and uh to take time as well as you need to run the program long enough to determine whether or not it's having any kind of impact on decreasing behaviors. And with this new legislation, I'm not seeing

097a big impact on our out of district placements for students with that new legislation because I've always felt like as a district, we've always done our due diligence in trying to keep our students in district because there is just so many benefits for those students. um within district that we do our due diligence before we arrive at the decision that you know we don't have the uh ability to support this student. They require far more intensive um supports and that's when we begin to look at out of district placements. Um you can see here that we have seen an increase in the number of students that are being uh put in out of district or being IEP for out of district placements. A lot of that is the result of of um the impact of

098mental illness um dysregulation which often results in aggression and students sometimes it's because students are entering district moving into the district and they have already been placed in an outofd district program which we now have to abide by that IEP and that programming um when they enter our district. So we now own uh that out of district placement. Um many of those things I just talked about we can't plan for. You don't know how many students are going to move into the district. How many students are going to come and join our families as a foster placement that requires special education out of district placements. If you take a look at this graph here in 2023 to 2024 year, this is our DURB out of district placements. Uh Cheshire is in the red at the

099far right hand side. You can see we are second to the lowest uh uh in our DUI. Um Glastonberry at the far other end is around 9% or almost approaching 10% of their um out students on out of district placements. Whereas we are at 2 point I don't remember the exact number but it's 2 point something but we're far below that. And I did want to point out too, because we always like to compare, uh, Madison is pretty much dead center, uh, at almost 5%. I knew I'd get a smile out of someone. So, our average tuition cost has really uh, changed over time. Let me get to that. In 1819, year 1819, we were averaging around $62,000 for an out of district placement. We saw a slight drop during COVID year. Um that was

100I think largely due because some of our students chose some of our families chose to keep their students home during COVID and so we weren't paying a full year's tuition. Um but then we've gone on to see a steadily um in a steady increase. I was it was like sticker shock for me this year. Um, and as I look at what is coming in for next year, so our average cost in 2520 20, I'm sorry, 2425 was at about 126 plus,000 for an out of district placement. This year it's averaging at $140,000 plus at an out of district placement. That does not include transportation. So you then have to add that in. One of the reasons for the increase in the result of the very intensive needs that our students require, there are lots of

101waiting lists. So now that's required the district to look at other schools that are farther away and um may not be tradition the traditional schools that we go towards. stu schools that are located within the risk of ACES um tend to to provide excellent programming at a lower cost um than some of the other private schools. So with the waiting list that we're running into and the um that there's not available seats um we've had to look farther away. often these students require onetoone uh support um and for their very complex needs. So we saw some increases. A school last year was about $143,000 tuition. It's now $163,000. $156,000. School was now $196,000. Um it's quite alarming. Now, I know the state has recently passed legislation to say that they're going to put a cap

102on out of district placement rates. Um, I haven't seen the result of that yet, but um but with some of the rates that are coming in for next year, we're seeing at a 10 11% increase. A recent quote for an out of district placement for a student who's been waiting came in the other day at $283,000 just for tuition for the school year. $283,000. I'll let that sink in. [laughter] So >> Robin, that's not transportation. >> That is not transportation, which will require an aid. I will we will require a need. a person saying an aid. >> Yes. >> So there' be a person >> on the bus >> along with the bus >> for safety reasons. >> Understood. But there's a >> Got it. >> There's a price test. >> Yeah. So um you

103know one of the positives that I can say is that you know our rate of number of students that are in out of district placements as you saw is quite low compared to other districts in our DUR and other districts across the state and I attribute that to our ability to keep our students in district because of the programs that we have in district that we've built over time. So, we have the early intervention center, our prek intensive education program, um our elementary intensive education programs. Uh we have the three schools at um Highland, the two schools at Norton, which were just recently opened up in the ca past couple years. Um we have our bridges program at Dittle that um services our students that um have more behavioral and emotional needs. We have our

104life skills programs that are located at Dodd and two at the high school. Our Aspire program at the high school which allows for our students to get the support they need um but also allows them to attend and be in um in our high school courses and our high school classes and to take advantage of that instruction while getting the social emotional support that they need. Our two transition programs, one located on the QU campus and the other one at the high school. Um and then of course our Humveist Alternative High School. These programs have really allowed us to keep many of our students within district. Okay. So our goals in special education always align with the district goals. We really um when looking at um high quality and complex thinking with our instruction along

105with our social emotional learning, we aligned our goals along with executive function skills and specially designed instruction. Our work on executive function skills and specially designed instruction has allowed us to focus on increasing our teachers knowledge, assessing skills to enhance the identification of lagging skills and applying specialized instruction and strategies. So we did a lot of work in training for our special education teachers in systematic reading programs that are designed to address decoding and encoding deficits seen in reading disabilities and dyslexia. Given our strong belief in in Bettinghoff's saying that I love and we've adopted, you can't teach a child to swim if you take him out of the pool, which really speaks to you need to keep we need to keep our kids in the classroom getting that rich general education instruction if we're

106going to see them make those gains um which is demonstrated through our um ESPA testing in many cases. So we made a lot of changes to our delivery of instruction increasing students opportunities for instruction in general education classrooms while we provided targeted instruction in um in pull out and resource areas. Both the middle and the high school saw a restructuring of their IB block and ASC to support students in making those gains on those lagging skills. So we really tried to do a nice balance of get our kids in the classroom, give them that instruction and support them through our eyeblock and our ASC's. Eyeblock and ASC are like a very I hate to call it a structured study hall, but it it's where the work a lot of work takes place in our middle

107school and our high school. So, our special ed teachers are highly focused on providing that specialized targeted instruction to address the lagging skills so that students can master all the standards, not just a small group of standards. So, we're trying to give them the skills to be able to master all those standards. So in doing that we have seen our increase in our time with non-disabled peers um over the course of the past couple years with that focus. So 80 to 100% of our students we see that growth of students being um spending a majority of their time in the general education classroom taking advantage of that instruction which is really great to see that go up. uh we don't just you know focus on academics. We also focus a lot on um the social

108emotional um aspects for our students. There are lots of ways students can be involved with their peers, their age appropriate peers in in different programs across the district. We have our unified sports programs at the elementary middle school levels. We have our unified theater at the high school, our best buddy programs that are throughout the district. We have business partnerships for our transition work sites. Um inclusive field trips. We work with small businesses that allow our students to go and and perform and um different task, work tasks and learn um various uh skills and um and um and be able to practice a lot of what they're learning in interacting social skills and with peers. And then we had our SEPTA group, our special education parent teacher association that um also supports our students. So

109all this work, what are we seeing? What's the results? So in our statemandated testing that we're seeing um our highnee students ranked third up from fourth in our DUI. They were ranked 11th in the state out of 169 school districts. Um that is something when I saw those numbers come through this year. I mean I practically leaped out of my seat to be third in our DUR um is just amazing and it was a steady climb. So to see that our work on executive function skills, on specially designed instruction, allowing our students to be in the classroom to get that general ed instruction is paying off. In math, in the statemandated testing, our grade eight high need students ranked fourth in our state for growth rate and seventh in the state for percent of growth

110target. and our annual performance report back came back from the state where we meet met all our requirements. They gave us uh a substantial compliance on our time with non-disabled peers which is what we were really looking for. And um again our out of district um our out of district placements where it was at 2.74% where the target was 7.15%. That annual report is from 23 24. It's always two years behind. So, um, you know, we always have to stay tuned to see what currently is happening. Um, last year I got asked, "How many students do we ex exit from special education?" Not counting the students that age out or that leave us after they graduate. So far this year, my supervisors have been keeping track of this because they wanted to know the answer

111to that. And so as of January, we have exited 15 students out of special ed because they no longer required the services and no longer were eligible. Um so that to me is is amazing. Amazing. As you know, our numbers continue to change all the time because there are referrals always coming through the door. But um to see that students are exiting and making those gains is a wonderful thing. Some other results that we're seeing again in unified sports at Highland, our Special Olympics Spirit of Inclusion Award was given to our group at Highland. That program is um spearheaded by Alli Ranciato and Stephanie Duchelle. I had to give them a shout out for all the work that they've been doing for the past several years. Um, in Best Buddies, our uh, special education life

112skills teacher at the high school, Thomas Manning, um, was nominated for Best Buddies Connecticut champion of the year. And we currently have Norton and Doolittle Best Buddy groups that are up and running. They're fairly new, but up and running and do and running strong. Um, soon to come. This is something really exciting that came through this fall. We were contacted, if you remember, Steve Trafon uh is working closely with um Special Olympics and he contacted us about starting a program, a unified sports program with our transition students at QU. And so we're now in talking with QU and um our team over there about getting our 18 to 22 year olds involved in um Special Olympics um programming. So, so I am just ecstatic about the results that we are getting with the work that

113we are doing and I'm extremely proud of everything that takes place in Cheshire Special Education. And if I could speak for myself and our administrative team, we're so fortunate to work with a staff that holds such a great work ethic, dedication to students growth and talent. We want to keep this momentum moving forward by continuing to support the work as num as the number of students with special needs increases which is not any different than what's happening in general ed too. We're seeing the increase there too. So as you know in the budget is an elementary special education teacher. We're looking at some technology, particularly iPads for assessment. And you'll see the increases in the budget lines due to the increases in the number of students that we are now servicing. So the dayto-day for

114an elementary special ed teacher, we're seeing that increase in numbers of students with IEPs and multiple needs. Uh coming in, students coming in at multiple performance levels. Um teachers are servicing multiple grade levels. They're providing those services in multiple settings. The general ed setting and the resource room setting. They're providing specialized instruction um especially that systematic specialized reading instruction and they're supervising and training pareducators and they're also continuing to collaborate and to um communicate with families, outside providers, teachers within the building, support service keeping case loads at reasonable levels to meet the individual needs of students and provide quality services both in special ed and general aid in general ed setting is really important to us in Cheshire. It's valued without adding a special ed teacher for next school year. Our 26 27 case loads

115will begin the year with 22 students per teacher. That's higher than some general ed classrooms and that's at the start of the school year. There's always students being added during the course of the year. The chart that you see up here in very tiny print, I gave you a copy of it because I think it just kind of sets the picture. This was shared to me by a special ed teacher and you can see in here that she has 18 students across four grade levels. She communicates and collaborates with eight eight general education teachers and I should have included to support service. So, speech, OT, counseling, school psychologist. She has five triannual testing to do, which means she needs to do comprehensive testing one- on-one with that student. Write a analyze and write a report

116um on the data. She has seven classifications on her case load. Emotional disability, learning disability, hearing impaired, speech and language impaired. They're kind of tiny for me to read from here. Autism. She services her students both in and out of the classroom for reading, writing, and math, executive function skills, and behavioral support. Technology. So increasing numbers means that we are conducting more evaluations both initial evaluations, re-evaluations, and targeted assessments, all requiring standardized measures. The publishing company Pearson is putting the squeeze on us. All I could think of is the vice, the vice, and Pearson right there holding us at bay. They hold the licenses for many of the assessment tools that we use to evaluate our students and they have moved to an electronic platform that only works on iPads. It requires two iPads for

117every person who is assessing a student. two iPads. One is given to the student, one is used by the person doing the assessment so that the student can respond and the report and the the uh assessor can um can uh also uh make put into the report the responses and the data. At this time, we were able to provide iPads for our school psychologists and our speech and language pathologists, but at this point in time, we need at least 16 iPads to support special education teachers in conducting evaluations. They all have to test their own students. Um, and as you saw in my example, she's got five students to test for trianuals. Every three years, a special ed student comes up to be reassessed to see if they're still eligible. And we call that a

118triannual or a re-evaluation. Sometimes during the course of in between those evaluation years, the team may decide to do additional assessments. We call those targeted assessments. It gives us more information to then plan that student's IEP and um target what their needs are. So it's very important for us to be able to do our assessments uh in an efficient way. Um and having this online platform does a lot is much more efficient um and can save um teachers time when it comes to doing those evaluations. And like I said, we don't really have much choice because they are the holders of the majority of the assessments. Okay. An increase in students with disability also means there are increases in the other bud budget lines that also support us in special ed. Keeping students in districts

119requires the proper supports and at times these supports have to be contracted through consultants. Um consultants um can vary in their cost. Uh we recently had to provide a teacher of the deaf substitute because our consultant who we have in district a contract with was out for medical leave. So the only place we could find a teacher of the deaf in the state was through CRE and the price was at $425 per hour for that substitute teacher. Reading consultants can come in as high as $215 per consultant per hour and a lot of times that includes trans them traveling back and forth too. We try as best as possible to work with local consultants whenever possible as their fees are much more reasonable. While Pearson carries much of the bulk of our testing tools, there

120are still testing kits needed that must be updated to have the latest normative data and must be replaced with the newest version when they become available. So, you can see why I've listed assessment there as additional resources that we still also need to um provide uh that we still need to purchase. We're seeing an increase in a need for communication devices for our incoming pre-K students. In many cases, this means an iPad is provided for the student with a durable case and the very specific apps for communication. Um apps like u proloqu um touch chat. These apps come in with licenses at they can run from $150 to $250 per license per student. There's lots of equipment that we purchase, brand new wheelchairs, walkers, especially as students grow, and changing tables that raise for our

121nurse office, uh for our um nurses when when students are required to have changes during the day. Hoyer lifts so our staff doesn't hurt themselves in lifting students. And of course, you already know, vans. While we've implemented a process for determining whether a student requires PAR support and have focused on building skills in our students to support independence, we still have need for paras. And so that staffing line is very important um that we continue to support that. When Dr. Solen put up this graphic in his first presentation when we started this process. It really resonated with me because as I rattle off these prices, these price tags, you can see how um how high they are and how much they've increased over time. And special education too is experiencing those same pressures and challenges

122that the whole district is um is feeling at this time with our growth. So, I'm going to review again. We are hoping, we are looking for an elementary special education teacher, the technology to support our assessing of students, and those additional resources that continue to support so we can continue to get the results that we've been getting. Anybody have any questions? >> Any questions? hands up. Mark, go ahead. >> The prek IEPs, we're over 80 [clears throat] out of how many students? >> Was thereund how many 140? >> Right now, that was last year. We ended at 80. That 85 number of IEPs. That's that surprises me. >> So it's it's interesting and Kim can step in anytime. We you know we have it's a integrated prek program. The um so you have a balance

123of students coming in from birth to three with IEPs or that have we develop IEPs and students that are coming in as general ed students. Sometimes those students that are coming in as general ed students, we are identifying as needing an IEP. So they didn't come up through birth to three, but as they've worked in their classrooms and their teachers have worked with them, it's been clear that their students that are impacted by a disability, they go through the evaluation process. >> Also, anyes Okay, thank you. Um, and currently we're we're 24 outplaced right now. >> Yes, >> at 140 average. >> That's the average. Um, right now um I mean there's a placement in that list that's like $238,000 a year. >> Okay. Um >> and and we're not and the next question that

124usually comes is are any of them aging out? No. >> Okay. >> Nobody's coming off that list soon. >> Thanks. And one last question, the uh if you get the extra uh special ed teacher at the elementary level, what's that going to bring the case load down or what's that going to approximately what the case load? >> It'll bring it down to more reasonable. We like to see around 15. >> Okay. >> 15 16 around there. >> Okay. Thank you. >> Thank you. Um yeah, so just to clarify a couple points here. I'm not sure if I understood you correctly when you were talking about the prek IEPs, >> you were talking about the numbers increasing and it sounded as though you were saying that that increased number >> was related to kids continuing in

125prek in perpetuity like because I just saw this as like a one-time thing of like going from 12 to 16 months and then we were back to a 12 month. So students who are coming out of birth to three are eligible for program at three years old. So you have your three-year-olds coming in. Typically you have a three year classroom, a four-year classroom. Many of those students would then turn five depending on when their birthday is. They would go off to kindergarten. But now you're seeing some of those students stay for another prek year because they're of where their birthday falls. >> So what happens anytimes is when birthdays are always changing. [cough] >> [clears throat] >> Some of our spend really just had a child started last week. and that that's a result of

126the state changing >> some of that is the amount >> January 1 >> that well that makes sense to me if it's always been that way >> it was but now our kids are spending The other difference between >> Yeah. No, I get But I just I in my mind this was like a one-time thing and the just a shift where you would have more kids in one year but overall you know three years on the numbers would be equivalent without an uptick. >> We had a very large >> Okay. Thank you. Um, another clarifying point. >> Yep. >> If I heard you correctly, you said if a kid has an outofd district placement and he lives in another town and then he moves here to Cheshure. >> Yep. >> Is that child required? Are

127we required to do an out of district placement >> or >> we are required to implement the IEP? >> Well, that makes sense to me. I I could understand. And if it says an out of district placement, that child, we pick up that out of district placement. >> Yeah. >> Even if like we provide the services or even better services or that just doesn't exist like that doesn't occur. >> You know, in theory, what I would do is take a look at that IEP. I would work with the family. I would work with the audit district placement. We would look at what the students needs are. you know, coming into the district, I c I would never make the decision decision right off the bat to say that the student should go into one of

128our programs because I don't know that student very well. >> Yeah. >> And so maybe in time I can, you know, the student can demonstrate to us that they are appropriate for one of our programs and we would be able to make that adjustment um through the PPT process. But when students enter our district, we follow the IEP. We we have are obligated to follow the IEP that they come with. >> Okay. Okay. Thank you. >> Um and if I'm following if I was following you correctly, it's excluding transportation, it's 140,000 on average for an average placement up to almost 300,000 was sort of the extreme end. >> Yeah. >> Um >> and it can depend on how far. We have students traveling as far as Bloomfield and as far south as where's St. Vincent?

129Trumble. Um, you know, we we always look as close as possible for an appropriate program with that. You know, we want to make sure we get the right fit for the student so they are successful. But um you know sometimes um we've had to look at programs that are farther away because of those waiting lists and those waiting lists are a year out in some places. I in you know if you have a student that's requiring an out of district placement it's it's highly impossible to maintain them in district for a year while you wait for that out of district placement. Um the uh the out of district placements could be with ACES or could be with other maybe private vendors private. Okay. >> Um >> is this these are state requirements the way this

130>> the way this works? I'm thinking is the state looking at expanding ACES in a serious way? Not like oh that would be nice but >> I think what they're trying to do there's two things that are happening that they're trying to do to address this problem. um is one is they're going to set rates for tuition. Um that that that passed this July. I haven't seen anything and Amaria was just asking me about it. I haven't seen anything yet to say what the cap is going to be. How they're going to determine what that cap is going to be. >> Could places just shut down and say we're not going to do it? >> That would be really up to them. >> Yeah. But it just it doesn't seem crazy to me that if

131it's like a private ASES would be different if it's state funded. Anyway, >> yeah. >> Um, >> thank you. >> Yeah. >> Um, welcome. >> Just >> uh you had mentioned uh on a results page that you exited 15 special ed students so far this year >> and that is out of how many? I saw the IEPs was about 680 this year. Or is that what's the 15 out of what? >> What? Uh we have 700. What did I say? 725. >> Oh, okay. I was thinking >> that December date we had 725. >> Okay. Sorry. >> On the first first page. Yeah. >> Got it. So 15 out of Okay. >> 15. >> And that number would possibly if not likely increase. >> Uh absolutely. >> And kids will keep coming in, >> right?

132>> But there are kids who are exiting as well and it will go above 15 presumably. Yes. >> Through the rest of the year. Thank you. Um >> I could just build on that uh outplacement piece. You know, we as Robin talked about the the state intervening. This is why because the costs have become astronomical for communities and the demand um to support students with really significant needs has increased. And I think as a community what we've always aspired to do is to retain uh students all of our students in district to the greatest extent possible. What what happens is there there's like a a tipping point where we have enough students with similar needs that we can we can provide a program at home uh more efficiently and effectively than a lot of outplacements

133can with a lot more stability and that's great for kids and we do that. So like the intensive ed program, the bridges program, our transition programs, you see those things built in house. The students that we ultimately outplace have really unique and specialized needs that require more or different supports than we're able to provide efficiently and effectively in house. Um, and like I said, we're seeing more of that across the state. And you know, as much as I've advocated for reimbursement on excess uh costs, so that's the three and a half times. So you see the 140,000 on average, our per pupil expenditure in round numbers is $20,000. So, you know, that delta between the $70,000 and the $140,000 in theory, the state should send that back to the community. That's not what happens because

134they fund it in a block grant where the money is capped. So, we get a percentage of what we should receive back. And um so you know there is advocacy to increase that percentage to increase the actual money that we get back but at the same time that can't just be fueling increased costs for outplacement because then you're just feeding the beast if you will and I I only use that term um is a turn of phrase not you know current calling out placements beasts but financially it's it's really escalated past >> um well beyond our ability to to support it. So um there really has to be I think increased reimbursement but also a governor on the on the outplacements to keep costs down as well and that's what I think the state is

135trying to find out and thankfully Ann Marie is serving on that committee to help us figure it out. So >> um but that's it's a really complex and and challenging issue at the heart of it. we want to do best by our kids and we try and provide programs in house to do that. I think one Tim. >> Yeah. Just I think this is uh the last point. Um you mentioned crack before. >> Crack. Yes. Crack. >> Oh, capital region. Um educational center, >> right? Greg Florio. >> Yeah, that's where Greg went. I'm going to have a word with him about our >> I almost gave him a call about that teacher of the death. [laughter] >> He's retiring. >> I have a serious question which is I mean is isn't that state funded at

136least in part in a significant way? >> Yeah, it's All the risks are offset that way. >> They charge out at $425 an hour. 2,000 hours a year. That's $850,000 a year. >> Yeah. My guess is that >> I was ready to go back to school to become a teacher of the deaf. >> Yeah. That my guess >> it's not a lot of courses. >> Yeah. My guess is that person is not >> um you know is not somebody who works um like or something >> full time. No, I mean I don't know that the credentials are that uh it's a probably a bit of a supply and demand issue >> that there aren't many of them. >> There are not. >> Um and the I'd say the demand is relatively limited too. So >>

137it's not but we've seen an increase in our district. >> Yeah. So you know at Darcy we have like five students that >> and one more coming and then we have other students in the district that that don't necessarily require that direct instruction that a teacher of the deaf might provide but do provide do need the consultation to help support them in the gen settings because many of them are in the gened setting. Um but um you know with that increasing number you know we've been able to meet that need using con consultants um and I but I think as we watch that you know if this is a trend that's going to continue to increase we at some point we may want to consider hiring our own teacher of the death. So, when we

138talk about a governor on the system, $425 an hour feels a bit like gouging to me. Um, I don't know the circumstances enough, but it certainly seems out of whack. >> Yeah. I mean, >> and so, you know, that's part of what we're pushing at. I could see it if it's a, you know, a person doing their own consulting business and they did it as a oneh hour one time, but like the equivalent of $850,000 a year for government, whether it's municipal or state or whatever, it's just outrageous. [laughter] >> Agreed. >> Because I can't believe >> when there's only one place you can go to get that, >> what am I going to do? I have a question about um that technology for assessment and the iPads that that's mandated. >> Um it's the

139state doesn't mandate that we use Pearson and that uh for our testing. But the tests that are um reputable and that are um provide us with the information that we need to program for our students, the majority of the licenses are are held by Pearson. And Pearson's doing away with their kits and moving to that online platform. And that's why so like our cognitive testing, our speech and language testing, um our achievement testing is on there, some of the OT, some of um trying to think of some other areas. >> So, so we we can't do a lot of shopping around. >> No, no, they kind of have the invice. >> Yeah. [laughter] I I have to say I always find this part of our budget the most frustrating because we're doing such good work

140and it's very obvious every time you report to us. Um >> but there's nothing we can do about these costs. >> Right. Right. It's true. And you know >> we have we have to we have to somehow force them into our budget. And our budget is always lean and there's no wiggle room. I just, you know, and that's why I just, you know, it is what it is. And that's the saying I've used in my office for the past five years. It is what it is. We deal with it. We do what we have to do. Um because we have to provide the appropriate programming for our students. We have to provide them for what they need. Um and and it costs >> and and you know >> and we do it we do it

141very you know I have to say we're very good about looking at the resources we have like when we when we found ourselves looking showing those numbers to be increasing okay I haven't come to you for a special ed teacher in quite a while uh but we looked about we made some adjustments we adjusted places we made some cuts in different you know we were able to move things around where we were able to reallocate those resources and uh and we've done that, but now we've gotten to the point where I can't reallocate it anymore. I I've run out of that. >> Well, thank you for thank you for presenting this material. >> I hate to be the Debbie Downer after Mrs. Solano. >> You were nice and upbeat about our accomplishments, so I [laughter]

142I appreciate that, too. if you want to go bang your things over there. >> I just have a couple of >> quick questions. Um, do you have any general feel for >> just qualitatively like are are IEPs generally initiated by families that feel that they need them? like, you know, my my son had one for speech uh and it was sort of driven from preschool and and issues at at a private preschool versus something identified in the classroom >> that you know then the the school takes on and says, "Hey, this is what we think is best." So, um I I couldn't quantify whether more come from one or the other, but uh you know, we have our SRBI process that's in place. And so, as teachers are working with students and they're providing those

143tiered interventions, um so sometimes the referral comes from that process. Um sometimes the referral does come from families. Um so uh you know whether I I think that a majority of ours do come from our staff as they work with students. Uh but um but we do tend to get our share of parent referrals and then you know and then we work with families to determine whether or not it's it's appropriate whether it's you know the student is eligible. >> And that's the second part of my question. Do you have any feel for once it gets to that step? I mean how often are they approved? I don't know if that's the right word to use. approved or denied for an IEP. >> You know, when I I looked at that data actually when I

144was the elementary supervisor um a while ago and what I was finding is that um and I can't remember exact numbers, so don't quote me on this, but what I found was the m out of the parent referrals or the family referrals, not a lot of them were coming to fruition with a full IEP. Um did the parent have concerns? parent had some concerns, but sometimes once we teased that out um or the student was provided SRBI, the student was not eligible. >> Okay. Um and then my last question, maybe this one is for you, Dr. Solen, I don't know. Um, but we, you know, I've seen for a long time Cheshure saying our, uh, expenditure per student or, you know, do we do something similar on the special ed side or is that just

145too complicated to do because of the line items? I mean, we seem to stack up generally well against the budget as a whole. Do we know how we do >> with that same metric on special ed? It's funny you say that because I was just taking a look at at Glastonberry out of curiosity with you know 5673 students on their PPE 851 um students if you consider that they have a prevalence rate of 15%. I don't know that to be sure. I didn't look it up, but ballparking it. Um, you know, how do you afford to outplace 80 students at $140,000 a pop? Like, it's got to be really hamstring the rest of their budget. And they're an interesting scenario because they're in the middle of the DUI PPE. You know, I don't know what

146region 15, you know, who spends roughly $4,000 more per student than we do. I don't know what their outplacement numbers look like. It is really hard to know because, you know, I I guess we could look at special ed teachers. There's probably a way to get a an estimate, but there's no way to really know apples to apples how much people are spending on special ed versus one another. You know, um Emily talked about the uniform chart of accounts, which doesn't exist here. I could do it that way. you know, I could then have a much much better estimate, but um there's no real definitive way to know. >> Yeah, the DUI the Durb B data that I used, I went back to this was from the 23 24 because I pulled it off of

147the annual performance statement that the state provides. And the reason and it's the most updated that they have available to the public. Um, and the reason I went off of that and I didn't go off of the edite data, which is more current, is because the way it was described as that pool of out of district placements. Um, it seemed like it was going to include those schools that um that Marlene had mentioned that we also pay some fees towards and that is like your sound school, Lyman Hall. When a student with special needs attends one of those schools, those outofd district schools that are like a vinyl tech, um a Wilcox, um some of those schools will charge us for any extra special needs um services that the student needs. So we pay tuition

148or we pay fees towards special education services for the sound school, for Lyman Hall. Those are two that stick out in my mind and that's chunked in with that outofd district placement number that is coming up on edite. So because I wasn't able to tease that out I went with the annual performance reports that come out just on special ed to get these numbers the derby. >> Yeah. what Matt was saying sort of jog my memory about some thoughts I've had over the past six or seven years that I've been a parent in the elementary schools which is um you know I've I've talked to parents who've sort of suggested to me that if there's a problem between a student and a teacher ask for an IEP and um >> I'm not saying that it

149happens but I'm not saying that you approve an IEP but I have heard this from parents and the concern that I have is what I've heard with these stories is while I understand a real benefit in setting standards in the classroom, I also have felt that there's times when teachers should just be able to make decisions without having the standards set. And I'm not going to get into any particular examples, but I definitely have had discussions in particular situations and I'm like this this doesn't um I would love it if I I I won't say I'd love it. I think there'd be a real benefit to the extent you could consider providing the teachers with a little bit more flexibility um when certain situations come up. And and I I've never dug into the details

150on this. It's getting very personal really to take it any further than speaking generally about it but just as a >> a comment >> but I hope there's an understanding that you know teachers are able to differentiate and that is happening in the classrooms. So even though you know we yes we do have standards and we do um provide you know in the in we provide a lot of coaching for our teachers to on how to how to provide that instruction in the classroom. the teacher does have the ability to differentiate. They have the ability to decide on small groups like, you know, if they're noticing there's a group of students that are struggling with a certain um skill, they could easily pull that group to a small to a table and work with them

151doing that. So, um, so I I I don't agree with the statement that they're locked into doing something just one way because they certainly that's the craft of teaching is being able to take that standard, take that instruction, read the room, read your students, look at your data, and make those decisions. >> And our teachers certainly, we provide a lot of training to give them the skills to do that. We're not stopping them. We wouldn't stop them from doing that. >> Okay. >> Thank you, >> Robin. I just uh I always I'm going to echo what Ann said. You know, this is the part of the budget presentation that I do appreciate because you put a lot of thought into this. Um and I, you know, I'm going to miss the caliber of your expertise

152as well as the team, too. So, um I do have a couple questions if you will. There was a lot of talk obviously last year about regionalizing services and again you guys do an exceptional job of trying to bring inhouse those services and so forth. Any further you know news on that at all with you know we obviously have aces but I I know they were trying to build on that >> um concept of regionalizing. So, um, I haven't had any conversations with any of the surrounding districts. Um, but I guess I could share an example of our transition program at QU. Um, you know, that is a program that not every district has and we're very very fortunate that we're loc we have the location on the QU campus. Um it is a program

153that in the past we have taken students from other districts in and they pay a tuition to us. It's a very low amount. It was a very low amount and um we had the room to take those students in. So that, you know, to me that kind of speaks to regionalizing a little bit. Um that you're able to take in students from other districts into a special program and you know, but the situation that we're running into is that we're limited in the number of students we can take in that program. It's 12. That's QU puts that cap on us and because of room, you know, but having the room for us and um and we've been filling it pretty close to capacity. Um, so we have not been able to take in the several

154years that I've been director, we have not been able to take any students into that program um, from another district. Um, and I I see that also with, you know, I think of our intensive ed programs that we have, they're at capacity. Um, and so I I you know, I'm not I haven't had conversations at this point with other districts in regionalizing something like that. It's ongoing for sure. >> As far as the lines are concerned, um I know Marlene started with you know the 6% including instructional. Is the request for the hardware and the software part of that Marlene or is it going to go into the pupil services line? >> The technology of the Chromebooks. >> Yeah. Noads. >> The iPads. I mean, excuse me. Yeah. Uh, Emily, you know what >> line

155the iPads are? >> 732. The capital equipment. >> Oh, okay. 732. >> Do we have a estimate of I know you mentioned 150 to 200 for at least the software. We have a hardware cost estimate. M. >> Yeah, it was in my It's either 4600 or 5600. I'm getting why I said on Tuesday, but that was >> so then 200 for the yearly cost of the software then >> at best >> what we're looking for is to the in this case the iPads that we're looking for are to use for assessment. >> Yeah. >> So that um we're already uh on the platform the Pearson platform which we do pay a yearly rate for. >> Okay. Um and but we're in need of the additional iPads in order to um special ed teachers to have

156access to them to be able to test their students. Got it. >> So the licenses are all bulked already. >> It's going to be all bulked together for the district >> and I think in the past that you provided us and if you can moving forward um kind of a breakdown of the disability types >> uh and the number of students you know autism, ED, ID I can tell you that it hasn't changed from the year before then when I have [clears throat] shared that you know obviously the majority of our students are learning disabled um but it's closely followed by autism >> and that you know it's the autism spectrum disorders because we have students that are in our intensive ed programs that require a lot of support and maybe even non-verbal um all

157the way and at the other end we have our high functioning students with autism that are very very bright but they struggle in the social world and um and and but they're still they require an IEP for supports. Yeah, I'm sorry. Just to provide a little more detail to that response on edite um you can see the prevalence rate within Cheshure the state how it's changed over time or um other districts the of one when you consider 100% of our students who are identified for special education services 31.8% of those students are identified for a learning disability. 23.8 are identified for an other health impairment and 18.5 are identified for uh autism. 18% of our special education population. Uh that is that's 18.5% in >> and they don't break out the OI do they don't.

158That's why I'm asking you kind of it up if unless there's identifiable obviously if the numbers are so low that you know >> but I'd love to see also what the dyslexia numbers look like too. >> Yep. Yeah. When I jump on to uh CT sets right on the opening screen. >> Yeah. >> It breaks it all out. >> Yeah. If you could send us that that'd be great. Thanks. >> Sorry. We can now age more of our children. So you're going to see that might change that might be >> yeah expected but because the state site doesn't delineate those specific disability types >> and I and I think a lot of directors including myself and including Kim applaud the state for making that change >> because it is so hard when they're very young

159to tease out what is the disability in many cases and sometimes you'll see students at a very young age uh qualify under one classification but down the road it's um it's not what they're um what's impacting them. It's a different classification. >> Thank you, Roman. >> Just to comment on that, I I do think though that if um the age didn't go up, >> those developmentally delayed kids would have been diagnosed with someone something else that maybe didn't really identify what their needs are. Yes. So, we're lucky at that. And I also wanted to go back, Robin, and and Tim, I apologize, but I couldn't really hear your question. Um, so I got my Irish up, you know, I just had to do that. But, um, so looking at your results on page 25, I

160mean, I think they're really outstanding. I think we should acknowledge, um, you know, high need students ranked third in our DUI. I mean, that's really incredible, which speaks to what general ed is doing along with special ed being pushed in and the whole inclusion and time with non-disabled peers because on your annual performance report, I know those always run >> careers behind >> backwards. But anyways, um but you're meeting requirements. So time with non-disabled peers is what it should be, right? The amount of time kids are included is what it should be. So we're doing all the right things with general ed working together with special ed because of these results. So I just want to compliment you and the principles and the whole department and what you've been doing here because these even the

161exiting of special education um >> you know is a is a good sign. I do know um as Jeff said that the committee I'm working on is called the Bergen Committee. Um don't ask me what the letters stand for but uh we are looking at um the cost of out of district placements um and they're talking about a cap. I will say that the um out of district placements have um are there in the forefront talking about you know their needs too. But um I I think everyone understands that some of the answer will be around something that I think um when we went up to Hartford last year, we spoke about is having uh regional programs with our resk with ACES to bring kids back into district where we would get tuition like if

162Prospect sent someone to us or something like that. So this um these committees are looking at those kinds of um solutions because they recognize that the the districts can't sustain $180,000 plus 12,000 for transportation and then you know paying >> for other needs a pair professional or whatever. So, I I don't know where it'll go, but there's looking at um special ed case loads, um RTI, MTSS kind of stuff, tiered, you know, instruction. And a big one is the um is the tuition out of district tuition. So, >> hopefully, >> yeah, >> because the the legislation that came out talked about all these issues, but there was no, you know, like the next step. So this commission is now supposed to come up with next steps. >> So because of this, this is what >>

163you know we need to do or at least bring it out in the open again because you know >> Yeah. >> But anyways, >> okay. Any other questions? Before I go, I just I have to give a shout out to my two supervisors. Christina Sherwood's here tonight with us, who uh is our elementary supervisor. She runs between the four elementary buildings with the 300 plus students on IEPs um and does a phenomenal job uh working in in work with our families and our staff and our administrators and Marie Broadway who's our secondary supervisor again who really really was instrumental in a lot of the work that was done at Dodd and at the high school and helping those math scores at the middle school. So, I like to give kudos to them and and make

164sure that uh I I make sure I share with you all their hard work. They're a great team. >> Thank you, Rob. And >> thank you. >> With that, >> well, that concludes our presentations. Um, >> can we ask >> I know that we had some um questions. We received uh email questions late uh tonight before the meeting and know board members have additional questions. um you know those we could answer questions now but certainly um our next meeting is scheduled for January 20th uh which is the publicformational meeting and u certainly questions there but uh also board members response to the presentation to um potentially even make recommendations to adjustments to for the budget as well. >> The public information meeting that's just opening up the public >> Tuesday. Yeah. Well, certainly welcoming the

165public to make comments on the >> Yeah. I'm just wonder uh if the public had been here, I don't know if we I haven't really seen I've seen administrators here. I haven't seen a lot of the public. I'm just curious if there is any have you heard from That's not to say that you're not members of the public, too. Um, >> one. Sorry. Sorry. >> Thank you. >> I apologize. >> Um, I'm just wondering, we haven't really discussed much about making any changes to your budget at this point, >> right? >> And without that, I'm not expecting to have a lot of people, >> right, >> show up. They may because the 8%. >> Um, >> yeah. >> But I have a feeling when we talk more about actual changes when we get more feedback.

166>> Yeah. So, we have the meeting scheduled um the 20th to talk about any of those adjustments. Um and if you know if the board were to adopt a budget that night that you that's the earliest that they could I mean obviously you could make a motion right now if you wanted to but realistically the 20th we have a business meeting on the 22nd uh preceded by a legislative meeting um of the hole with our local representatives and then if needed again on January 29th we would be back here u unfortunately we can't meet that Tuesday because we have the uh Cheshire Foundation concert that night but then on the 29th we'd be back for adoption if needed as well with that do I have a motion to adjurnn Thank you, Tim. Second, Matt. Thank

167you. All in favor? >> Thanks, everyone. Thanks for coming out.