001okay wow nice look okay tim all right uh let me see so where are we uh i'm looking for i have a um so call to order uh call the meeting to order uh roll call okay i will handle that mr white here is ham here ms harrigan here okay mr white you do have a quorum and your entire legislative committee here thank you um stand for the pledge okay give me one second can we see the flag not yet i don't see anything myself right now good pledge allegiance to the flag the flag the united states of america and to the republic for which it gets under god indivisible with liberty and justice thank you thank you for that so um basically just uh i had some ideas on things that wait a second
002i had some ideas on things that uh from from my perspective possibly from the board's perspective might be beneficial to us um some the state i'm guessing will not agree with uh so the purpose of this meeting for people who are watching so this is the legislative committee and the idea is that as a board of ed committee you know we discuss legislative issues and how they could impact us um and so i just had so pulled together pulled together an agenda um and there's some items that uh i'd like to discuss tonight that could impact the cheshire schools and see if there's anything that we could do to work with the state on these things so the first item on the agenda is prevailing wage the mailing the prevailing wage law is so vin
003cut me off if i go off here or get anything wrong basically the prevailing wage law i believe is a law which requires uh native connect and government entities within the state of connecticut so municipal or state have to pay prevailing wage what is the prevailing wage the prevailing wage is basically the union wage and generally speaking unions get paid more than say private contractors and so the prevailing wage law has a has an effect of increasing the cost of construction when in the absence of the prevailing wage law the cost you know could very well be lower if you could just go with a private contractor at their rates is that a fair way to describe it then yes the prevailing wage is essentially it's a schedule published by this by the state every
004year that we're required to pay as a labor rate for any renovation construction project a hundred thousand or more uh and new construction is a million dollars or more and um the rough estimate that's used is your prevailing wage adds about 20 to the labor rate um had you not had to pay prevailing wage so i guess so i actually asked the town manager about it and the number the number he said as a rule of thumb was double the labor wages are you i'm just curious just to be clear on it is that possible or 20 of the total cost that might be half of the labor cost yeah well i don't want to put out anything there that i don't know to be accurate but you know what we use as the labor
005rate it adds about 20 to the labor rate had you not had to pay prevailing wage okay okay so do you know so i'm curious do you happen to have an idea why this really is in my mind right now is we're talking about school modernization we're talking about numbers that go into the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars so we so we're above new construction if it is new construction it's going to be above a million dollars so the prevailing wage law would um be enforced so i'm wondering do you know as the rule of thumb that you were using uh so what's the total what's the total proposed cost for the schools right now the two schools that are it's 88 million isn't it uh that would be the net cost to
006the town so the project value is over a hundred million dollars right okay projects for two labor you know labor is a component of that it's not the entire cost obviously can i ask a couple questions yeah you can you can go so what percentage of it let's just take a renovation project for example the new roof a job what percentage do you estimate labor will come what typically do you see is it 40 of the cost of the project it depends on what it is so i don't want to you know i don't want to guess at it i mean i we could probably put together some numbers and it's going to vary depending on you know what type of work is being done and the prevailing wage rate does vary by uh type
007of work being done you know there's a prevailing wage rate for roofing a prevailing wage rate for you know masonry work so it it varies and that schedule is published um you know while we're speaking here i can you know i can just pull up an example and show you and it it's created by town so just a thought i know we're never going to get the the legislature to agree to abandon prevailing wage maybe and i think this has been an approach taken in in years past we look to um raise those ceilings so instead of a hundred thousand dollars maybe we asked for a 500 000 750 000 cap um and for new construction maybe we go to 5 million something that yeah that um recognizes the reality of of the law yeah
008i did share um and i just like to mention that the town council did adopt its legislative agenda in uh december and what they are suggesting in in their proposal is that the renovation project threshold go up to 500 at least five hundred thousand dollars from the current 100 000 and they they didn't mention the new construction at a million because the legislature did raise that from 400 000 to the million dollars it's currently at back in 2017. inflation's been pretty bad i wouldn't be i miss remus and or i don't think we're asking much to reconsider raising that again so i'm just i just want to put this out there i mean this the way i see this is it is the the benefit is if you're a union member and i totally respect
009the union members and the cost is borne by the taxpayer and i just think this is a huge this is a huge issue for cheshire right now because we're talking about school modernization and so even if it was on the very conservative side the numbers we're talking about is in the millions of dollars in additional costs that we're going to be paying uh if we go to referendum and presumably prevailing wages in place we're talking about millions of dollars could be tens of tens of millions of dollars maybe i mean at least over three phases could i ask a question tim maybe it's worth um maybe it's worth looking into uh what other communities are interested in this topic as well i mean cheshire going at about something all on our own is is not
010as powerful as if there are you know all the communities we can't be the only ones who are interested in in changing those caps i guess yeah no i yeah i agree absolutely it's not so much a question it's a kind of a comment it's a good suggestion i mean build a coalition and um and who i don't know if there's a is there a professional association out there that like school construction laborers association i'm thinking this would probably be either it would be either cabe or ccm vin do you know if either looked at this at all yeah i mean the prevailing wage rate is always you know a legislative priority for many of the organizations i can't speak specifically to caps okay where their position is right now but you know this is
011not an uncommon topic for discussion yeah i think i mean to be totally frank i i would like something to i would like it to change to get those numbers up um the thing that just has me really concerned about it is we've got school modernization that we're talking about we just voted on it last night we're talking about like you just said what into 100 million for the total cost including the state funding and stuff we're talking about a lot of money and the prevailing wage will certainly be based on what you said in the millions of dollars on phase one it could be in the tens of millions of dollars um as a you know an increased cost of the taxpayers purely by way of state law that could be changed if our
012legislators chose to change it or you know if the legislature collectively did the governor agreed um so i really wanted i am interested in having a change but my goal is to put this out there in the public purview because particularly because we've got school modernization right now we're talking about big numbers so are we in in agreement that we would we would stand with the town council and adopt their language as well i i mean i'd be comfortable with that i would go even higher but i'd be comfortable with that at a minimum have they crafted something already yeah uh yes yes it was shared with uh carol sharer with the agenda so there were two documents there was the agenda and she also included the town council's legislative recommendations for 22. i could
013send it again do you want me to read it is that necessary yeah i mean i don't think so maybe somebody could share their screen i got it i can do it if i can figure this out give me a second okay uh i'm just checking out the 2022 state agenda legislative agenda there's nothing in here about i don't think i can share screen right i got it face i tried um oh present now i got it oh okay it's going to ask you to present your entire screen you could select that then hit share and then just go to the screen you want to share there you go can you guys see it [Music] no it's still coming up i think it's still loading it looks like it's stalled maybe yeah i agree with
014your hand on that all right well at least figured this out i think that the gist of it i have it up the gist of it is uh what vin said in 2017 new construction got bumped from 400 000 to a million right and however while the threshold for prevailing wage for new construction is a million renovation projects has remained at 100 uh dot dot dot therefore we again advocate for an increase to the threshold for renovation projects to at least 500 000 and also recommend that both thresholds for new construction renovation should be indexed annually to reflect the in the effect of inflation so i see no reason why we should very veer off of what the town has already decided on and it only makes sense for us to come together on that
015statement no i mean i'm fine with that i would go further but if we have if we have consensus on that then that's a good thing i'm happy with that again i think again part of this is i want i just want the public to understand it because i think that um it is it's a law that could change right and it's just huge numbers for us right now because of where we are i i would i would like to see higher thresholds but uh if we want to present a position or you know we want to be in solidarity with the if we're going to be more effective by standing with the town council on this one then i'm okay with the language okay um and i'm not just so everyone knows i'm not
016planning on calling for a vote tonight i mean obviously either you can if you want but this is just for discussion is what i'm thinking getting a sense of where we are um so uh if it's okay move on to the next item i think we should move through them if we're just it's quite a list you put together there yeah so let's move through it so i think this next one is relatively simple i'm not basically state law pertaining to referenda my point on this is that to some extent our referendum questions are governed by state law and also our referendum questions having been on the council i do believe that there is an incentive to come up with a small number uh if you want something to pass generally speaking it makes sense
017to me that a lower number is more likely to pass than a bigger number and in a certain way that incentivizes reducing the number and cutting things out for example we're doing school modernization we want to have a lower number let's take the insulation out of the ceiling it doesn't something like that wouldn't make any sense so all i'm thinking about is if the if there was more flexibility in terms of uh referendum wording that would be a good thing and it is i think it's partly governed by the charter it's also partly governed by the state it gets into legal nuance that i can't grapple with i've tried and it sounds like legal gibberish to me but my point is that uh more flexibility with referendum wording would be valuable so i just wanted
018to mention that okay is does this require a legal uh change in the law that i think it i think it could yeah i think it could yeah i i don't know the details of it that well i'd probably have to talk to a lawyer about it to even understand some of the stuff but okay um and one more question is this a board issue or is this a town council issue i mean who's putting forth the i think this would i think i mean it's both but the town is puts together the referendum yeah the thing for me is it comes back to school modernization right now this is like i don't feel like the board can be decoupled from some of this stuff because of that um school construction faith i think you
019would mention this one maybe the funding for it funding rating i think the point of this was do we foresee any changes in the construction formula and um it also if i we can actually combine here um because there's similar themes with the state pension issue which is just below it in both cases um there have there has been talk about adjusting formulas to um to address um concerns about inequities within the funding system between say alliance districts and wealthier districts and ben i don't know if you've heard any of this but it relates i've read a few things about lawmakers um particularly concerned about pensions um in making uh wealthier towns contribute more to the pensions to offset the fact that they can pay a higher salary than say a water but we can
020pay a higher salary than waterbury can supposedly um same two with construction are they going to adjust those so that the waterbury district gets more than we do which they already do but i mean there's there's those are all proposals at this point and you know the state did you know uh increase well we know that teachers pay in to their own retirement plan the state did increase the amount that teachers pay by one percent into their retirement plan that's probably about three or four years ago um i i don't know that that's open that's going to be proposed again legislatively and i hadn't heard about you know what you're referring to faith that they're going to try and change the formula how to to fund the state pension okay well um it was it
021was an article that i had read i believe in ct mirror and it may not even be able to get onto the agenda this this time around so if it's not then we don't at this point need to add it i guess because they are very tightly controlled in what they can introduce as as bills this time around aren't they the second session particular session isn't it mostly addressed the short session uh legislation or bills get introduced by the committee chairs i think and this is the short session the long session anybody can introduce it so you're probably going to have more legislation introduced in a long session yeah and and the focus primarily has to be on budget doesn't doesn't it or is that am i wrong i don't think so if if it
022has budget implication it just gets a fiscal note yeah because they do a two year they i think it's a two year budget the state actually does right okay okay i'm willing to take that off okay um yeah yeah with regard to the state pension i uh i don't really want to have that get tweaked too much or a huge cost get put on to the town all of a sudden that's my point i don't want the talent i don't want the cost imposed upon us that's all um next item here is existing or potential mandates impacting education faith you had mentioned some of it also leslie had mentioned something to me that you probably know better than i do which is the k-8 curriculum and there's so that that's just one of them but
023i'll just mention it right now it's further down the list but there's uh there's a change to to create a model k through eight curriculum yes right now it's optional and i'm i'm comfortable with optional stuff but i don't care for mandates so wait just in fact tim some background it has not been developed yet this was in the implementer bill um at the end of the session last time and it is um section 374 effective july 1st 2021 not later than january 1st 2023 the department of education in collaboration with the state education resource center shall develop a modical model curriculum for grades kindergarten to grade eight inclusive that may be used by may be used by local uh and regional boards the content of the model curriculum shall be rigorous age appropriate aligned
024with curriculum guidelines approved by the state board of education and in accordance with the statewide subject matter content standards adopted by the state board pursuant to section 10-4 of the general statutes be in accordance with blah blah blah um and it gives the language and it shall include and integrate throughout such model curriculum at least the following a the subject matter prescribed of the general statutes and gives the statutes um b native american studies c asian american and pacific islander studies d lesbian gay bisexual transgender queer and other sexual orientations and gender identity studies e climate change f personal finance management and financial literacy g the military service and experience of military veterans age civics and citizenship including instruction in digital citizenship media literacy that provides students with the knowledge skills necessary to safely ethically
025responsibly and effectively use digital technologies to create consume digital content communicate with others and participate in social civic activities principles of social emotional learning that was i and j racism it talks about how circ will develop the curriculum and consultation with persons and organizations with subject matter expertise in the model curriculum they may utilize existing and appropriate public or private materials personnel and other resources that goes on and said the state department shall make the model curriculum available to the local and regional boards of education and to the departments on the department's website and this shall be submitted not later january 15 2003 so that's what we're talking about so can i ask a question about this so is the purpose for developing this model curriculum so that districts have some guidelines or language to
026go by if they delve into any of those areas that you that you mentioned um good question it doesn't state its purpose it says its model and says districts may and i just i think i think the concern is that this does not become another curricular mandate that's i mean that's my concern i mean if it's out there as an option that's the law right now as it's optional but my understanding is that there are people who want to turn it into a mandate and i just disagree with that i mean i don't have any problems with it as it's currently states because i think it's a good thing to be developing some guidelines around all of those issues uh to the extent that there will be there are districts who will want to pick
027and choose some of these things and then you know then there's models to um refer to sure yeah no my understanding is that's what's happening right now is it's it's supposed to be getting crafted um for to serve as a model yeah to serve as a model yeah but it's it's an option it's it's not a mandate that's the difference and and it goes to the um broader issue and and we've talked about this i think with the last time with the last go around with the budget is just the number of mandates that the legislature continues to impose on districts that cost us you know a lot of money that takes away from instruction actual instruction and i i guess my message to the legislative uh delegation would be stop really you know let
028us catch up we've got three four five pages of single space tight you know single spaced list items of things that we have to comply with because it's very easy for the legislature to impose this upon us and we have to come up with some way of implementing it or be in non-compliance so i guess the general question is how do we how do we get them off this idea of continually mandating things that we have to do and that's a question anyone wants to answer i mean in some respects districts won't do stuff unless you do mandate it and there is stuff that needs to be done and and it costs money i agree with that but you know all the special ed all the special ed stuff for example you can't let some
029school districts just say it costs too much we're not doing that um it's a broad brush that i think many of these they are very general with their mandates and it embodies i agree with that as well so you know i think we're not we're not living you know in the early 1900s i think we all have a social conscience i think our town is equitable now if another district doesn't comply i'm sorry i don't i don't mean to be cruel that's not cheshire's problem we've got to concern be concerned about what cheshire is doing without for our students and ensure they have a safe environment and i don't think we're going to skirt corners or or in any way stiff our kids and i don't understand how a bunch of folks up in hartford
030can tell us what we need to do to keep our schools safe and our kids safe and our kids educated so i don't know i guess i'm on an autonomy kick but for me it's just for me it's a general principle i just don't want any additional mandates i support i mean i support special ed um but i guess where i'm coming from is i i don't we i don't want any new mandates making you know making jeff and vins and marlene's the whole school system their lives even more difficult um and it's not to say that it's not without a good intention but it does complicate things when you get mandates put down on you so that's that's where i'm coming from on it i wonder if um if we could uh change our
031focus a little bit and and think about looking at some of the past mandates and if there's anything that's obsolete stuff that should be taken off the rolls um at this point i mean it seems like that's the legislature's job to do that but i mean they do have a wonder if there are president oh i'm frozen you're good now all i was gonna say is they do have a legislative review committee that is at least in theory supposed to look at that stuff and repeal it when it becomes obsolete but i know vin is does anything come to mind for you for stuff that would just make your life easier if it because it really doesn't have any point to it at this point well sorry i'm gonna find it's just if you haven't
032no it's okay i'm just gonna bring up um you know one of the items that we always present in a in our budget hold on one second it's those pages yeah so this this is from last year we're actually in the process of updating it we'll be presenting this tuesday so this is this is a fairly comprehensive list it's it's not a hundred percent but some of the items on here you know the basic things you mentioned special education student transportation you know adult ed you know those are all items that yeah i just don't see those changings some things did change over the years like the you know this is the patient up at the top here if you could see where i highlighted the first item the patient portability the aca act a
033lot of those provisions have sunseted so it's it's not quite costing us what we were concerned it was going to cost and over the years what i've done is believe it or not i have taken items off these lists that no longer apply but for the most part items that come onto the mandate list don't come off this slide is the one that will update for tuesday night's presentation but you could see here you know some of the things that we the bolded ones are the ones that were added to the list last year so we know the connecticut state minimum wage went up that's not education specific but it certainly affected us the two-hour sexual harassment training for all employees we did complete that last year obviously the the pandemic requirements we put it
034on here as a mandate because they were certainly guidelines mandated by the state and you know i can't say anything specific comes to mind with you know with mandates that come off the list i i will mention uh because this has just come up and it's not a state mandate i stopped sharing the screen but you know i'm sure everyone's aware that the federal government uh has required you know that um individuals be employed be reimbursed for any home test kits that they purchase well as far as we know and this is being investigated you know the the onus is now on us as an employer if an if an employee who has health coverage with us bought a home test kit they'll now go through the claims process and they'll be reimbursed for that
035so if there's no money that will reimburse our medical benefits through cigna then that essentially becomes an unfunded mandate right or wrong i mean i'm not objecting to the fact that you know we want people to be able to test but it is going to add potentially a cost burden and so we'll talk about that a little bit on tuesday night tom kwalczyk from usi a benefits consultant and i talked to him about this question today and he was already aware of it and on it so the mandates you know come from different different levels of government you know i just don't expect them to stop coming you know my personal opinion is if there's a mandate it would be helpful if it comes with the dollars associated fund the mandate but at the end
036of the day there's only you know the taxpayers pay for all mandates whether it's funded by state or federal government or or locally see that's this what you just mentioned though is like it's one of the reasons why i just generally don't like mandates and that's independent of whether i agree with something or not the testing we have i think it's i think it's very valuable for us to be doing it but i would prefer if there was no mandate and you you know sat down and discussed it wait how do we do this what makes sense we know we have to do it what can we make happen how can we make it happen and then you also configure then you're also planning it before you before you make all this stuff happen you
037know how many staff you have how many teachers how many kids if they're on the medical plan you're gonna know how many kids they have and things like that you can start to come up with numbers on this stuff but that's why i prefer to be optional from a state perspective and then we're going to do it anyway but just not have it mandated and we can we can make it happen so ben back in september you sent me that document from shipman um what is it shipment and jimin and goodwin yeah i put together a comprehensive list of all mandates um the couple of years old at least it's 25 pages long i i wish i could share my screen so you could see this i mean it's just yeah i don't know it's
038uh it's it seems extreme so i you know we're not going to be able to i just would like very much to imp impress upon our legislators that just because they want it you know they're they're passing a bill puts another layer of expense and administrative burden on a district that again potentially takes away from our primary duty which is teaching these kids and so not going to see any bill come forward that says we'll no longer mandate but i i would just like them to be aware and sensitive too that was my point in putting that on um yeah so the yeah the the mandates are widespread um but i think we could probably just convey to our legislators you know in general and there are in general that you know mandates are not
039great um and uh they're burdensome yeah there's there's some uh yeah so we touch we've touched on a few of them and a few of them are specifically i'll just mention them right now um the next items on the agenda that are more specific they actually came the next two items came from jeff uh so vin i'm not sure if you'll want to speak to him at all but uh number one i'm trying i'm jumping around i've got a lot of uh school indoor air quality so then um correct me if i miss anything on this but the the concern that uh jeff has with this mandate it basically says we have to meet a certain our schools are old and this indoor air quality rule says that if we don't meet certain air quality
040standards over the course of two years the school gets closed so this is the this is the proposed legislation and i'm not saying that you know it's good to you know we need to address the air quality but supply chain issues everything else we're talking about school modernization we're going in the in the right direction i think i don't want to see our schools get close to all of a sudden that that to me would be a big problem we kind of saw that i don't think anything happens with the state all of a sudden well no well with kovid we saw it all of a sudden we're literally we're pretty much i know but the state moves a lot more slowly than that anyway but this is this is coming from jeff and he's
041saying this is a concern for him and i support him on it um is it did i kind of yeah i mean in a nutshell what this um proposed legislation would require is all schools to reach a certain level of ventilation standard you know air conditioning you know proper filtration i mean to your point to him because our buildings are old many of them don't have mechanical air systems at all so the cost of doing that in our district where you know only one of our buildings i would say would probably meet the standard that means seven buildings we would have to retrofit it would be i don't even want to say it's millions i i think it would be above 10 million dollars to make our schools compliant so we would we certainly don't
042have funding for that at this point and you know even if the state provides funding i i don't think realistically we can get it done in two years if all schools across connecticut have to upgrade to meet these standards so yeah i i i'm hopeful that you know whatever is proposed is gonna you know wind up with you know the right amount of time and the right amount of dollars to provide a solution that the state you know desires which i don't i don't disagree i mean it is 2022 right our building should you know have full air conditioning and you know you know the best quality ventilation to improve air circulation and a lot of this comes out of the pandemic concerns so it's something that should be done but how it gets done
043and how it's funded is a big question and certainly cheshire if you look at how much funding we received for esser you know the three grants combined was just under two million dollars so trisha did not get enough even to upgrade the hvc in one school and you know the two million dollars has basically been slated to either help and safety or earning loss we'll spend it all on that there won't be anything really left to do any meaningful improvements that the state's looking for in this proposed legislation thank you the next item on the agenda student data privacy and so this is basically there's a lot of laws um we want to ensure our student data is kept private but it gets into contracts and lawyers figuring this stuff out and it's done pretty
044much right now at a town level and what jeff is advocating in support of a particular in support of particular legislation is saying can the state do this because otherwise we have you know 169 towns looking at all these different contracts when you can do it much more simply at a state level it just would make more sense is that a fair way to put it yeah i wish it would have been done that way i think it's what three years in from when the legislation went into effect and so we've done all the legwork that we've needed to do and you know as jeff and you're saying when this got introduced and and passed 169 school districts all had to figure out how to comply and so yeah i mean hopefully this is kind
045of a model for how not to implement you know a uh a requirement like student data privacy um and so legislatively i think this is certainly something that should be mentioned as you know there was a lot of time and effort put in 169 different times to accomplish the same thing and you know i guess what i didn't explain is that most school districts are using a lot of the same software most school districts are using all the google apps most school districts are using power school most school districts you know are using um you know a lot of the software that students share on a common basis so if the state would have done all that legwork would have saved a lot of time and energy for for all of us um let's see
046so ben are we raising that as a comment just an observation um or is there any action we can ask them to undertake what i'm saying is i think we've solved the problem at this point because we are three years in i know we're compliant with the student data um privacy requirements you know as we at this point it's kind of ingrained in what we do so if we're going to go out and purchase a new piece of software you know which we we just did um earlier this year for transportation routing you know we made sure that we incorporated the student um data privacy requirements into the contract so it's kind of embedded in what we do we just saw a nice presentation on that too didn't we faith we did it was very
047good it was excellent it really instilled a lot of confidence in in what we're doing in cheshire public schools anyway but so it's a kind of a cautionary going forward make sure you find a better way to put something like this together if you is that yeah not to send 169 school districts scrambling to accomplish the same thing right okay and i think the legislation was kind of passed in a hurry because of some issues that were going on and concerns that were raised so it was a reactionary piece of legislation in my opinion and not enough time to implement it in a global manner okay um next item on the agenda uh mental health so this is i put this on here um i know this is a concern for jeff the actual the
048the first person i heard this from was liz linehan um so she i'll characterize which what she had conveyed to me which is um then i think i'm gonna get i think i'll get this right the state has been given a bunch of money from the federal government in relation to kovid that money has not been earmarked for anything and liz would like to have some of that money earmarked for to address mental health um particularly with children i think she chairs the children's committee um it goes right to you know the schools when we're talking about children um and so her her interest is in getting funds to uh fund mental health counselors um either uh at any moment in time throughout the school year so we have budgets and we have to we
049have certain details we have to live with our budgets um and make those decisions up front as to how we're going to spend money and so what she wants to do is to pass a law to provide funding for mental health counselors and provide it in a way that school districts don't have their hands tied for other reasons like annual cycles and things like that is somebody typing i hear a bunch of clicking going on i don't know if that's mic or not just to go on that was me just taking some notes oh okay yeah sorry um so that's basically where that's basically where liz i think what liz is looking for and when we meet i definitely don't want to put words in her mouth by any means um when we i think
050tony will put this you know the legislative committee will be on the agenda so we can bring some of this stuff up um and lizzle but i'll make sure that liz is aware of it so she could speak on her own behalf but at least put this out there um generally i look at it you know i i don't like spending lots of money but i do think mental health is mental health particularly in the last two years has been really important and in the absence of knowing where else the money would go i i generally i you know if she wants to say let's spend some of this money on mental health i think it's a perfectly um perfectly reasonable way to spend the money that's already been earmarked to be spent so tim
051was your sense that this is going to be this money though for this mental health for children is going to be allocated somehow through the schools no i think uh the school's the way i would say it is she was saying she would set up a grant system so the school applies for say you know eighty thousand dollars hundred thousand dollars for salary plus fringe for one year it's a durational position i'm thinking i i'm probably going a little bit further than our disc than my discussion with liz but it wasn't i'm pretty sure she said it would not be set up to create a cliff where it's locked in i'm not sure exactly where you know you hire you go out you get 10 counselors and then the next year everybody's gone i think
052she was trying to address that in some way because that's not an ideal situation either but i may very well be going beyond that could have been a conversation with someone else i don't recall uh i i hope that when tony puts this on the agenda she'll be able to speak to it herself i would like if we can and again i'm i'm looking forward to what liz has to say but um give the school the discretion to if we're going to be getting these funds some kind of funds um that it's the school's discretion where they go you know if if we decide that we need uh specialists for instructional remediation i would like to be able to access that money um if we feel we are adequately staffed for mental health um i
053just i don't want to pigeonhole money that may be coming our way yeah no and i understand that i don't know where this i have no idea where this where these funds how much the governor has how much the state has and where it's headed right now um it could be all headed to you know something that you know i would think is totally useless i have no idea um but i mean i i'd like to hear more i'd like to hear more from liz and i i just to be clear i did not even mention this meeting to her tonight it wasn't meant as any sort of slight i just figured she's busy and we could get her to uh we could hopefully she'll come to the full board meeting i mean i did
054speak to her about it and um i think that was the idea that we would try to get our legislative delegation to a board meeting rather than bringing people to committee meetings where we could chat more informally okay um let's see so we already touched on k through eight model curriculum um bullying interpretation and an application of connecticut general statute 10 22 d it's bullying i think some of this stuff if i recall correctly some of this gets to the laws or law that's been passed regarding bullying in recent years where parts of it are vague i don't know if it vindi are you close to are you close to this it's i think maybe it touches on staff or doesn't touch on staff i forget there's i know jeff is jeff knows it really
055well um anyway i think we could i don't think this is any sort of law or anything um i think this is just nudging this will just be nudging our legislators to get clarity on it and i think that's something that they probably could do rather than getting you know whatever it is 76 votes in the house another 18 or 19 votes in the senate uh just to get clarity from the uh administration on these things um the last item just other items i'm gonna throw i i'll i'll ask the two of you in a second if you have anything but one thing that i definitely want to mention is the school bus depot so we have our school bus depot on is that school house road or sandbank i forget stem bank road okay
056yeah it's on sandbank road right right almost right across the road from highland bowl for anybody who doesn't know where it is it is state property and we basically lease it from the state for a dollar every five years but it's still state property it would be easier we would have more flexibility if the town if it was granted to the town um and so i think this is something that we might actually our delegation may be able to advocate for and make happen um so that's something that i i'm a strong believer in i think it's a win for cheshire and i don't see what the loss is for the state because we do everything with it anyway it's just moving the ownership on the books i don't know even if you had anything
057more to add to it yeah i mean just the it's 3.26 you know as tim said we pay a dollar every five years but we do have to renew the lease um you know and it's an administrative process i mean the it's actually the department of corrections that owns or that supervises that piece of property and you know in addition to going through the administrative work of renewing the lease every time we need to make an improvement on the property like we did over the last few years we had to replace the septic system we had to replace the old office trailer which is is you know actually that goes property with a new one um we have to go get approval from the state and they've not been difficult to work with you know
058they they do give us the approvals to do the improvements but it doesn't really make a lot of sense for that property to stay with the department of corrections you know would be more sensible to transfer the property over to the town we're responsible for all costs related to the property and i don't you know believe that the department of corrections is ever going to need that property back so just make it a lot easier for everybody including the state to transfer the property it's not an unusual process for the state to do that in fact where the cheshire food bank is that's also was formerly department of corrections property and it was you know transferred to the ownership of the town so as you said tim i hope that the you know the delegation
059does support this and it can get done it was requested in last year's session it didn't it didn't make it through i don't think it got voted down i just think that they they didn't get this on the legislative dockets so hopefully this year we can get that through this would this would benefit the school buses and benefit the children so maybe this falls on this committee the children's committee i'm confident liz would support this one yeah um yeah no i know it is commonplace because i think we have the town has 10 acres um that mary fritz got for the town years ago and it's it's probably i'm not is it adjacent to the school bus depot or is it separated by parks it's my understanding that that property is you know which is
060route 10 yeah so for people who know it the property i'm talking about is north of jarvis west of route 10. um and yeah there's about 10 acres in there it's basically a big field behind a bunch of arborvities i think a whole row of our bivariates right i think that's exactly where it is yeah and there's that there's also a long um uh on the uh what is it 691 um over toward waterbury there's an exit ramp that got changed a few years back the land where the road hit the state highway had been i believe that got seated to the town okay because they didn't use it anymore and it butted up to the dime savings property so it made sense as from a green space perspective so this sort of stuff happens
061you just need to get the right people paying attention to it i think and it can't happen um is there did either did faith or and did you have any other thoughts on anything are you on you you're a mute faith said you have mine there so i'm okay okay anything you wanted to mention in no i i just was going through uh the cabe agenda their legislative priorities just to sort of see where we stand on things i didn't see anything that wasn't i didn't see anything that we would be want to jump on or anything that we would take issue with so yeah okay okay okay all right i mean i think that's it then um do i have a second or yeah sure all right all those in favor aye thank you
062thank you for uh thank you for talking tonight yes thank you ben and thanks for thanks for being here everybody have a good night