Board of Education 9-2-21

001good evening everyone we're going to call this being the order mr zenski have a roll call for quorum please here thank you carol ask that we please rise for the pledge of allegiance thank you welcome everyone it's nice to see what looks like our entire administration staff our teachers and our valued educators thank you for coming out tonight i know it's an important night we get to get a very important presentation opening the schools so that being said we're going to move around to agenda item 2 which is the update and the fall opening of 2021 so dr solon you want to absolutely forward presentation sure thank you very much mr peregini we're going to step down front for the presentation that we have this evening so i invite the board to come down so

002we can lower the screens and get started thank you check all right thank you again mr paragini uh the opening of schools this year was obviously unlike any experience we've had in the sense that this year for the first time in you know 18 months or so we had all of our students coming back for in-person learning it was incredibly exciting and you're going to see that in some of the pictures as we flip through um we have uh uh overview actually to kick things off from mr maciana to take us through the summer before we get into our opening of school so i'll introduce our chief operating officer mr vin massiana thank you dr sullin good evening everyone i will be presenting from here it's good to have a nice audience and i know

003many of you were at convocation so some of this may seem a little bit familiar you could still laugh at a couple of the slides if you like that's that would be fun so the um presentation that i'm making this evening is really an overview of you know the work that was done over the summer and i just wanted to start with a an introduction i know those of you that work in the school district or where school district operations is a team of over 100 employees that work in the areas that you see there technology facilities human resources fiscal services nutrition transportation benefits budget payroll and so what you see there is just the name of the leadership team but we have a lot of very very very dedicated employees that work in the

004background to make the school district work uh and especially and um you know i always like to emphasize that what we do in school district operations is they're really to support the important work and that is to educate the children of the school district here in cheshire so i'm lucky enough to be the spokesperson for the group but the group does all the hard work each and every day not just over the summer so most of my presentation tonight is in the form of pictures that i took over the summer and as i was going through i did see this particular picture that i took back on august 5th we were having trouble in our central office and so you see if you can read it says trouble and system that's pretty much where school

005district operations thrives you know we we work through the chaos obviously we do a lot of planning and project work but you know things like snow and wind storms water main breaks bus delays technology issues funding requests and issues you know distributing ppe to our staff which is something that was new to us last year and even dealing with mold outbreaks those are the things that we deal with you know on a week to week basis so that's what we do in school district operations as far as the summer is concerned we operate on a slightly different calendar our summer begins the day after graduation so this is a picture of our superintendent dr sullin with one of our graduates that was on june 16th so on june 17th we started in earnest on our

006summer projects i'm not going to bore you with all the details but we do a lot of routine summer maintenance things like painting cleaning the schools inspecting playgrounds fire sprinklers our emergency lighting those all the things that we do each and every summer obviously an important part of what we need to do to have not only safe schools but also clean and healthy schools and then this is a list again i'm not going to walk through the details but this is a list of some not all of the projects that we did by school that essentially were funded through our operating budget and you'll see that we did everything from repairing front step set at the hummuston building to um making improvements at the high school we had installed windows right here when the addition

007on the high school was added in 2000 we had about 80 windows that over time the openers failed so we got those fixed this summer this way those windows can be opened to allow better ventilation well you know which is certainly important in the school at all times but especially so in a pandemic where that air circulation is very very critical to good ventilation again these are more projects by school and then the other type of project that we did this summer like we do every summer larger projects are funded differently through the capital budget so you could see and i'm going to show you pictures of some of these we completed quite a few major projects this one was the ada compliance to upgrade all the doors and the entrances and the classrooms at

008cheshire high school there were well over 100 doors and doorways impacted that was a project that we'd been working on to get approval to develop the plan for many years so you know the check mark here indicates the project's fully completed um you'll see that there's three projects that aren't yet complete the uh there were four schools that we are improving the security entrance building in person traps um that work is almost complete it will be completed there are some delays due to materials delivery having to do with pandemic so we expect that project to be completed at the end of september and then boiler replacements that do a little high at highland are well underway those will also be completed probably towards the end of september certainly in time for heating season so to

009give you uh kind of a more interesting explanation of what we did so this is dodd doolittle cheshire high school and that's highland this was mid-summer around mid-july and you could see that all the entrances were taken apart and and boarded up you'll see here this is principal scott jeffrey okay again this is july 15th you really can't see unfortunately but you know typical of a school principal when it's mid-july and you've got construction going on they start to get very nervous like how are you going to get this school back together and so fast forward to the start of school which was a couple of days ago you could see dodd's entrance is complete doolittles is complete cheshire high school is complete and there's highland and there's mr jeffrey in like the same spot

010i promise you he wasn't there the entire period waiting for us to get done but it did get done so that was you know really key improvement that project we had funding for we had to delay it a year because we couldn't get good bids last summer so it's getting done this summer this is picture of some of the improvements the ada improvements at cheshire high school what we had to do was make the doors compliant so we had to extend the door frames which meant we had to cut into brick in a lot of these cases the doors were upgraded also with security locks so that um teachers from the inside can see if the door is locked it's a push button instead of a key requirement now so as part of the ad

011upgrade ada upgrades we also improve security in those rooms and then this is a picture of the computer lab at doolittle under construction uh this year doolittle has two kindergarten classes that were at darcy in previous years so those kindergarten students we had to essentially take some first grade classrooms make them kindergarten and that has a domino effect throughout the whole school so we had to wind up taking this old computer lab space and we made two offices for the school counselors so that they can work with their students so again important upgrade gun um this is another project too a little this was under construction this was this tile was going up and that is the completed uh boys room at doolittle over on the on the back end of the school so we

012upgraded boys girls bathroom as well as a faculty bathroom pictures don't do it justice necessarily but it looks great this is some of the work these are three new boilers that are going in at doodle doo little uh we increased the redundancy there were two boilers now there's a three boiler system and this is at highland the pads were prepped and those boilers um are in partial completion already we also did some network upgrades these are just pictures of a couple of boxes of aruba switches again we're very reliant on our um our internal network a wi-fi network you know that's how education works these days and so it's very important that we continue to keep our schools upgraded technology-wise and then there are some things that we do that i call them invisible because

013this is a couple of ceilings in the auditorium area of cheshire high school that the ceilings really needed to be replaced but as part of that that project we go up into the ceilings we take out any wiring that's no longer used we've found some ventilation infrastructure that could be removed so we really clean up the guts of the inside of the ceiling and this is a building that you know cheshire high school is over 60 years old so you do get a lot of accumulation of items that you no longer need or no longer needs so they get pulled out so this is what it looks like now it certainly looks better when you walk in you may not know if we didn't do the work why it looks better but it's brighter it's

014cleaner but what i'm saying is importantly everything above the ceiling infrastructure wise is in better shape as well this is another invisible improvement this section of floor this is in what i call the one of the two norton permanent portables this is where the art the art teacher does her work this section of floor was kind of bouncy when they went to fix the floor they realized that it was all rotted uh subfloor and some of the structure in that in that floor area so it had to get ripped out repaired and that's what it looks like today you know including a new water heater and some of this mill work is new as well and i happen to be in the classroom when the teacher returned that day and you know she knew it

015looked better but had no idea that we had to really demolish that subfloor to get it back into condition so i was jumping on that section of floor to prove to her that it was fixed and i didn't fall through which is good and then this is a picture of the doolittle parking lot um looking out towards the entrance into the parking lot front entrance of the school is here just to orient you if you're familiar with doolittle and you could see other than a patch of asphalt that looks looks pretty normal and so what lies beneath is the question and so what lies beneath was one of our toughest projects you know this summer so this is a six thousand gallon underground oil storage tank the one that was in the ground had to

016be removed because it was at the end of its 30-year life so this one that's going in is has a 40-year life i will not have to worry about it i won't be here for the replacement is what i mean um so the answer is what what lies beneath that parking lot you know is a six thousand uh gallon tank but to get it in first of all we hit um a buried concrete barricade we actually couldn't get through it so we had to relocate the section or where the tank was being placed there was an underground water main leak that we believe was leaking for a long time it didn't result from the excavation work so we had to get that repaired then at the back end of the school leading into the cafeteria

017there was a buried loading dock which nobody knew at least nobody that's currently working in the schools ever knew that there was a loading dock at one time it do little and then for good measure of a main electrical feed got severed because it wasn't buried at the required depth it was down only about 15 inches so the good news is the work got done so that's what it looked like in the ground and that's actually what it looks like today so that oil tank is now on the ground and you can see the grass is already growing in that area and the reason i brought this picture up again is because while that was a difficult project board of ed meeting which i gave an update on august 12th what i said to the

018board is that there was no construction project that will prevent schools from opening and so that's true what happened though because we did have one school that couldn't open and that's too little i'm sure that um most of you know that we had to delay the start of doolittle this is dr solon this is a section of chromebooks that was stored in the library there was mold discovered on top of some of the chromebooks that are you know stacked here and in the carts and then exploring it further when it was discovered we found that there were there was mold in other parts of the school and again this picture is not great but this little white edge that you see here this is a student desk if you lift up the desk and look

019at the edge there is some white mold and so there was enough that we felt we could not get it cleaned up in time to get school open we discovered it the day before school was scheduled on august 30th at about 2 p.m so we were able to hire surf pro which specializes in mold remediation this is just a couple of pictures this is a dehumidifier that they um had in in the library but they had them scattered throughout the school this is a commercial hepa air filter and so surf pro came with a very large crew over two days was able to wipe down all the surfaces that needed to be wiped down you know throughout the school including all the books in the library as an example so it was a very extensive

020amount of work that had to get done and it did get done in time so that school was able to open today so what they do is they wipe things down they dehumidify taking the moisture out of the building and then they run these help filters to pull the mold spores out of the air and then the last step that they do is they disinfect the floors so you know the kids were in today we had no reports you know of any issues mold is naturally occurring it does happen from time to time the two things you have to do when you have mold is eliminate the water source in this case it wasn't a roof leak it wasn't a perpetual water issue it was just very high humidity in a closed up building that

021doesn't have um you know forced any kind of forced air movement really so the the eliminating the water was not difficult because it was a humidity issue and then you clean the surfaces and that's what was done so school did start today that is a picture of the students in the school and again i think they had a good day overall last couple of things that i wanted to mention as part of the summer we did unfortunately because this delta variant is still you know spreading throughout not only connecticut and the united states but across the globe so we're back to providing all the ppe disinfecting supplies this is a box of merv filters we're 13 so that we try and pull out as many particles as out of the air as possible across the

022schools so we're doing all the things that we were hoping we wouldn't have to do is because everyone knows as we got through may and june you know we were looking pretty good but then the delta variant changed all that so we have everything we need and that was part of what we did leading into the summer this i wanted to show you just to remind the board members that student meals are free in 21 22 so that's this whole school year this was a planning meeting it looks odd to see people without mass but this meeting took place in late june and it was prior to the uh mass mandate coming back so back then if you were vaccinated you didn't have to wear a mask when you're seated next to each other last

023couple of things here we now do our compliance training using an e-learning platform it's called vector solutions this is the eight required compliance courses that all employees need to complete i can't tell you enough about what an improvement this is in not only employees being able to complete the compliance training but us being able to track and monitor and then follow up with employees who haven't completed and as this bullet said even the day before we came back to school 40 percent of the staff already completed that online training and they have until september 30th to go through and complete it um and you know that is a big improvement we made two years ago and it's it's working very effectively for us and then this school year 2122 we also added additional personal development

024opportunities for all staff and in particular our non-teaching staff so our secretaries are building maintainers our food service staff and you can see here some of the titles we're looking to improve communication skills conflict resolution interpersonal skills leadership skills all available most of this is done either online or you know in a video presentation or on a webinar some of it will be in person training but again that not only helps employees improve their skills but it also increases job satisfaction and helps create a career path for our staff and so i explained that our summer began the day after graduation in school district operations our summer ends august 30th not september 22nd um and so this is a picture of the first student day at highland that again was a success a lot of

025traffic last couple of days but other than that students were in and did did quite well in our schools and so i'm just going to close by saying all systems are normal including at too little now so welcome back you know to the board and certainly all our administrators and the parents that are in the room and let's have a great school year on 21-22 thank you [Applause] thank you ben i'll add you know vin talked about invisible improvements everything that his team does touches our school system uh it is a critical component of making sure that we have a successful experience for our students our families and our staff so you know thank you very much again vin for you and your team and everything you did this summer to make sure that we

026were ready to go tim you have a question sure go ahead um two things uh first of all the boilers you were talking about the doolittle so there's a heating seasonal kickoff they're going to be done by then like september 30. so they're on track yeah i mean the season the kickoff there's actually a firm date i forget if it's the 12th or 15th but they'll be ready in advance of that and we have a contingency if there is an issue but at this point everything else is done before school opens but the heating system doesn't um and the other thing you mentioned like a new type of door lock without a key i'm just wondering sort of how that works like each side of the door like i'm wondering kids or parents might be

027curious i'm curious yeah so the question about the door lock working and those are locks that we install installed for ada compliance at cheshire high school uh you want to take it yeah yeah so the the lock um the lock set that we installed has a lock on the outer side of the door but if you're inside the classroom it now has the new these new door locks have a red push button when you push that button in it sets the deadbolt and it has a red indicator so the teacher can very quickly see by looking that the door is locked because they see that red indicator the you know across the district and at the high school not all the old locks work that way and in some cases to lock the door you

028physically had to open the door and lock it from the outside and then close the door and so you know this gives you greater access to the door lock and excellent visibility if you need it if there's a lockdown called you know the teacher can quickly see the status of the door but yeah there is a key on the outside none required on the inside on those locks so that's certainly something we'd like to do all across the district um so i want to take you back a week ago today last thursday is when we kick off the school year for our instructional team our staff comes back uh every year we kick that off with something we call convocation and we have a really firm belief that school should be fun for our students

029it should be fun for our staff and so we make that first day of school a day that many teachers across connecticut or america kind of dread we try and make it really fun and engaging and you know thanks to a lot of folks that are good sports and our kids and a lot of cooperation i think we always accomplish that goal and and have a lot of fun so these are a couple of pictures of convocation on day one what you see up on the left there is our chs cheerleading squad uh led by marlene solano uh and i'm on the far right there with our on our staff is on the right um here i am dressed as zac efron uh that ram right there is scott jeffrey and kristin pells and john

030parasino served as referees we had the chs ram band playing outside it was a a really good time the gentleman here you see uh is a man named peter roby he's the acting athletic director at dartmouth university or dartmouth college and he has a really unique background growing up in new britain ultimately went on to play basketball at harvard and coached at west point and stanford and uh harvard and before he is now the like i said the athletic director at dartmouth but he also had a long stint for reebok and really uh is just such an interesting and grounded man and gave us a great presentation on coaching and leadership because really so much of what our teachers do is coaching but they also are coached because we aspire to always be better i

031think we're an incredible school system but we're always working on getting better and personally for us that means you know taking feedback willing to to learn and work hard to be better at what we do so peter gave us a great presentation on that so there are some wonderful uh opportunities we get during convocation like naming our instructional assistant of the year patty motto who's works at dodd middle school working with our reading program there and then our teacher of the year lindsey grant she's a teacher at highland elementary school uh and it's just really incredible to honor these these folks that lead our organization in their really shining lights so we're going to go school by school to take a look at the opening and are projected in actual enrollments so we'll start with

032darcy school darcy's a little bit different this year as you know given the enrollment growth we've had we had to take two kindergartens out of darcy and slide them over to doolittle school see the kids are having a great time to to kick off their year it was great to welcome our students we projected uh in kindergarten uh 55 students and had exactly 55 students for the september 2nd enrollment at chapman school let's hear our little buckaroos looking a little bit more normal than things looked last year thankfully for them a lot of fun to get back i thought those boards were really cool celebrating your children's first day of school with who their teacher is what their favorite things are great keepsakes so chapman school our overall enrollment projection was to have uh 350

033total students we ended up with 345 so we're fairly close on the 2nd of september to the projected enrollment and then you'll start to see a trend of exceeding our enrollment projections so welcome back to doolittle school unfortunately delayed but exciting nevertheless the real thrill of my day today was going to do a little school and i just hung up with another connecticut superintendent who called me about mold remediation because they were dealing with the same issue and i walked up the driveway here to watch kids playing kickball and the cheering the screaming the fun they were having it was really really cool to see that back in our schools again so doolittle there you can see it at the bottom we had a total projection of students now we have 488 students so that's

034you know pretty far in excess of what we anticipated but like you know i've said before our enrollment is growing and we're seeing that become more typical that we're out out uh enrolling our projections highland elementary they did a really cool thing with the chalk on the on the entryway welcoming kids taking picture tent dining a lot of smiling faces so we again our projection was 767 students we enrolled at this point 780 students at highland elementary school norton so our total projected enrollment was 439 and we were pretty close to spot on it 436. at the middle school they rolled out the literal red carpet so our projected enrollment last year was 615 students and we're at 629. you can see a lot of uh you know growth really coming in at um the

035seventh grade [Music] finally at the high school welcome to ramland our link crew does a great job uh working with our students and preparing students to greet their freshman classmates and students that are new to the school so all you have to do is look for those those green t-shirts and you know somebody's there to help you out if you have a question and the red t-shirts and we also had like a i guess like a more of a maroon color with gold for our seniors it's our tradition at cheshire high school so our enrollment here uh is you know pretty close to projection 1337. projected in 1348 the actual enrollment but you can see it's really the younger grades that are driving it even you know cheshire high school with 32 beyond projected in

036the freshman class so our overall enrollment summary in k through six uh pre-k through six actually is 2163 was projected actual for enrollment over 51. the total for the district the projection was 4081 where at 4206 or 125 beyond what was projected and that's you know for us the first time in a long time that we've seen enrollment numbers you know well in excess of what was projected so that's a sign of growth and it's it's a great sign for our community people want to move here so transitioning a little bit from our opening in school our opening of schools and our enrollment uh just want to you know quickly go through what our strategic initiatives were we've had the same strategic initiatives for 12 years and that's you know an issue that's what we're

037updating and it's supposed to be like 10 years but because of the pandemic things kind of got pushed back a little bit and we've we've updated things since then but this is a year when we really have to renew uh what we're doing and so i'm going to quickly go through that our mission statement cheshire public schools and partnerships with fam and partnership with families in the community will prepare all students to meet the challenges of an ever-changing global society by providing high quality educational opportunities that inspire lifelong learning and service to others so in 2011 we created these strategic initiatives designed to be applied through 2021. really i mean five six years ago a lot of these initiatives were fulfilled and we reviewed them with our cheshire strategic planning committee back in 2016-17 and

038ultimately we sharpened the focus to what you know today complex thinking and social emotional learning now i'm not going to read you each slide but we identified key initiatives in the areas of curriculum we identified some instructional strategies that we wanted to improve a decade ago how student work should look how we want to assess and evaluate students what technology should look like in our schools and think about that you know that was ten years ago to project technology a decade ago i don't think we would have you know predicted what we see today and then finally personalized learning was added a few years after 2011 for a total of 16 goals now the issue is nobody could remember any of the 16 goals it was just a little bit overwhelming on top of that

039we had our cheshire performance standards which we had adopted about mid 20 it was about 2 000 it was about 2006 2005 and we've evolved uh uh in 2019. so for those of you that have seen our corner of complex thinking and social emotional learning uh before we've updated courtesy of mr woods our our logo here this is really the uh pictorial version of what we aspire to be in our school system we want to really support all of our students to be in you know complex thinkers and have that capacity as well as strong social emotional learners so what does social emotional learning look like if we consciously focus on social emotional development of our students then school practices will demonstrate a clear focus on social emotional growth and students will demonstrate these key

040skills self-awareness self-management skills cultural awareness relationship skills and responsible decision making now these are this is a goal that we adopted the five years ago so what are we doing in 2122 we're building the capacity of our staff supporting teachers with sel coaching really respond again focusing on responsive classroom and restorative practices the ruler program which you may have heard of from yale recognizing your emotions understanding them labeling expressing and regulating your emotions and so these are things that aren't new but given what we've been through over the last 18 months we wanted to focus on you know doing what we do well and continuing that that trend rather than trying to to go after chase something new from the component of complex thinking if we engage in strategic systemic alignment of curriculum assessment instruction

041professional development and resources around complex thinking then classroom instructional practices will demonstrate a clear focus on complex thinking and student work will demonstrate complex reasoning inquiry problem solving skills and the exploration of ideas so you know some of the strategies that we're looking at here we want our we want our students engaged in meaningful application explanation and inquiry connections proof reasoning finding solutions to problems we're doing these things through learning walks a few years ago pre-covered we would take teachers around to observe other teachers and practice how well you know where are the these things happening in the classroom and then how do i improve my practice to ensure that these things are embedded in and when we talk about you know our test results and we did this an awful lot k through eight

042we're focused on making sure kids are complex thinkers and they can be successful on whatever they apply themselves to whether they be you know a project in class or an assessment they're just sharp people and we're using learning walks again this upcoming year and we're focused on something called acceleration so students may have missed things from being you know out at the end of spring at 20 or uh the kind of the tumultuous last year we're not going to go back and re-teach everything our kids are perpetually behind that way we teach them what they need to know right now and fill the gaps from old stuff so that it's connected to what they're learning now and um you have to pare down the curriculum and really focus on what's important and that's really helped

043us as well to be successful through the pandemic so some of the dividends of our work um the fifth best overall s back performance in connecticut for k through 12 districts uh that probably sounds familiar because we had the fifth best connecticut performance pre-pandemic and we still have the fifth best performance i want to kind of get into some of those details that now that's sixth grade levels worth of kids third through eighth grade norton has been named one of the top elementary schools in america that's just incredible right um highland was recognized as a special olympics unified champion school an espn honor roll member i believe the first elementary school to be given such an honor numerous other awards and recognitions the commissioner of education the governor others cabe have recognized the work that

044we've done to keep our kids in school and keep them successful and so we're really excited about that and then you know skills you can't possibly quantify if it weren't for the five minute delay that we had here and the technical issues i'm afraid to play the video because i it's uh i don't want to mess with our technology but the video is probably the cutest thing you've ever seen it's a darcy student last year walking his mom through some of our sel skills so it's something called the dandelion breath where you close your eyes take a deep breath and exhale as if you're blowing the seeds off the top of the dandelion and then he does another strategy where you do a three count on an inhale three count on an exhale and he

045you know is sharing this with his mom and talks about how his his teacher helped teach him these things that goes back to the the ruler program and you know i'll talk momentarily in a moment about why that's so important that our kids have those sel skills and they're connected to our academic success as well so we you have to pardon me the state just released all the um the student achievement data yesterday so we are still going through stuff but as of right now it looks like at the high school level we had 73 percent of our students reach the achievement benchmark in ela and 59 in math in science we had 57 rankings wise that's 15th 17th and 14th in durgby now those are areas that represent our performance it's kind of where

046the ranking was a couple years ago last three years ago last year we had improved a little bit pre-pandemic there are things that we want to focus on to improve that we do have a a new math department chair this year who's already kind of started running and and we also have added more instructional supports in math and writing so we're there to provide those supports in coaching kind of like that acceleration piece that i was telling you for students of all grade levels at chs in grades three through that's by the way that's only 11th grade for all three of those in grades three through eight combined our ela percentage of students that were at the goal or higher was 77.2 percent and that's second in durgby uh and it was fifth out of

047the derg a and b combined so durga is basically fairfield county ridgefield darien westport new canaan wilton weston those districts there are eight districts there and there are about 18 k12 districts in durgby out of that group uh we finished fifth uh in the state now the reason there's an asterisk next to that is that last year's testation was a little key because the pandemic the vast majority of students participated in person in the building with some students participating remotely and so the students who participated remotely weren't included into the counts across the state they were small and they were so small that they didn't often register the state won't report a group less than 20 students so it really doesn't in change the rankings necessarily but i do want to put that caveat out

048there and definitely you know all schools across connecticut were in different places with respect to how much in person learning they did obviously nobody had more than cheshire we were full day every day in k-8 math smarter balanced achievement you see here after the year that was the pandemic last year and the three months that we were out of school the year prior we still had 68 of the kids meet the benchmark pre-pandemic you know right before our you know the pandemic couple years before we were at 68 percent so our achievement is still really exceptional we were second in the derg there as well when you combine overall math and english achievement we were number one in durgbay so our students are still performing at exceptionally high levels compared to their peers across connecticut

049and if you're performing at the top of the pack in connecticut you know by looking at the data we're performing at the top of the pack nationally so this shows you 2019 these were the rankings in 2019 the early review of our data the top five are still the same new canaan dairy and west port ridge field and cheshire we're in pretty outstanding company there these folks i'll just they spend quite a bit more per student than we do and we actually by the way so do these people and we outperform them so there's a lot to be proud of there i think it's because we're focused on complex thinking social emotional learning and we have an incredibly dedicated staff and families that are incredibly supportive of the schools and their students so success for

050all learners i think this is equally critical for us pre-pandemic our special education students that were identified with special ed services performed fifth in connecticut i can't tell you unfortunately i don't have the data yet on where we are in connecticut but we're third in the derg amongst you know really high performing communities so our special education students are performing at very high levels too so that's something that we're we're definitely very proud of so i talked a little bit about why that social emotional learning the dandelion breath all that's important we live in a vuca world that's a phrase coined by the u.s military represents volatility uncertainty complexity and ambiguity things are constantly changing i talked about technology being different 10 years ago everything changes at a lightning pace and i loved when uh

051canadian prime minister justin trudeau said the pace of change has never been this fast yet it will never be this slow again so we're preparing kids that are kindergartners in the class of 2033 or you know whatever it is to be to be ready for 2033 and what the world's going to look like then and that's you know kind of mind-blowing so we're teaching them the skills to be complex thinkers and how to be really self-aware in terms of you know their emotional states and being able to manage so that they can be successful not just in the cheshire public schools but life after cheshire so what are we doing as a school system moving forward what what should things look like as we move on um i've asked the board of education to review

052our our documents called the vision of the graduate i'll be working with community stakeholders parent groups business groups the teaching staff the students to take a look at that and see what sort of adjustments are needed but also you know part of the early board feedback was around what sort of benchmarks are we looking for so those will be things that we'll incorporate this spring we will i will propose to the board after a thorough community review a three-year plan to continue toward our goals ten-year plans in the vuca world get outdated really quick so we're focused on it on a three-year plan so i know that you know i hate standing here and droning on to you you know to folks and just going through the slides but i wanted to give you a

053thorough overview of you know particularly our enrollment because i know that's such a critical component of our uh school modernization plan moving forward and indeed as beyond actually what was projected we're growing and then of course you know the the board of education uh agenda item why we're here tonight is the affirmation of our goals so these would be our goals for the 21 22 school year and then like i said in the spring we hope to adopt new goals that uh can last us three years and and help propel propel our school system uh to continue to move forward so at this point i'll take any questions from the board yeah tim uh yeah with respect to the change in the student population you went up from 4 100 to 425 students yep any

054common trends that drove it elementary schools uh our elementary we saw a lot of the growth at the elementary level um and so you know obviously if you've lived in the community over the last year or so you recognize that the housing market has been very active and i you know half jokingly say people don't move here for the night life um you know they move here to get a great education and so we see a lot of young families buying homes and that's reflected in our data so you had the projected at a moment in time a few months ago versus the actuals what was last year's actual so this year's actual day or two ago was what 42 42-20 or something right yeah i could go back do you happen to know what

055the actual was for last year carol i know we have that so last year's actual was 4098. you were thinking drop about 10 or 20 students and it went up over 120 yeah that really speaks to the school modernization and part of why we're looking at that right now right well it's not necessarily factored into that tim and it just to follow through on your your point is that the birth rates from a few years ago crossed over 300 births in town for the first time in a long time it had been hovering in the mid twos birth rates crossed three uh several years ago three four years ago and those are students that are going to start enrolling into our school system uh in the next couple of years which will push things up

056in cheshire the rate of enrollment is more than one student per birth if that makes sense so if we have 300 students born in a given year because people move into the community we have more than one student born per every or more than one student enrolled for every student so the students who are born here stay here and more move in is you know the data interpretation of that and that's what slr formerly mylon and mcbroom and nasdaq they look at those things and that's why we're projecting issues with the size of our elementary schools any other board members with any questions comments i talked about the songs don't do a little so uh yeah disappointing we had the mold issues but i really appreciate the quick turnaround and a lot of new little

057families were disappointed but intermediate after two days uh kudos to the team and angle surfboard came around really quick so i know the mold was found initially in the library where chromebooks work yeah i know there's really no air circulation in that building unless the heater is running or even at the boiler right so it's not right of course there so assuming next year we have another hot even muggy summer what what can we do to prevent that from happening well air circulation is a significant component to you know inhibiting mold growth obviously there's a couple of things we could do air circulation with windows open and fans running and dehumidification are the two strategies that would you know i mean certainly this is more vin's neighborhood than mine but we've had a lot of

058conversations about this over the last 48 hours so i mean anything you want to add there i would add a couple of things i would just you know say that there should be some context around what happened at too little because when you have some small amount of mold that's just taken care of internally either by our step by and or by performance so since i've been here which is almost 12 years we've had three mold remediation issues one has to do with the cheshire high school we had a lot of water that was sitting in the underground utility tunnels and and there was some insulation that was paper based and so the paper the hot uh air and the humidity because there was standing water led to mold you wouldn't have known it except

059that teachers and staff that were allergic to mold started reporting symptoms we have a process through the school nurse that's how we found out there was an issue we went exploring found the issue resolved it took us a couple of years and quite a significant investment to fix that problem so that was a standing water issue that was about 2011. in 2018 similar issue um to um at the high school but it was different it was air conditioning that was short cycling over the summer and when we came back around this time of year there was mold in the library now you would say well it's air conditioned why did you have mold well i'm not a technical expert but because there was nobody in the library the whole summer the air conditioner was running

060in short cycles but not enough to dehumidify the air and so we had you know a mold growth that had to be remediated it was the same crew actually from surf pro who did a really good job in 2018 that did this one and then we had this one at two little slightly different set of circumstances than this one in that it was just very humid period of time doolittle does have some a high water table we believe and so it was an extraordinarily humid period of time we don't think the mold was there for very long at all because the chromebooks that it was discovered on had just been cleaned and put into the carts you know within the two weeks before the the they were about to be distributed so yes it happened

061we dealt with it um if we had a long-term solution the real long-term solution would be to add proper ventilation in that school which would include air conditioning and dehumidification within the air conditioning one of the solutions we had for the 2018 library issue was not change out the air conditioning but we literally added dehumidification heat so that as that air conditioning unit is running when there's no occupancy it does dehumidify the space so you know my point is you need some context this is not a recurring issue of this magnitude it was large enough that we needed to close the school for two days and as jeff said for next summer what we'll clearly do because we're not going to have you know a full scale solution you know we will take you know

062extra precautions make sure we run some more fans along the floor open the classroom doors periodically to try and and move the air through it's really you know a strategy that does work we we typically do that um in all this all the schools that don't have ac which is all but highland so this year just was a combination of factors and and a large outbreak will you continue to test the era do a little bit of sure enough you know this is okay and for parents that concerns about especially kids that have you know a larger account or really bought by even you know small amounts of mold just so that again so the situation the answer to that is what we'll look for and this is why the process that we follow is

063so important so if anyone has symptoms you know whether it's a student or a staff member it has to get reported to the school nurse because the school nurse you know does maintain a log of the complaints and if there's a trend that we see that you know there are many students or staff that have allergic issues that gets reported to a maintenance department we have a regular process called two tools for schools we do meet there's an indoor air quality committee for each of our schools so we're on top of it from an understanding if there are symptoms being reported you know as far as testing that is not recommended for mold there is no standard for mold in a school building because mold exists naturally it's just when the conditions are right those

064mold spores will grow rapidly and that's what happened with us over too little over the last couple of weeks so testing isn't the answer it's really watching for any kind of symptoms being reported and obviously maintaining a regular cleaning cycle you know the the schools are not cleaned over the summer there's there's no reason to do that they all the classrooms are detailed over the summer but there's not the nightly cleaning and wipe down which does tend to remove any any mold that would be located on the hard surfaces in particular so you're welcome you know been talked about um really mitigating these problems you know not having quote a solution that would be uh you know a full-scale air conditioning dehumidification system within the building you know it's the same thing this morning not

065maybe this morning but on many other mornings with our traffic you know we can take small steps to to mitigate the issue but in people drive their students more than they did in 2050 when the buildings were built so we can do things that will mitigate the issue but until the the facilities are scaled uh and designed in a way to handle that sort of vehicle traffic you're not going to quote solve the problem um today's problem i will say is dramatically different than what typically happens today we had a substantial four car accident i think it was four cars on route 10 route 10 was closed i i haven't seen that in forever uh it was closed for like 40 minutes and unfortunately all the traffic had to be directed toward doolittle down cornwall

066as a detour and then we also had a an accident at the corner of academy route 68 and route 10 this morning with three vehicles as well airbags deployed um it was just like a perfect storm this morning after last night's storm so um that this morning was an anomaly unto itself but otherwise speaking you know we're going to try and work on traffic and mitigate those issues any other questions from the board we want to we can entertain a question good so i mean we could all agree that the mold is dangerous correct it depends on the amount okay but we all agree that molded causes respiratory damage or possibly that um no i you know i don't know that i would go i'm not an expert to be able to answer that question

067at the panel nobody has nobody's certified industrial hygienist or has a degree in mycology is this correct yeah okay i'm just asking yeah so you know but you responded in my email you said it's not black mold but when you put up a picture up there mr master says it's a white ring but all i see is black black in the center yeah was there a nest on the mold that's wood no there's mold on the wood right the white stuff can we go back to it or not um i just have a few questions because i'm i'm here on behalf of the do a little you know the community here's got major concerns over the mold it's i i don't want to compare the mold to a traffic incident that's not a fair comparison

068so i'd like to get back to the screen that you show yeah i'm getting there yep because you did state in an email that it's not black mold and if we had it tested white or grey no we didn't test it you can look at it and see it and servpro who does do this every day and has you know qualified people know what yeah we just put it we more or less put a band-aid on an ongoing problem since 2010. how much did the movie it's your characterization what was that that's your characterization no those are the facts multiplayer hasn't disappeared and disagree we've talked many especially oh yeah it's available in nature as we remind everyone tonight there is no public comment tonight because it's more of a showcase oh we can't ask

069questions later this month because i signed up for songs all right i just want to see the mold though just so we're clear that when a statement it's not blackboard actually that's why you can email the presentation yeah it's going to be available online an hour before our meeting here it's going to be available on uh our website tomorrow okay so that can we zoom up on that mr match does that happen no it's the same as high as it goes yeah are you talking about those things i'm talking about the two white spots there one white this side the center yes that's those are holes that's not mold no they're holes in the wood okay all right maybe i didn't see this this here is what we're looking at well it's really hard to

070see that's the problem it's this lights up here yeah that's a little closer here so the fuzzy ring you were talking about was not about the mold when you said a fuzzy ring that's a hole right here right and this is a hole as well those are two holes right correct holes in the wood where kids are like just pencils down a hole into the wood and then this is on the edge of that the mold on the inside okay correct that's that right there is a hole and i understand why you would look at me i understand why you would look at that and think gee what is that that's those are holes it's white it's called white or gray mold white or dremel yeah what is what it's typically more rice because you

071don't know or not the health director she she doesn't review this she we have an expert from servpro come in and evaluate that so when you say remediated how much the remediation cost we don't have a final cost so that's so much we will definitely remind us that there is no public comment tonight when you move on to the business meeting but here's what i suggest we do you're going to follow up the dual appearance so if you do have a report certainly from sopro you can share i would definitely eat them out yeah as soon as we have all the information available definitely so we will do that thank you so much back to the chairs we can resume the meeting please yeah so if the board could please return to the dance we'll

072just adopt the uh goals thank you guys before i i do that though i just want to take one quick moment um mr peregini you mentioned uh vin can you hit the screen there thank you um mr perry mentioned at the outset that our administrative team was here did i just kill that lamb perfect the our administrative team was here tonight and there was a point last fall i swear to god when my phone would ring and my wife would say scott jeffrey because when we were going through the the kovid thing you know with 800 750 kids in his school unfortunately each principal here had a a patch whereas like every time the phone would ring it would be them unfortunately during some of those those periods um and they stuck through what you

073know contact tracing is not their expertise although i could argue they've become it um they stuck through that they worked incredible hours last night kelly grillo my wife's yelling at me because kelly's texting me at the dinner table at eight o'clock because she's got questions on these things the the work that they put in not only to do that stuff but to get the results that we see here tonight and it's not just the academic achievement it's the fact that our kids are well adjusted enough to have that sort of academic achievement to be able to come to school every day feel loved feel cared for feel like they belong and able to perform on that level i don't know that i could never say enough thank yous to the folks that are in this

074audience i know the time and energy to it and from the bottom of my heart i just want to express my gratitude in front of my bosses and the community for what you have done for our kids so thank you very much i appreciate it [Applause] thank you dr solomon man santa for the the presentation as a doctor so no the presentation will be available online and for any parent that has any questions on the mold issue please email uh cpskova19 at cheshire.e12.ct.us i should run this one by heart now uh it will get that out to you so a lot of information there and uh i really appreciate the pretty essentially little community for the latest schools as i heard from many parents and and some today very happy with the outcome um very

075happy the kids are back there they didn't seem to miss a beat they seemed very happy and uh so i when i want to iterate you know i'm sure you have to board i can speak as well but uh i know it's uh uh probably a very emotional uh day for all you folks out there being their first day of school considering what you went through last year so i definitely echo dr sullins concern praise that uh while it's not always ideal i think you do an outstanding job you know kids back to school acclimated we all know they do much better when they're in our school buildings interacting learning having that social emotional dialogue it's critical so uh behalf of my kids thank you very much for making this happen and uh you know

076let dr still know if things come up during the year we'll certainly be there to help you uh work through it so again i want to say thank everyone for getting going and hopefully the rest of the school years smooth sailing any uh comments from the board members on the presentation or seeing as there are none there is no old business we have one new business item which is just the affirmation of the strategic plan and it isn't our border bed packets it's also printed out for us um we can make a motion and we can discuss a little more like someone like to make a motion mr grippo thank you mr chair um move that the cheshire board of education reaffirms the cheshire public schools strategic objectives and goals for 2021 2022. great is

077there a second second by mr martelly any discussion or any more details you want to share in this thought or something i would just say you know i think that these goals serve their purpose for the time and place that they were in um obviously you know when we as we've evolved we've reached a pretty high uh pinnacle and we hope that you know collectively with the community we can design new goals that allow us to continue to sustain and even grow beyond where we are today thank you i had a quick question so these goals as the strategic planning initiative kicks off throughout this year that's that's happening uh around the context our stage of plan correct so if for some reason is it likely we might you may come back by spring and

078say hey we review the goals and we have a slight change to them and are these sentence stoners an opportunity to adjust them based on the work of that committee sure i we these are definitely not set in stone i mean what we have here is um a pathway that has has been quite successful for us uh we as i mentioned earlier we accomplished a lot of those 16 goals that were set forth in 2011 and focused in 2016 on complex thinking and social emotional learning you know we talked about some of the dividends we've seen at that point we were 35th in connecticut in our performance and we've been fifth for two consecutive administrations now so we've seen great academic achievement but a few years back 2018 uh dr gad miss solano mr grippo

079was a very active in some of these meetings we have other team members who were on the personalized learning task force and designed a vision of the graduate and those were those really at that point became more of our focus for our goals so we want to continue to review that and not only look at all right well are these goals still appropriate for the next three years and if so what sort of benchmarks will we want to try and hit on that on that pathway for our success and just one last question for as far as the strategic planning initiative uh committee if there are parents out there or community still go someone involved what's the best way for them to well they're going to be invited at various points throughout the year so

080as i did with you know the initial formulation back in 2016 we'll be going to uh pto meetings to make sure there's broad parent involvement and opportunity for feedback but like i said i think my favorite part was meeting with students at cheshire high and at the middle school they they were really instrumental in ensuring that we had a social emotional learning goal and they they told me that that was really critical to them and um you know as a former mental health professional um it just you know so obvious when they pointed it out thank you for that any questions on the board tim yes thanks with regard to the pta meetings do you have a sense across all your schools generally are they going to be online in person any rules at this

081point yeah unfortunately right now it looks like they'll be predominantly online i know that our administrators want to be creative and maybe if we can get outside for one early in the air or something like that but um until this stuff really subsides uh we're we're just being conservative uh i'd hate to lose one of these guys because of a contact for eight days or something like that so we're just trying to be a little conservative thank you yeah thanks tim any other questions from the board seeing as there is none the motion is that the cheshire board of education reaffirms the cheshire public schools strategic objectives and goals for 2021 2022 all those in favor it is unanimous thank you team we have no well we thought about business there's none before a call

082motion to adjourn just uh a couple of upcoming meetings our next board of ed business meeting is september 23rd here in town council chambers 7 30 p.m there will be an open forum here in town thompson chambers on october 7th and i'll follow up with the two parents earlier that's an opportunity for uh an open dialogue more or less with the board where we can actually sit down out there break up in the groups and talk about finances planning uh various committees and have a little bit more back and forth dialogue so stay tuned for that i'll find more details on that at december 23rd meeting and that's really the upcoming is this month we may have a curriculum meeting on the 13th faith is working with marlene uh and myself an agenda for that

083so hopefully more details next week but uh hopefully this rest this month is is fairly smooth smooth sailing for you out there and again thank you for getting schools back open again that being said i'm going to call for a motion to adjourn just like to make a motion tim question adjourned uh second second by faith all those in favor uh unanimous thank you this meetings adjourn thank you for coming here tonight we'll see you soon you