001hi everyone uh we are going to uh call this finance uh subcommittee to order i don't know where to look because usually i'm looking at my computer um let's see uh ah miss joginski well call please yes here is here i pledge the republic allegiance which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all that was weird to hear everyone say it all the same time right we sounded like the vienna boys choir compared to what we sound like remotely so doctor is there any uh public comment there's not for this okay thank you um let's see federal grant funding uh i'm guessing uh mr maciana that's uh that's your report it's gonna be mostly a tag team solon yes yeah so i'll just kick it off first of all it's
002really nice to see all of you in three dimensions for the first time together in a very long time uh very happy to be back in person and look forward to the day that we have the public back as well so we've made great strides like i said happy to be back in person tonight i'm going to walk through with vin's help and marlene as well because i i don't want to give the impression that this is just jeff's ideas or bin's ideas this was really a collective effort um and marlene and kevin hanlon and our administrative team played a critical role in the development so without further ado i'm titling this bouncing forward and i got that title from a professor who works with resilience a guy by the name of dr steven flynn
003out of northeastern university who specializes in coming back from tragedy setbacks graces what have you and i think i i chose this term because it really embodies what we've tried to do from day one of the pandemic i think we organizationally have adopted the mindset that we're gonna there will be life post covet we want to be better as an organization after covid than we were before how do we do this how do we how do we attack it this way and hence bouncing forward we're not going back we're going forward as an organization and i'm going to talk a little bit about how we've done that currently and where we're going and moving forward you each have a copy of the presentation at your table as i appreciate that it may be somewhat difficult
004to read off the screen particularly some of the smaller numbers here but we received three federal grants the first is the elementary and secondary school emergency relief grant one uh better known as sr1 that grant had to be expended by december of 2020. as you are certainly familiar we had to purchase a lot of ppe personal protective equipment we purchased technology a lot of cleaning and contracted services tents bus monitor a lot went into ensuring that we had a safe start to the school year so that uh money has all been expended elementary and secondary two sir two uh was just recently released in terms of um your allocation amount our allocation amount is 439 559 those funds have to be spent by september of 2023 so you know i think the federal government as
005we recognize understand that covet is not you know it's not turn off the faucet everything's back to normal when kovid tapers off eventually we still have fallout that we're managing you know we have approximately 700 students who have not been in school for you know more than a year at this point we're anticipating close to that number 17 months so while they're engaging remotely we recognize that's not the same even engaging in school this past year has been different we've had a really dramatically change what we do to keep people apart uh to make it safe so next year we'll there will be needs and in probably beyond next year as well so the next set of funding that's coming down the pike is something called the american rescue plan that's a shade over a
006million dollars close to 1.1 million dollars we're still awaiting details about where you can spend that money the state has identified various areas where we can spend the s or 2 money and i'm going to go through some of that now before i do though i want to talk about an issue that you might hear around towns in connecticut uh supplement versus supplant and supplant uh that that term is really meant in terms of budgeting when we have this money that's allocated to the community we could do one of two things we could try and just take money out of the operating budget artificially lowering the tax rate and replacing that with the federal money or we could fund the operating budget as we typically would and use these resources to build forward i have
007a very strong opinion and rationale for why supplementing the latter is much more effective if we were to supplant our budget artificially lowering the tax rate what you're doing is creating a cliff for when that federal money runs out so as sweet as it may be today it's going to be at least that painful two years from now when the money runs out because in order to maintain services now you need to not only cover the cost of living two years from now but also that gap that you created with the federal money now in our budget meetings with the town council dave barwey who as you know has an accounting background identified this same issue that i'm raising today and i think there's uh i wouldn't call it universal agreement within our our community
008but a strong understanding that you're really setting yourself up for perilous actions by supplementing there's uh excuse me supplanting i wish the words was like distinctly so much different um so the other element to this is as i indicated just a moment ago there really is substantial need we recognize that not only do are we going to be in a position next year where we have to ensure a safe reopening whatever that means in august 2021 um that might mean tense ppe we're anticipating those things will still be necessary to a certain extent to what extent who knows on the variant the the vaccination schedule but there's a three-year window we have to play with here additionally as i mentioned before we have a lot of students who didn't receive the same educational experience they
009had and learning loss is a legitimate concern that we have how do we close those gaps how do we get those kids to grade level performance and do the best we can to ameliorate the effects of covid19 over the last more than a year as i said so the 2021 grant funding that initial allocation what did we do with that i'm going to turn it over to vin to kind of walk you through how we spent our initial sr1 money thank you dr solon and again it's good to see everybody live and in person in the flesh and the um the slide that we're looking at grant news fund 2021 we have had this in the finance reports the last several months and i'll just run through quickly the column all the way over to
010the right which shows you know the actual uh expenditure and the grant reimbursement that we received that's been allocated back to our operating budget so it's there as you look at our finance report for this month on the personnel costs that first line thirty thousand four hundred thirty four dollars that was the cost of supplying the isolation room monitors for the first several months of the school year those were required as part of the state's guidelines for students who weren't feeling well they needed to go into a separate room and an isolation monitor needed to be present we don't need that any longer the internal staff and the nurses are able to cover and there are very actually very few incidents where that occurs parents have been very prompt to pick up students who aren't
011feeling well in school the 55 000 265 under personnel called transportation those were the bus monitors that we had just the first couple of months of school and then dropping down to the non-personnel cost 402 249. those were for contracted services that included the tent rentals that we did you know back in the fall it also includes the intraday cleaning that we um had done during this period which ended december 31st for the grant but that service still continues so that's part of that 000 and then supplies for sanitizing disinfecting ppe school buildings i think those speak for themselves 99 295 and 116 0832 and then finally we had a supply separately and submitted under the grant received two thousand dollars for sanitizing the buses in between runs on a daily basis so the total
012of of those six categories is the 706 so 75 that you know we previously received and um i think made you know very good use of the 706 000 by the way didn't cover all our covert related expenses but that was the maximum amount of the grant and we fully realized all of that grant i think this is probably a good time you know to pause and take any questions as we you know kind of cover 2021 before we get into 21-22 uh tim first yeah um did you within your accounting system so you know what that number is what's the number at least for this time period you said it was 706 what was your big number above and beyond that it's about a million dollars i mean so 300 000 difference correct okay
013got it which came out of our operating budget yeah and it was was it basically the same sort of items or anything like radically different for two hundred thousand dollars i mean the one additional incremental item i would refer to is the revenue loss for food service yeah so that's included in that in that million dollars roughly and that is in the finance report we can go through more of those details later if you'd like thank you all three grants are federal grants federal monies but we know that federal money allocated two states states then have the responsibility of disseminating two districts and do we know how they figure that out um a formula that um and it's i it is incredible to see how much money some districts received billion dollars incredible how much
014money so we know that that million dollar for the american rescue plan that's a pretty solid number i feel confident in that number right i mean that was a what the state recently told us we would receive and i think you're comfortable i'm comfortable [Laughter] all right i'm slightly less comfortable but i i i am i feel i feel pretty good about it okay thank you any other questions yeah just on the topic of the distribution of money our student population 40 200 right what's the state population of students i don't know oh you don't no i'm sorry i don't know that i mean our problem i know our town population figure it out pretty quick our town population i'm assuming that we're typical for a town uh yeah in the state it wasn't based
015on a strict like here's the dollar amount divide out the number of students and disseminate it that way clearly yeah need excuse me need was factored in excuse me so fairfield county towns you know didn't receive the same funding that cheshire received and get on a per-student basis and we didn't receive the same money that other towns uh that have greater need let's say received sure no i understand i'm just thinking in terms of i mean total population were a little bit less than one percent whether you include the prisoner or not i mean it's three and a half million people were close to 30 000 right to take their prison um anyway so but this is nowhere we got less than a million out of a this is a billion dollar bucket i for
016the state for this first one okay yeah the state received a lot of money in some other districts that you know no one ever received 30 million right then meredith received 36 million the total number of students in connecticut is 513.79 according to ed's site so that the the percentage the proportion makes sense it's a little bit less than one percent yeah but one percent of a billion would be 10 million dollars right americans twice our size they didn't get 1.4 million get thirty cents away and now that i mean i don't mean to take anything away from meredith i'm just thinking from a public perspective just sort of look at this isn't just like a small percentage this is an order of magnitude in the way this was distributed in this money you know
017i i educators leaders are having the conversation like what do you do with 36 million dollars i you know that's transformative money for a community i you know and i think the biggest question facing connecticut's educational leadership right now is how do we ensure that these investments translate into academic success and and you know improvement for the school in the community so um unique problem to have 36 million dollars i think it's important to note that the foundation for the distribution though is is around title one so the you know the poorer the community from you know an affluence point of view the more money they did receive so that's why when you look at it the cities on a proportion you know per student basis did receive a lot more funding than you know
018community like cheshire thank you so moving forward into 2122 what will we use this money for the state identified a few categories that districts can apply this money toward again strategically thinking reflecting on this past year the success that we've had not only keeping kids in school but with achievement we wanted to continue to bounce forward how do we do that with the resources allocated the first piece that we looked at was the component of academic supports learning loss learning acceleration and recovery this is a critical component to make sure that our students are on track with grade level material moving into the next few years for 21 22 we identified a few strategies to move that forward for our kids the first is a summer transition program for as i said the nearly 700
019students excuse me who will have not been in school for about 17 months can you imagine in your youth from last march 2020 to august 20 you know 21 not being in school over that long a period of time it's actually end of august so that is a massive stretch where students have not been in person and so we want to capture those students encourage them to come in connect them to schools make them comfortable and confident that they can be successful returning to the schools english language learners and students in need of intervention support it's critical that our our students i mean the dr flynn this resilience professor talked about during crisis usually people that are not well positioned prior to crisis come out even worse positioned after crisis so we want to make
020sure that our students who have academic needs or social needs post-crisis receive support to be on grade level to find success so we're building in intervention supports focused professional development on accelerated learning uh you may have heard marlene talk about this she and kevin have really championed that work arlene's been way out in front of this with cheshire and for other districts that we are focused on teaching grade level content we can't go back and teach you last year we're we'd be constantly teaching you last year you just won't catch up so what we're doing is really focused on grade level work and identifying where where there are gaps we provide pre-teaching and intervention support that's connected to what you're learning now so you're learning in the context of what's happening today which helps it
021stick much easier um for for our students and we've found that all year long by the way and of course you know we know that future gaps will be identified when our students do get back and we do return more to normal with grade level assessments uh we also want to update technology in the classrooms the the technological rooms that we and the cheshire ed foundation installed this year have been incredibly beneficial uh the audio is so much richer when you're in those rooms i know you got to experience that at norton so that is powerful like i said an investment to move forward post covid that's really going to be valuable for our kids so the second area is school safety this is the the state's title and social emotional well-being of the whole
022student and of our school staff so really what we're doing here is we could add two social workers who will over the next two years maybe have a caseload of 50 kids a year when the money runs out we've got no social workers and you know maybe 50 kids that were benefited our plan is to provide extensive professional development in tier one classroom based social emotional support so how do we is teachers best coach student self-awareness um communication skills empathy in the classroom the the castle standards uh and i'll highlight those in a moment so that when covit is over we have 50 teachers now better equipped to support their kids every year in perpetuity and you know that's just part of the strategic approach that we've taken to bounce forward so the summer transition
023program i know the curriculum committee got some of this and marlene please elaborate here if there's anything that we're missing but five days not consecutively but i think we're doing two one week three the next to bring students in connect them michelle picarillo from youth and social services has offered to help us with this as well with her team but bringing students in connecting them even providing transportation for them we want them to be there we want it to be a fun exciting engaging experience for them just like we did for our teachers who were getting vaccinated for the first time it means something to make it inviting the camp will focus on reducing anxiety academic and personal self-confidence and re introducing students or introducing them if they're transitioning to a new school with some
024of these school expectations don't forget you know a lot of our transition stuff is is much different now virtually than what they would typically do go tour buildings and all that other stuff that uh is a tune of about 25 000 including some summer academic programming for high school students as well um so marlene is there anything that i didn't do you want to add there well except that i'll just add as we talked about the other night we do have a parent component as well for that to make sure that we're providing support and some strategies for parents on how to help their children get back to school after being gone for so long yeah that's a really important part i appreciate you adding that closing achievement gaps that's the next thing we talked
025a little bit about learning loss you know certainly you know we take questions when we get through this but um this is where we're doing things a little bit differently um you know uh my philosophy uh since you know being here has been to focus in on the classroom and that's where we pour our resources that we're not very administrative heavy um and in this case we are adding some uh elementary administrative support the rationale for that administrative support is to provide coaching to teachers but in effect be the case manager for those 700 kids that we have coming back and anybody else who may have been here that it's that may be struggling so they will be the pivot person in the building working with the reading and math specialists at the elementary level
026and the principal to ensure that what we're we're providing those students the best possible service so that includes acceleration coaching of teachers and really monitoring of performance and ensuring that our students continue to make progress so we currently have 1.6 assistant principals at the elementary school and we're going to let's see 0.7 so one point adding an additional 1.4 for a total of 3.0 elementary assistant principles so uh norton and chapman will share an assistant principal right now chapman has no assistant principal and that's a smaller school it's probably appropriate under you know typical non-covid circumstances here what we're doing is leveraging this resource to bounce forward to coach more teachers to utilize more data support more students the other thing that we're adding is at the high school and middle school level math support
027teachers um there are reading support people in both the elementary and or excuse me middle and high schools now where so we're adding additional math support where it doesn't necessarily exist uh understanding that particularly with the sequential nature of math that there's going to be more support necessary there and what we've done is internally been creative about well if we promote internal people and fill their positions it's kind of like a retirement incentive if we promote these internal people to these positions and hire short-term people we can get talented people lower on the pay scale and therefore stretch our money a little bit further so that's kind of in part with our plan um and that kind of covers some of the achievement gap piece but the other the other piece that is i think
028instrumental to the achievement gap is that acceleration component that i talked about how do we coach teachers to be able to teach grade level content for students who have learning gaps to be able to identify those gaps and pre-teach those gaps as we move through and again not every child is going to have those same gaps so you know if sparky was remote for you know the entire period versus cletus who was remote for five weeks those are two different experiences and we our teachers need coaching and how to support that again reading and math supports to uh also improve achievement and i outlined again you know how we're how we're structuring staffing to be able to cover that finally i mentioned the castle standards those are things like self-awareness self-management responsible decision making relationship
029skills and social awareness in cheshire we also focus on cultural awareness is part of our uh you know theory of action around social emotional learning so we recognize i mean i think at the elementary level we have a rich history of uh teaching responsive classroom strategies that really first kinder excuse me elementary teachers have a very strong handle on working with students and building these sel skills you've probably heard of things like morning meetings and goal statements that our elementary students make we want to build that up through middle and high school to ensure that our we're using responsive classroom strategies to support kids in the classroom at that tier one level that's the classroom level and so we're working with a consultant named mike anderson uh he's written books he's consulted in other districts
030has a tremendous reputation uh to come in and provide not only 20 days of in-house support but additional uh supports for our school system so we're we're really looking forward to using that resource but again in bouncing forward we're going to coach a lot of teachers that will now have that benefit of when covid's over when the money runs dry we've improved our capacity it's about getting better as an organization through these resources so um marlene miss anything on that one that you want to fill in recognize himself and an author and have met with him a number of times to to and i really very much like how he embeds the social emotional learning within the academics this is not another add-on this is another in addition to this isn't some one-off lessons that
031we're doing this is shoulder to shoulder coaching in the classroom um with everyone from you know we'll be attending we would like to attend some of his um workshops for him to come here and for him to really demonstrate things in the classroom and have be a part of the of the community so he he'll be doing things like supporting teachers to offer kids choices to motivate students to re-engage students who have been absent or who have been remote for this amount of time and look at deep enriching tasks so i just want to make that point that it's truly embedded in the academic work that our teachers would be doing i had the opportunity last night to do the cheshire cast and you know part of the conversation was i i if you have
032more than one child and you talk or you talk to other people and there could there are you know such distinctly different personalities and some kids are just so ready to re-engage with school or like run to the door every day and some kids aren't and after this process you know this really dysfunctional uh schooling experience they've had for the last year and a half what is that going to look like and how do we support them uh if they're not really necessarily eager but beyond that how do we build those sel things into what we do every day so like marlene said it's not just an add-on it's an important component that supports their growth and again moving forward beyond that so the grant fund use for 2122. um you can kind of see
033where we are where it says fiscal year 2122. i don't need to read to you each and every area there but we have the learning loss component that's a lot of the acceleration and the work that we were talking about restructuring administratively to to add one and a half roughly assistant principles and teaching support for math and reading and math support at the elementary levels but then we have budgeted a number of other items that we had to utilize this year things like tents and cleaning and all that other stuff will that absolutely be necessary in the end of august 2021 i i hope not um but i can't tell you today uh you know with the variant um with some vaccination hesitancy who knows uh where things will stand at the end of august
034but what we have budgeted out of the one roughly 1.1 million dollars in that american recovery act money we and again it spread over three years next year we have budgeted uh enough that we would have 442 000 left over for the subsequent two years and so what you see there is vin's put you know 221 in fiscal year 22 23 221 fiscal year 23 24. optimally for me things pan out much better that we don't need to spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on tents next year that we don't have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on ppe that like and so there's substantially more money left in that account which allows us to continue to bounce forward in 2223 the way that i feel we're bouncing forward in in 21 22. so
035again you know i i've used the term several times i think through the presentation but we're really excited about the strategies that we've put in that we believe covid will make us a significantly stronger school system than we are right now and i think we're a really good school system today so it's exciting to think that we're only going up from here in spite of the the real challenges that our kids and and staff have faced over the last year plus so adam i turn it back to you for any questions anybody has thank you um before the questions i i just comment that uh even though it uh we won't get 39 million dollars in grant funding it sure looks like uh the plan that you put together here maximizes the money that we
036will get and you know we'll make our our system better going forward thank you so much you know because that's really with this team included when we started the process back in the you know last spring when you were supportive of this same philosophy we didn't have a name to it then that we do bouncing forward now but the foresight to put cameras in in uh auditory supports in classrooms that it doesn't matter i mean covet could end tomorrow our kids are still going to benefit from that moving forward and i think that's we've embraced that from the outset and that's what we're trying to embrace in this plan and i appreciate that recognition um let's see uh ann go ahead yeah so those positions the you knew i was going to ask this um
037the administrative support the assistant principals and the math and reading coaches will those positions remain positions in our budget no not necessarily their positions that right now i think are critical given the experience that our kids have been through given the support in the learning curve that we have to adapt when students return to a more typical environment and so you know i think when we have these resources we want to use those people one uh internally to develop capacity so that you know we have well-trained administrative candidates down the road because the turnover will eventually happen you know you know maybe i'll hit powerball or something we want to have these this turnover available but on top of that in this short term those people are responsible for coaching other people to be better
038at what they do and they're responsible for monitoring this kind of closing the the learning loss gaps that may exist as a result of uh kobit 19. so i'm hopeful that you know they're not necessary as that grant money runs out and maybe over naturally we'll they'll give those people other opportunities or they can return to what they were doing before andrew the summer transition program is that just for the students that have been out since march 11th of 2020. marlene you want to address it as our primary target audience but we'll also be looking to other groups of students who we know struggle either with getting to school or with anxiety or a multitude of things that we think could benefit from this type of program and from hopefully their parents being a part
039of it as well so we haven't limited it to just them now and the plan is to do it at each building so that we have some flexibility to add students or staff as needed at each school great thank you okay one more the uh the funding for the assistant principal positions is that just for next school year or is that for the three years of the grant the dollar amount that you saw in the slide presentation the 189 covers 21 22 only and um but that doesn't that's not just the assistant principles that's that's the other positions that we included in there as well okay thank you so with your grant funded projected use 2021 through 2022 um technology if we're able to use how what percentage of our rooms are going to be
040wired by the time we get down this marlene do you have that we're right now we have over 30 classrooms that are broadcast ready i think we have a very firm belief that there's no uh replacing in-person learning that that is by far the most powerful vehicle to support students that being said you know at the high school level i think there's a little bit more flexibility there that um from maturation perspective and the fact that some of our students are transitioning to colleges many of them now that offer remote learning opportunities as well i think we would be focused on probably doing more at the high school level with this sort of stuff than elementary level the one place where we've studied and recognized that we want to enhance the audio in the classroom
041more is on the route 10 side of chapman because there's a fair amount of white noise from route 10 that when you walk into a building on that side of of chapman when you walk into that side of chapman and you're in the classroom and you hear the audio piping through the speakers it's demonstrably better than rooms that don't have it so is we've studied the effects of white noise and classrooms and stuff like just kind of things that we never thought we'd be getting into but now that we have realized that this is a place where we want to improve but beyond that we want to go back to the high school i can't give you an exact percentage of classrooms unfortunately can i say a few more um i just wonder um and
042i don't want to get into my you know the ins and outs of the technology but i understood that the audio was proven to be more valuable in many respects than even the video but um i in terms of learning yeah the for the kids in the classroom the audio is incredible yeah you know for students at home we've been using video and that's really beneficial for the kids at home to participate but we share a lot of screens and stuff like that that it's not as critical as the audio is that the kids at home can clearly hear what's happening in the room and the kids in the room even if you know with the teacher wearing the mic can hear so much better so that raises the question how long do are we
043going is the remote option going to be a remote permanent i hope not um because like i said i think that the the experience for students is much more powerful in the classroom from not just an academic but from a social emotional perspective um that being said if whether or not we have any remote students next year the audio enhancement in the classroom is really powerful for the kids in the classroom so we would want to pursue that but at the high school i recognize we may have situations where we have students who may have to be remote and in that case i think it's good to have the video and the audio okay i just want if i can really quick it will be really quick i know we got to get going so
044um with regard to bringing the summer program um it's i imagine it's going to get be tough getting some of these kids to actually come in so you're almost going to need a marketing campaign or something in this and so is that build into the cost um we're going to be doing a lot of outreach through our social media and through personal invitation and phone calls and emails and school messenger yes okay thank you um okay so uh as uh many of you who work remotely you'll uh recognize this term we've gone over time and uh so uh i would like uh the uh the second item on the agenda was for the auditor of student accounts which uh the finance committee had um had passed through to the uh full board uh many months
045ago um and this was just going to be an update so we can cover the update in the uh review portion of the main agenda uh for our for our main meeting tonight um so um with that can i get a motion to adjourn all right faith second all in favor great thank you mr chair the floor is yours you